You're listening to the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service.

Hello, I'm Oliver Conway. We're recording this at 13 hours GMT on Monday the 14th of April.

The EU calls for maximum pressure on Russia after the deadliest attack on Ukrainian civilians for two years.

China's president visits Vietnam as he tries to shore up ties across Southeast Asia

in the face of the U.S. trade war.

And Japan's population has fallen to a record low.

Also in the podcast,

We need fiction in order to fill the gap between what we are and what we would like to be.

We look back at the life of one of Latin America's most important writers, Mario Vargas Iosa,

and the trial that could shake up social media as meta is taken to court.

Vladimir Zelensky has called on President Trump to visit Ukraine so he can, quote,

understand what Putin did. The people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children, destroyed or dead. The Ukrainian leader was speaking

on US TV yesterday after Russia's deadliest attack on civilians for two years. At least 34 people were

killed and 117 wounded in the double ballistic missile strike on the northeastern city of Sumi.

The White House sent its condolences but stopped short of condemning Russia,

which claimed it had actually hit a meeting of Ukrainian army commanders.

Our Ukraine correspondent James Waterhouse traveled to Sumi to investigate what happened.

We're just approaching the second of two quite robust checkpoints.

Outside the city of Sumi, it's a place, which has become more of a front line in recent weeks,

with retreating Ukrainian forces from the Russian region of Kursk.

But it has also become the site of one of the worst missile strikes in this war so far.

So we're now through and we're going to go and see the site of the devastation.

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