TOP HEADLINES

• President Vladimir Putin said that Russia has a "sufficient stockpile" of cluster bombs and could use them if such munitions were used against Russian forces in Ukraine. That's after Kyiv received the same type of bombs from the U.S., munitions banned in more than 100 countries. READ MORE BELOW

• The last ship to travel under the UN-brokered Black Sea grain deal left the port of Odesa on Sunday as a deadline to extend the agreement comes to a close. Russia has refused to extend the deal over Western obstacles to its own food and fertilizer exports.

• President Putin discussed the grain deal by phone with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday, the Kremlin said. Putin reportedly reiterated to the African leader that commitments to remove obstacles to Russian exports had not yet been fulfilled.

• Russia's defense ministry said its forces had prevented a Ukrainian "terrorist attack" on the Crimean port of Sevastopol on Sunday, destroying seven aerial and two underwater drones.

• Russia has arrested seven people who were allegedly plotting to kill two prominent Russian journalists in a Ukrainian-backed plan. Russia's state-owned TASS news agency reported the detainees had tried to target journalists Margarita Simonyan, head of state media outlet RT, and Ksenia Sobchak, who ran against President Vladimir Putin in 2018.

• Ukrainian shelling killed a woman while she was riding her bicycle in the Russian border town of Shebekino, according to the governor of Belgorod region. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv, which almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia. 

• A civilian was killed and another wounded in Russian shelling in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, while seven were injured in a village in Kyiv-controlled Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.

• A day earlier, Russian-backed officials in the Zaporizhzhia region said Ukrainian forces had destroyed a school in the village of Stulneve. 

• Fighters from the Wagner group have arrived in Belarus from Russia, Ukrainian and Polish officials have announced, a day after Minsk said the mercenaries were training the country's soldiers southeast of the capital.

• Russia has demanded Kyiv immediately release a senior Orthodox cleric who is accused of inflaming religious hatred and justifying Russia's assault on Ukraine. Ukraine has been cracking down on the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church, claiming it is pro-Russian and collaborating with Moscow. 

IN DETAIL 

Putin says Russia will use cluster bombs in Ukraine if it has to

President Vladimir Putin said Russia had a "sufficient stockpile" of cluster bombs and could use them if such munitions were deployed against Russian forces in Ukraine.

Ukraine said on Thursday it had received cluster bombs from the U.S., which says the munitions are needed to compensate for shell shortages faced by Kyiv's forces.

Cluster munitions are banned in more than 100 countries because they release large numbers of smaller bombs that can kill indiscriminately over a wide area. 

Some of them inevitably fail to explode and can pose a danger for decades, particularly to children.

Kyiv has said it will use cluster bombs to attack concentrations of Russian soldiers when trying to take back its own territory, but would not use them on Russian territory.

Putin told state TV Moscow would respond in kind if necessary.

"I want to note that in the Russian Federation there is a sufficient stockpile of different kinds of cluster bombs. We have not used them yet. But of course if they are used against us, we reserve the right to take reciprocal action," he said.

Putin said he regarded the use of cluster bombs as a crime and that Russia had so far not needed to use them despite reports of Russia's low ammunition stockpiles in the past.

Human Rights Watch says both Moscow and Kyiv have already used cluster munitions. Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. have not signed up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the production, stockpiling, use and transfer of the weapons.

Putin also said in the interview he saw nothing wrong in Russian specialists examining captured Western military equipment and missiles, such as the Storm Shadow missiles Britain supplied to Ukraine, in order to see if there was anything useful that could be used in Russia's own military hardware.