A soldier has died and six others have been injured after heavy shelling by pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The Ukrainian military announced the casualties on Wednesday, which it said had taken place within the past 24 hours as ceasefire violations remain at a high level.
The military said on its Facebook page it had recorded 96 incidents of shelling by separatists over the last day compared with 84 a day earlier.
It said separatist forces used heavy artillery, mortars and Grad rocket systems.
Ukraine has accused Russia of provoking violence, saying it used it as a pretext to formally recognise eastern Ukraine as independent and move its troops into the region, precipitating a crisis that the West fears could unleash a major war.
It comes as Western nations and Japan punished Russia with new sanctions for ordering troops into the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
They have threatened to go further if Moscow launched an all-out invasion of its fellow former Soviet neighbours.
The United States, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan announced plans to target banks and elites while Germany halted a major gas pipeline project from Russia in one of the worst security crises in Europe in decades.
Bitter about Ukraine's long-term goal to join NATO and claiming it as historic Russian land, Russian President Vladimir Putin has amassed more than 150,000 troops near Ukraine's borders, according to U.S. estimates.
The former KGB strongman has ordered soldiers into the so-called People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk to "keep the peace".
The United States dismisses that justification as "nonsense".
"To put it simply Russia just announced that it is carving out a big chunk of Ukraine," U.S. Presidnt Joe Biden said on Tuesday.
"This is the beginning of a Russian invasion."
Satellite imagery over the past 24 hours shows several new troop and equipment deployments in western Russia and more than 100 vehicles at a small airfield in southern Belarus, which borders Ukraine, according to U.S. firm Maxar.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian cancelled separate scheduled meetings with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday as weeks of frantic diplomacy failed to end the crisis.
Plans announced by Biden to bolster Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania include sending 800 infantry soldiers and up to eight F-35 fighter jets to locations along NATO's eastern flank, a U.S. official said, but are a redistribution, not additions.
Putin did not watch Biden's speech and Russia will first look at what the United States has outlined before responding, according to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, cited by Russian news agencies.
Putin said he was always open to finding diplomatic solutions but that "the interests of Russia and the security of our citizens are unconditional for us."
Moscow is calling for security guarantees, including a promise that Ukraine will never join NATO, while the United States and its allies offer Putin confidence-building and arms control steps to defuse the stand-off.
Lavrov brushed off the threat of sanctions.
"Our European, American, British colleagues will not stop and will not calm down until they have exhausted all their possibilities for the so-called punishment of Russia," he said.
