Talks between Kyiv and Moscow have ended without a breakthrough as Russian troops closed in on the Ukrainian capital and other major cities in the face of deepening international isolation over the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last week.
Reports that Russian artillery on February 28 had bombarded residential districts of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, tempered most of the optimism generated by an agreement between the two sides to hold a second round of talks in the coming days.
Five days into Russia’s invasion of its neighbor, the Ukrainian side headed into the meeting pressing for an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of Russian troops.
But after nearly five hours of talks, Vladimir Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, said the two sides “agreed to keep the negotiations going,” adding that the new meeting will take place on the Polish-Belarusian border.
WATCH: Witnesses say a rocket blast set a building ablaze in the early morning hours of February 28 in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus.
The meeting took place as European foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the Russian military campaign “is becoming more and more ruthless.”
Satellite imagery from the Maxar company appeared to showed a 25-kilometer convoy consisting of hundreds of Russian armored vehicles, tanks, artillery, and support vehicles a mere 25 kilometers from the center of Kyiv.
Borrell told journalists that Ukrainian armed forces were fighting back with courage, but said there were a lot of civilian casualties and “the flow of people looking for shelter, escaping the war is increasing.”
In this situation our support of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is crucial,” Borrell said at a press conference in Brussels after a meeting of EU defense ministers, who discussed supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine.
In a fresh address on February 28, Zelenskiy issued an appeal to invading Russian soldiers to lay down their arms.
“Abandon your equipment. Get out of here. Don’t believe your commanders. Don’t believe your propagandists. Just save your lives,” Zelenskiy said in the address, adding that more than 4,500 Russian soldiers had already lost their lives during the Kremlin’s assault.
There have been no independent confirmed numbers of casualties Russia’s army on February 27 admitted for the first time that some of its soldiers had been “killed and injured,” but did not give any figures or further details.
Zelenskiy also called on the European Union to immediately accept Ukraine into the bloc, a proposal that found a mixed audience — with countries such as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia calling for Ukraine to be given immediate EU candidate-country status.
However, several EU officials played down the likelihood of any quick entrance to the 27-nation bloc for a number of reasons, including the fact that no such fast-track procedure exists.
As Moscow faced the impact of harsher Western economic sanctions over its unprovoked invasion, there were reports that the cities of Kharkiv and Chernihiv had come under intensive Russian bombardment.
Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said dozens of people were killed in rocket strikes by Russian forces on Kharkiv on February 28.
“Kharkiv has just been massively fired upon by grads (rockets). Dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded,” he said in a post on Facebook that showed a series of explosions in the town.
Elsewhere, witnesses said a rocket blast set a building ablaze in the early morning hours of February 28 in the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus. Locals blamed the Russian military for the attack.
With fighting on the ground escalating, Western allies have ramped up efforts to punish Russia by closing airspace to Russian aircraft, shutting out some banks from the SWIFT financial network, and limiting Moscow’s ability to deploy its $630 billion foreign reserves, all measures that are expected to hammer the economy.
On February 28, Washington adopted further measures, saying it would start blocking Americans from executing any transactions with Russia’s central bank, which more than doubled its key interest rate to 20 percent as it scrambles to access currency with the ruble in a free fall.
The new sanctions also bar transactions with Russia’s Finance Ministry and national wealth fund, according to a U.S. official, while the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on a key Russian sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, its management company and its chief executive, Kirill Dmitriev, who is considered a close ally of President Vladimir Putin.
To keep up the diplomatic pressure, U.S. President Joe Biden hosted a call with allies and partners on February 28 to further coordinate a united response, the White House said.
In Ankara, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey was using its legal right to apply the Montreux Convention, blocking warships from passing through the key Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits and into the Black Sea. He said he hoped the move would keep the situation from escalating further.
Ukrainians have volunteered in huge numbers to defend their country, taking guns distributed by authorities and preparing firebombs.
Pentagon officials said Russian troops were being slowed by Ukrainian resistance, fuel shortages and other logistical problems, and that Ukraine’s air-defense systems, while weakened, were still operating.
After another night of air assaults by Russian artillery and missiles, a strict 39-hour curfew that had kept people off the streets of Kyiv was lifted on February 28, offering residents the chance to visit shops to buy food.
People in the Ukrainian capital have been hunkering down in homes, underground garages, and subway stations in anticipation of a full-scale Russian assault.
Zelenskiy’s office said that during the peace talks, which were set to start at noon local time, Kyiv would press for “an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of troops from Ukraine.”
The number of Ukrainians fleeing Europe’s largest armed conflict since World War II had grown to 422,000, mostly women and children, the head of the United Nations’ refugee agency said on February 28.
