Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that he and French President Emmanuel Macron discussed Paris’ defense support for Kyiv amid the ongoing war in the country.

The leaders discussed "the course of hostilities, the operation to rescue the military from Azovstal and the vision of the prospects of the negotiation process," Zelenskyy announced on Twitter following the discussion, adding that he raised the issue of fuel supply to Ukraine.

Zelenskyy said he and Macron also discussed defense support from France, preparing the sixth package of European Union sanctions against Russia and possible ways to export Ukrainian agricultural products.

He also highlighted the "substantive" discussion between the two presidents on Ukraine's application for the status of a candidate for EU membership.

Meanwhile, Mariupol appeared on the verge of falling to the Russians as Ukraine moved to abandon the steel plant where hundreds of its fighters had held out for months under relentless bombardment in the last bastion of resistance in the devastated city.

The capture of Mariupol would make it the biggest city to be taken by Moscow's forces yet and would give the Kremlin a badly needed victory, though the landscape has largely been reduced to rubble.

More than 260 fighters – some of them seriously wounded and taken out on stretchers – left the ruins of the Azovstal plant on Monday and turned themselves over to the Russian side in a deal reached by the two warring parties. Ukrainian authorities said they were working to extract the remaining soldiers from the sprawling steel mill, though how many were still there was unclear.