Russia-Ukraine Crisis: All you need to know right now

Ukraine launched its first air strike on Russia on Friday (April 1) while Russia and Ukraine resumed peace talks online.

Image credit: Reuters

New Delhi: A fuel depot was ablaze at one of Russia`s main logistics hubs for its Ukraine war effort, after what Moscow described as a cross-border air raid by Ukrainian helicopters, the first of its kind in the five-week war. Kyiv would neither confirm nor deny responsibility for the fire in Belgorod.

FIGHTING

* Russian forces are being pushed back around Kyiv but fighting is still fierce in some areas near the capital, Ukrainian officials said.

* In Irpin, a commuter suburb northwest of Kyiv that had been one of the main battlegrounds for weeks, now back in Ukrainian hands, volunteers and emergency workers carried the dead on stretchers out of the rubble

* Britain said Ukrainian forces had recaptured villages linking Kyiv with the besieged northern city of Chernihiv.

* The International Committee of the Red Cross said a convoy it had organised had been denied permission to bring aid into the besieged and devastated port city of Mariupol in southeast Ukraine but said it still hoped to evacuate trapped civilians.

ENERGY

* European governments and companies are working on a common approach to Russia`s demand that they pay for its gas in roubles as the threat of an imminent supply halt eases.

* Under a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin, foreign buyers of Russian gas were required to open rouble accounts in state-controlled Gazprombank from Friday to allow foreign currency to be converted to roubles. But the Kremlin said it would not immediately turn off the taps.

ECONOMY

* Russia`s bombardment of Mariupol has caused at least $10 billion in damage to infrastructure, according to a preliminary estimate by local authorities.

DIPLOMACY

* Russia and Ukraine resumed peace talks online after Moscow said it was preparing its response to Ukrainian proposals.

* Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan spoke with Putin by phone and urged Russia and Ukraine to act with common sense and maintain dialogue, Erdogan`s office said.

* Russia will boost its use of non-Western currencies for trade with countries such as India, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a visit to New Delhi.

* Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told EU leaders that Beijing would push for peace in "its own way" in Ukraine, after Brussels pressed for assurances that China would not supply arms to Russia or help it circumvent Western sanctions.

QUOTE

* The Russian government must "answer to the mothers, the sisters, the wives of those soldiers - why did they force them to put their lives at risk?" - Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba speaking about trenches dug by Russian soldiers in the radioactive zone around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant.