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US President Barack Obama vowed Sunday to ramp up pressure on Russia after a rocket barrage blamed on Kremlin-backed Ukrainian rebels killed 30 and threatened to open new front in the war.

Saturday's assault on Mariupol -- the main city standing between separatist territory near the Russian border and the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea that Moscow annexed in March -- came a day after the insurgents pulled out of peace talks and vowed to capture new land.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told an emergency security meeting that Kiev had intercepted calls proving the attack was masterminded by terrorists who receive support in Russia".

And Obama said he would now look at all options -- short of military intervention -- aimed at restraining Russian President Vladimir Putin's alleged proxy war aimed at stripping Ukraine's pro-Western leaders of their vital eastern industrial base.

He pledged to "ratchet up the pressure on Russia" and signalled that he took a dim view of some EU members' desire to revive their ailing economies by restoring full financial and trade ties with Moscow.

"If Mr Putin and if Russia are hell-bent on engaging in military conflicts, their military is more powerful than Ukraine's," Obama said during a visit to India.

"The question is going to be whether they continue to pursue a path that not only is bad for the people of Ukraine, but is... bad for the people of Russia."

New European Council President Donald Tusk -- a former Polish prime minister who had long been suspicious of Putin -- also called the Mariupol attack evidence that "appeasement encourages the aggressor to greater acts of violence.

- 'No alternative to truce' -

"Time to step up our policy based on cold facts, not illusions," Tusk tweeted.

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Ukraine scrambles after new rebel attacks