Ukraine has rushed to assure a jittery public it will not suffer from Russia's latest gas cut and has sent a team to Europe to bolster energy ties.
The delicate mission came as MPs prepared to call on Kiev to declare martial law in two separatist eastern regions where a 10-week insurgency has claimed more than 320 lives.
The latest violence in the heavily Russified rustbelt saw the border guard service report the injury of 31 soldiers in mortar fire attacks.
The pro-Russian uprising has threatened the survival of the ex-Soviet state and put East-West relations under pressure not witnessed since the Cold War.
The Kremlin has denied fomenting the unrest. But its March seizure of Crimea and border troop movements were followed on Monday by a fuel stoppage that Kiev called "another stage of Russia's aggression against the Ukrainian state".
The head of Ukraine's indebted state energy firm Naftogaz said consumers - already facing unpopular social benefit cuts being adopted under the terms of a massive IMF rescue loan - would be shielded from Russia's punitive step.
"I think that normal users will not be affected in any way," Naftogaz chief Andriy Kobolev said in televised remarks on Tuesday.
Weeks of acrimonious debt and price negotiations broke up on Monday with Russia walking away from a compromise solution proposed in Kiev by the European Union's energy commissioner.
Ukraine receives half its gas from Russia and transports 15 per cent of the fuel consumed in Europe.
Russia imposed the cut after Ukraine baulked at making a $US1.9 billion ($A2.06 billion) debt payment in protest at Moscow's decision to nearly double Kiev's rates in the wake of the February ouster of a Kremlin-backed president.
A gas shortage is not expected to felt in either Ukraine or Europe for several months.
Ukraine's bolstered its underground storage volumes and analysts believe Europe's own reserves are nearly full.
But Kiev is seeking to devise a longer-term solution that would eliminate a need to maintain an alliance with Russia to secure gas prices it can afford.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said on Tuesday a team headed by Kobolev and Energy Minister Yuriy Prodan was flying to Budapest to negotiate "reverse-flow" deliveries along pipelines now used for transporting Russian gas west.
But European utilities have for the most part refused to complicate their relations with Russian energy giant Gazprom by selling Russia's own gas back to Ukraine at a price lower than that imposed on Kiev by Moscow.
European companies "do not have the right to do that", Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller told Russia's RIA Novosti news agency on Monday.
Economists believe Kiev will face strong European pressure once gas supplies dwindle because EU nations do not want Ukraine to tap into shipments intended for Russia's western clients.
Meanwhile Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has urged the OSCE to put pressure on Ukraine to implement a roadmap drawn up by the pan-European security body to de-escalate the violence.
"Ukrainian leaders absolutely refuse to implement the (de-escalation) roadmap and we call all countries members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe to put pressure on Ukrainian leaders," Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday.
The OSCE drew up the plan to help bring the pro-Western Kiev authorities and pro-Moscow militants in the southeast to the negotiating table, but no progress has been made in several rounds of dialogue that excluded the armed separatists in the east.
Ukraine's new President Petro Poroshenko said on Monday he hoped to impose a ceasefire once troops regain control of the Russian border and stop the flow of arms and gunmen into the conflict zone.
The 48-year-old confectionery tycoon promised to accomplish that uneasy goal by the weekend and then launch talks with peaceful separatists.
But MPs want him to go further and declare martial law - a step Poroshenko has resisted out of fear of fanning pro-Russian sentiments in the east.
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