While the Russian troops advanced from the north, Kiev with its defiant president and citizen militias armed with rifles and homemade bombs prepares a strong defense, while talks to end the war stall and incessant shelling hit southern coastal cities.
In Kiev, major road junctions and bridges were blocked by trams, buses and garbage trucks.
Near the ring road that surrounds the city, trucks with rocket launchers parked in fields and launched a barrage against the position of Russian forces to the northwest .
As Russian troops advance out of the city, residents of the Kiev suburbs felt the strain.
“We have seen more civilians. Sometimes also soldiers, but much more civilians,” Volodymyr Andriiets, deputy director of the main hospital in Brovary, 15 miles northeast of central Kiev, told the Los Angeles Times.
“Gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds; what we have seen is very severe, because in many cases we see an amputated appendix”.
Andriiets seemed tired. Although the area around the hospital seemed calm, the fighting was slowly approaching the suburb, a change that is reflected in the patients admitted in the last three days.
Although the fighting continued and efforts to evacuate more people, there was no progress towards an end to hostilities when the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine met on Thursday in Anatolia, Turkey, for the highest-level talks between the two countries since the war began two weeks ago.
After negotiations that lasted about an hour and a half, the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine still were widely separated in their views on a conflict that has killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people.
Although there was a discussion on humanitarian issues, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said there was no progress on Kiev’s key demand for an immediate ceasefire.
“We cannot stop the war if the country that launched the attack is not willing to do so,” Kuleba said, adding that Moscow continued to search in vain for “a surrender of Ukraine”.
Kuleba pointed out that the surrounded southern port city of Mariupol remained under constant bombardment by Russian forces, in violation of agreements to allow the safe passage of civilians.
Although some observers had speculated that the meeting of foreign ministers could pave the way for direct talks between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, such a summit still seems a long way off.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said the two leaders would meet only if they could achieve “added value” beyond the ongoing negotiations at lower levels.
Far from the diplomatic disputes in Turkey, the works Residents of some of Ukraine’s most war-torn cities struggled to evacuate their people to safety.
It was not clear if the fighting had stopped in the evacuation routes of seven cities that had been agreed on Thursday with the Russian side, although the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky stated on Wednesday that only three of them were operating.
On Thursday night, Zelensky said that the Ukrainians delivered hundreds of tons of water, food and medicine along the humanitarian corridors and evacuated some 40.000 people from the cities of Sumy, Trostyanets, Krasnopillya, Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel and Izyum.
But the cities of Mariupol and Volnovakha remained blockaded because the Russian troops refused to cease fire.
“We did everything necessary to make the humanitarian corridor work,” Zelensky said in a video published Posted on Facebook. “But the invaders launched a tank attack exactly in the area where this corridor was supposed to be. They did it consciously. They knew what they were interrupting. They have a clear order to take Mariupol hostage, to torture it, to carry out constant shelling.”
After stalling for many days, the Russian troops approached about three miles to Kiev, a senior US defense official said Thursday afternoon at a briefing at the Pentagon.
They are now about 12 miles north of the city center, the official added, and the city of Chernihiv is isolated and experiencing heavy fighting.
The United States continues to provide security assistance to Ukraine, and another shipment will arrive in the next 24 hours.
Forty-two Republican senators signed a letter Thursday urging President Biden to work with Poland to transfer fighter jets to Ukraine, a day after the Defense Department said Russia could see such a move as an escalation.
Biden is expected to announce Friday that the United States will suspend normal trade relations with Russia, a person familiar with the plan confirmed Thursday night.
The Mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klitschko, said that his city had become a fortress before the Russian invasion.
“All the streets, all the houses… are being fortified,” he said, adding that even people who never expected to do so “are in uniform with machine guns in their hands.”
For the Ukrainians on the outskirts of Kiev, there were small victories: a skirmish broke out on Thursday about 20 miles to the northeast when a column of Russian armored vehicles tried to break through the city’s defenses near a bridge on the main highway between Kiev and Chernihiv.
In the middle of the morning, Ukrainian soldiers showed a Russian armored personnel carrier whose occupants had escaped, said a Ukrainian commander.
The vehicle was at the side of the road, its dull green metal gleaming in the cold morning sun.
The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that the humanitarian situation in Mariupol has become “increasingly serious and desperate”.
In an interview published on the organization’s website, Sasha Volkov, a representative of the Red Cross, said that all shops and pharmacies were looted four or five days ago and that people were running out of food and medical supplies. “Some people still have food, but I’m not sure how long it will last,” Volkov said. “People started attacking each other for food. People started wrecking someone’s car to get the gas out of it.”