Russia strikes Kyiv again

Lviv: Russian forces pounding the port city of Mariupol shelled a mosque sheltering more than 80 people, including children, the Ukrainian government said Saturday. There was no immediate word of casualties from the shelling of Mariupol's elegant, city-center mosque.

Fighting also raged on the outskirts of the capital, Kyiv, as Russia's expanding invasion bombarded cities into rubble.

In his nightly video message, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky encouraged his people to keep fighting. "It's impossible to say how many days we will still need to free our land, but it is possible to say that we will do it," he said from Kyiv.

In multiple areas around the capital, artillery barrages sent residents scurrying for shelter and air raid sirens wailed. Britain's Defense Ministry said Russian ground forces massed north of Kyiv for most of the war had edged to within 25 km of the city center and also spread out, likely to support an attempted encirclement.

As artillery pounded Kyiv's northwestern outskirts, black and white columns of smoke rose southwest of the capital after a strike on an ammunition depot in the town of Vasylkiv caused hundreds of small explosions.

Mariupol, the encircled city of 446,000 people, has suffered some of the greatest misery from Russia's war in Ukraine, with unceasing barrages thwarting repeated attempts to bring in food and water, evacuate trapped civilians and to bury all of the dead.