[ad_1]
Russia widened its targets in Ukraine on Sunday with strikes on a military base near the Polish border, as Kyiv said the toll from one of its most besieged cities had topped 2,000. A total of 2,187 residents have died in days of relentless Russian bombardment, the city council said Sunday, raising the toll by almost 1,000 since Wednesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had earlier said he hoped a humanitarian convoy accompanied by Orthodox priests would finally make it to Mariupol.
He has accused Moscow of both blocking and attacking humanitarian convoys, although he said Sunday that another 125,000 people had been evacuated that way across Ukraine.
“The key question today is Mariupol,” he said, saying “we will do everything to break the resistance of the occupiers”.
Russian air strikes killed 35 people at a military base outside the western city of Lviv overnight, dangerously close to the frontier with EU and NATO member Poland, local officials said.
And in the capital Kyiv, fighting raged in the suburbs, leaving a US journalist dead — the first foreign reporter killed since Russia’s invasion of its neighbour on February 24.
Read: Is Vladimir Putin seriously ill? What UK media reported so far
Meanwhile efforts continued to get help to the strategic southern port city of Mariupol, which aid agencies say is facing a humanitarian catastrophe.
Talks between the two sides have yet to yield a ceasefire but Russia said Sunday that negotiators were making headway at talks in neighbouring Belarus.
“If we compare the positions of both delegations at the start of the talks and now, we see significant progress,” Leonid Slutsky, a senior member of Russia’s negotiating team, told state-run television network RT.
Zelensky had also said on Saturday that Russia had adopted a “fundamentally different approach” in the latest talks to end the conflict.
He told reporters it was in contrast to earlier talks at which Moscow only “issued ultimatums” and that he was “happy to have a signal from Russia”.
Read: Russia-Ukraine war: US journalist shot dead in Irpin
Broadening target sets
For the first two weeks of the war, Russia’s forces had focused on eastern and southern areas of Ukraine, but in recent days they have moved to the centre, striking the city of Dnipro.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told ABC News that Russia was “clearly, at least from an air strike perspective… broadening their target sets”.
Meanwhile in Kyiv, only the roads to the south remain open and the city is preparing to mount a “relentless defence”, according to the Ukrainian presidency.
City authorities have set up checkpoints and stockpiling of food and medicine.
[ad_2]
Source link