The EU will target new individuals with sanctions over their involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, France said Thursday as the 28-nation bloc's foreign ministers met to discuss fresh measures against Russia.

"We will show the EU's very strong unity and take all necessary steps, including extending and expanding the individual sanctions, in order to secure a return to a negotiated solution," France's European affairs minister Harlem Desir told reporters in Brussels.

EU foreign ministers will consider further "robust measures" against Russia over the fighting in Ukraine when they meet in Brussels Thursday, Ukrainian foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin said.

His European counterparts are holding emergency talks on new sanctions after dozens of people were killed in clashes between Ukrainian forces and Moscow-backed rebels near the key port city of Mariupol.

A mother of seven has been accused of treason for calling the Ukrainian embassy about Russian troop movements in the latest sign of Moscow attempting to cover up its intervention in its neighboring state.

Svetlana Davydova, 36, was arrested last week by a group of men in black uniforms who burst into her apartment in the town of Vyazma, west of Moscow, her husband Anatoly Gorlov told AFP.

Governments increasingly view human rights as "a luxury" they can ill afford, Human Rights Watch said Thursday, warning that abuses fuel crises in world trouble spots like Syria and Ukraine.

Western powers, including the United States, are far from blameless and in some cases their wrongdoing has fed the very climate in which serial rights abusers like Islamic State jihadists thrive.

The United States gave a clear signal Wednesday that Russia will face further sanctions for what the White House says is Moscow's role in fueling violence in eastern Ukraine.

Following a telephone call between U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the White House condemned "Russian-backed separatists" and the "heavy toll that the Russian-backed offensive in the east was having on Ukraine's civilian population."

Canada is lending $200 million to Ukraine to boost the strife-torn nation's economy as it battles pro-Russian separatists, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Wednesday.

After backing stringent Western-led economic sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine, Harper said Canada now wanted to help stabilize the Ukrainian economy.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Wednesday he had written a letter to Russia's Vladimir Putin demanding that Moscow rein in eastern separatist fighters in his war-torn ex-Soviet republic.

Poroshenko said his letter also requested that Russia release female Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko, who claims she was abducted by pro-Russian fighters before being put in a Moscow prison and starting a hunger strike.

Greece's new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras distanced himself Tuesday from a threat by EU leaders to impose further sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, saying Athens was not consulted about the warning.

In a statement two days after his radical left Syriza party won Greece's general election, Tsipras accused EU leaders of failing to consult his government on a joint declaration Tuesday accusing Russia of "growing support" to separatists in Ukraine's east.

NATO allies must stay the course in Ukraine, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe insisted Tuesday, calling for alliance command and control centers to be set up quickly in Kiev's neighbors.

"We have to keep our security commitments to each other," said Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland said, adding that all NATO allies must contribute to the new "spearhead force which will allow us to speed forces to troubled spots."

About 1,100 children are living rough in underground shelters in Ukraine's rebel-held eastern city of Donetsk, the U.N. children's agency said Tuesday.

"We were able to assess 12 bomb shelters where there are adults and parents with the children," UNICEF's representative in Ukraine Giovanna Barberis said.