INTERNATIONAL

Ed Sheeran “belittled” a songwriter who accused him of stealing one of his songs, London’s High Court has heard. Sami Chokri says he was hurt by the tone of Sheeran’s lawyers’ emails after he noticed similarities between his song Oh Why and Sheeran’s Shape Of You. “I feel like I’ve been robbed by someone I respect, or respected,” he told ...

China’s top diplomat has (again) called for both sides to exercise restraint, in a high-profile meeting with US officials yesterday. “All parties should exercise maximum restraint, protect civilians and prevent a large-scale humanitarian crisis,” Yang Jiechi said, in a read-out summary of the meeting published by Beijing this morning. Yang said that China was committed to promoting peace talks, and ...

A Ukrainian government advisor said he expects the war to be over by early May at the latest, when Russia runs out of resources to attack its neighbour. “I think that no later than in May, early May, we should have a peace agreement,” said Oleksiy Arestovich, an advisor to the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, late on Monday. He ...

We’ve been bringing you news from Mariupol – one of the Ukrainian cities hit worst by the fighting. In the last few hours, a maternity and children’s hospital has reportedly been hit by a Russian strike. Myhajlo Todurov – who used to live in Mariupol before moving to Slovenia two decades ago – says he has not heard from his ...

We’ve heard about the thousands of Indian students who have been stuck in Ukraine and desperate to get out – but one student has been going in the opposite direction. Sainikesh, 21, went to study aerospace engineering in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 2018 from the Indian southern state of Tamil Nadu. When the war broke out, his family asked him to return home ...

Ukraine’s state run nuclear company says electricity supplies to the former power plant at Chernobyl have been cut and has warned that radioactive substances could be released, because spent nuclear fuel cannot be cooled. In a post of the telegram messaging app, Energoatom says a high-voltage line feeding the plant was disconnected after it was damaged during Russia’s seizure of ...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent shivers of fear through many of its neighbours – from the Baltic states to Moldova. Finland ought theoretically to be safe, since it has historically been neutral and gave Stalin’s Soviet army a hard time when he invaded the country in 1939. Like other Scandinavian countries, besides Sweden, there has never been much support ...

President Volodymyr Zelensky has told Ukrainians they have “withstood the blow” of Russia’s invasion as he urged citizens to continue fighting. In an impassioned speech delivered from Kyiv on Saturday night, Mr Zelensky told the country that the time has come for them to launch a fightback. “You need to go out and drive this evil out of our cities,” ...

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has told the BBC that he is convinced Ukraine can win its war with Russia. He could not say how long the conflict would last, but insisted that Ukraine’s defeat was not inevitable. Mr Blinken praised the “extraordinary resilience” of the Ukrainian people. “If it’s the intention of Moscow to try somehow to topple ...

I saw a steady stream of people coming into Poland from Ukraine at one of the points where you can cross on foot. Most were in small groups, families but also people who had met on the journey. I asked one young man, Nikita, how he had managed to avoid the restrictions on men of fighting age leaving Ukraine – ...