Bombardment of cities amid talks
NEW ROUND OF NEGOTIATIONS BUT RUSSIAN MILITARY CONTINUES ONSLAUGHT AS CIVILIANS SEEK SAFETY
RUSSIA and Ukraine have kept a fragile diplomatic path open with a new round of talks even as Moscow’s forces pounded away at Kyiv and other cities across the country in a punishing bombardment.
Meanwhile, a convoy of 160 civilian cars left the encircled port city of Mariupol along a designated humanitarian route, the city council reported, in a rare glimmer of hope a week-and-a-half into the lethal siege that has pulverised homes and other buildings and left people desperate for food, water, heat and medicine.
The latest negotiations, which were held via video conference, were the fourth round involving higher-level officials from the two countries and the first in a week.
The talks ended without a breakthrough after several hours, with an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying the negotiators took “a technical pause” and planned to meet again today.
The two sides had expressed some optimism in the past few days.
Mykhailo Podolyak, the aide to Mr Zelensky, said over the weekend that Russia was “listening carefully to our proposals”.
He tweeted yesterday that the negotiators would discuss “peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops & security guarantees”.
Previous discussions, held in person in Belarus, produced no lasting humanitarian routes or agreements to end the fighting.
Ahead of the talks, air raid alerts sounded in cities and towns around the country overnight, from near the Russian border in the east to the Carpathian Mountains in the west, and fighting continued on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Ukrainian officials said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces shelled several suburbs of the capital. Authorities in Ukraine said two people were killed when the Russians struck a plane factory in Kyiv, sparking a large fire.
The Antonov factory is Ukraine’s largest aircraft manufacturing plant and is best known for producing many of the world’s biggest cargo planes.
Russian artillery fire also hit a nine-storey apartment building in the northern Obolonskyi district of the city, killing two more people, authorities said.
Firefighters worked to rescue survivors, painstakingly carrying an injured woman on a stretcher away from the blackened and smoking building.
And a Russian air strike near a Ukrainian checkpoint caused extensive damage to a central Kyiv neighbourhood, killing one person, Ukraine’s emergency agency said.
A town councillor for Brovary, east of Kyiv, was killed in fighting there, officials said.
Shells also fell on the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, which have seen some of the worst fighting in Russia’s stalled attempt to take the capital, local authorities said.
Air strikes were reported across the country, including the southern city of Mykolaiv, and the northern city of Chernihiv, where heat was knocked out to most of the town.
Explosions also reverberated overnight around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, firefighters doused the smouldering remains of a four-storey residential building. It was unclear whether there were casualties.
In the southern city of Mariupol, the city council did not say how many people were in the convoy of cars headed westward for the city of Zaporizhzhia.
But it said a ceasefire along the route appeared to be holding.
Previous attempts to evacuate civilians and deliver humanitarian aid to the city of 430,000 were thwarted by continuing fighting.
Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the war has become “nothing short of a nightmare” for those living in besieged cities.
A pregnant woman who became a symbol of Ukraine’s suffering when she was photographed being carried from a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol last week has died along with her baby, the Associated Press has learned.
The UN has recorded at least 596 civilian deaths since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, though it believes the true toll is much higher.
Millions more have fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million crossing into Poland and other neighbouring countries in what the UN has called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War.