Ukraine appealed for help from the West on Friday, pleading for faster arms deliveries to repel better-armed Russian forces and for humanitarian support to combat advancing deadly diseases.

In Sievierodonetsk, the small town that has become the center of Russia’s advance into eastern Ukraine and one of the bloodiest flashpoints in a war well into its fourth month, fresh fighting intense have been reported.

To the south, the mayor of the port city of Mariupol – reduced to rubble by a Russian siege – said sewage systems were broken and corpses rotted in the streets.

“There is an epidemic of dysentery and cholera… The war which took away more than 20,000 inhabitants… unfortunately, with these epidemics of infection, there will be thousands of additional victims,” ​​he said on national television.

He called on the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to work to set up a humanitarian corridor to allow the remaining residents to leave the town, which is now under Russian control.

In an overview of the wider impact of the war, the UN food agency said cuts in wheat and other food exports from Ukraine and Russia could inflict chronic hunger on up to to 19 million more people worldwide over the next year.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called in a video conference speech for Ukraine to be integrated into the West, with binding guarantees for its protection.

Calling on the EU to accept Ukraine as a candidate for membership, he told a conference in Copenhagen: “The European Union can take a historic step which will prove that words about the Ukrainian people belonging to the European family are not just words”.

The war in the east, on which Russia is focusing its attentions, is now mainly an artillery battle in which Kyiv is severely outgunned, according to Ukrainian officials.

This means that the course of events could only be reversed if the West keeps its promises to send more and better weapons, including rocket systems that Washington and others have promised.