Blasts heard in Russian city, Ukraine's key port bombed: Report

Russian attacks have destroyed an oil refinery in the central Poltava region and struck “critical infrastructure”, most likely oil facilities, near the port city of Odesa, local officials said on Sunday.

Russian forces have attacked Odesa, the main base for Ukraine's navy, alongside other Ukrainian Black Sea ports such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv. If taken, it would give Russia a land corridor from Crimea to Transniestria, a Russian-speaking breakaway province of Moldova that hosts Russian troops.

Oil facilities have been a focus of attacks.

Dmytro Lunin, governor of the Poltava region, said on television that the refinery had been destroyed in a rocket attack on Saturday.

“The fire at the refinery has been extinguished but the facility has been completely destroyed and can no longer function,” he said.

Two blasts were heard in the Russian city of Belgorod near the border with Ukraine on Sunday, two witnesses told Reuters, days after Russian authorities accused Ukrainian forces of striking a fuel depot there.

The cause of the blasts was not immediately clear. One witness said the blasts were so powerful that they rattled the windows of her home in Belgorod.

The blasts come days after Russia's defence ministry said two Ukrainian helicopters struck a fuel depot in the city, some 35 km from the border with Ukraine, after entering Russia at low altitude.

Russia on Sunday denied Ukrainian allegations that it had killed civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

Ukrainian prosecutors investigating possible war crimes by Russia have found 410 bodies in towns near Kyiv and 140 of them had been examined, Prosecutor General Iryna Venedyktova said on television on Sunday.

EU warns Russia faces new sanctions for ‘war crimes’

Some European Union governments are pushing for the bloc to quickly impose new sanctions in response to multiple reports that Russian troops executed unarmed civilians in Ukrainian towns, according to diplomats familiar with the discussions.

The European Commission was already honing measures that would mostly focus on closing loopholes, strengthening existing actions – such as export controls on technology goods and fully sanctioning banks already cut off from the SWIFT global payments system – and expanding the list of sanctioned individuals.