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.
Shortly before the talks broke up, Putin laid out his prerequisites for ending the war in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron. Putin told Macron that a settlement was possible only if Kyiv was neutral and if Russian control over Crimea was formally recognized — demands that Kyiv has previously dismissed.
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The talks 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.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Russian soldiers have encountered resistance they did not expect, putting them “behind schedule” in their attack, but he said Russia has not yet sent all its forces into the country.
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 said it was time to consider imposing a no-fly zone for Russian missiles, planes, and helicopters in response to Russian shelling of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
In a video address, Zelenskiy did not specify how and by whom a no-fly zone would be enforced. He said Russia had launched 56 rocket strikes and fired 113 cruise missiles against Ukraine in the past five days.
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.
