Thread by @fulelo

Ukraine news 🧵at 0730 AM GMT on @bbcworldservice - listen live bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/li…

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called for comprehensive peace talks with Russia. In a video address published online in the early hours of Saturday, he said the time had come

for a meeting to end the war - otherwise, he said, Russia would need generations to recover from its losses. The two sides have been holding lower level negotiations remotely, but the talks have yielded little progress, with Russia and Ukraine blaming the other. Analysts say

that three weeks into the conflict, Russia's offensive remains largely stalled, with its troops about thirty kilometres from the capital Kyiv and continuing to face heavy resistance.

The regional governor of Ukraine's eastern region of Luhansk has said a humanitarian corridor for evacuations is due to open shortly. Serhiy Gaiday said an evacuation operation will get under way, as well as an attempt to bring in food after what's being called a

'regime of silence' was agreed by the Russian military. He did not say where the people will be sent. In the city of Mariupol further south, it's still not clear how many people died from the Russian shelling of a theatre where civilians were sheltering on Wednesday.

Two former British prime ministers - Gordon Brown and John Major - are among one hundred and forty global figures from law, academia and politics who have called for the creation of an international tribunal to investigate President Putin and his accomplices

for their actions in Ukraine. The campaign has set an immediate target to get two million signatures for its online petition in support of the tribunal. It supports the investigation being set up by the International Crimininal Court in The Hague into alleged war crimes

and crimes against humanity. The signatories say that eventually, there must be a day of reckoning for Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine's interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, has said it could take years to defuse all the unexploded bombs and mines on Ukrainian territory left as a result of the war. Speaking to the US news agency AP, Mr Monastyrsky said a large part of the ordinance used

in the Russian barrage against his country lay undetonated under rubble. There were also mines planted by Ukrainian forces at airports and bridges. He appealed for international help to deal with the problem.