Russian forces pounded Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region yesterday but failed to capture three target areas, Ukraine’s military said, while Moscow said western sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine were impeding peace negotiations.

The Russians were trying to capture the areas of Lyman in Donetsk and Sievierodonetsk and Popasna in Luhansk, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a daily update. “Not succeeding — the fighting continues,” it said.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, in remarks published early yesterday, said the lifting of western sanctions on Russia was part of the peace talks, which he said were difficult but continued daily by video link.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has insisted since the Russian invasion began on February 24 that sanctions needed to be strengthened and could not be part of negotiations. He said on Friday there was a high risk the talks would end because of what he called Russia’s “playbook on murdering people”.

Ukraine accuses Russian troops of atrocities in areas near the capital, Kyiv, that they previously occupied. Moscow denies the claims.

Lavrov said if the United States and other Nato countries were truly interested in resolving the Ukrainian crisis then they should stop sending weapons to Kyiv.

French president Emmanuel Macron told Zelensky during a call yesterday that his country would step up military and humanitarian support for Ukraine.

In Washington, US President Joe Biden’s proposed $33bn (€31bn) aid package for Ukraine, including $20bn for weapons, has received cross-party support. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Friday she hoped Congress would pass the package as soon as possible.

Earlier, Russian state television simulated how Vladimir Putin would launch a nuclear strike on three capital cities in Europe, declaring there would be “no survivors”, in response to comments made by Britain’s Armed Forces Minister supporting Ukrainian strikes on Russian infrastructure.

Hosts on Channel One’s 60 Minutes programme announced the cities of London, Paris and Berlin could be hit within 200 seconds of nuclear missiles being launched, as tensions ramp up amid the ongoing war in Ukraine.

It comes as ex-Nato chief Richard Sherriff warned the West must “gear itself up” for a “worst-case scenario” war with Russia in Ukraine, amid reports the Russian president could use the country’s victory day parade on May 9 to declare “all-out war” on its neighbour.

On the show the chairman of the nationalist Rodina party, Aleksey Zhuravlyov, pondered what would happen if Russia launched nuclear weapons against the UK, saying: “One Sarmat missile and the British Isles will be no more.”

When pulled up on the comment by one of the hosts, he insisted he was “saying this seriously”, while another host added that the UK has nuclear weapons too and that “no one will survive in this war”.

Producers on the show then showed viewers a map seeming to suggest missiles could be launched from Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea.

It suggested these could reach Berlin in 106 seconds, Paris in 200 seconds and London in 202 seconds.

Russia has dubbed its actions in Ukraine a “special operation” with the intended aims of disarming Ukraine and protecting it from fascists. Ukraine and the West say the fascist allegation is baseless and the war is an unprovoked act of aggression.

The war has turned cities to rubble, killed thousands and forced five million Ukrainians to flee abroad. After failing to capture the capital, Russia is now focusing on the east and south of Ukraine. Moscow hopes to take full control of the eastern Donbas region made up of Luhansk and Donetsk, parts of which were already controlled by Russian-backed separatists before the invasion.

Moscow said yesterday its artillery units had struck 389 Ukrainian targets overnight.

Alexander Bogomaz, the governor of Russia’s Bryansk region, claimed air defences had prevented a Ukrainian aircraft from entering the region, and as a result shelling had hit parts of an oil terminal, Russian news agencies reported.

The governor of another Russian region, Kursk, said several shells were fired from the direction of Ukraine yesterday at a checkpoint near its border. Roman Starovoit said in a video on his Telegram channel that there were no casualties or damage.

On the Ukrainian side, Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai said the Russians were shelling all over the region “but they cannot get through our defence”. He said civilians would continue to be evacuated despite the difficult situation.

Gaidai said two schools and 20 houses were destroyed by Russian attacks on Friday in the Luhansk towns of Rubizhne and Popasna.

Mykola Khanatov, head of military administration in Popasna, said two buses sent to evacuate civilians from the town were fired on by Russian troops on Friday and there was no word from the drivers. He did not say how many people were on the buses.

Russia’s TASS news agency, reporting from the scene, said 25 civilians, including six children, had left the territory of the Azovstal steel plant in the besieged southern port of Mariupol yesterday.

It was unclear where they had gone, and Reuters could not independently verify the report.

There were also reports of attacks on places outside the Donbas, including in the southern Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia areas and the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where the regional governor said a residential area had been shelled overnight.

Britain’s defence ministry yesterday said Russia had been forced to merge and redeploy depleted and disparate units from failed advances in north-eastern Ukraine. Reuters could not independently verify the reports on what was happening on the ground.

Ukraine’s deputy agriculture minister Taras Vysotskiy accused Russian forces of stealing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain in the areas they occupy, and said he feared an additional 1.5 million tonnes were at risk of being stolen.

Ukraine had said on Thursday that Russian theft of grain from its territory was increasing the threat to global food security posed by disruptions to spring sowing and the blocking of Ukrainian ports.

The Kremlin on Friday denied the allegations, saying it did not know where the information was coming from.

According to International Grains Council data, Ukraine was the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter in the 2020/21 season, selling 44.7 million tonnes abroad. The volume of exports has fallen sharply since the invasion.

Meanwhile, Serbia yesterday displayed a recently delivered Chinese anti-aircraft missile system, raising concerns in the West and among some of Serbia’s neighbours that an arms build-up in the Balkans could threaten fragile peace in the region.

The sophisticated HQ-22 surface-to-air system was delivered last month by a dozen Chinese Air Force Y-20 transport planes in what was believed to be the largest-ever airlift delivery of Chinese arms to Europe.

Although Serbia officially seeks membership in the European Union, it has been arming itself mostly with Russian and Chinese weapons, including T-72 battle tanks, MiG-29 fighter jets, Mi-35 attack helicopters and drones.

In 2020, US officials warned Belgrade against buying HQ-22 missile systems, whose export version is known as FK-3. They said that if Serbia really wanted to join the EU and other Western alliances, it must align its military equipment with Western standards.

The Chinese missile system has been widely compared to the American Patriot and the Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, although it has a shorter range than the more advanced S-300s.

Serbia is the first operator of the Chinese missiles in Europe.

Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic said at the end of the arms display at a military airport near Belgrade that the Chinese missiles, as well as other recently delivered military hardware, are not a threat to anyone and only represent a “powerful deterrent” against potential attackers.

“We will no longer allow to be a punching bag for anyone,” Vucic said, apparently referring to Nato’s 78-day bombardment of Serbia for its bloody crackdown against Kosovo Albanian separatists in 1999.

Serbia, which was at war with its neighbours in the 1990s, does not recognise Kosovo’s independence declared in 2008.

It still has frosty relations with Nato-members Croatia and Montenegro as well as Bosnia, whose separatist Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik attended the military drill.

Vucic said Serbia is also negotiating to buy French multi-purpose Dessault Rafale jets, as well as British Eurofighter Typhoon fighters.

He said that only “political hurdles” could prevent the purchase of the Western aircraft.

There are widespread concerns that Russia could push its ally Serbia into an armed conflict with its neighbours to try at least partly to shift public attention from the war in Ukraine.

Although Serbia has voted in favour of UN resolutions that condemn the bloody Russian attacks in Ukraine, it has refused to join international sanctions against its allies in Moscow or to criticise outright the apparent atrocities committed by the Russian troops in Ukraine.