LONDON – Three European leaders on Tuesday delivered a defiant statement of support for Ukraine and traveled to the beleaguered capital of Kiev, even as a relentless Russian artillery bombardment set the city’s apartment towers ablaze, forcing terrified residents to flee onto the streets with only the clothes on their backs.
The dramatic visit by the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, which took place in top secrecy as they crossed the Ukrainian border by train after dawn, was a strikingly personal gesture. But it caught other European leaders by surprise, angering some and showing uneasy division over how best to show Western solidarity with Ukraine.
It also came when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia discredited the second consecutive day of negotiations with Ukraine, undermining the faint glimmers of hope sparked the day before from talks that both sides were looking for a way to to stop war.
The Kremlin has imposed retaliatory sanctions on President Biden and other senior US officials. Mr Biden announced his own plans to travel to Europe next week to demonstrate the unity of the NATO alliance in the face of Russian aggression.
A spokesman for Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the three visitors “de facto” represented the European Union in Ukraine. In Brussels, however, officials said the trio did not have the EU’s blessing, and some European diplomats complained that the trip was too risky, given the Russian forces surrounding Kiev.
Others said they admired the group’s brutality, including Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic and Prime Minister Janez Jansa of Slovenia, calling it a powerful symbol of support for Ukraine among the countries on Europe’s eastern flank, where the ghost is Russian aggression looms larger than in Paris or London.
Despite all the symbolism of standing shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine’s leaders under the threat of Russian missiles, Ukraine faced the devastating barrage largely alone. Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko imposed a 35-hour curfew on Tuesday evening, suggesting the capital was entering an even more difficult phase in its fight to stop Russian troops and tanks.
“This is their attempt to wipe out the Ukrainian people,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an emotional video address to Canada’s parliament, reiterating his plea for NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over the country. “It is an attempt to destroy our future, our nation, our character.”
Mr Zelensky asked lawmakers to imagine that the CN Tower in Toronto would be shelled just like the towers in Kiev. His language has become sharper, even swearing, with every speech to a Western audience, demonstrating his frustration with leaders who have resisted more direct military involvement for fear it would entangle them in a wider conflict with Russia.
The Ukrainian leader, who has become a hero to many in the West, will speak via video with Congress on Wednesday, where he is expected to strengthen his pleas for more aid and increase pressure on the United States and its allies.
On Tuesday evening, Poland’s state broadcaster carried video of the Czech, Slovenian and Polish leaders meeting Mr Zelensky and other officials across a long table, with Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag behind them.
“They are here to support us,” said Mr. Zelensky at a press conference after the meeting, which was also broadcast on Ukrainian television. “It’s a big, brave, right, kind step. I am convinced that with such friends, such countries and neighbors and partners, we can really win.”
A picture previously posted on Mr. Morawieckic showed the three men peering over a map, seated in what appeared to be a train car bound for the Ukrainian capital.
“It is here, in war-torn Kiev, that history is being made,” Morawiecki said in the Twitter post. “It is here that freedom fights against the world of tyranny. This is where the future of all of us is at stake
The White House announced that Mr Biden would fly to Brussels for an extraordinary NATO summit on March 24. That could lead to further economic and military aid to Ukraine, but is unlikely to comply with Mr Zelensky’s request for a no-fly zone. † Government officials declined to say whether Biden planned to meet with the Ukrainian president, whom he has called a hero. But they said Mr Biden might go somewhere in Eastern Europe to meet refugees pouring in from Ukraine.
The flow of people fleeing the war continued unabated on Tuesday, as Russia claimed to have taken control of the strategic Kherson region to the south. Russian forces continued to pound civilian targets in Kiev, where Ukrainian troops fortified intersections with sandbags, tires and iron spikes.
A hail of rockets on Kiev before dawn shattered windows, left craters in buildings and turned a 16-storey apartment complex into a towering inferno. The fire spread quickly after a rocket hit the building and blew up a jagged hole at the entrance. The fire brigade rescued the residents with a ladder from the windows due to rising smoke. By mid-afternoon they had carried two bodies out, wrapped in black bags.
“I came out with nothing,” says Mykola Fedkiv, 85, a retired geologist. “I left everything behind, my phone, my medicines, everything.”
When the rocket hit, Mr. Fedkiv left his apartment on the 12th floor and went down the stairs. He climbed through the ruined hall and found himself in the bomb crater. People pulled him out by his arms. He stood outside for hours hoping to get back into his apartment to collect personal documents. When asked where he planned to spend the night, he replied, “God knows.”
Conditions were even more desperate in the coastal town of Mariupol, which was ravaged by Russian forces during a two-week siege, with some residents crushed under the rubble and many others dying in a winter frost without heating, food or clean water. Officials can no longer justify the number of dead and missing.
Officially, 2,400 civilian casualties have been identified in Mariupol, but Pyotr Andryushchenko, an adviser to the city government, said he believed the toll was much higher, possibly as much as 20,000. Ukrainian estimates of the number of people in detention range from 200,000 to 400,000.
War Between Russia and Ukraine: Important Things to Know
A show of support from the EU. Leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia went to Kiev to express the “unequivocal support” of the European Union and provide financial aid to Ukraine. The visit was kept secret until the last minute as fighting raged around the Ukrainian capital.
Andryushchenko said 2,000 vehicles had escaped from Mariupol on Tuesday and another 2,000 were packed and ready to go. Officials told citizens to “delete all messages and photos from phones” in case Russian soldiers searched them for signs of support for Ukrainian troops.
The dangers of reporting accurate information from Ukraine’s combat zones were further underlined on Tuesday with the news that a Fox News cameraman and a Ukrainian colleague had been killed in an attack outside Kiev on Monday — raising the number of journalists killed in Ukraine in recent years. to dawn.
In Kherson, a southern city under Russian occupation, the mayor said members of the Russian National Guard detained activists who opposed the Russian presence and may have tried to recruit them by force.
“They are all in the city, in jail,” the mayor, Igor Kolykhaev, wrote in several text messages, referring to the activists. Russian troops, he said, “gather them, hold them, rearrange them and release them.”
Kherson was the first major city to fall to Russian troops after the invasion began on February 24. Although Kremlin officials had predicted that the Ukrainian people would welcome their “liberation” by Russian troops, Kherson residents were defiant and regularly gathered in the main square to protest the Russian presence, even when Russian troops were in the air. shoot to disperse them.
Russia claimed to have conquered the entire Kherson region, possibly bolstering its ability to push west toward the strategic port cities of Mykolaiv and Odessa. A senior Ukrainian military official, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed that Russian forces controlled much of the Kherson region, but said Ukrainian forces attacked their positions and inflicted losses.
Negotiations over a video link between Russia and Ukraine continued for a second day on Tuesday, although Putin obscured the prospects of an imminent breakthrough. In a telephone conversation with European Council President Charles Michel, Mr Putin complained that “Kyiv does not show a serious attitude towards finding mutually acceptable solutions,” the Kremlin said.
Mr Putin also continued to struggle in the information war with Ukraine. On Tuesday, France’s President Emmanuel Macron said his country could provide diplomatic “protection” to a Russian state television employee who was detained and fined Monday over an anti-war aerial protest.
The collaborator, Marina Ovsyannikova, burst into the live broadcast of Russia’s most-watched news program Monday night, shouting, “Stop the war!” and with a sign that read, “They’re lying to you here.”
Russia also faced further isolation from Britain, which imposed sanctions on more than 370 people it labeled as oligarchs, political allies or propagandists for Mr Putin. Among those on the blacklist: Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former president of Russia; Mikhail Mishustin, the current Prime Minister; and Mikhail Fridman, the billionaire founder of Alfa Bank, one of the largest private banks in the country.
Russia, for its part, said it had imposed sanctions on 13 Americans, including Mr Biden, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III in response to US sanctions against Mr Putin and other officials. Also on the list were Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former Secretary of State, and Mr Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, shook off the news, jokingly suggesting that the Kremlin’s announcement may not have accomplished its intended purpose. The president, Ms. Psaki said, is a “junior, so maybe they sanctioned his father by accident.”
Mark Landler reported from London, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels. Reporting contributed by Carlotta Gallo and Lynsey Addario from Kiev, Ukraine; Michael Schwirtz from Odessa, Ukraine; Anton Trojanovskic from Istanbul; Andrew Higgins from Warsaw; Ian Austen from Ottawa; Steven Erlanger from Brussels; David E. Sanger and Glenn Thrush from Washington; and Michael M. Grynbaum From New York.