Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky says peace talks with Russia close to collapse

Ukraine and Russia traded accusations over shaky talks to end a war now in its third month as Russia pounded areas in the east of the country and US lawmakers vowed a massive new weapons package for Kyiv. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in remarks published early on Saturday, said lifting Western sanctions on Russia was part of the peace negotiations, which he said were “difficult” but continue daily by video link. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told Polish journalists that chances were “high” that the talks, which have not been held in person for a month, would end because of Russia’s “playbook on murdering people,” the Interfax news agency said. Ukraine accuses Russian troops of atrocities in their withdrawal from areas near Kyiv. Moscow denies the claims. After failing to capture the capital in the nine-week assault that has turned cities to rubble, killed thousands and forced 5 million Ukrainians to flee abroad, Moscow is now focusing on the east and south. Russian forces captured Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson and mostly occupied the southeastern port city of Mariupol, where the United Nations is making efforts to evacuate civilians and fighters holed up in a large steel plant. Lavrov, speaking to China’s official Xinhua news agency, said 1.02 million people had been evacuated to Russia from Ukraine since the invasion began on February 24. Ukraine says thousands have been taken to Russia against their will. Reuters could not independently verify the claims of either side. Lavrov said the evacuees included 120,000 foreigners and people from Russian-backed breakaway regions of Ukraine – the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics that Russia recognised as independent just before President Vladimir Putin announced the invasion. Moscow calls the war a “special military operation” to disarm and “denazify” Ukraine, defend Russian-speaking people from persecution and prevent the United States from using the country to threaten Russia. Ukraine dismisses Putin’s claims of persecution and says it is fighting an unprovoked land grab to fully capture Donetsk and Luhansk, which form the Donbas region. Biden seeks US$33 billion for Ukraine, wants power to seize oligarchs’ wealth Britain and the United States have voiced support for Ukraine in the peace talks but say it is vital to keep arming Kyiv. On Thursday, President Joe Biden asked the US. Congress for $33 billion in new aid, more than $20 billion of it in weapons. The funding has received bipartisan congressional support. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she hoped to pass the package “as soon as possible”. Ukraine acknowledges losing control of some eastern towns and villages but says Moscow’s gains have come at a heavy cost to a force already worn down from its defeat near the capital. “We have serious losses but the Russians’ losses are much, much bigger,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said, without elaborating. “They have colossal losses.” Russia was pounding the entire Donetsk front line with rockets, artillery, mortar bombs and aircraft in part to stop Ukrainian troops from regrouping, Ukrainian officials said. Ukraine’s military said Russia was preparing for offensives in the areas of Lyman in Donetsk and Sievierodonetsk and Popasna in Luhansk. In the south, it said, Russia was “continuing to regroup, increase fire effectiveness and improve position”. Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had struck Ukrainian weapons storage sites, platoon strongholds, artillery positions and drones. Russia said a diesel submarine in the Black Sea had struck military targets with Kalibr cruise missiles, the first report of such strikes from a submarine. Putin warns West of ‘lightning response’ to intervention in Ukraine Russia said its high precision long-range missiles had destroyed the production facilities of a rocket plant in Kyiv. Ukrainian forces fought to hold off Russian attempts to advance in the south and east, where the Kremlin is seeking to capture the country’s industrial Donbas region, and a senior US defence official said Moscow’s offensive is going much slower than planned. While artillery fire, sirens and explosions were heard on Friday in some cities, the United Nations sought to broker an evacuation of civilians from the increasingly hellish ruins of Mariupol, where the mayor said the situation inside the steel plant that has become the southern port city’s last stronghold is dire. Citizens are “begging to get saved,” Mayor Vadym Boichenko said. “There, it’s not a matter of days. It’s a matter of hours.” Zelensky’s office had said an operation was planned to get civilians out of the plant on Friday but there was no sign of an evacuation as dusk fell. He later expressed pessimism over the prospect of continued peace talks with Russia, blaming public anger with what he said were atrocities by Russian troops. Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv was hit by multiple Russian shellings on Saturday, though President Zelensky says Ukrainian forces are making “tactical successes” in the region. Although Ukraine has retained control of Kharkiv, the city has been repeatedly battered by Moscow’s forces and still faces daily attacks. Russia confirmed on Friday that it carried out an air strike on Kyiv during a visit by UN chief Antonio Guterres, the first such attack on the Ukrainian capital in nearly two weeks, and in which a journalist also died. Russia’s defence ministry said it had deployed “high-precision, long-range air-based weapons” that “destroyed the production buildings of the Artyom missile and space enterprise in Kyiv”. Ukrainian prosecutors said they had pinpointed more than 8,000 war crimes and were investigating 10 Russian soldiers for suspected atrocities in Bucha, where dozens of bodies in civilian clothes were found following Moscow’s retreat. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby on Friday briefly choked with emotion as he described the destruction in Ukraine and slammed Putin’s “depravity”. Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse, Associated Press