Live updates | Russia-Ukraine War

Russia assaulted cities and towns along a boomerang-shaped front hundreds of miles long and poured more troops into Ukraine on Tuesday in a potentially pivotal battle for control of the country’s eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories. After conferring with U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders on Tuesday, Scholz said “all of us will continue to support Ukraine, financially and also militarily.” ___ The Kremlin’s diplomats are doing more online dirty work as governments and social media companies try to suppress Russia’s state media and the disinformation it spreads about the war in Ukraine. Johnson’s spokesman, Max Blain, said the prime minister had told Cabinet that Ukraine’s position remained “perilous,” with Russian President Vladimir Putin “angered by defeats but determined to claim some sort of victory regardless of the human cost.” ___ MOSCOW — The Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya says he is certain that the Russian forces will uproot the last remaining pocket of Ukrainian resistance in the key port of Mariupol within hours. ___ MOSCOW — Russia’s defense minister has accused the U.S. and other Western nations of supplying Ukraine with weapons so that it continues fighting “until the last Ukrainian.” Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday at a meeting with the top military brass that Washington and its allies are doing all they can to drag out Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. He noted that “the growing supplies of foreign weapons clearly signal their intention to provoke the Kyiv regime to keep fighting until the last Ukrainian.” Shoigu said that the Russian military has “consistently implemented the plan to fully liberate the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics.” Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years in the mostly Russian-speaking region eastern industrial heartland, Donbas, that includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.