After the fall of a first major Ukrainian city to Russian forces, Putin appeared in no mood to heed a global clamour for hostilities to end as the war entered its second week.
Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has vowed there is no going back on his invasion of Ukraine, even as the warring sides met for ceasefire talks and Kyiv demanded safe passage for besieged civilians, AFP reports.
After the fall of a first major Ukrainian city to Russian forces, Putin appeared in no mood to heed a global clamour for hostilities to end as the war entered its second week.
“Russia intends to continue the uncompromising fight against militants of nationalist armed groups,” Putin said, according to a Kremlin account of a call with French President Emmanuel Macron, on Thursday.
Russian armoured columns from Crimea pushed deep into the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson on the first day of their invasion Thursday, triggering fighting that left at least 13 civilians dead.
Nine Ukrainian soldiers were also killed, the Kherson regional administration said, as the Russian force seized crossing points from Crimea to the mainland and a crossing over the Dnipro river.
But Ukraine insisted on the need for humanitarian corridors, to get urgent supplies into cities and trapped civilians out, as negotiators met at an undisclosed location on the Belarus-Poland border.
They shook hands across a table at the meeting’s start, the Ukrainian delegates in military khaki clothing and the Russians in more formal business suits.
A first round of talks on Monday yielded no breakthrough, and Kyiv says it will not accept any Russian “ultimatums”.
Putin, however, said any attempts to slow the talks process would “only lead to additional demands on Kyiv in our negotiating position”.
Macron said he feared that “worse is to come” in the conflict and condemned Putin’s “lies”, according to an aide.
The invasion, now in its eighth day, has created a refugee exodus and turned Russia into a global pariah in the worlds of finance, diplomacy and sports.
The UN has opened a probe into alleged war crimes, as the Russian military bombards cities in Ukraine with shells and missiles, forcing civilians to cower in basements.
“We will restore every house, every street, every city and we say to Russia: learn the word ‘reparations’,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video statement.
“You will reimburse us for everything you did against our state, against every Ukrainian, in full,” he said.