Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have held a new round of talks as Russia’s military forces bombarded Kyiv and other cities across Ukraine with a punishing assault that the Red Cross said has created “nothing short of a nightmare” for the country’s civilians.
After an air strike on a military base near the Polish border brought the war dangerously close to Nato’s doorstep, the talks raised hopes for progress in evacuating civilians from besieged Ukrainian cities and getting emergency supplies to areas without enough food, water and medicine.
“Everyone is waiting for news,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a new video address on the 19th day of the war.
The negotiations, which took place by video conference, are the fourth round involving higher-level officials from the two countries and the first held in a week.
Previous discussions, held in person in Belarus, did not produce lasting humanitarian routes or agreements to end the fighting in Ukraine.
The two sides expressed some optimism in the past few days.
Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said over the weekend that Russia was “listening carefully to our proposals”.
He tweeted on Monday that the negotiators would discuss “peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops & security guarantees”.
The talks ended without a breakthrough after several hours.
Mr Podolyak said the negotiators took “a technical pause” and planned to meet again on Tuesday.
Air raid alerts sounded in cities and towns all around the country overnight, from near the Russian border in the east to the Carpathian Mountains in the west, as fighting continued on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Ukrainian officials said Russian forces shelled several suburbs of the capital, a major political and strategic target for their invasion.
Authorities in Ukraine said two people died and seven were injured after Russian forces 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 still smoking building.
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 officials 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 rang out overnight around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, firefighters doused the remains of a four-storey residential building on a street of apartments and shops.
Ukrainian emergency services said a strike hit the building, leaving smouldering piles of wood and metal.
It was unclear whether there were casualties.
The surrounded southern city of Mariupol, where the war has produced some of the greatest human suffering, remained cut off despite earlier talks on creating aid or evacuation convoys.
“The city is encircled and civilians today cannot make it out,” said Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
He said the situation for besieged civilians was “nothing short of a nightmare”.
A pregnant woman who became a symbol of Ukraine’s suffering when she was photographed being carried from a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol has died along with her baby, the Associated Press has learned.
Images of the woman being rushed to an ambulance on a stretcher had circled the world, epitomising the horror of an attack on humanity’s most innocent.
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.
Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said a further 28 people were injured by the Soviet-made Tochka-U missile, which carried shrapnel warhead.
The claim could not be independently verified.
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 people have fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million crossing into Poland and other neighbouring countries in what the UN refugee agency has called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War.
Since launching its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has waged a multi-pronged attack.
Russia’s military is bigger and better equipped than Ukraine’s, but its troops have faced stiffer than expected resistance, bolstered by Western weapons support that has frustrated Russian President Vladimir Putin.
With their advance slowed in several areas, they have bombarded several cities with unrelenting shelling, hitting two dozen medical facilities and a large number of apartment buildings.
The war expanded on Sunday when Russian missiles pounded a military training base in western Ukraine that previously served as a crucial hub for co-operation between Ukraine and Nato.
The attack killed 35 people, Ukrainian officials said, and the base’s proximity to the borders of Poland and other Nato members raised concerns that the Western military alliance could be drawn into the largest land conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
Speaking on Sunday night, Mr Zelensky called it a “black day” and again urged Nato leaders to establish a no-fly zone over his country, a move the West has rejected for fear of starting a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
“If you do not close our sky, it is only a matter of time before Russian missiles fall on your territory. Nato territory. On the homes of citizens of Nato countries,” Mr Zelensky said.
Ukraine said Moscow’s troops nevertheless failed to make major advances between Sunday and Monday.
The Russian Defence Ministry gave a different assessment, saying its forces had advanced 11 kilometres (seven miles) and reached five towns north of Mariupol, whose capture could help Russia establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Russia’s latest attack on its ex-Soviet neighbour has shaken the post-Cold War security order, with unpredictable and dangerous consequences.
The US says Russia asked China for military equipment to use in Ukraine after the West imposed severe economic sanctions to hobble the Russian economy and the invasion met stronger-than-expected Ukrainian resistance.
The request heightened tensions about the ongoing war ahead of a Monday meeting in Rome between top aides for the US and Chinese governments.
US President Joe Biden is sending his national security adviser Jake Sullivan to Rome to meet with a Chinese official over worries that Beijing is amplifying Russian disinformation and may help Moscow evade Western economic sanctions.
In his talks with senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi, Mr Sullivan will be looking for limits in what Beijing will do for Moscow.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Monday denied Russia had asked China for military help.
He said “Russia has its own potential to continue the operation”.
Mr Peskov said it was “unfolding in accordance with the plan and will be completed on time and in full”.
He rejected Western allegations that the war was not going to plan.
Russia has called the invasion a special military operation that only targeted military facilities, though hospitals, schools and residential buildings have been hit.
It has denied intending to occupy Ukraine, but Mr Peskov said Russia “does not rule out the possibility of taking full control of large settlements that are now practically surrounded”.
Russia’s cruise missile strike on the military base in western Ukraine also has international significance.
The International Centre for Peacekeeping and Security near Yavoriv has long been used to train Ukrainian soldiers, often with instructors from the United States and other Nato members.
In addition to the 35 deaths, 134 people were wounded in the attack, the Ukrainian Defence Ministry said.
The base is less than 25 kilometres (15 miles) from the Polish border and has hosted Nato training drills, making it a potent symbol of Russia’s longstanding fears that the expansion of the 30-member Western military alliance to include former Soviet states threatens its security – something Nato denies.
Nato said on Sunday that it currently does not have any personnel in Ukraine, though the United States has increased the number of US troops deployed to Nato member Poland.
Mr Sullivan said the West would respond if Russia’s strikes travel outside Ukraine and hit any Nato members, even accidentally.
Ina Padi, a 40-year-old Ukrainian who crossed the border with her family, was taking shelter at a fire station in Wielkie Oczy, Poland, when she was awakened by blasts on Sunday morning from across the border that shook her windows.
“I understood in that moment, even if we are free of it, (the war) is still coming after us,” she said.
