Russian forces escalated their attacks on crowded urban areas in Ukraine on Wednesday as a huge convoy of tanks and armour inched closer to the capital Kyiv.
Paratroopers were said to have landed in the besieged second city of Kharkiv early in the morning.
And at least four people including a child were killed in the northern city Zhytomyr when a cruise missile hit their home, according to an interior ministry advisor.
The latest attacks came as Ukraine’s leader accused Russia of conducting a blatant campaign of terror.
“Nobody will forgive. Nobody will forget,” President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed after the bloodshed on the central square in Kharkiv and the deadly bombing of a TV tower in the capital.
A slowly-advancing 40-mile convoy of hundreds of Russian tanks and other vehicles was said to be around 15 miles from Kyiv.
The invading forces also pressed their assault on other towns and cities, including the strategic ports of Odessa and Mariupol in the south.
Mr Zelensky called on Russia to stop bombarding civilians and resume talks.
“It’s necessary to at least stop bombing people, just stop the bombing and then sit down at the negotiating table,” he told Reuters and CNN in a joint interview in a heavily guarded government compound in Kyiv.
US President Joe Biden vowed Russian President Vladimir Putin would pay a heavy price for his decision to invade Ukraine.
“He has no idea what’s coming,” he said in a State of the Union address in the chamber of the House of Representatives.
“Let each of us if you’re able to stand, stand and send an unmistakable signal to Ukraine and to the world.”
Mr Biden announced the US was closing airspace to Russian planes and vowed to seize the yachts and apartments of Russian oligarchs.
As the fighting in Ukraine raged for a seventh day, the death toll remained unclear. One senior Western intelligence official estimated that more than 5,000 Russian soldiers had been captured or killed. Ukraine gave no overall estimate of troop losses.
The UN human rights office said it has recorded 136 civilian deaths. The real toll is believed to be far higher
The UK Ministry of Defence said it had seen an increase in Russian air and artillery strikes on populated urban areas over the past two days. It also said three cities - Kharkiv, Kherson and Mariupol - were encircled by Russian forces.
At least 21 people were killed and 112 wounded in shelling in Kharkiv in the last 24 hours, regional governor Oleg Synegubov said on Wednesday.
Many military experts worry that Russia may be shifting tactics. Moscow’s strategy in Chechnya and Syria was to use artillery and air bombardments to pulverise cities and crush fighters’ resolve.
Ukrainian authorities said five people were killed in Tuesday’s attack on the TV tower, which is near central Kyiv and a short walk from numerous apartment buildings. A TV control room and power substation were hit, and at least some Ukrainian channels briefly stopped broadcasting, officials said.
The bombing came after Russia announced it would target transmission facilities used by Ukraine’s intelligence agency. It urged people living near such places to leave their homes.
Mr Zelensky’s office also reported a missile attack on the site of the Babi Yar Holocaust memorial, near the tower. A spokesman for the memorial said a Jewish cemetery at the site, where Nazi occupiers killed more than 33,000 Jews over two days in 1941, was damaged, but the extent would not be clear until daylight.
In Kharkiv, with a population of about 1.5 million, at least six people were killed when the region’s Soviet-era administrative building on Freedom Square was hit with what was believed to be a missile.
The Slovenian Foreign Ministry said its consulate in Kharkiv, located in another large building on the square, was destroyed in the attack.
The attack on Freedom Square - Ukraine’s largest plaza, and the nucleus of public life in the city - was seen by many Ukrainians as brazen evidence that the Russian invasion was not just about hitting military targets but also about breaking their spirit.
The bombardment blew out windows and walls of buildings that ring the massive square, which was piled high with debris and dust. Inside one building, chunks of plaster were scattered, and doors, ripped from their hinges, lay across hallways.
“People are under the ruins. We have pulled out bodies,” said Yevhen Vasylenko, an emergency official.
Mr Zelensky pronounced the attack on the square “frank, undisguised terror” and a war crime. “This is state terrorism of the Russian Federation,” he said.
