The Ministry of Defence has said service personnel are banned from travelling to Ukraine amid reports British soldiers have gone absent without leave to fight Russia.
The statement followed reports that a 19-year-old Coldstream Guardsman is among as many as four missing British soldiers feared to have travelled to Ukraine to help.
A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "This applies whether the service person is on leave or not. Personnel travelling to Ukraine will face disciplinary and administrative consequences."
A teenage Coldstream Guardsman, who was based in Windsor barracks, wrote a goodbye letter to his parents and bought a ticket to Poland on the weekend with the aim of crossing into Ukraine, according to The Sun.
A group of young British fighters arrived in Ukraine on the weekend to help defend it and declared: "Hopefully we'll win."
All travel to Ukraine is banned under official UK military advice.
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Civilians in Mariupol, a city of about 430,000 people, have been without water, heat, sanitary systems and phone services for several days.
In desperation, many have turned to breaking into stores.
A video showed a Ukrainian soldier telling people: "People, please be united. You don't need to panic. Please don't steal everything. You will live here together."
Belarusians living in Ukraine have formed a military unit and are preparing to join the fight against Russia.
Jan Derbeiko, 26, said he had been living in Kyiv since November 2020 after being forced to leave Belarus for participating in protests against President Alexander Lukashenko.
"I had a job and I had plans for future, but the war happened here," Derbeiko said. "At that moment, I decided to stay here. I've already lost my homeland and now my new home is being destroyed."
Derbeiko urged all Belarusians "who have a conscience and honour left" to provide "maximum support to the Ukrainians".
He said the squadron of Belarusians - which grows each day - are preparing to take their positions when the Russian soldiers attack Kyiv.
Two million people - half of them children - have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded the country, officials said as Europe's worst refugee crisis since the Second World War grows by the day.
The humanitarian situation in the country's besieged cities grows more dire, including in Mariupol, where bodies lay uncollected in the streets and hopes for a mass evacuation of civilians were dashed again.
Australia's Office of National Intelligence director general said Chinese leader Xi Jinping is "really battening down and hardening his country for this struggle to overtake the United States as the world's leading power".
Andrew Shearer said: "The base camp ... is to establish primacy in the Indo-Pacific region."
He said the geopolitical threat would centre around technology, including use of cyber attacks, so Australia must bolster its cyber defences without closing itself to trade and information sharing.
A "troubling new strategic convergence" between Beijing and Moscow had developed and the risk of "major power conflict" had grown since Russia invaded Ukraine, Australia's intelligence chief said on Wednesday.
Andrew Shearer, director general of the Office of National Intelligence, said China's President Xi Jinping appeared to be planning to dominate the Indo-Pacific region and use it as a base to overtake the United States as the world's leading power.
The comments reinforce warnings that the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has met near-universal condemnation by the West, may spread into a regional or global conflict.
Ukrainian troops repulsed a Russian attempt to enter the eastern city of Kharkiv on Tuesday and foiled a planned operation by 120 Russian paratroopers near the border, regional Governor Oleh Synehubov said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told MPs and peers in the UK that his people will fight Russia "in the forests, in the fields, on the shores and on the streets".
"We will fight till the end, at sea, in the air, we will continue fighting for our land. Whatever the cost.
Russia said it is ready to provide humanitarian corridors on Wednesday for people fleeing Kyiv and four other Ukrainian cities, as the number of refugees created by the biggest assault on a European country since the Second World War surpassed two million.
Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Russia's National Defence Control Centre, was quoted as saying by the Tass news agency that Russian forces would "observe a regime of silence" from 10am Moscow time (7am GMT) to ensure safe passage for civilians wishing to leave Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Mariupol.
It was unclear if the proposed routes would pass through Russia or Belarus - conditions previously opposed by the Ukrainian Government.
Civilians fled the besieged city of Sumy on Tuesday in the first successful "humanitarian corridor" opened since Russia's invasion.
Ukraine accused Russian forces of shelling another evacuation route, from Mariupol in the south of the country.
The Pentagon said Poland's offer to give its MiG-29 fighter jets to the US so they could be passed to Ukraine raises serious concerns for the NATO alliance and the plan is not "a tenable one".
Under the plan, the used Russian-made jets would be transported to a US air force base in Ramstein, Germany. They were "ready to deploy – immediately and free of charge", the Polish Government said.
Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said the prospect of jets departing from a US/NATO base in Germany to fly into airspace contested with Russia in the Ukraine war was concerning.
He said it was not clear to the US that there was a substantive rationale for it.
The US would continue to talk to Poland about the matter.
Read more: Poland offers fighter jets to help Ukraine repel Russians
Ukrainian authorities say Russian warplanes have carried out new strikes on residential areas in eastern and central parts of the country.
Ukrainian officials said two people, including a seven-year-old child, were killed in the town of Chuhuiv just east of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine late on Tuesday.
And in the city of Malyn, in the Zhytomyr region west of the capital Kyiv, at least five people, including two children, were killed in a Russian air strike.
The Russian artillery has pounded the outskirts of Kyiv, forcing civilians to hide in shelters while water, food and power supplies have been cut, said Yaroslav Moskalenko, an official who coordinates humanitarian efforts in the Kyiv region.
He said that the shelling made it impossible to evacuate the bodies of five people who died when their vehicle was fired upon in Borodianka near Kyiv and the bodies of 12 patients of a psychiatric hospital there.
He said another 200 patients were stuck there without food and medicine.
US Senator Marco Rubio said there were "Russian propaganda" reports claiming the discovery of a plot by Ukrainians to release biological weapons, with coordination from NATO.
Asked by Senator Rubio if a biological or chemical weapon attack were to occur inside Ukraine, and whether Russians would be behind it, senior State Department official Victoria Nuland said: "There is no doubt in my mind, Senator."
"And it is a classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they're planning to do themselves."
The Atlantic Council, a think tank headquartered in Washington, said the Kremlin was seeking to justify its invasion by pushing a false narrative that Ukraine was developing dirty bombs and biological weapons.
The council said there was no evidence Ukraine was creating such weapons.
The US is working with Ukraine to prevent invading Russian forces from seizing biological research material amid concern governments or unscrupulous actors might try to use such items to create bioweapons.
"Ukraine has biological research facilities, which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of," senior State Department official Victoria Nuland told US lawmakers at a hearing when asked directly whether Ukraine has bioweapons.
"So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach."
Thousands of Airbnb users have booked vacation rentals in war-battered Ukraine, not to visit but to provide aid to local hosts struggling to survive the Russian invasion.
Over a two-day period last week, some $1.9 million was spent on reservations for more than 61,000 nights in Ukraine, a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based company told AFP on Tuesday.
The outpouring of support came as Airbnb announced a suspension of its business in Russia and Belarus, joining a US tech freeze-out of Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.
One user told AFP that she had made reservations in the besieged cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv.
"You have people that are in the middle of an active crisis," said Canadian Meghan Bamford.
"If you can get money directly into their accounts, that's the difference between somebody being forced to stay in somewhere like Kyiv or surrounding communities or potentially being able to get out."
The Ministry of Defence has said that service personnel are banned from travelling to Ukraine amid reports that British soldiers had gone absent without leave to fight against Russia.
The statement followed reports that a 19-year-old Coldstream Guardsman is among as many as four missing British soldiers feared to have travelled to Ukraine to help.
A MoD spokesman said: "All service personnel are prohibited from travelling to Ukraine until further notice.
"This applies whether the service person is on leave or not. Personnel travelling to Ukraine will face disciplinary and administrative consequences."
A teenage Coldstream Guardsman, who was based in Windsor barracks, wrote a goodbye letter to his parents and bought a ticket to Poland on the weekend with the aim of crossing into Ukraine, according to The Sun.
A group of young British fighters arrived in Ukraine on the weekend to help defend it and declared: "Hopefully we'll win."
All travel to Ukraine is banned under official UK military advice.
It states that going to Ukraine to fight, or to assist others engaged in the conflict, may be against the law and could lead to prosecution.
Another issue is that the UK has limited consular support in Ukraine, and is unlikely to be able to offer help.
Read the full story here.
A British man struggling to get his elderly mother-in-law out of Ukraine has said he is "lost for words" at the "utterly ridiculous" response from the UK Government.
Michael Felton, 61, has been attempting to get his children's 83-year-old grandmother to safety in the UK after her home came under fire from Russian air strikes.
"My wife said to me she doesn't want her mother, who was born during the Second World War, to die in another war... it's hard to know what to say," Mr Felton told the PA news agency.
"I am truly lost for words at how to describe the help our government is giving.
"By comparison other countries across Europe are accepting people with free transport, free food, free clothing, free accommodation... actually helping these refugees."
Mr Felton said it had taken "some coercion" from his wife to convince her mother Nadia, known as Babulya to her family, to leave her home in Kharkiv, in north-east Ukraine.
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