Volodymyr Zelensky visited the embattled towns of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk on Monday, as their Ukrainian defenders attempt to hold back the Russian onslaught.

In Pokrovsk, Mr Zelensky visited the 25th Separate Airborne Brigade and awarded medals to soldiers. He then oversaw the construction of trenches and “defensive structures” at an unspecified location in Donetsk.

My Zelensky then headed to the city of Kupiansk, which last week repelled a major Russian attack when two tank convoys attempted to gain a foothold in the city.

Filming himself outside a large Kupiansk sign, Mr Zelensky paid tribute to Ukrainian soldiers, saying “the strength of our entire Ukrainian army is the people who serve”.

Chinese and Russian foreign ministers discussed bilateral ties, the conflict in Ukraine, and the situation on the Korean peninsula on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Brazil, they said.

“We are truly at an unprecedented stage in the development of our strategic relations of a comprehensive partnership,” Russia’s Sergei Lavrov told China’s Wang Yi, according to a post on the Russian foreign ministry’s Telegram channel.

Mr Wang said Beijing is willing to work with Russia to further strengthen bilateral “comprehensive strategic coordination”, the Chinese foreign ministry said in a statement.

The “two sides also exchanged views on the Ukraine crisis and the situation on the Korean Peninsula”, it added without providing further details.

China and Russia have held a series of bilateral meetings since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine 1,000 days ago. The war isolated Moscow from Kyiv’s Western allies, bringing waves of sanctions on its politicians and businesses, but pushed it closer to China.

The clock on her wall stopped almost as soon as the day began, its hands frozen by the Russian bomb that hit the dormitory serving as home for Ukrainians displaced by war.

It was 1:45 a.m. in an upstairs room in the eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, Natalia Panasenko’s home for just shy of a year after the town she thinks of as her real home came under Russian occupation. The explosion blasted a door on top of her, smashed her refrigerator and television and shredded the flowers she’d just received for her 63rd birthday.

“The house was full of people and flowers. People were congratulating me … and then there was nothing. Everything was mixed in the rubble,” she said. “I come from a place where the war is going on every day. We only just left there, and it seemed to be quieter here. And the war caught up with us again.”

The US will announce additional security assistance for Ukraine in coming days, the US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said as the United Nations marked 1,000 days since Russia’s invasion of the country.

Ms Thomas-Greenfield said supporting Ukraine in the US Congress and beyond could not and should not be a partisan issue, and that standing up for democracy and human rights was “above petty politics” and would outlast any one leader.

A pair of fibre-optic communications cables were severed on Sunday and Monday, in an incident which “immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage”, Finland and Germany said in a joint statement.

A 745-mile (1,200 kilometre) cable linking Helsinki to the German port of Rostock stopped working at 2am on Monday, according to Finnish state-controlled cyber security and telecoms company Cinia.

Another cable linking Lithuania and Sweden’s Gotland Island went out of service at 8am on Monday, according to a Lithuanian communications firm.

The Ukrainian military has shared its gratitude after Estonia committed a new military aid package to Ukraine.

“We are grateful to our Estonian friends for a new military aid package which includes ammunition and equipment for 🇺🇦 Defense Forces!” read a post on the military’s X account.

“Thank you for your unwavering support! Together, we are stronger!”

A few hours later, on the 1,000th day of the invasion, Moscow claimed the first use of the US Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) ballistic missiles on the Bryansk region of Russia, about 80 miles from the Ukraine border. The missiles have a full range of around 190 miles.

Askold Krushelnycky reports:

Russia is ready to normalise its relations with the United States, but will not “tango alone”, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told TASS state news agency in remarks published on Tuesday.

“Russia, as our president has said, is open to normalisation,” TASS cited Mr Peskov, a close aide of Vladimir Putin, as saying. “But we cannot tango alone. And we are not going to do it.”