Image source, Reuters

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has said Belarus and Russia will deploy a joint military task force in response to what he called an aggravation of tension on the country's western borders, Belarusian media are reporting.

"Do not count on a large number of troops of the Russian Federation Armed Forces. But it will be more than 1,000 people," the website Zerkalo quoted Lukashenko as saying.

Lukashenko, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, said the two countries started pulling forces together two days ago, apparently after the explosion on Russia's bridge to Crimea, state news agency Belta reported.

But he does not say where the troops will be deployed.

Lukashenko also claimed that Ukraine was preparing an attack on his country's territory.

"I've said already that today Ukraine is not just discussing but planning strikes on the territory of Belarus," Belta quoted Lukashenko as saying.

"My answer was simple: 'Tell the Ukrainian president and other madmen that the Crimea bridge will seem like a walk in the park if they touch even a metre of our territory with their dirty hands.'"

The strikes in Kyiv today targeted parks and roads used by commuters to get to work, a resident of the city has said.

Speaking to BBC News, Yevhen Petrov described hearing the first explosion early this morning.

“They targeted not military, not even the civic infrastructures," he said.

"It was targeted at [a] children’s playground in the centre at Kyiv, at 8am, when a huge amount of people were just trying to reach their workplaces.

“At about 9am I was trying to reach my workplace and heard two very hard and loud explosions not very far away."

Petrov said he arrived in the centre of Kyiv to see a plume of smoke coming from one of the sites that had been hit.

He said the attack "definitely" appeared to be targeting civilians, because the location has a lot of roads connecting different parts of the city and linking important business centres and workplaces.

He added one of the parks hit was “the kind of place where, especially in the morning… people can have a walk with their dogs”.

He said the morning had felt similar to the earliest days of the invasion, but now civilians knew what to do in response.

“[The] missiles will end one day, but we will be standing as we were before,” he said.

A pedestrian on Kyiv's Klitschko bridge had a narrow escape this morning when a missile damaged the popular walkway.

As we reported earlier, the bridge opened in 2019 to pedestrians and cyclists and is normally a busy attraction for tourists.

The BBC has been able to verify this footage from a surveillance camera on the bridge this morning, but it is not yet known whether anyone was injured in the strike.

The national police of Ukraine has said that 10 people are known to have died and about 60 have been injured across the country as a result of this morning's Russian strikes on Ukrainian territory.

Image source, Getty Images

The building housing the German consulate's visa office in Kyiv has not been in use by Germany since the war broke out, the country's foreign ministry has confirmed in a tweet, external.

Those who work in the German embassy in the Ukrainian capital city are unhurt, the ministry says.

As we've been reporting, the glass high-rise office building in Kyiv was one of many severely damaged by a Russian missile this morning.

Laura Gozzi
BBC News Live Reporter

Image source, Kremlin / EPA

President Vladimir Putin chaired a meeting of his security council today - an unusual occurrence, as these meetings are usually held on Fridays.

In a statement that was broadcast by state news channels, he accused Ukraine of bombing the Turkish Stream gas pipeline - a natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Turkey through the Black Sea.

Putin also said that Ukraine had attacked the Kursk nuclear power plant in western Russia, going back to accusations from last August, when Russia's FSB security service said Ukrainian saboteurs had blown up electricity pylons in the Kursk region, about 100km (60 miles) from Ukraine's north-east border.

At the time, the FSB said the attacks had affected the "technological process of functioning" of the Kursk nuclear plant.

In his statement, Putin also said that Ukraine was behind attacks on the Zaporizhzhia power plant, which he said amounted to "atomic terrorism". Ukraine and Russia have frequently traded accusations of shelling the facility.

Putin added that "should attempts to carry out terrorist attacks on the territory of the Russian Federation continue, the response will be harsh and proportionate to the level of the threats".

Witnesses to a missile explosion in Kyiv's Shevchenko Park have described their horror to the BBC.

Husband and wife Valerii and Olena Badakh live in an apartment overlooking a playground that was hit this morning.

The strike was "horrifying", Olena told the BBC's Paul Adams. "In an instant, there appeared a hole in our lives. It was terrible."

Valerii says he spent his "entire life here" - cleaning the park and sowing the grass. His son and grandson have also enjoyed the park.

He adds that "there are always so many kids here" and that he's "not sure whether any got hurt today".

The Kyiv resident says some of the strikes this morning on non-military targets represent a "symbolic attack".

Image source, .

The surveillance images show the moment before the pedestrian bridge in Kyiv known as the Klitschko bridge was struck by a missile this morning, and the moment of impact one second later.

The bridge located in central Kyiv creates a shortcut on a tourist route along the right bank of Dnieper river in the city.

Jessica Parker
Reporting from Brussels

More reaction from Western allies of Ukraine now, as the European Union describes the "indiscriminate" Russian attacks on civilians in Ukraine as amounting to a "war crime".

The European Commission describes the missile strikes being seen in Kyiv and other cities as "barbaric and cowardly".

Foreign Affairs spokesman Peter Stano condemns the "heinous" attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in the "strongest possible terms".

It's understood countries like Poland are pushing for further sanctions including new trade restrictions and a ban on Russians buying property in the EU.

The bloc only just approved an eighth round of sanctions last week after some considerable haggling amongst countries.

Stano says that EU member states were deciding on the next steps.

He adds that the EU is committed to providing further military aid with the latest tranche of funding being finalised amongst member states.

The building housing the German consulate in Kyiv was hit by a Russian missile strike, Reuters news agency quotes Germany's foreign ministry as saying.

It is not clear if anyone was killed or injured in the attack, we'll bring you more information as and when it is available.

In the hours since the Russian military began to strike cities around Ukraine, reaction has flooded in from across Europe.

French President Emmanuel Macron has held an emergency call with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

Macron reaffirmed his support for Ukraine and expressed "extreme concern" at the reports of civilian casualties, the Elysée Palace said in a statement.

Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also spoken to Zelensky, assuring him of support from Berlin and from the other G7 states, a German government spokesman has confirmed.

Poland's foreign minister Zbigniew Rau called the missile strikes "an act of barbarism and a war crime", adding: "Russia cannot win this war. We stand behind you Ukraine!"

UK Foreign Minister James Cleverly echoed these thoughts, stating that Russian attacks on civilian leaders were "unacceptable" and a "demonstration of weakness by [President Vladimir] Putin, not strength".

The foreign minister of Moldova, which shares a border with western Ukraine and has its own area of land annexed by Russia (Transnistria), has said several Russian cruise missiles targeting Ukraine had crossed its airspace.

Moldova summoned Moscow's envoy to the country to demand an explanation for the violation, Nicu Popescu confirmed.

Image source, .

Russia has launched 83 missiles on Ukraine this morning - more than 43 of which were shot down - in an ongoing attack on the country.

Civilian casualties are continuing to be reported and a number of key infrastructure facilities have been hit, causing widespread power outages across the country.

It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of committing an "act of terrorism" after an explosion happened on the only bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea. Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for that explosion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has confirmed the strikes on a range of locations in Ukraine this morning.

In a video address, he says long-range missiles hit energy, military and communications facilities.

Putin promises a "harsh" response to any further "terrorist" acts on Russian territory.

The Russian leader is today expected to meet his security council and discuss the explosion at the weekend on a bridge linking Russia to Crimea - something for which he blames Ukraine.

A video of people singing en masse while sheltering from the air raids in a Kyiv metro station has been circulating on social media.

BBC News has been able to verify the clip - which you can watch above.

Chris Partridge
BBC News

Russia's strikes across several major Ukrainian cities demonstrates it still very much has the capability to deploy precision-guided weapons at scale.

Ukraine's air force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said Russia launched 83 missiles - and more than 43 had been shot down by air defences. The missiles, he added, included Kalibr, Iskander and Kh-101, launched from the Caspian and Black Seas.

This year, we have seen attacks on Lviv in the west and Odesa in the south carried out by Tu-95 bombers from as far as the Caspian Sea, over 900km (560 miles) away.

And this weekend's missile strikes on Zaporizhzhia, according to the Ukrainian military, came from multiple Tu22M3 bombers and Su-35 strike aircraft - each deploying air-launched cruise missiles.

The wave of attack will lead to further calls in Ukraine for modern Western missile defences.

The National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System - NASAMS - is due in Ukraine by the end of November, according to the Pentagon.

Image source, re

"Eleven important infrastructure facilities" in eight different Ukrainian regions plus the capital city, Kyiv, have been hit in this morning's shelling, says the country's prime minister.

Denys Shmyhal does not give more detail on the facilities in his Telegram post, external.

He says "some areas are cut off" - with personnel working urgently to restore services.

Shortages of power and water have been reported by officials in the major cities of Lviv and Kharkiv, and the regions of Khmelnytskyi, Sumy and Ternopil.

There are many pictures and images of this morning's attacks around Ukraine on social media.

We are working to verify as many of them as we can.

One person filming from the passenger seat of a car in Kyiv captured the moment one such missile strike hit.

If you're just catching up, here's a summary of what happened over the weekend in Ukraine in the lead-up to Russia's strikes:

Saturday

• Early in the morning, the only bridge linking Russia with occupied Crimea was badly damaged after an explosion
• Three people were killed in the blast, according to Russian investigators

• Parts of the car section of the bridge, which is a pivotal symbol of Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, fell into the Black Sea
• Work to repair the bridge has begun, with light vehicle traffic and some trains able to cross later in the day
• Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the explosion, but many politicians and military officials made pointed references to it in social media posts

Sunday

• More missile attacks on Zaporizhzhia were seen following the blast, with at least 13 killed in the south-eastern city
• Russia has also increased its security around the bridge, with President Vladimir Putin ordering the Federal Security Service (FSB) to oversee the key crossing to the occupied peninsula

• Putin later accused Ukraine's security services of attacking the bridge, saying that it was an "act of terrorism"

Sarah Rainsford
Eastern Europe Correspondent

Ukraine says Russia launched 83 rockets in total, and a map shows strikes right across the country.

It looks like brutal payback for the audacious attack on the Crimean bridge over the weekend, a symbol of Russia's control over the peninsula it seized illegally in 2014.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called that strike a "terrorist attack", blaming Kyiv, then appointed a notoriously cruel general to command operations in Ukraine.

Today is Gen Sergey Surovikin's first day in the job. State TV propagandists and other Putin loyalists had been calling for attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure to freeze the country into submission this winter.

One, Vladimir Solovyov had demanded to know "when will we start fighting?" - declaring that "it’s better to be feared than laughed at".

They're now hailing these strikes, which hit parks and city streets in rush hour. Margarita Simonyan, the editor of Russia's state-controlled international TV network RT, called the Crimean bridge attack a "red line" for Russia. And now our "little response" has landed, she wrote.

President Zelensky has said the G7 is to hold an emergency meeting following the strikes across Ukraine and that he will deliver an address.

Writing on Twitter, he said he had spoken to Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, which currently holds the G7 presidency, and that Scholz had agreed to hold an urgent meeting of the group.

"My speech is scheduled, in which I'll tell about the terrorist attacks by [Russia]," Zelensky said.

"We also discussed the issue of increasing pressure on [Russia] and aid in restoring damaged infrastructure."