Kyiv areas shelled but ‘hard’ Ukraine peace talks go ahead

Ukraine said it held “hard” talks on a ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops and security guarantees with Russia on Monday, despite the fatal shelling of a residential building in Kyiv.

Russia and Ukraine kept a fragile diplomatic path open with a new round of talks on Monday even as Moscow’s forces pounded away at Kyiv and other cities across the country in a punishing bombardment that the Red Cross said has created “nothing short of a nightmare” for the civilian population.

A crane removes a ruined car from in front of a destroyed apartment building after it was shelled in the northwestern Obolon district of Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Aris Messinis / AFP)

Ukraine said it held “hard” talks on a ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops and security guarantees with Russia on Monday, despite the fatal shelling of a residential building in Kyiv. Both sides suggested some results could be in sight after earlier rounds primarily focused on ceasefires to get aid to towns and cities under siege by Russian forces and evacuate civilians; those truces have frequently failed.

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 Tuesday.

The two sides had expressed some optimism in the past few days. Mykhailo Podolyak, the aide to Zelensky, said over the weekend that Russia was “listening carefully to our proposals”. and 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. Ukrainian officials said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces shelled several suburbs of the capital.

Ukrainian authorities said two people were killed when the Russians struck an airplane 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-story apartment building in the Obolonskyi district of the city, killing two more people, authorities said.

And a Russian airstrike near a Ukrainian checkpoint caused extensive damage to a downtown Kyiv neighbourhood, killing one person, Ukraine’s emergency agency said.

A wounded pregnant woman who was taken on a stretcher from a maternity hospital that was bombed by Russia last week has died, along with her baby, the Associated Press reported.

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.

Airstrikes 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 smoldering remains of a four-story residential building. It was unclear whether there were casualties.

In the southern city of Mariupol, where the war has produced some of the greatest suffering, the city council didn’t 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, and he pleaded for safe passage for civilians to leave and humanitarian aid to be brought in through the front lines.

“The situation cannot, cannot continue like this,” he said. “History is watching what is happening in Mariupol and other cities.”

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 United Nations has called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that “Russia has its own potential to continue the operation” and that it was “unfolding in accordance with the plan and will be completed on time and in full”.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday sounded the alarm over Russia raising the alert level for its nuclear forces after invading Ukraine, describing it a “bone-chilling development”.

“The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility,” Guterres told reporters, and repeated his call for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

Meanwhile, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan started talks on Monday with China’s top diplomat, according to people familiar with the meeting, the first of their kind since Russia’s invasion.

The discussions in Rome come as the Biden administration seeks to enlist Beijing’s help in exerting influence on President Vladimir Putin to end the war.