Updated 2 hours ago
The Russian president says that companies in his country are still operating despite the sanctions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has urged Russians to stay united and accused Western governments of trying to destroy the country from within.
He said foreign agencies, especially the CIA, were planning horrific attacks.
Putin told an annual meeting of Russian prosecutors that the United States and Europe were practicing a strange kind of diplomacy by sending weapons to Ukraine.
He complained regarding what he called the aggression of sanctions once morest Russia, but insisted that companies in his country were doing well.
In another development, Russia said Monday it would expel 40 German diplomats.
The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said that this step came in response to Germany’s order three weeks ago for 40 officials of the Russian embassy in Berlin to leave the country.
The German Foreign Ministry said that the expulsion of these officials came in response to the discovery of mass graves in Bucha, north of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
Meanwhile, Russia announced on Monday a ceasefire, starting at 11 a.m., GMT, at a besieged and heavily bombed steel plant in the port city of Mariupol, to allow civilians to leave.
The Russian Defense Ministry said civilians might leave the Azovstal site in any direction they chose. But the Ukrainian authorities met this with suspicion.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Irina Verychuk, told the BBC that the evacuation of civilians must be backed by international guarantees.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to visit Russia and Ukraine this week.
Blinken and Austin visit to Kiev
picture released, EPA
Blinken, right, and Austin, left, during their meeting with Zelensky.
On Sunday, the two US secretaries of state and defense took a train from Poland to Kyiv, and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior officials.
The meeting took – according to a US official – three hours, or more than twice the time allotted to it.
What did the US Secretary of State say?
Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken said Russia was failing to achieve its war aims in Ukraine.
He added that the American delegation saw the people in the streets of Kyiv, and saw that the city had won the battle.
During the delegation’s visit, the United States announced more than $700 million in additional military aid to Ukraine, including advanced weapons.
The State Department also said US diplomats will begin returning to Ukraine this week.
“We are inspired by the resilience of Ukraine’s Orthodox Christians in the face of President Putin’s brutal war of aggression,” Blinken said earlier on Twitter, as fighting in eastern Ukraine overshadowed religious celebrations of Orthodox Easter.
‘Russia is weak’
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Monday that the United States wanted “to see Russia so weak that it can’t do what it did in its invasion of Ukraine.”
He added during the press conference that he believed that Ukraine might get the appropriate support.
His comments came on the heels of his trip to Kyiv with Blinken.
Before Blinken and Austin’s visit, Ukrainian officials had prepared a list of weapons their country urgently needs from the United States, including anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems, armored vehicles and tanks, Zelensky aide Igor Zhovkva told NBC News Sunday.
The United States and NATO allies have shown a growing willingness to provide Ukraine with heavy equipment and the most advanced weapons systems.
Britain also promised to send military vehicles, and is considering providing Poland with British tanks to send Russian Warsaw T-72s tanks to Ukraine.
The visit highlighted the shift in the conflict since Ukrainian forces, armed with formidable weapons from the West, faced an attack by Russian forces on the capital, Kyiv.
Russia has not succeeded in capturing any major city since the invasion began on February 24, Ukraine says. Having failed to capture Kyiv, it concentrated its forces in the south and east, and began an offensive called Zelensky’s Battle of Donbass.
The Russian strikes had hit a number of stations in central and western Ukraine.
Among the victims of these strikes was the town of Krasin, east of Lviv.
Maxim Kozytsky, the head of the Lviv region, posted on Telegram channel saying that a missile hit a power substation around 8:30 local time.
“There is no information on casualties yet,” he wrote. Emergency services are still at the scene and working to put out the fire.
Footage posted online shows a thick plume of black smoke rising from the site.
picture released, EPA
Ukrainian President during his meeting with Blinken and Austin.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in its daily update on the conflict that Russia had made little progress in some parts of Donbass.
“Russia still needs more logistical support and fighting in order to achieve an important breakthrough,” the ministry added.
Earlier, in a moving Orthodox Easter speech at the 1,000-year-old Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Zelensky said his country would overcome “difficult times”.
Some signs of a return to normalcy in the capital began to appear, as several countries reopened their embassies in recent days, and some residents who fled the fighting returned to celebrate Easter.
US diplomats will return to Ukraine in the coming weeks, with Washington announcing the appointment of a new ambassador.
The governor of the Poltava region, 320 km southeast of Kyiv, said that Russian missile strikes targeted an oil refinery and a power station in Kremenchug, killing one person and wounding seven.
Moscow, which describes its actions in Ukraine as a “special military operation”, denies targeting civilians and rejects what Ukraine says is evidence of atrocities, saying they were orchestrated by Kyiv to undermine peace talks.
And the British newspaper The Times reported Monday that the European Union is preparing “smart sanctions” on Russian oil imports, possibly in the form of an oil embargo, quoting the Executive Vice President of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis.
