Russian forces press Ukraine offensive

Russian forces have launched a major assault on the holdout Azovstal steel plant in the devastated port city of Mariupol while pounding sites across eastern Ukraine, as the European Union moves to punish Moscow with oil sanctions.

Three months into the war, Moscow has focused its fresh offensive on Ukraine's east and south, while Western allies continue to provide Kyiv with cash and weapons in a bid to force Russian leader Vladimir Putin to pull back.

In one of a series of assaults on Tuesday, 21 civilians were killed and another 28 wounded in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, local authorities said.

Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said 10 of the 21 dead were killed in the shelling of the Avdiivka coke plant, one of Europe's largest, calling it the highest daily death toll since a Russian strike on a train station in Kramatorsk about a month ago.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksky, meanwhile, said more than 150 people had been successfully extracted in Mariupol evacuation operations.

"Today, 156 people arrived in (the Ukrainian-held city) Zaporizhzhia. Women and children. They have been in shelters for more than two months," Zelensky said in a daily address.

Further evacuations from the city were scheduled yesterday with the help of the United Nations and the Red Cross, a Mariupol mayoral adviser said.

But Osnat Lubrani, UN humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, has warned there "may be more civilians who remain trapped" in the immense underground galleries of the Azovstal steelworks.

As Russia's renewed campaign in eastern Ukraine intensified, EU officials on Tuesday handed a draft plan to member states on a new package of sanctions aimed at Moscow.

But several EU officials and European diplomats in Brussels said there were divisions, with at least one member state jockeying to opt out of an oil embargo.

Ambassadors from the 27 European Union countries were to meet yesterday to give the plan a once-over, and it will need unanimous approval before going into effect.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a telephone conversation with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday that despite Kyiv’s unpreparedness for serious work Russia remained open to a dialogue, the Kremlin’s press service has said.

"The Russian president explained the fundamental approach to negotiations with the Ukrainian representatives. In particular, he stressed that despite Kiev’s inconsistency and unpreparedness for serious work Russia remained open to a dialogue," the Kremlin said.

Putin tells Marcon that the EU countries ignore war crimes committed by the Ukrainian forces.

"It was stressed that the EU member-countries ignore war crimes committed by the Ukrainian forces and massive bombardments of Donbass villages and cities, which kill peaceful civilians," the Russian presidential press-service said in a statement.

The Russian side pointed out that "the West might contribute to putting these crimes to an end by exerting pressure on the authorities in Kiev and terminating weapons supplies to Ukraine."

Putin and his French counterpart also discussed global food security. The Kremlin’s press-service said "the French side expressed concern over the problem of maintaining global food security." It is due to Western sanctions first and foremost.

"In this context Putin stressed that the situation in this field was aggravated in the first place by the Western countries’ sanctions and underscored the importance of unhampered operation of the global logistic and transport infrastructure," the Kremlin said.

Deadly strikes

Since abandoning early attempts to capture Ukraine's capital Kyiv, Russian forces have shifted to the east, including largely Russian-speaking areas, and the south.

In the town of Lyman, Ukrainian soldiers said they had rigged with explosives a railway bridge over the Donets river and were awaiting orders to blow it up.

"It's never easy to destroy one of your own pieces of infrastructure. But between saving a bridge or protecting a city, there's no question at all," said one, going by the nom de guerre of "The Engineer".

Russia's defence ministry, meanwhile, said its forces had struck a logistics centre at a military airfield in the region around the Black Sea port of Odessa, used for the delivery of foreign-made weapons.

Storage facilities containing Turkey's Bayraktar drones as well as missiles and ammunition from the United States and Europe had been destroyed, it said.

A rocket strike also knocked out power in part of Lviv, the western city near Poland that has turned into a haven for the displaced due to its comparative calm, Mayor Andriy Sadovy said on Twitter.

Missiles also struck far to the country's west in Transcarpathia, a region bordering Hungary that has largely been spared to date, Victor Mykyta, head of the local military administration, said.

Ukrainian prosecutors say they have pinpointed more than 8,000 war crimes carried out by Russian troops and are investigating 10 Russian soldiers for suspected atrocities in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.