MAIN HEADLINES

• Odesa authorities have accused Russian forces of carrying out a strike on residential buildings on the city's outskirts, the first such attack on the Black Sea port, but reported no casualties.

• Ukraine has rejected Russia's ultimatum to surrender the besieged city of Mariupol, its deputy prime minister insisting "there can be no talk of surrendering weapons."

• The EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called Russia's attack on Mariupol "a massive war crime" as EU foreign ministers prepared to meet to discuss imposing more sanctions on Moscow.

• Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of bombing a Mariupol art school where some 400 people had been sheltering. 

• Local officials claim Russian forces have forcibly deported around 1,000 residents to Russia from the strategic port city, confiscating their Ukrainian passports.

• Chernihiv's mayor says dozens of civilians have been killed by shelling in the encircled northern city, and that a hospital has been hit, calling the situation "an absolute humanitarian catastrophe."

• At least six people were killed in the bombing of a 10-story shopping center in Kyiv. The capital's mayor Vitali Klitschko announced a new citywide curfew on Monday that will last until Wednesday. 

• The governor of Ukraine's Rivne oblast, Vitaliy Koval, says Russian forces have hit the city's military training grounds with two missiles. 

• British military intelligence suggests that Russia will continue to prioritize a siege of Kyiv in the coming weeks amid heavy fighting north of the city.

• Ukrainian staff at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have been allowed to leave for the first time since Russian forces took the site of the 1986 nuclear meltdown.

• Turkey says Russia and Ukraine are 'close to agreement,' adding that Ankara is ready to host a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, the Kremlin said on Monday that peace talks had not yet made any significant progress, accusing Kyiv of stalling talks by making proposals unacceptable to Russia. 

• Ukraine said it is willing to negotiate but will not surrender territory or accept Russian ultimatums.

• China's ambassador to the U.S. says Beijing is not sending military support to Russia.

• U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Poland on Friday to meet president Andrzej Duda, the White House says.

• Ten million people, more than a quarter of Ukraine's population, have now fled their homes, according to the United Nations refugees chief, with more than 3.3 million of them leaving the country. 

IN DETAIL

Mariupol surrender

Kyiv defied a Russian demand that its forces lay down arms before dawn on Monday in the besieged of Mariupol, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have been trapped and its infrastructure left in ruins by Russian bombardment.

Russia's military had called on armed Ukrainians inside Mariupol to surrender by 5 a.m., saying it would grant safe corridors for those leaving the city.

"There can be no question of any surrender, laying down of arms," Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk replied. "We have already informed the Russian side about this."

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Russia's assault in Ukraine, nearly in its fourth week, has largely stalled, and until recently its military had yet to seize a major Ukrainian city or capture the capital Kyiv in a bid to depose the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

However, Russian forces have now entered the city center of Mariupol and are engaged in heavy fighting there. Local reports state they are already in control of the left-bank district in the city's east and several residential areas in the north-east. 

A Russian-backed separatist leader in eastern Ukraine said it would take more than a week to take control of the city, according to Russian news agency Interfax.

The strategic port city which sits close to the Russian border along the Sea of Azov has been under siege since late February, and experienced the heaviest shelling of the conflict so far. 

Mariupol was home to 400,000 people before the conflict, and those still trapped there are reported to be experiencing extreme hunger, with limited access to medicine, power and fresh water. 

Reports from the ground say long convoys of cars are exiting the city, having to pass by dozens of Russian checkpoints, but Moscow has not yet permitted access to aid convoys or buses to evacuate civilians.

Ukraine also accuses Moscow of deporting some civilians from Mariupol to Russia.

"What I saw, I hope no one will ever see," said Greece's consul general in Mariupol, Manolis Androulakis, the last European diplomat to leave the city. 

"Mariupol will become part of a list of cities that were completely destroyed by war; I don’t need to name them: they are Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny, Leningrad."

In an interview with CGTN Europe, former heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko, whose brother Vitalii is mayor of Kyiv, said Ukrainians would never stop fighting for their homes.

He urged the country's allies to continue supplying it with humanitarian and military aid as the destruction of the economy had left it unable to support its people or its war effort alone.

EU mulls Russia energy sanctions

Despite pushback from some of the EU's biggest economies, several member states are demanding the bloc step up sanctions targeting Russia's energy sector, as a week of intense Western diplomacy aimed at agreeing more steps against Moscow gets underway. 

The West has already imposed a series of unprecedented sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict, including freezing its central bank's assets, with Ireland and Lithuania calling to ramp up sanctions in response to the siege of Mariopul. 

"Looking at the extent of the destruction in Ukraine right now, it's very hard to make the case that we shouldn't be moving in on the energy sector, particularly oil and coal," Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said before a meeting of EU ministers.

But the decision to target Russian oil, as the U.S. and Britain have done, is a divisive one for the EU, which relies on Russia for 40 percent of its gas.

Germany in particular has warned against acting too quickly because of sky-rocketing energy prices in Europe, while Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said the EU remained dependent on Russian oil and gas and could not cut itself off by tomorrow.

Diplomats have said a Russian chemical weapons attack in Ukraine or a severe aerial attack on Kyiv could trigger an energy embargo. Moscow warned that such EU sanctions could prompt it to close a gas pipeline to Europe.

A fifth round of economic measures against Russia under discussion on Monday will likely see the EU add more names to its blacklists, while French officials said there should be no "taboos" in terms of sanctions.

The bloc was also set to approve a new defense strategy designed to increase the EU's capacity to act, including setting up a 5,000-strong rapid reaction force. Planned for two years, the strategy has been updated to increase the focus on the threat from Russia amid the Ukraine crisis.

"It's not the answer to the Ukrainian war, but it is part of the answer," EU foreign policy Josep Borrell said ahead of a meeting of the bloc's foreign and defense ministers. 

"When we started working, we couldn't imagine that at the last moment of approval the situation would be so bad and Europe would be facing such a big challenge."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday called on European leaders to stop all trade with Russia amid warnings from Moscow that further sanctions could "hit everyone."

On Thursday U.S. President Joe Biden will arrive in Brussels for talks with NATO's 30 allies, the EU, and in a Group of Seven (G7) format including Japan, designed to ramp up the West's response to Moscow.