INTERNATIONAL: U.S. officials have stepped up efforts to soften comments made on Saturday ,March 26, by U.S. President Joe Biden, who has said in a fiery speech in Poland that Russian leader Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said on Sunday ,March 27), Washington had no strategy of regime change in Moscow and that Biden had simply meant Putin could not be "empowered to wage war" against Ukraine or anywhere else.
Refugees from Ukraine's port city of Odesa have said they were afraid for their home town as they fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine by ferry to Romania on Sunday.
Some 159 Ukrainian orphans and their caretakers have arrived in Turkey's Antalya province weeks after they fled the war and evacuated to Poland.
Ukrainian Ambassador to Ankara Vasly Bodnar has said up to 2,000 children could be brought to Turkey in the coming weeks.
The invasion has devastated several Ukrainian cities, has caused a major humanitarian crisis and displaced an estimated 10 million people, nearly a quarter of Ukraine's total population.
Firefighters have battled to extinguish a fire in a fuel storage facilities in Lviv hit on Saturday by Russian cruise missiles as plumes of thick smoke and flames were seen rising from the site.
The day after, Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko has said Russia had started destroying Ukrainian fuel and food storage centres, meaning the government would have to disperse stocks of both in the near future.
Russia wants to split Ukraine into two, as happened with North and South Korea, Ukraine's military intelligence chief has said on Sunday, vowing "total" guerrilla warfare to prevent a carve-up of the country.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has urged the West to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to help fend off the Russian forces, which the Kyiv government has said were increasingly targeting fuel and food depots.
And during his address to thousands of people in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, Pope Francis has said the threat of a global conflict spawned by Russia's invasion of Ukraine should convince everyone that the time has come for humanity to abolish war before it abolishes humanity.
