A new round of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine ended on Monday without progress but will continue on Tuesday, while dozens more people were killed in Ukraine in Russian attacks on kyiv and other cities and in a Ukrainian bombardment against the capital of a pro-Russian province.
Meanwhile, a convoy of 160 vehicles left this Monday with civilians from the southern Mariupol, which for a week and a half has been under siege and Russian attacks that pulverized houses and buildings and left the port city almost without food, water, heating and medicine. .
The round of negotiations, which was held via videoconference, was the fourth between high-level officials from the two countries and the first in a week.
The talks ended without concrete progress after several hours, with an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky saying afterward that negotiators had taken a “technical break” and planned to meet again on Tuesday.
Both sides had expressed some optimism in recent days.
Mikhail Podoliak, Zelensky’s adviser, said over the weekend that Russia was “listening carefully to our proposals.”
This Monday, the official, who leads the Russian delegation in the talks, tweeted that the negotiators would discuss “peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops and security guarantees”, that is, the core of Ukraine’s demands.
Russia, for its part, demands written guarantees that Ukraine will demilitarize and adopt the status of a neutral country that guarantees that it will not join NATO and that, therefore, it will not fall under the military orbit of either the United States or Moscow. .
Before the talks, air strike alerts rang in cities and towns across the country overnight, and fighting continued on the outskirts of kyiv.
Ukrainian officials said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government forces shelled several suburbs of the capital.
Ukrainian authorities said two people were killed in Russian attacks on an aircraft factory in kyiv, sparking a huge fire.
The Antonov factory is the largest aircraft manufacturing plant in Ukraine and is best known for producing many of the world’s largest cargo planes.
Russian artillery fire also hit a nine-story apartment building in the city’s northern Obolonskyi district, killing two more people, authorities said.
In addition, a Russian airstrike near a Ukrainian checkpoint caused extensive damage in a central kyiv neighborhood, killing one person, Ukraine’s emergency agency said.
Artillery shells also fell in several towns on the outskirts of kyiv, including Irpin, Bucha and Gostomel, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting as Russia’s attempt to besiege the Ukrainian capital, local authorities said.
Other airstrikes were also reported across the country, including the southern city of Mikolaiv and the northern city of Chernigov.
Explosions also rang out overnight around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port city of Kherson.
In the eastern city of Kharkov, Ukraine’s second largest, firefighters doused the smoldering remains of a four-story residential building. It was unclear if there were any casualties.
In western Ukraine, meanwhile, a Russian bombardment of a television tower left nine dead and nine wounded in the town of Antopil, Rivne province, according to the governor.
In Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, where the war has caused a humanitarian disaster, the municipality did not say how many civilians were in the convoy of cars that managed to leave the city for Zaporizhia, some 200 kilometers to the northwest.
The bloodiest bombing of the day, at least 23 people, including children, died and 19 others were injured this Monday in the city of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, by an attack by the Ukrainian Army with a ballistic missile, authorities reported. local and Russian authorities, who accused kyiv of a “war crime”.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that The Ukrainian Army had fired a “Tushka-U” ballistic missile at a residential area of Donetska large industrial city of more than 900,000 inhabitants.
Surveillance camera captures the moment of missile impact in Donetsk
A Tochka-U tactical missile attack in central Donetsk on March 14 killed 20 civilians and injured 28 people, including children, the Russian Defense Ministry said. pic.twitter.com/JoGiOrlhjF
— RT in Spanish (@ActualidadRT) March 14, 2022
The city is the capital of the province of the same name, with a Russian-speaking majority and bordering Russia, which in 2014 proclaimed itself a “republic” after holding a referendum on the independence of Ukraine in rejection of what it describes as the anti-Russian policy of the kyiv government.
More than 14,000 people have died since then. in combat between the Ukrainian Army and the militias that control Donetsk and another neighboring Russian-speaking province, Lugansk, located further north, which also separated from Ukraine and proclaimed itself an independent republic.
The militias joined the offensive that Russian troops have been carrying out in Ukraine since they invaded the country on February 24.
The UN has recorded at least 596 civilian deaths since Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. although he believes that the real figure is much higher. Millions more have fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million crossing into Poland and other neighboring countries in what the UN has called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said that “Russia has its own potential to continue the operation” and that “it was developing according to plan and will be completed on time and in full.”
Russia has denied intending to occupy Ukraine, but Peskov said that he “does not rule out the possibility of taking full control of large settlements that are now practically surrounded.”
