Finland will formally join NATO in the "coming days," after the country was able to clear its final hurdle, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

"Their membership will make Finland safer and NATO stronger. Finland has highly capable forces, advanced capabilities and strong democratic institutions. So Finland will bring a lot to our alliance," Stoltenberg said in a statement Friday.

Turkey was the last of the 30 NATO allies to approve Finland's bid to join the alliance.

-ABC News' Will Gretsky

Russia just struck Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine with multiple missiles, Ukrainian officials said Thursday night.

Local officials in Kharkiv said Russia fired six Soviet-era S-300 surface-to-air missiles.

ABC News reporters heard explosions outside the city center and saw Ukrainian air defense active just before and during the attacks.

There are currently no reports of casualties or damage to infrastructure as a result of the strikes in Ukraine's second-largest city.

There are also reports of Russian strikes in the Dnipro region.

-ABC News' Tom Soufi Burridge

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Thursday ordering a spring conscription. Russia will call up 147,000 people to join the Russian Armed Forces from April 1 to April 15.

-ABC News' Will Gretsky

Russian media reporting suggests authorities are preparing to start a major military recruitment aiming to sign up an additional 400,000 troops, the United Kingdom's Defense Ministry assessed.

Russia is presenting the campaign as a drive for volunteer, professional personnel, rather than a new, mandatory mobilization. There is a realistic possibility that in practice this distinction will be blurred, and that regional authorities will try to meet their allocated recruitment targets by coercing men to join up, UK officials said.

Russian authorities have likely selected a supposedly ‘volunteer model’ to meet their personnel shortfall in order to minimize domestic dissent. It is highly unlikely that the campaign will attract 400,000 genuine volunteers, according to UK officials.

However, rebuilding Russia’s combat power in Ukraine will require more than just personnel; Russia needs more munitions and military equipment supplies than it currently has available, UK officials said.

In the basement of the Syayvo bookstore in Ukraine's capital, hundreds of Russian language books stand piled, waiting to be pulped.

The books -- ranging from everything between the classics of Russian literature to works translated into Russian and Soviet-era textbooks -- have been donated by Ukrainians who have turned away from Russian culture to embrace their own since the invasion last year.

They are set to be recycled and turned into Ukrainian language texts or other products, with all profits going to support the war effort, Nadia Kibenko, the 32-year-old store worker who is handling the books, told ABC News. They have recycled 75 tons -- around 150,000 volumes -- since last July, she said. As a child, Kibenko grew up in a Ukrainian speaking household but, more often than not, only had the choice to read in Russian.

"We do not burn books," Kibenko told ABC News during a recent interview in Kyiv. "We just give them second life."

The cultural battleground is not just symbolic. Witnesses from the Russian occupied territories say that, in schools, Ukrainian language books were thrown out and replaced by Russian ones as new curricula taught Putin's view that Ukrainians and Russians are "one people."

A report published in December by PEN America, a New York-based literary and human rights organization, said that "culture was on the frontlines" and Putin "seeks not only to control Ukrainian territory, but to erase Ukrainian culture and identity."

-ABC News' Guy Davies