Ukrainian commander Oleksiy Tarasenko witnessed a frightening shift last month in Russia's efforts to punch through Kyiv's defense of the industrial region known as the Donbas.

Standing against Russia's unyielding advance in the strategic front-line town of Chasiv Yar, he noticed that, instead of making typical light infantry assaults, Moscow's forces were taking brazen risks by launching battalion- and platoon-sized attacks, sometimes with up to 10 combat vehicles.

For the first time in history, prosecutors will present a criminal case against a former American president to a jury Monday as they accuse Donald Trump of a hush money scheme aimed at preventing damaging stories about his personal life from becoming public.

A 12-person jury in Manhattan is set to hear opening statements from prosecutors and defense lawyers in the first of four criminal cases against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to reach trial.

Russia said Monday it captured the village of Novomykhailivka in eastern Ukraine, while Ukrainian officials warned the situation on the front lines is likely to deteriorate in coming weeks.

Russia's defense ministry said "units of the southern grouping of troops have completely liberated the settlement of Novomykhailivka," some 20 kilometres (12 miles) away from Vugledar that Russian forces have been trying to seize.

The Kremlin warned Monday it would take "necessary" measures to "ensure its security" if Poland hosted nuclear weapons, after Warsaw said it was ready to do so should NATO decide to deploy the arms.

"The military will of course analyze the situation and in any case will take all necessary response steps in order to ensure our security," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday approved long-delayed military aid to Ukraine in a rare show of bipartisan unity, while also bolstering Israel and Taiwan defenses and threatening to ban Chinese-owned TikTok.

The four bills in the $95 billion package were overwhelmingly approved in quick succession, though they leave the future of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in some doubt as he seeks to fend off angry far-right detractors.

French authorities on Friday detained a man after receiving an alert from the Iranian consulate in Paris that someone had entered carrying an explosive, the capital's police authority said.

"The man has exited the consulate and is being controlled" by police, it said, after a security source told AFP that the mission called in law enforcement following a witness seeing a man enter carrying a grenade or an explosive belt.

Millions of Indians began voting Friday in a six-week election that's a referendum on Narendra Modi, the populist prime minister who has championed an assertive brand of Hindu nationalist politics and is seeking a rare third term as the country's leader.

The voters began queuing up at polling stations hours before they were allowed in at 7 a.m. in the first 21 states to hold votes, from the Himalayan mountains to the tropical Andaman Islands. Nearly 970 million voters — more than 10% of the world's population — will elect 543 members to the lower house of Parliament for five years during the staggered elections that run until June 1. The votes will be counted on June 4.

New York police have removed a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at Columbia University and arrested more than 100 demonstrators, including the daughter of a prominent Minnesota congresswoman.

Several students involved in the protest said they also were suspended from Columbia and Barnard College, including Isra Hirsi, who is the daughter of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosive-laden vest near a van carrying Japanese autoworkers, who narrowly escaped the attack Friday that wounded three bystanders in Pakistan's port city of Karachi, police said.

The van had been heading to an industrial area where the five Japanese nationals worked at Pakistan Suzuki Motors, local police chief Arshad Awan said. He said police escorting the Japanese returned fire after coming under attack, killing an accomplice of the suicide bomber whose remains were found from the scene of the attack.

Russia has made clear to Israel that Iran "does not want escalation", Moscow's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday, after reports Israel had carried out retaliatory strikes against its arch-rival.

"There have been telephone contacts between the leadership of Russia and Iran, our representatives and the Israelis. We made it very clear in these conversations, we told the Israelis that Iran does not want escalation," Lavrov said in an interview with Russian radio stations.