Ukraine and Russia: What you need to know right now

(Reuters) – Russia launched an assault on the encircled Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, Ukraine’s last redoubt in the port city, after a ceasefire broke down on Tuesday with some 200 civilians trapped underground despite a U.N.-brokered evacuation.

FIGHTING

* At least nine civilians were killed by Russian fire in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, the regional governor said. The Ukrainian president’s office said earlier that other areas of Donetsk were under constant fire.

* Russia has struck a military airfield near Ukraine’s southwestern city of Odesa with missiles, destroying drones, missiles and ammunition supplied to Ukraine by the United States and its European allies, the defence ministry said.

Reuters could not immediately verify reports of battlefield developments.

BUSINESS AND THE ECONOMY

* Russian President Vladimir Putin put the West on notice on Tuesday that he could terminate exports and deals, the Kremlin’s toughest response yet to the sanctions burden imposed by the United States and allies over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

* Slovakia will seek an exemption from any embargo of Russian oil agreed by the European Union in its next set of sanctions against Moscow, the Slovak Economy Ministry said. The European Commission is preparing a sixth package of sanctions against Russia and is expected to finalise work on Tuesday.

* Ukraine is forecast to have a significant shortage of grain storing facilities in the 2022/23 season due to a sharp fall in exports resulting from Russia’s invasion, analyst APK-Inform said.

* Russian retailers Magnit and Lenta are in talks with their suppliers and other parties about importing goods via Kazakhstan, Russia’s southern neighbour and close partner, a Kazakh official was quoted as saying.

DIPLOMACY, CIVILIANS

* French President Emmanuel Macron was due to speak with Putin by telephone, Macron’s office said. The two spoke regularly in the early weeks following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, but not since March 29.

* German Chancellor Olam Scholz said on Tuesday no one could assume that Russia would not attack other countries given its violation of international law in Ukraine, and Germany would support Finland and Sweden if they decided to join NATO.

* Pope Francis said in an interview that he had asked for a meeting in Moscow with Putin to try to stop the war but had not received a reply. He also told Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper that Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has given the war his full backing, “cannot become Putin’s altar boy”.* Ukraine hoped a first column of evacuees from the ruins of a steel works in Russian-occupied Mariupol would reach the city of Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday, and hospitals prepared to treat people for anything from burns to malnutrition.

QUOTES

* “You wake up in the morning and you cry,” said Mariupol resident Tatyana Bushlanova, sitting by a blackened apartment block and speaking over the sound of shells exploding nearby. “You cry in the evening. I don’t know where to go at all.” ​

(Compiled by Lincoln Feast, Nick Macfie and Mark Heinrich)