The new sanctions targeted Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, two adult daughters of Putin's with his former wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva.

A recent report by the activist group Accept-LGBTI Cyprus surveyed around 100 people and revealed the scope of widely discredited practices that claim to be able to change sexual orientation or gender identity still being carried out on the Mediterranean island.

The figure issued by the UN's International Organization for Migration is up from the 6.48 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) estimated in a first study by the IOM on March 16.

Steinmeier, a Social Democrat who served as Foreign Minister under Chancellor Angela Merkel before being elevated to the presidency, said Russia's invasion of Ukraine meant he and others had to reckon honestly with what they had got wrong.

Speaking to German news organization RND, Filip Thon warned that the energy firm was already seeing wholesale retail prices 20 times higher and electricity prices eight times higher this spring than a year ago.

Local authorities said they had been forced to dig communal graves to bury the dead accumulating in the streets, including some found with their hands bound behind their backs, in scenes that sent shockwaves through international capitals more than a month into Russia's invasion.

Addressing a jubilant crowd chanting his name, many of them wearing Fidesz's orange party color, Orban said: "We have won a great victory -- a victory so great you can perhaps see it from the moon and certainly from Brussels".

"Here in this long grave, 57 people are buried," said Serhii Kaplychnyi, who identified himself as head of the rescue services in Bucha and who was organising the recovery of the bodies. 

Like other Western countries, the United States has turned to its own stocks to furnish Ukraine with shoulder-fired Stinger and Javelin missiles, for instance. These weapons from Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon Technologies were paid for some time ago.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will hold the videoconference with EU leaders Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, carrying through on an annual exercise that was skipped last year as tensions simmered.

Mathias Mogge, chief executive of the group, which serves 14.3 million people with projects in 35 countries, said it was critical to maintain communication with Russia, one of the world's largest producers of wheat, in tackling the crisis.

The first poll conducted by Levada since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, said 83 percent of Russians approve of Putin's actions, up from 71 percent in early February. 

Macron, who is due to address a rally for the first time in his re-election campaign on Saturday, attended a meeting at the headquarters of his Republic on the Move (LREM) party late Wednesday.

The text, which provides legal cover, says the restrictions can be applied "exceptionally and when there are extraordinary circumstances or force majeure that justify it".

"Based on what we know now, the most likely scenario is that the COVID-19 virus continues to evolve, but the severity of disease it causes reduces over time as immunity increases due to vaccination and infection," Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a briefing.

"We have information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military, which has resulted in persistent tension between Putin and his military leadership," Kate Bedingfield, White House communications director, told a press conference.

The report by the parliament-supervised National Audit Office (NAO) will fuel opposition claims that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government was wasteful and nepotistic in its allocation of huge contracts during the two-year pandemic.

His critics -- including many in Brussels -- accuse the nationalist strongman of neutering all opposition.

BA.2 now represents nearly 86 percent of all sequenced cases, according to the World Health Organization. It is even more transmissible than its highly contagious Omicron siblings, BA.1 and BA.1.1, however the evidence so far suggests that it is no more likely to cause severe disease.

"In my 40 years as a humanitarian worker, I have never, ever seen three million people displaced by war and conflict every week for a month", Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told AFP in an interview.

The billionaire businessman, recently slapped with sanctions by Western nations seeking to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine, has reportedly been shuttling between Kyiv, Moscow and other negotiation sites.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said 3,862,797 Ukrainians had fled the country -- an increase of 41,748 from Sunday's figures.

Sharon Dijksma, the Labour mayor of the central Dutch city acknowledged that conditions in the existing centre for asylum-seekers were "disastrous" and "overcrowded" in a Twitter post.

Speaking to a group of Russian journalists via video call, Zelensky said Russia's invasion had caused the destruction of Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine, and said the damage was worse than the Russian wars in Chechnya.

Biden's point, Blinken said in Jerusalem, was that "Putin cannot be empowered to wage war, or engage in aggression against Ukraine, or anyone else".

Biden's comment that the Russian president "cannot remain in power" -- delivered in Warsaw at the close of three days of marathon diplomacy -- was termed "a horrendous gaffe" by one Republican senator.

NATO member Turkey has good relations with both Russia and Ukraine and has sought to mediate in the month-long conflict.

Biden's comments on Saturday, including a statement earlier in the day calling Putin a "butcher," were a sharp escalation of the US approach to Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.

"It is currently impossible to estimate the extent of damage due to hostilities that do not stop in the area of the nuclear installation," the post quoted the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate as saying.

The pact to be announced by U.S. President Joe Biden and the president of the EU's executive, Ursula von der Leyen, follows a day of three summits in Brussels where leaders lambasted Russia's invasion of Ukraine and offered fresh support to Kyiv.