Fighting in eastern Ukraine has “somewhat intensified” as Ukrainian and Russian forces clash in at least three areas, Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said, writes The Guardian.

Russian forces had been attacking in the direction of Kupiansk in Kharkiv for two successive days, she said: “We are on the defensive”, - Maliar wrote. “There are fierce battles”. She also said the 2 armies were pummelling one another around the ruined city of Bakhmut but that Ukrainian forces were “gradually moving forward” along its southern flank.

The UN-brokered deal under which Moscow allowed Ukraine to ship its grain across the Black Sea is due to expire late Monday. The Kremlin has threatened to pull out of the agreement and said at the weekend it still had concerns that obligations to remove “obstacles to the export of Russian food and fertilisers still remain unfulfilled”.

Two people were killed on Sunday when Russia launched a series of missile and shelling attacks on the city and region of Kharkiv, beginning in the early hours of the morning and continuing into the evening.

Kharkiv governor Oleh Synyehubov said a young man was killed in the city’s Osnovianskyi district and another civilian man was killed in a village in the Kupiansk area.

Only a “few hundred” fighters from Russia’s Wagner group have so far relocated to Belarus, a Ukrainian official said, leaving the eventual fate of the fighting force unclear.

“There are some groups of mercenaries on the territory of Belarus, but we are not talking about any massive or large-scale deployment … we are talking about a few hundred”, - Andrii Demchenko, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s border guards, told Ukrainian television.