A meeting of EU leaders will take place in Brussels this evening to sign off on a plan.
Any sanction will be fully implemented here.
Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney says a second package of penalties will be introduced very shortly:
"Whether or not a very comprehensive set of sanctions changes the direction of this conflict; there's quite a lot of pessimism around that. But the idea that Europe wouldn't respond at all with a very severe package of sanctions, I think would be completely unacceptable. So I think you'll see European leaders this evening- they're meeting at eight o'clock- they'll agree in principle, a very broad and hard hitting package."
The Ukrainian President says Russian forces are trying to take Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
Volodimir Zelenskyy says his troops will defend the site so a tragedy can't be repeated.
He said this act by Vladimir Putin is a declaration of war on Europe.
President Putin insists he doesn't want to occupy the country and that his action is designed to protect Russia by - in his words - demilitarising Ukraine.
He's been talking to officials in Moscow this afternoon:
"What is happening; it's something that we were not given any other choice but to react otherwise in the security area. We couldn't react any other way."
Kim Sengupta, the Defence and Diplomatic Editor of The Independent, is in Kiev.
He says the military onslaught has happened at a very rapid rate:
"What would be worrying for the Ukrainian forces, the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian people is the fact that the speed at which the Russians and their Belarusian allies are coming through the north... So the the rate of the forward movement has been quite fast. And of course at the same time they're trying to hem Ukrainian forces in the South and East as well."
