Human Rights Watch is urging Kyiv to repatriate dozens of Ukrainian women and children it says are being held in "horrific" conditions in Syrian camps.

U.S. President Joe Biden has urged Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to take measures to ease mounting tensions with Ukraine and proposed a summit between the two leaders in a third country as Washington and NATO reaffirmed their support for Kyiv.

The U.S. State Department has called for the release of an RFE/RL freelance correspondent arrested in Ukraine's Russia-annexed Crimea region and joined human rights groups in expressing concern over his treatment and a televised "confession" he gave.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has published a survey that it says shows that illegal fishing and trade in wild sturgeon is happening in the lower Danube region on a “rather serious scale.”

Ukraine says it has requested talks with Russia to discuss escalating tensions in eastern Ukraine but has yet to receive an answer, prompting warnings from the West, including calls by Washington for Moscow to explain its actions at an upcoming security meeting.

The United States has warned of "consequences" if Russia "acts recklessly or aggressively" toward Ukraine amid concerns over Moscow's troop buildup near Ukraine's borders.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called for an end to what he described as "worrying" developments in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on April 10.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was due on April 10 to embark on a series of overseas meetings with U.S. allies amid rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia and what Washington calls Moscow's "destabilizing behavior."

Ukraine's IT industry grew by 20 percent in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic hit hard but bolstered demand for digitalization. Can cash-strapped Kyiv find a way to tax the tech sector without scaring away "top talent"?

The COVID-19 pandemic is raging across Ukraine. At a small rural hospital in the village of Lavriv in the country's Lviv region, there are no spare beds and patients are lying in corridors. Ukraine has recorded over 37,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic. The Lviv region has recorded more deaths than any other apart from Kyiv.

Alliance warns about ‘largest massing of Russian troops since annexation of Crimea’

Nato’s secretary general has called on Russia to halt its military buildup around Ukraine, describing it as “unjustified, unexplained and deeply concerning”.

Later on Tuesday, Moscow hit back, saying the deployments were a reaction to what it claimed were Nato plans to move troops closer to Russia’s borders in the Baltic and Black Sea regions.

Related:Military buildup near Ukraine sows confusion over Russian intentions

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US president proposed a summit between the two leaders amid growing concern over Russian military buildup on Ukraine border

Joe Biden has called on Vladimir Putin to demand he de-escalate tensions with Ukraine amid the largest buildup of Russian forces on its borders since the annexation of Crimea.

In a phone call on Tuesday, Biden also proposed a meeting in a third country in the coming months, potentially setting up the first US-Russia presidential summit since Putin held talks with Donald Trump in Helsinki in 2018.

Related:Nato tells Russia to stop military buildup around Ukraine

Related:Military buildup near Ukraine sows confusion over Russian intentions

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The Russian poet’s eloquent writing is caught between a pursuit of the past and the meaninglessness of memorialising

Translated poetry seldom finds its way into this column. It is too high risk: there is the probability the original voice will seem muffled or will not travel. But an exception has to be made for Maria Stepanova, born in Moscow and a leading voice in post-Soviet culture: poet, journalist, publisher and force for press freedom (founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site) who has been showered with prizes in Russia but has not, until now, been much known here. She is translated by Sasha Dugdale, a poet herself, whose imaginative instincts serve her tirelessly. Having said this, a sense that we might be playing Russian whispers (I don’t speak the language) cannot be altogether avoided if only because, as Dugdale explains in her introduction, there is much in Stepanova’s challenging writing that does not translate at all. And yet it has been Dugdale’s remarkable project to give Stepanova a parallel life by dextrously furnishing her modernist poems with English examples.

It is essential to read War of the Beasts and the Animals alongside its companion work, the richly absorbing “documentary novel” In Memory of Memory (just nominated for the International Booker prize). Stepanova scrutinises the memorialising drive of writers and artists: Proust, Mandelstam, Susan Sontag, Joseph Cornell, WG Sebald, Charlotte Salomon – the book is, in part, a Jewish history. Yet she has a simultaneous regard for oblivion, for not recording, for the right to vanish definitively. Holocaust photographs, she argues, need protecting from their audiences. Her writing exists on an edge between an avid pursuit of the past and an acknowledgment of the eventual meaninglessness of memorialising. There is a sense that she might, at any point, be tempted into silence. She writes eloquently about modern technology’s influence on memory, about the wantonly comprehensive record digital photography makes possible – its images persisting into an unwanted immortality. By contrast, she salvages piercingly personal material, including letters from “Lyodik”, her grandfather’s cousin, killed in 1942 in the siege of Leningrad.

Related:'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer

War of the Beasts and the Animals by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale, is published by Bloodaxe (£12). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale, is published by Fitzcarraldo (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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