Sitting beside a trench, the smoke of nearby combat visible, "Batya" looks towards the besieged town of Ilovaysk and considers the options of the pro-Kiev fighters there battling for survival.

Kiev on Wednesday said a massive convoy of tanks and heavy weapons from Russia was travelling towards a government-held town in restive east Ukraine.

Three days after a hail of rocket fire shook their homes, residents in Olenivka are still digging out casings from their gardens and arguing over which side shot at them.

A massive Russian aid convoy rumbled towards Ukraine's border on Wednesday as Kiev vowed to block what it feared could be a "Trojan horse" bringing military assistance to pro-Kremlin rebels fighting a bloody insurgency in the east.

Russian television images showed a line of nearly 300 lorries moving through the countryside, covered with white tarpaulin and stretching over almost three kilometers (two miles).

Ukrainian police on Friday detained a man after a grenade blast injured two people close to Kiev's Independence Square, the interior ministry said.

The man hurled the explosive device at the director of an exhibition center where some demonstrators from the remains of the protest movement that toppled president Viktor Yanukovych in February are still squatting, it said in a statement said.

Forensic experts have identified the first of 298 people killed in the MH17 disaster, the Dutch government said, as grieving relatives defied safety concerns to pay an emotional visit to the crash site in eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian military said Tuesday it had rescued four crew members of a transport plane shot down over rebel territory, while two more were being held by insurgents and another two still missing.

"Four of the eight crew members of the AN-26 plane were found and brought to a safe area after a search-and-rescue mission," the Ukrainian military said in a statement after Monday's incident.

Escalating clashes between pro-Kremlin separatists and Ukrainian forces on Sunday killed 12 civilians and forced the new Western-backed leader to cancel a pivotal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the World Cup in Brazil.

An explosive security crisis on the eastern edge of the European Union that has claimed more than 550 lives and inflamed East-West relations has since Friday threatened to spiral into an all-out civil war.

Urgent EU-brokered gas talks between Russia and Ukraine resumed in Kiev on Sunday ahead of a looming threat by Moscow to cut off its neighbor's supplies in a move that could impact Europe, an EU source told Agence France Presse.

Russia's RIA Novosti news agency cited its own source as saying that the first meeting involved EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Alexei Miller, the head of Russia's state gas firm Gazprom.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed Sunday that a Ukrainian mob that attacked Moscow's embassy in Kiev wanted to take over the compound and see "blood spilled."

"Our diplomats feel that the attackers wanted to physically seize the embassy," news agencies quoted Lavrov as saying. "There are also reasons to believe that they wanted to see blood spilled."