Pre-dawn explosions were heard in the capital Kyiv on Tuesday, as Russia and Ukraine were due to meet again for talks aimed at ending the 20-day war.
There were reports that residential apartment blocks were on fire after a Russian missile strike. The attack came one day after one person died and three were hospitalised after a missile partially destroyed a nine-storey block of flats in Kyiv’s Obolon district, with a second person killed later by falling missile fragments on a nearby street.
The latest attacks came as Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, urged disaffected Russian troops to surrender, saying in a late night address on Monday: "We will treat you as humans have to be treated: with dignity. The way you have not been treated in your army. And the way your army doesn't treat our people."
Talks between Russia and Ukraine will continue on Tuesday, Zelenskiy said, adding that the previous round had gone “pretty well”.
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While previous negotiations had focused on humanitarian issues, the latest talks aim to achieve a ceasefire, securing Russian troop withdrawals and establishing security guarantees for Ukraine, Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak has said, describing negotiations as "hard". Russian delegate Leonid Slutsky suggested draft agreements may not be far off.
Zelenskiy said on Monday night the war had become a "nightmare" for the Russians, and claimed that more Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine in the past 19 days than in Russia's two wars in Chechnya combined. "You will take lives – you are many – but yours will be taken too," he said.
Ukrainian armed forces say more than 12,000 Russian troops have been killed since February 24th. The US puts the figure at 5-6,000. The number of Russian personnel killed in Chechnya are not clear but it is thought nearly 6,000 died in the first conflict between 1994-96 and around the same number in the second war between 1999 and 2009. Some estimates are much higher.
Peace agreement
Despite US concerns that China has already decided to send aid to Moscow, Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to the Ukrainian president's chief of staff, voiced hope that a lack of Russian resources would lead to a peace agreement by May at the latest, with small clashes ongoing possibly for a year.
“We are at a fork in the road now: there will either be a peace deal struck very quickly, within a week or two, with troop withdrawal and everything, or there will be an attempt to scrape together some, say, Syrians for a round two and, when we grind them too, an agreement by mid-April or late April,” he said in a video published by several Ukrainian media outlets.
Russia has enlisted more than 40,000 Syrians for the conflict, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, with media reports inside Ukraine that the first 400 have arrived at its borders.
The observatory said accommodation and training centres had been set up near the border in the Russian region of Rostov, and in Gomel, Belarus.
Nearly all of the Russian military offensives remained stalled after making little progress over the weekend, according to a senior US defence official. Russian troops were still about 15km (nine miles) from the centre of Kyiv, the official said.
Financial support
China has already decided to provide Russia with economic and financial support and is contemplating sending military supplies such as armed drones, US officials fear. The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, laid out the US case against Russia's invasion in an "intense" seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.
Zelenskiy praised Russian state media employee Marina Ovsyannikova after she burst on to the set of a live broadcast of the nightly news on Monday evening, shouting: "Stop the war. No to war." Zelenskiy said: "I'm thankful to those Russians who don't stop trying to deliver the truth."
Spain has temporarily seized a $140 million superyacht in Barcelona believed to belong to oligarch Sergei Chemezov, a former KGB officer who heads state conglomerate Rostec. More seizures would follow, said prime minister Pedro Sanchez.
Ukraine's president is expected to use his virtual address to Congress in Washington on Wednesday to intensify pressure on Joe Biden to allow the transfer of MiG-29 fighter jets from Poland. He is also likely to repeat a call for Nato to impose a no-fly zone.
Biden is considering travelling to Europe in the coming weeks to rally leaders there, according to NBC. A visit to Brussels, which hosts Nato and EU headquarters, is reportedly being considered. – Guardian