this is bbc news, the headlines... talks are continuing between the uk and the eu over securing a new brexit deal for northern ireland. there are signs an agreement is close, with a no 10 source calling negotiations "positive." also in northern ireland... a fifth person's been arrested in connection with the attempted murder of the off—duty police

officerjohn caldwell in omagh. he remains critically ill in hospital. there's been a small earthquake in wales overnight. the tremor was centred just to the east of crickhowell in powys. the 3.4 magnitude quake was felt up to 30 miles away in cardiff. there are no reports of any injuries or major damage. voting is under way in nigeria to elect a new president. the incumbent, muhammadu buhari, is stepping aside after serving the maximum two terms in office. the result isn't expected before monday. you're watching bbc news. now it's time for ukraine: a year on the frontlines.

over the past 30 years or so, i've covered conflicts in the middle east, in the balkans, and in africa, but this is unlike anything that i have ever known. this is a war that we did not expect to see in europe in our time. there was a sense that the security architecture that we knew, the safety, the security, that we thought we had since the end of the cold war, that was gone. i was here injanuary and february of last year counting down to the invasion. i was sure it would come, but it turned out to be even worse than i expected.

we were in mariupol, which is a port city in the east. it's only 30 miles from the russian border. but inside the city, there was this surreal atmosphere of calm. and i remember we went to film in a supermarket. there was no panic buying. the shelves were full. we met a lady called tatiana, who was 7a, and very feisty. and, i remember, she almost seemed angry that we had dared to ask the question, will the russians invade all?

maybe it was denial. maybe it was disbelief. i've thought about her so often since, and i wondered, did she survive? i'm a bbc ukrainian bilingual correspondent, and i've been covering the war in my country since its very beginning. 0n the first day of the russian invasion, i was in kyiv. the bbc�*s zhanna bezpiatchuk, who's sheltering with her parents as i speak in a residential suburb in kyiv. for the moment, the whole country, all of ukraine became the front line. at some point i had to take some breaks between lives and just get out of my home and watch what was happening. if any missile strikes were in the air in the skies over kyiv.

i wanted very much to do everything that it was possible to at the moment. so i decided to continue reporting. and at the same time i had this thought in my mind all the time, how tell parents what to do when we have to evacuate, if we have to flee kyiv. so, that was the beginning of warfor me. one of the things that i realized that it's really important to meet your professional commitment as a journalist. i felt that, in fact, all my previous experience with journalism was like a preparation that helped me stay focused and be able to do yourjob on this day. what seemed very clear in those early days was that the russians would try hard to get to the capital and to topple the ukrainian government, and try to achieve a quick victory. so, we set off driving

from the east. i remember how empty the roads were. it was a very eerie journey. for long stretches, we were the only thing moving. we went filming at the northern edge of the city where there was a territorial defense unit. and when we arrived, there was an extraordinary scene. there were a few dozen people of all ages wrapped up in winter coats and woolly hats. a typical group of civilians, that could have been a residents association meeting, filling bottles with petrol and putting rags in the top. they were all making molotov cocktails because people felt that the russians could arrive at the gates of their city at any moment. that's our country, and that's hurting us a lot. hard to discuss it. did you ever think you'd find yourself in a situation like this?

never imagined. nobody imagined like this. when we were filming there, someone caught my eye, a young guy with a woolly hat. he looked quite scholarly and, frankly, very out of place, sitting behind a lookout post with a rifle. and, we went to speak to him, and it turned out that he was a lawyer. a week ago, i was representing my cases in the courtroom, and now it's difficult to grasp but if you don't think about it, and simply do what you have to do it, it actually feels pretty, already, normal. i mean, have you ever held a gun in your hands before? at school, we've trained, uh, to deal with these sort of things, but i have never dealt with it and never even shot a gun or a pistol.

there was a real sense at that time that ukraine, and indeed europe, was being dragged back in time. we were at the edge of the city one day in a forest, and we were watching young men, lines of young men, digging trenches with shovels. chopping down trees, frantically trying to create a line of defence around the city. and it's a scene that could have played out, and indeed did play, out in world war one. this could have been the somme, but it was the edge of a european capital in 2022. you can hear lots of shooting tear gas coming in. i've been based in the middle east covering conflicts in iraq, syria, libya for the past ten years. before that, i was in afghanistan. i've covered a lot of catastrophes, a lot of wars.

never been to ukraine before. all of that was new, and it was just very different. the raw fear in those early days. like nothing i'd ever seen before. just that overall sense of uncertainty. it was clear when the invasion happened, the scale of russia's invasion, that this was something different. it was like a 9/11 moment. this was going to change the world. this would change european defence policy. it would change european energy policy. how all of us felt about our collective safety. we set out. at first we didn't know where we were going to go, but it seemed to make sense to go east. there were no flights, there were still no commercial flights in ukraine.

so, you had to drive and it's driving a long way. and in those early days, there were checkpoints everywhere. people were so jumpy, so suspicious, especially of foreigners. it took us a long time to get to kharkiv. we arrived there and there was a ghost city. there were no people on the streets. there was just an abiding sense of fear and terror and an expectation that, at any moment, the city could collapse. one of the first things that happens when we're there is we get stopped by the police. we get searched. i get patted down. other colleagues have been thrown on the ground. had guns pointed to their heads, because there was that fear of saboteurs everywhere. we spoke to the police and we said, "look, you know, we're journalists now." "can we ride along with you at night through the cityjust to get a sense of what's going on?" and we did. but a lot of buildings had been destroyed. hardly anyone on the street,

anyone who was on the street was treated with suspicion. you know, ithink in the first night. cruise missile took out the building opposite our hotel. whole building shook. and that was how it was in the early days. just attack after attack. constant artillery, constant fear and a constant sense of, well, i really don't know what's going to happen. i don't know how long ukraine will manage to hold on here. having covered the conflict in afghanistan and because of the taliban's regime in the 1990s, you expect a level of brutality in that conflict. but i think when i went to cover the war in ukraine,

perhaps because it was in europe, perhaps because it involved global powers, you know, it might have been naive of me, but i didn't expect to see the level of brutality that i saw on the ground there. the first time i went to cover the story, it was at a time when russian forces had just withdrawn from northern ukraine. and so areas around kyiv that had previously been under russian control were areas that we could access. there were so many stories of civilians being executed, of civilians being tortured, of crimes against women. one of the most distressing stories we covered, i think, was about how this mass of people was held. more than 100 people crammed together in a basement for weeks. the windows were completely sealed

shut, so there was no ventilation. it was in a town outside of the northern city of chernihiv. and i remember as we walked underground, just this stench assailed us. foul, decaying smell. when i think about it or when i see those pictures again, it'sjust, you know, i can smell it again. those who died in this room, they were mostly elderly people. ijust, i couldn't make sense of it. i really couldn't make sense of it. what form of torture is this? what are you going to gain out of it? the one thing for me that really stood out about the man that we interviewed and i still remember his name, and it was just his face, the trauma that was just visible. when we asked him to recount it was the tears just came streaming down.

there are moments in which sort of the senselessness of war strikes you and i think for me, that was one of them. why were these perfectly ordinary, happy lives destroyed? what for? i remember i was standing amid literally the sea of children and women that were trying to get on buses and trains to poland and other countries. as russia's invasion continues, it's hard enough for a single family to get their kids out of the country. but the task of helping tens of thousands of vulnerable children find safety is almost an impossible one. i felt that it was so easy to drown

in this huge sea of people. i saw many, many exhausted children around me and, at the same time, it was a sea of pain, despair, fear, and some hope at the same time because, at that time, in march 2022, it was already clear that the ukrainian people, ukrainian army, ukrainian government opted for fighting for the home and it gives hope that these small children will have an opportunity to regain their home, and i could feel that it's a very, very difficult choice for people around, but this is exactly the courage — the real courage of people under the most critical circumstances of their life.

we drove about half an hour from the centre of kyiv out to the edge of the city and to a commuter town called irpin. a lot of people who worked in kyiv used to live there. and when we arrived, there was an exodus of people desperately trying to get out. you can see the smoke is still rising. you get a sense of what people are fleeing from. there's a steady stream of people coming here now. they're carrying their bags, their suitcases. some of them have their pets. they're taking just what they can carry. and i remember thinking, "what would i take if it was me? "what would i be grabbing if i had to run out the door "with little or nothing?" now, the ukrainians had blown the bridge at the entrance to irpin because if the russians had got that far, they could have literally driven straight down the road into the capital, so the only way out was by foot. it was a very precarious journey.

you had to cross an icy river on planks of wood that were balanced on boulders and all the while, the shelling was continuing. people were being targeted as they fled. this is where we saw very clearly that the russians, contrary to what they were claiming, they were targeting civilians and they were targeting civilian areas. screams. and it was extraordinary to stand there and hear the shelling and feel the biting cold and actually hear screaming and to remind yourself that this was happening in europe in 2022. it was the scale of the russian attack which was overwhelming. glass smashes.

the blunt force that russia was using to smash through neighbourhoods, to get into cities. get in here! get in, get in! that blunt force that russia was using was — was overwhelming. i've just never seen anything like it in my life. i mean, i've covered a lot of wars, but not wars where you have that force of artillery, of tank fire. just beyond this position, there's only open country. and russians. they've tried to punch through here again and again and again, and they've failed. the ukrainian armed forces are keeping them at bay. everything was being thrown towards kharkiv and to civilians and to the people there. explosion. and russia was saying it was only targeting military installations. that was a lie — it was very clear that was a lie. and we knew these were lies because i covered syria for many years and russia helped bashar al—assad defeat the revolution in syria, and did that

with absolute brutality, without care for civilians — that russian playbook we were seeing played out again in ukraine. as a ukrainian and as a journalist, i think i realised quite fast that this is more than just russia's attempts to seize some lands in ukraine or to occupy the ukrainian territories. this is pretty much the existential struggle of ukrainians — for themselves, for their future and for their identity. we travelled all across the region of kharkiv that was retaken by the ukrainian army in september 2022 within their successful counter—offensive. we spoke to really brave teachers, educators.

they told us terrifying stories of tortures for refusal to teach in russian and to teach their schoolchildren that they are not ukrainians any more. i spoke to the school director and when we arrived in her house, she burst into tears and she told me, "now i feel that my pain, my choice and my life really matter "because my story will be told". so, at that point, it became

so clear that beneath bombardments, shelling, attacks from air, from land, from sea, there is also a big identity battle, and ukrainians really have to defend their own identity in this war with russia. when we went to kherson late december, i think it became pretty clear for us quite quickly that, you know, what we've seen about it before in the — from november onwards from when it was liberated, was really the stories ofjubilation, of people saying, "yeah, we're still under attack, "but we'll endure this". but then, we were there on a day when, according to ukrainian official numbers, 41 mortars landed in the city of kherson. you know, we can't verify that because we didn't count it but we were there

and it was continuous. this is a constant sound that we hear in kherson of artillery fire being exchanged. this city is essentially now pretty much on the front line, close to the river, which has become the de facto front line in the south. behind me, actually, is where an explosion took place just over an hour ago. five people were killed here, 20 were injured. it's not a very big city, so wherever you are in the city, you kind of hear it quite loud and i think, really, the spirit of that city where it was, like, you know, we can endure the cold, we can endure having no power, "we can endure having no running water" and then suddenly, when you are shelled a0 times in a single day, many people, their spirit broke, and theyjust decided they want to leave — and we saw that happen literally in front of our eyes in a matter of few hours.

right at the beginning, we met this young man. he was with the national guard then. eugene gromadskyi. fighting for his country. fighting for his survival. and one of the first things i heard when i met him was that his father had been killed a few days earlier as the fought to push back the russians. eugene would eventually be awarded the hero of ukraine award from president zelensky for his bravery that day for keeping back the russians. and, you know, one of the interesting things in this war is because ukraine has held on and because people have, by and large, managed to stay in place, we've been able to keep in contact with them. so, at the end of last year, we revisited eugene and he is transformed. he's gone from this young lad

wearing training shoes to a fully fledged soldier who's been battling for his life. he's seen his comrades die and he's battle—hardened in every sense. battle—scarred, too. there have been a lot of casualties in this war. you've lost a lot of people. do you fear death? and that's an interesting transformation because it's a transformation that ukraine has undergone. it's changed its economy. it's changed how — how people live their lives. and the terror from the russian bombing campaign, whether it's missiles or artillery, still exists there. but underneath all of that, there's a determination. "it's our country. "we won't give it up.

"it's ourfamilies�*. "it's our land. "we are not going to give up this fight." i was observing that dense, black, smoke billowing over the horizon of the city when suddenly, i spotted the young couple — newly married couple — in the empty street of lviv. and it was very gloomy, it was almost twilight, and you could feel uncertainty and danger in the air. you can feel that even amid this horror and terror, life and love are winning over this.

now we're a year in, the world is still paying attention, the west is still sending weapons, but you have to wonder how long is that focus going to stay here if there is no major breakthrough this year, in 2023? and that is a real fear that people here have — that the longer the war grinds on, the less the outside world will be paying attention. we've been there through all seasons. we arrived in the midst of winter, the snow on the ground, it was freezing cold.

then, there was the thaw of spring. then, the sunflowers were planted and then, we saw them grow. and then, we saw the sunflowers rot on the stalks not harvested because the russian aggression was still happening. and we'll go back again and then, it will be another cycle, another four seasons. and you wonder how many winters, summers, springs, autumns will ukraine have to endure before this war is over? it certainly feels on the chilly side today. the sunshine has been hit and miss as well. you can see cloud across central, northern and eastern areas of the country. here is the forecast

for this evening. the chilly breeze continues. the skies were clear across western and central areas through tonight. there will be a touch of frost early in the morning. these are the mid—morning temperatures, early to mid—morning temperatures, early to mid—morning temperatures, typically around 125 celsius. the forecast tomorrow shows a few showers around the north—east of england. generally a dry day. again quite chilly. the wind will not quite as strong tomorrow so perhaps it will feel a little less cold. the forecast intimidation is very similar weather with the high—pressure sticking around.

this is bbc news. welcome if you're watching here in the uk or around the globe. i'm frankie mccamley. our top stories. millions of nigerians have been voting in their country's most competitive election since military rule ended there more than two decades ago. china's plans for peace in ukraine cause ripples around the world — president zelensky says he wants to hear more. and the leader of russia's key ally belarus announces plans to fly to beijing. downing street says talks with the eu over a brexit deal covering northern ireland have been positive, raising hopes of an imminent new agreement on trade.