A pregnant journalist is recovering in hospital today after a pro-Kremlin political leader in Russia told two male aides to 'violently rape' her at a press conference.

Defeating grim expectations of a failure, talks on the Ukrainian crisis have led to a deal aimed at hauling the region back from the brink.

Jews have reportedly been told to "register" with pro-Russian forces in the east Ukrainian city of Donetsk, in a move condemned by the US as "grotesque and beyond unacceptable".

Ukraine's armed forces and government suffered a public humiliation yesterday after pro-Russian separatists seized six of their armoured personnel vehicles and paraded them through the streets.

A prolonged and increasingly vicious confrontation in eastern Ukraine turned into armed conflict yesterday.

Are some of the 'patriotic' gunmen seizing police stations and buildings in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine actually Russian troops?

An Auckland man who went to the other end of the earth to find his biological parents in Russia has chanced upon another person from the same orphanage living in New Zealand.

After a rush of emergency meetings to frame its strategy, the West is now scrutinising the impact of a first volley of sanctions against Russia but doubts persist whether Europe will swiftly follow the United States in hiking up the pressure.

Russian forces have completed their takeover of the Ukrainian navy's assets in Crimea with the storming of the minesweeper Cherkessy.

Concern is growing that Western pressure, including a suspension from the G8, has failed to dent Russian President Vladimir Putins military ambitions.

Jolted by a sense that history has changed course, Western leaders meet this week to ponder a strategy for neutralising the threat of virulent Russian nationalism.

Russian armour smashed into a base of Ukrainian troops yesterday in the first serious military action in the confrontation over Crimea.

New Zealand's modest travel sanctions over Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine are largely symbolic, says Foreign Minister Murray McCully.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's Crimean gamble will face its biggest test tonight, when the EU and US ready sanctions to punish him for a land-grab.

A Ukrainian border patrol plane came under fire near the regional boundary with Crimea as tensions increased further in the contested peninsula yesterday.

With a handful of houses, a couple of shops and some crumbling Kruschev-era flats, the village of Lyubovnets, near the northern side of Sevastopol's bay, is not much to look at.

Russia's President is deserving of respect - the kind you would show if you were in close proximity to a hissing cobra, writes John Armstrong.

Unable to intervene militarily and with no direct economic levers to pull, the West believes it is successfully pressing Russia in the Ukraine crisis.

There is a huge amount riding on just how the West deals with Putin's incursion, with the Ukraine merely a pawn in the Russian president's geopolitical chess game, writes Fran O'Sullivan.

Prime Minister John Key says New Zealand athletes should complete in the Sochi Winter Paralympics despite Russia's intervention in Ukraine.

They stood together with their arms linked: a priest, a former soldier, two housewives and a teacher.

The trouble in Ukraine has left NZ in a critical position as it vies for selection to the United Nations Security Council, an expert in international relations says.