KYIV, Ukraine — The highest-level meeting between Russia and Ukraine since the war began produced no breakthroughs Thursday as those on the ground tried to alleviate the suffering of devastated Ukrainian cities, evacuate more people to safety and assess the grim toll of a strike on a maternity hospital.
The Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers met in Antalya, Turkey, on the sidelines of a diplomatic conference, at the invitation of the Turkish government. After talks lasting about an hour and a half, the two sides emerged still far apart in their views of a conflict that entered its third week Thursday and that has killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people.
Although there was discussion of humanitarian issues, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said there was no progress on Kyiv’s key demand of an immediate cease-fire.
“We can’t stop the war if the country that started the attack has no willingness to do that,” Kuleba said, adding that Moscow continued vainly to seek “a surrender from Ukraine.”
Kuleba noted that the encircled southern port city of Mariupol remained under incessant shelling and bombing from Russian forces, in violation of repeated agreements to allow civilians safe passage out. Mariupol officials Thursday said three people, including a child, died when a maternity hospital was hit the day before, an assault whose brutality sparked outrage around the world. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a war crime.
That toll added to the more than 1,200 people killed in Mariupol alone in the war’s first nine days, according to the city’s deputy mayor — a number that far eclipses the figure issued for all of Ukraine by the United Nations, which acknowledges its tally to be an undercount.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said a cease-fire was never going to be on the table in Thursday’s talks but would rather be negotiated elsewhere in the context of Moscow’s overall demands. He brushed aside criticism over the deadly strike on the hospital, calling the accusation of an atrocity as another of Ukraine’s “pathetic outcries.”
He alleged that the facility had become a base for radical Ukrainian fighters, that women and children had been moved out and that Ukraine was using civilians as human shields.
Sticking to Moscow’s narrative of the invasion that began Feb. 24, Lavrov insisted that Russia “did not attack Ukraine” but rather launched a “special military operation” — he refused to call it a “war” — because Ukraine presented “a direct threat” to his country.
“Ukraine is being made into an anti-Russian state” through Western manipulation and intimidation, Lavrov said. He reiterated Moscow’s demand for the “de-militarization” and “de-Nazification” of a country whose army is a small fraction the size of Russia’s and whose president is Jewish.
Although some observers had speculated that Thursday’s foreign ministers’ meeting could pave the way for direct talks between Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, such a summit seems a distant prospect. Lavrov said the two leaders would meet only if it could achieve “added value” beyond ongoing negotiations at lower levels.
Far from the diplomatic wrangling in Turkey, officials in some of Ukraine’s most war-battered cities struggled to move their people to safety. Ukrainian authorities said evacuation routes from seven cities had been agreed on Thursday with the Russian side, but it was unclear whether fighting had actually halted in those so-called humanitarian corridors. Only three of six routes Wednesday were able to operate, Zelenskyy said.
Heavily besieged Mariupol, whose plight has captured international attention, was once again on the evacuation list. However, Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlov said Thursday morning that the designated safe routes have been anything but.
Instead, Orlov told the BBC, Russian shelling had forced fleeing people to turn back — to dire living conditions he likened to those of “ancient times,” without heat, water or sanitation. In a city where two weeks ago residents gathered in cafes and restaurants and moved around freely, people are now collecting snow in subfreezing temperatures to melt for drinking water and scrounging for firewood to cook what food they have left.
Orlov said 1,207 people in Mariupol were killed in the first nine days of the war, some of whom were recently interred in a mass grave, for lack of opportunity or resources to accord them more dignified burials.
Of the enemy’s ultimate goal, “now I think his final aim is to have Ukraine without Ukrainians,” Orlov said. “He’s not fighting with [the] Ukrainian army and Ukrainian troops; he’s fighting with civil society, with all Ukraine as a nation.”
Russian forces pressed their offensive elsewhere, including outside the capital, Kyiv, which they appear to be preparing to surround.
A skirmish about 20 miles northeast of Kyiv on Thursday saw a column of Russian armored vehicles try to breach the city’s defenses near a bridge on the main highway between Kyiv and the city of Chernihiv.
By mid-morning, Ukrainian soldiers were showing off a Russian armored personnel carrier whose occupants had run away, a Ukrainian commander said. The vehicle sat on the side of the highway, its dull-green metal glinting in the cold morning sun.
Beside it were strewn the Russian soldiers’ belongings: sleeping bags, toiletries and, oddly, a Canon printer.
