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TOP HEADLINES

• "The horrors that we've seen in Bucha are just the tip of the iceberg of all the crimes (that) have been committed by the Russian Army," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said at a press conference in Warsaw, Poland, alongside British foreign minister Liz Truss, who said there should be no talk of removing sanctions on Russia when its troops are in Ukraine.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday it has become harder for his country to negotiate with Russia since Kyiv became aware of the scale of atrocities carried out by Russian troops in Ukraine.

• Ukraine's president has urged the world to acknowledge "genocide" at the hands of Russian troops after bodies were discovered in the town outside Kyiv, sparking global outrage.

 • Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference Ukraine's version of what happened in the town of Bucha was a "fake attack" aimed at undermining Moscow with the help of Ukraine's 'Western patrons.'

• U.S. President Joe Biden has called for a "war crimes trial" over the alleged atrocities in Bucha and said he would seek "more sanctions" against Moscow, as EU momentum built for a tougher response on top of already unprecedented sanctions against Russia.

• European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said the European Union was ready to send a team of investigators to gather evidence of possible war crimes. 

• Germany has expelled a "significant number" of Russian diplomats in what Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called a response to the "unbelievable brutality" the Kremlin had unleashed in Ukraine. 

• Russia has repositioned about two-thirds of its forces from around Kyiv, with many consolidating in Belarus where they are expected to be refit, resupplied and redeployed elsewhere in Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said on Monday.

• Japan has no plans to withdraw from a joint Russian oil and gas project, despite joining tough sanctions on Moscow, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Thursday.

• Germany warns that cutting off Russian gas supplies to Europe is not a possibility, despite growing pressure on the EU to do so.

• The former Soviet republic of Lithuania has expelled the Russian ambassador to Vilnius over what it calls the "horrific massacre" in Bucha and atrocities in other occupied Ukrainian cities. Moscow vows to retaliate.

• Spanish police has announced the seizure of a mega yacht owned by an oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• More than 4.2 million Ukrainian refugees have fled the country since the start of the conflict, the UN says.

• The Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in the south-east of the country has been "90 percent" destroyed after being besieged by Russian forces, its mayor Vadym Boichenko said.

• The U.S. plans to seek Russia's suspension from the UN Human Rights Council following apparent evidence of mass executions by Russian troops in Bucha, US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said.

• Putin has suspended simplified visa rules for officials and journalists from "unfriendly" European nations in retaliation for sanctions imposed over its military action in Ukraine. 

• The European economy is set to suffer a sharp slowdown due to the war in Ukraine, but should avoid stumbling into recession, top EU officials said on Monday.

• Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has defended her 2008 decision to block Ukraine from immediately joining NATO, rejecting Zelenskyy's criticism.

• Eight people were killed and 34 wounded in recent Russian attacks on two towns in southern Ukraine, prosecutors in Kyiv said on Monday. Russian forces also shelled the nearby town of Dergachi, leaving at least three civilians dead and wounding seven, its mayor says.

• Russia maintained gas flows through key pipeline routes into Europe on Monday, despite uncertainty over payment terms and as European leaders called for more sanctions against Moscow after war crimes allegations in Ukraine.

• The Kremlin on Monday condemned comments by the leader of Poland's ruling party, who said Warsaw would be open to having U.S. nuclear weapons on its soil and would welcome a 50 percent increase in the number of U.S. troops in Europe.

• The U.S. bank JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon warned on Monday that the bank could lose about $1 billion on its Russia exposure, the first time it has detailed the extent of its potential losses resulting from the conflict in Ukraine.

• A prominent Russian journalist Ivan Safronov, set to go on trial for treason, insisted he was innocent and denounced the case that could see him jailed for up to 20 years. 

IN DETAIL

'Humanitarian needs are growing'

More than 4.2 million Ukrainian refugees have now fled the country since the Russian military action in Ukraine, the United Nations said on Monday, adding that the humanitarian situation was worsening.

UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, said 4,215,047 Ukrainians had fled the country since the conflict began on February 24, a figure up by 38,646 on the numbers for Sunday. 

"The humanitarian needs are growing by the minute as more people flee the war in Ukraine," the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.

The IOM says that in addition to Ukrainian refugees, nearly 205,500 non-Ukrainians living, studying or working in the country have also left. 

Meanwhile, nearly 6.48 million people were estimated to be internally displaced within Ukraine as of mid-March, according to IOM.

Before the start of the conflict, Ukraine had a population of 37 million in the regions under government control, excluding Russia-annexed Crimea and the pro-Russian separatist regions in the east. 

Women and children account for 90 percent of those who have left Ukraine, with men aged 18 to 60 eligible for military call-up and unable to leave.

The UN children's agency UNICEF said in late March that more than half of the country's estimated 7.5 million children had been displaced – 2.5 million internally and two million abroad.

Ukraine investigates possible war crimes

Russia's defense ministry says "not a single local resident" in Bucha suffered violence, accusing Ukraine of bombarding its own suburbs and falsifying images of corpses in "another production" for Western media. 

Ukrainian authorities were investigating possible war crimes by Russia after finding hundreds of bodies, some bound and shot at close range, strewn around towns near Kyiv after Kremlin forces withdrew to refocus their attacks in other parts of the country.

"Without an exaggeration, by what we have seen in Bucha and vicinity, we can conclude that Russia is worse than ISIS in the scale and ruthlessness of the crimes committed," said Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. "We will be collecting all the evidence, we will be working with all relevant international institutions, to identify and bring those responsible for these crimes to account."

Bucha's deputy mayor Taras Shapravskyi said 50 of some 300 bodies, found after Russian forces withdrew from the city late last week, were the victims of extra-judicial killings carried out by Russian troops.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called Russian troops "murderers, torturers, rapists, looters" on Monday after dozens of bodies were found.

Moscow has called for a special UN Security Council meeting to discuss what it calls the "criminal provocations by Ukrainian servicemen and radicals".

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia's diplomats would press on with their efforts to convene a U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss what Moscow has called "Ukrainian provocations" in Bucha despite their first effort to arrange such a meeting being blocked.

Peskov declined to comment on whether the furore over Bucha would affect peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv, which had been set to resume via video conference on Monday.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a news conference Ukraine's version of what happened in the town of Bucha was a "fake attack" aimed at undermining Moscow.

Lavrov told reporters: "Russian military had left the town completely on March 31. On March 31, Bucha's mayor solemnly stated that everything is settled, and two days later we saw that staging on streets which is being used now to undermine Russia."

He added that the video "is now being spread through all media channels and social media by the Ukrainian representatives and their Western patrons."