Top Russian diplomat warns Ukraine against provoking WW III

Russia's top diplomat warned Ukraine against provoking a Third World War and said the threat of a nuclear conflict "should not be underestimated," as his country unleashed attacks against rail and fuel installations far from the front lines of Moscow's new eastern offensive.

Meanwhile, the British Defence Ministry said Tuesday that Russian forces had taken the Ukrainian city of Kreminna in the Lukansk region after days of street-to-street fighting.

"The city of Kreminna has reportedly fallen and heavy fighting is reported south of Izium as Russian forces attempt to advance towards the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk from the north and east," the British military said in a tweet. It did not say how it knew the city, 575 kilometres southeast of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, had fallen. The Ukrainian government did not immediately comment.

Ukraine's General Staff said Russian forces were shelling Kharkiv, the country's second-largest city, as they fought to take full control of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which comprise the Donbas in Ukraine's industrial heartland, and establish a land corridor to Crimea.

In the area of Velyka Oleksandrivka, a village in the Kherson region largely controlled by Russians, Ukrainian forces destroyed an ammunition depot and "eliminated" more than 70 Russian troops, the General Staff said.

The governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai, said on the messaging app Telegram that the Russians had shelled civilians 17 times over the previous 24 hours, with the cities of Popasna, Lysychansk and Girske suffering the most.

Four people died and nine more were wounded on Monday in the Russian shelling of the Donetsk region, its governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Telegram. He said a nine-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy were among those killed.

The U.S. has been rushing more weaponry to Ukraine and said the assistance from Western allies is making a difference in the two-month-old war.

"Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared Monday after he and the U.S. secretary of defence made a bold visit to Kyiv to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Blinken said Washington approved a $165 million US sale of ammunition — non-U.S. ammo, mainly if not entirely for Ukraine's Soviet-era weapons — and will also provide more than $300 million US in financing to buy more supplies.

U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin went further, saying the U.S. wants to see Ukraine remain a sovereign, democratic country, but also wants "to see Russia weakened to the point where it can't do things like invade Ukraine."

Austin's remarks appeared to represent a shift in U.S. strategic goals since earlier Washington said the goal of American military aid was to help Ukraine win and to defend Ukraine's NATO neighbours against Russian threats.

In an apparent response to Austin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia has "a feeling that the West wants Ukraine to continue to fight and, as it seems to them, wear out, exhaust the Russian army and the Russian military industrial war complex. This is an illusion."

Weapons supplied by Western countries "will be a legitimate target," Lavrov said, noting that Russian forces were targeting weapons warehouses in western Ukraine.