Ukraine says it will never surrender its cities as Odesa reports airstrikes on flats

Ukraine has said it will never bow to ultimatums to surrender its cities, including devastated Mariupol, as authorities in Odesa accused Russian forces of striking residential areas in their first attack on the vital Black Sea port.

Hundreds of thousands of increasingly desperate people have been trapped in Mariupol, many without water, heat or power, for three weeks. Officials have said at least 2,300 have died.

As EU foreign and defence ministers gathered in Brussels to discuss further sanctions against Moscow, authorities in Kyiv said airstrikes in the Podil district had flattened a shopping centre and badly damaged apartment blocks. The mayor, Vitali Klitschko, announced a curfew from Monday night until Wednesday morning.

Russian intelligence said hundreds of mines had drifted into the Black Sea from Ukrainian ports, a claim Ukraine dismissed as disinformation. The US, meanwhile, said it could not independently confirm or refute Russian claims that it fired hypersonic missiles at Ukrainian targets at the weekend.

Conditions in some encircled and heavily bombarded cities in the south, such as Mariupol, and east, such as Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv, are atrocious, with whole urban areas destroyed by airstrikes and artillery shells.

Ukrainian officials accused Russian troops of firing on protesters in the southern city of Kherson as they demonstrated against the occupation, posting a video on Twitter showing a man with an armband of the Ukrainian flag wounded by gunfire.

A 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, Boris Romantschenko, was killed in a bomb attack in Kharkiv on Friday. Romantschenko had survived the Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.