San Francisco Frontiers - Russia closes in on key city as EU clinches oil deal

Ukraine meanwhile pushed on with an investigation into war crimes since the Russian invasion. Officials said thousands had been committed in the eastern Donbas region alone and that it had jailed two Russian soldiers elsewhere in the country.

Severodonetsk is one of the industrial hubs that lie on Russia's path to capturing the Donbas's Lugansk region, where Moscow has shifted the bulk of its firepower since failing to capture Kyiv in the war's early stages.

"Unfortunately, today, Russian troops control most of the city," Lugansk governor Sergiy Gaiday said in a video, insisting Ukraine's military was not in danger of being surrounded.

He added that "90 percent" of Severodonetsk had been destroyed.

Gaiday also warned that Russian forces had hit a tank containing nitric acid at a Severodonetsk chemical plant and called on people to stay in their shelters.

EU leaders meeting for a second day in Brussels were only partly successful in tightening the economic screws on Moscow.

A compromise oil embargo deal reached late Monday, meant to punish Russia for its invasion, cuts "a huge source of financing for its war machine", European Council chief Charles Michel tweeted.

- Talks on gas embargo -

But the EU remained divided on the issue of gas supplies, and leaders played down the chances of a rapid ban to follow the embargo on two-thirds of oil imports from Russia.

Europe relies on Russian gas for some 40 percent of its supplies, and a ban would add to the existing pain from an energy and inflation crisis.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen suggested Brussels had gone far enough for now against Russian fossil fuels and that it was time to focus more on the "financial and the economic sector".

The oil ban "will effectively cut around 90 percent of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year", she said.

The compromise oil deal exempts deliveries by pipeline, after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned halting supplies of cheap Moscow crude would wreck his nation's economy.

"Families can sleep peacefully tonight, we kept out the most hair-raising idea," Orban, whose country borders war-torn Ukraine to the west, said in a video message.

Denmark became the latest European country to be targeted by Russia over gas exports in the meantime, following in the footsteps of the Netherlands, Finland, Poland and Bulgaria.

Danish energy firm Orsted said Tuesday that Russian energy monopoly Gazprom Export would cut gas supplies on Wednesday after the Danish company refused to pay in rubles as the Russian government demands.

- 'Save your lives' -

The situation on the eastern frontline in Donbas has become increasingly desperate, with Ukrainian towns facing near constant shelling from Russian forces.

"We see some cars driving around with Ukrainian flags, so we figure that means we are still part of Ukraine," said Yevgen Onyshchenko, a 42-year-old plumber in a powerless apartment in Severodonetsk's twin city Lysychansk.

"But otherwise, we are in the dark."

French journalist Frederic Leclerc-Imhoff was killed while covering civilian evacuations in the area on Monday.

An overnight rocket attack killed at least three people and wounded six in the city of Sloviansk, Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said Tuesday on Telegram.

"There are no safe places in the Donetsk region, so I call again: evacuate -- save your lives," he said.

Four more civilians died and seven were injured in Donetsk on Tuesday, he added in a later Telegram post.

Ukraine's prosecutor general said authorities had identified a "few thousand" cases of war crimes in the Donbas, including murder, torture and the forced displacement of children.

Prosecutor Iryna Venediktova, who met international counterparts in The Hague on Tuesday, said Kyiv was already going to prosecute 80 suspects for alleged war crimes on Ukrainian soil.

A Ukrainian court on Tuesday jailed two Russian soldiers for 11 and a half years for shelling civilian areas. Earlier this month, another was jailed for life for murdering a civilian.

Servicemen Alexander Bobykin and Alexander Ivanov were both convicted Tuesday of firing Grad missiles on two villages in the northeastern Kharkiv region in the early days of the war.

- Odessa blockade proposal -

Russia's invasion of its pro-Western neighbour is also threatening a global food crisis, with Ukraine's huge grain harvest effectively taken off the world market.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday that he and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had urged Vladimir Putin to end Russia's blockade of the Ukrainian port of Odessa under the terms of a UN resolution.

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was up to the West and Kyiv to resolve the crisis, starting with the lifting of sanctions.

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M.Hill--SFF