Ukraine latest as Volodymyr Zelenskyy released footage of the shopping centre bombing in which 18 people died; Boris Johnson claims the war in Ukraine would never have started if Vladimir Putin was a woman; Joe Biden changes the US's military posture in Europe over the Russia threat.

Vladimir Putin still has ambitions to seize "most of Ukraine", a top US intelligence official said today.

Avril Haines, the US director of national intelligence, told a commerce department conference: "We continue to be in a position where we look at President Putin and we think he has effectively the same political goals that we had previously, which is to say that he wants to take most of Ukraine."

Ms Haines also said the picture for the war remained "pretty grim" and US intelligence agencies saw three possible scenarios in the near term.

The most likely would be a grinding conflict in which Russian forces only made incremental gains, while the other scenarios included a major Russian breakthrough and Ukraine succeeding in stabilising the frontlines.

"In short, the picture remains pretty grim," said Ms Haines.

Rescue workers are still searching for 20 people after a Russian airstrike on a shopping centre in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk.

Crews continued to search through the rubble of the area today after the strike, which killed at least 18 people, on Monday.

Ukrainian state emergency services press officer Svitlana Rybalko said that along with the people killed, investigators had found fragments of eight more bodies. 

A number of survivors are being treated for injuries such as skull fractures and severed limbs.

"The police cannot say for sure how many (victims) there are. So we are finding not the bodies but the fragments of bodies," Ms Rybalko said.

"Now we are clearing at the very epicentre of the blast. Here, we practically cannot find bodies as such."

Following the attack, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of becoming "a terrorist" state carrying out "daily terrorist acts".

However, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed what she claimed was the Ukrainian government's "blatant provocation" in trying to blame the shopping centre missile strike on Russia's military.

"All these fakes, unfortunately, were replicated and distributed," Ms Zakharova said.

British surveillance aircrafts could help secure shipping routes to release Ukraine's trapped grain, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said.

Mr Wallace told reporters at the NATO summit in Madrid that Rivet Joint or P8 Poseidon aircrafts could patrol areas of the Black Sea if a deal was done to allow grain ships to leave Ukraine's blockaded ports.

But he played down the prospect of Royal Navy warships being sent to the Black Sea.

He said: "We have to put this in perspective, even when Ukraine is at full throttle in its ports, it's about three million tonnes a month. They have 23 million tonnes to ship.

"So you've got to sort of manage the expectations. If there's a ceasefire on the Black Sea or there's a safe passage, it's not going to be like 'oh, you can have it for six weeks, isn't it generous of Russia'. I mean, you're going to get out not very much in exchange.

"What the Turks are trying to do is - with the UN - hammer out details with the Russians about doing it.

"This is first and foremost about getting Ukrainian grain out of Ukraine.

"It's not about helping stolen grain, allowing Russian ships with stolen grain out of the Black Sea, because the Ukrainians won't buy that and they are not going to lift things for that.

"So we have to see what we could do. Britain's role in that could be ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), we could help in overwatch, we could help in Rivet Joint, P8s down in the southern part of the Black Sea to protect.

"The Turks have got it pretty covered on mine hunting. We know the disposition of the minefields. So I think all of those things are definitely possible.

"But we're not going to be sending our ships to the Black Sea because that would mean we would ask the Turks to lift the blockade on foreign warships or warships from other fleets."

US President Joe Biden today thanked Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan for striking a deal with Finland and Sweden that would allow the two Nordic countries to soon become NATO candidates.

Speaking during a NATO summit in Madrid, Mr Biden said: "I  want to particularly thank you for what you did, putting together the situation with regard to Finland and Sweden, and all the incredible work you're going to try to get the grain out of Ukraine.

"You're doing a great job."

The UN atomic watchdog has said it has again lost connection with its surveillance systems keeping track of nuclear material at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. 

"The fact that our remote safeguards data transmission is down again – for the second time in the past month – only adds to the urgency to dispatch this mission (to Zaporizhzhia)," the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement.

The connection was lost on Saturday "due to a disruption of the facility's communication systems", it added.

In March, the world narrowly averted a nuclear catastrophe after Russian forces attacked Europe's largest nuclear power plant in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia. 

The UN's atomic watchdog said at the time that no radioactive material had been released.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has offered to deliver a message from President Volodymr Zelenskyy to Vladimir Putin to try and help peace talks.

Mr Widodo, who has been visiting Ukraine,  is due to go to Moscow and has said he will urge the Russian president to agree to a ceasefire. 

"Even though it's very hard to achieve, I expressed the importance of a peace resolution, the Indonesian leader said after meeting Mr Zelenskyy.

"I offered to deliver a message from President Zelenskyy to President Putin whom I'll meet soon."

It was not immediately clear how Mr Zelenskyy responded to the offer made by the Indonesian president.

Earlier we reported that a residential building in Mykolaiv had been left damaged after eight missiles struck the southern city.

Photographs from the region showed smoke billowing from a four-storey building, with its upper floor partly destroyed.

These images now show rescue workers evacuating a dog from the multi-storey building.

Regional governor Vitaliy Kim said today at least four people had died and five injured in the Russian missile strike.

By security and defence editor Deborah Haynes

The UK will commit an extra 1,000 troops to help defend Estonia, on top of 2,000 British forces already in the Baltic state, Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has said.

Some of the additional soldiers will be used to create a new military headquarters, while the rest will be stationed in the UK, ready to deploy if needed.

It is part of Britain's contribution to a NATO-wide plan, agreed at a landmark summit in Madrid, to shore up its defences across the east of the alliance in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Extra warships and jets are set to be used to help shore up wider NATO defences in the region, the defence secretary told reporters on the sidelines of the summit.

"We have now allocated a brigade, which will be another 1,000 (troops) because three battle-groups make a brigade - which is on standby back in the UK," he said. 

"We will be moving forward a brigade headquarters… that will be a few hundred people on top of the current 2,000."

Ukraine's defence ministry has said 144 Ukrainian soldiers, including fighters who were at Mariupol's Azovstal steel plant, have been freed in a prisoner swap with Moscow.

"Of the 144 freed, 95 are Azovstal defenders," the ministry said in a statement.

Elsewhere, the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, Denis Pushilin, wrote on Telegram: "Today, we are returning home 144 fighters of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Russian Federation who were captured by the enemy.

 "We handed over to Kyiv the same number of prisoners from Ukrainian armed units, most of whom were wounded."

Syria has decided to officially recognise the "independence and sovereignty" of the two breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, the country's state news agency SANA reports, citing a foreign ministry source.

The report comes months after the Syrian presidency affirmed its intention to build relations with the two breakaway republics.

The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic were formed in 2014 after violent protests in Ukraine led to the ousting of its pro-Russian leader Viktor Yushchenko.

In response, Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which caused international outrage.

After the annexation, protests against the new Ukrainian government by pro-Russian separatists started to break out in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and fighting saw the separatists establish a People's Republic of Donetsk and People's Republic of Luhansk.

Syria, of course, is one of few remaining international allies of Russia and President Bashar al-Assad has relied on military support from Vladimir Putin's regime.