Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal suggested on Monday that Russian assets seized as a result of Western sanctions could be used to finance Ukraine's post-war reconstruction.
"Russia's frozen assets according to various estimates range from $300 to $500 billion," Shmyhal told delegates to the Ukraine Recovery Conference in the Swiss city of Lugano on Monday.
"Russian authorities unleashed this bloody war, they caused this massive destruction, and they should be held accountable for it," Shmyhal added, saying that Ukraine would require an estimated $750 billion to rebuild its infrastructure once the war was over.
Those travelling to Lugano for the meeting included European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who promised that the European Union stood ready to help Ukraine fund its post-war reconstruction.
"Europe has a special responsibility and a strategic interest to be at Ukraine's side every step of the way," von der Leyen told the conference.
Ahead of the meeting, experts had warned that reconstruction efforts were urgently needed, though others cautioned that confiscating Russian assets in such a manner would be legally problematic.
"Ukraine is a huge country, a lot has been destroyed ... you cannot start planning and coordinating reconstruction soon enough," Markus Berndt, head of the European Investment Bank's department of external activity, told dpa.
Ukraine urgently needed help to secure basic services such as clean water, sewage, waste disposal, energy and internet access to ensure macroeconomic stability, Berndt said.
"We need investment, otherwise the economy will collapse completely and then we'd lose the most important pillar for reconstruction," he added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for reconstruction of the country's shattered infrastructure to begin as soon as possible in his Monday night video address, noting that it was necessary to prepare for winter, not least in terms of ensuring reliable energy supplies.
Large parts of Ukraine's economy had been brought to a standstill by the fighting, Zelensky said, adding, however, that Ukraine's reconstruction should be about more than just rebuilding walls. "Ukraine must become the freest, most modern and safest country in Europe," he said.
As western leaders in Lugano looked to the future, Russian President Vladimir Putin remained very much focused on the present, announcing alongside Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu that Russian forces would continue their "special operation" in Ukraine following the capture of the key city of Lysychansk on Sunday.
Shoigu said that over 2,200 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and more than 3,200 had been injured in the battle for Luhansk, though there was no way of verifying those figures independently.
The focus of the fighting in eastern Ukraine appears to have shifted from the Luhansk region to the neighbouring region of Donetsk, the Ukrainian military said on Monday, announcing that its forces had successfully repelled Russian attacks around the villages of Bilohorivka and Verkhnyokamyanske, on the border between the two.
The Vuhlehirsk thermal power plant, west of Svitlodarsk, which fell to pro-Russian separatists earlier on in the campaign, was now being fought over again, the Ukrainian General Staff said.
However, the general staff also conceded that Russian troops had made territorial gains near the village of Mazanivka north of Sloviansk.
Ukrainian forces still control some areas of the Donetsk region, including the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk urban agglomeration, which is expected to be Moscow's next target in the ground war.
Control of Ukraine's eastern Donbass region - consisting of Luhansk and Donetsk - is one of the Kremlin's primary goals in Ukraine, and so cementing Russia's victory in Luhansk represents a significant boost to Putin's stalled invasion.
Victory in Luhansk was even celebrated on the International Space Station, where cosmonauts Denis Matveev, Sergei Korsakov and Oleg Artemyev were pictured holding the flag of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, saying that the region was now "fully liberated," in an image released by Russian space agency Roscosmos.
For his part, Zelensky only briefly addressed the recent string of Russian military successes in Donbass in his Monday night video address, stressing that Ukrainian forces were inflicting losses on the Russian military every day.
"We have to break them," Zelensky said, adding that this would require "superhuman effort," but that there was no alternative if Ukraine's future was to be secured.
