LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia and Ukraine kept a fragile diplomatic path open for a new round of talks on Monday, even as Moscow forces shelled Kyiv and other cities across the country in a punitive bombardment, according to the “Red Nightmare” for civilians. persons.
Massive explosions rocked Kiev just before dawn on Tuesday as Russia advanced on multiple fronts.
Elsewhere, a convoy of 160 civilian vehicles left the besieged port city of Mariupol on a designated humanitarian route, city council said, in a rare glimmer of hope a week and a half after a deadly siege that razed houses and other buildings and left people desperate for food. , water, heat and medicines.
The latest talks, held via videoconference, were the fourth round involving high-ranking officials from the two countries and the first in a week. The talks ended without a breakthrough hours later, when an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the negotiators had taken a “technical pause” and planned to meet again on Tuesday.
There has been some optimism on both sides in the past few days. Zelensky’s aide Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted that the negotiators would discuss “peace, a ceasefire, an immediate withdrawal of troops and security guarantees.”
Previous discussions in person in Belarus have not led to solid humanitarian routes or cessation of hostilities agreements.
In Washington, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday that while the Biden administration supports Ukraine’s involvement in talks with Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin will have to show signs of de-escalation to show good faith.
“And what we’re really looking for is evidence of that, and at the moment we don’t see any evidence that President Putin is doing anything to stop the onslaught or reduce the escalation,” she said.
Overall, almost all Russian offensives have ground to a halt after little progress over the weekend, according to a senior US defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon’s assessment. Russian troops were still about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from central Kyiv, the official said.
The official said Russian troops had fired more than 900 missiles, but Ukrainian airspace is still contested and Russia has not achieved full air superiority.
At night, in the cities and towns of the country, from the border with Russia in the east to the Carpathians in the west, an air raid alarm sounded, and the fighting continued on the outskirts of Kiev. Ukrainian officials said Russian troops shelled several suburbs of the capital.
Ukrainian authorities said two people were killed when the Russians attacked an aircraft factory in Kyiv, causing a large fire. The Antonov plant is Ukraine’s largest aviation plant and produces many of the largest cargo aircraft in the world.
Russian artillery shelling also hit a nine-story residential building in the northern Obolonsky district of the city, killing two more people, authorities said.
And a Russian airstrike near a Ukrainian checkpoint caused extensive damage to an area in central Kyiv, killing one person, Ukraine’s emergency agency said.
Katerina Lot said that she was in her apartment while her child was doing homework when they heard a loud explosion and ran for cover.
“The child became hysterical. Our windows and balcony were broken. Part of the floor fell down,” she said. “It was very, very scary.”
In a suburb of Kyiv, Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall was injured while reporting and hospitalized, according to the network.
In Russia, a live broadcast of the main evening news program on state television was briefly interrupted by a woman who entered the studio with a poster against the war. The OVD-Info website, which tracks political arrests, reports that she is an employee of Channel One, who was taken into police custody.
According to officials, a deputy of the city council of the city of Brovary, east of Kyiv, was killed in the battle. The shells also hit the Kyiv suburbs of Irpen, Bucha and Gostomel, where some of the fiercest fighting in Russia’s stalled attempt to seize the capital took place, local officials said.
Airstrikes were reported across the country, including on Nikolaev in the south and Chernigov in the north, where most of the city was knocked out due to the heat. Explosions also took place at night around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson.
According to the governor of the region, nine people were killed as a result of a rocket attack on a TV tower in the western village of Antopol.
In the east of Kharkov, firefighters put out the smoldering remains of a four-story residential building. It is not known if there are any casualties.
In the southern city of Mariupol, where the war has taken its toll, the city council did not say how many people were in the convoy heading west to the city of Zaporozhye. But it says the ceasefire along the route appears to be holding.
Previous attempts to evacuate civilians and deliver humanitarian aid to the city of 430,000 have been thwarted by the fighting.
The Ukrainian military said it repelled Monday’s attempt to take control of Mariupol by Russian troops, who were forced to retreat. Satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed fires raging throughout the city, with many high-rise residential buildings badly damaged or destroyed.
The Kremlin-backed leader of the Russian region of Chechnya said on a messaging app that Chechen fighters are leading the offensive on Mariupol.
Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the war had become “nothing less than a nightmare” for those living in besieged cities and called for safe escape corridors for civilians and the delivery of humanitarian aid. in.
“The situation cannot, cannot continue like this,” he said. “History is watching what happens in Mariupol and other cities.”
A pregnant woman who became a symbol of Ukraine’s suffering when she was photographed being carried out of a bombed-out maternity hospital in Mariupol last week has died with her baby, the Associated Press reported.
Residents of Mariupol, including Natalia Koldash, rushed for cover in the building on Sunday as an unidentified aircraft flew over their heads.
“We don’t have any information,” Koldash said. “We don’t know anything. It looks like we live in a dense forest.
The Associated Press video shows the wreckage of a damaged apartment building and another building, which a young man named Dima described as an elementary school.
“There were no military men at this school,” he said. “It’s not clear why he was hit.”
The Russian military said 20 civilians in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine were killed by a ballistic missile launched by Ukrainian forces. The assertion cannot be independently verified.
The UN has recorded the deaths of at least 596 civilians since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, though it believes the actual toll is much higher. Millions more fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million people fleeing to Poland and other neighboring countries in what the UN called the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
“All day long I cry from the pain of parting with loved ones, with my husband, with my parents,” said 33-year-old refugee Alexandra Beltugova in the Polish border town of Przemysl after fleeing the industrial Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
“I understand that we may not see them. I want this war to end,” she said.
The Russian army is larger and better equipped than the Ukrainian one, but its troops have faced stiffer-than-expected resistance, backed up by Western-supplied weapons.
During a meeting in Rome with a senior Chinese diplomat, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan warned China against helping Russia.
Two administration officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing confidential information, said China signaled to Moscow that it was ready to provide both military and financial support to Ukraine to help stave off the fallout from Western sanctions, which include a fourth set of sanctions. The EU sanctions were announced late on Monday evening.
The Kremlin denies asking China to provide military equipment for use in Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “Russia has its own potential to continue the operation” and that it is “unfolding according to plan and will be completed on time and in full.”
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Associated Press writer Lolita S. Baldor in Washington DC and AP journalists from around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP reporting on the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.