Ukraine and Russia: What you need to know right now

Ukraine's army was holding out against a Russian assault in the city of Sievierodonetsk, its general staff said on Wednesday, while Russian troops were bringing more resources to the Donbas in a battle for control of the region.

Ukraine's army was holding out against a Russian assault in the city of Sievierodonetsk, its general staff said on Wednesday, while Russian troops were bringing more resources to the Donbas in a battle for control of the region. FIGHTING

* Soldiers are "successfully holding back the assault in the city of Sievierodonetsk" and were holding off attacks in Toshkivka and Ustynivka, the Ukraine general staff said. * "The heroic defense of Donbas is ongoing," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video statement on Tuesday. The situation in Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, and Popasna remains the most difficult, he said.

* Zelenskiy's office said two people were killed and two wounded in the Luhansk region in the past 24 hours, five civilians were wounded in the Donetsk region, and four were killed and 11 wounded in the Kharkiv region. It said the number of casualties in the Kherson region was unclear. * Zelenskiy said Ukraine would launch next week a "Book of Executioners" to detail war crimes.

* Russia denies targeting civilians and has rejected allegations of war crimes. * Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai said Russia's army was shelling Lysychansk, across the river from Sievierodonetsk. A local man was killed on a central street on Tuesday and a woman was hospitalized, he said.

* Over 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered in the city of Mariupol have been transferred to Russia for investigation, Russia's state-owned Tass news agency reported, citing a Russian law enforcement source. * Russia has returned the bodies of 210 Ukrainian fighters, most of whom died defending Mariupol at a vast steel works, Ukraine's military said.

ECONOMY * Russian shelling destroyed the warehouses of one of Ukraine's largest agricultural commodity terminals in the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv at the weekend, the region head said.

* Ukraine could export a maximum of only two million tonnes of grain a month if Russia refuses to lift its blockade of the country's Black Sea ports, said Ukraine's first deputy minister for Agrarian Policy and Food. * Russian and Turkish defense ministers have discussed a potential grain export corridor from Ukraine and northern Syria, Turkey's defense ministry said.

* The World Bank board has approved $1.49 billion of additional financing for Ukraine to help pay the government and social workers' wages. * Under heavy pressure from Western sanctions and airspace bans, Russian state airline Aeroflot said it planned to raise 185.2 billion roubles ($3 billion) in an emergency share sale.

NUCLEAR * Radiation detectors in the Exclusion Zone around Ukraine's defunct Chornobyl nuclear power plant are online for the first time since Russia seized the area on Feb. 24, and radiation levels are normal, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said.