The first round of high-stakes peace talks between Russia and Ukraine ended Monday with no clear resolution after the Ukrainian president’s office called for an immediate cease-fire and the withdrawal of Russian forces.
Officials from both countries held the “difficult” face-to-face talks at the Belarusian-Ukrainian border as Moscow’s assault entered its fifth day.
They were pictured sitting at a long table surrounded by both the Ukrainian and Russian flags.
“Negotiations are difficult,” Mykhailo Podoliak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, tweeted after the meeting concluded.
“Unfortunately, the Russian side is still extremely biased regarding the destructive processes it launched.”
A top Putin aide and head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said the delegations had agreed to continue the discussions in the coming days.
He added that officials from both sides had “found certain points on which common positions could be foreseen.”
The talks ended as Zelensky officially signed an application for Ukraine to join the European Union and as several blasts could be heard in Kyiv.
Despite Ukraine calling for an immediate halt to the violence, the Kremlin refused to disclose where it stood ahead of the talks.
“I suggest we wait for the talks,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had told reporters earlier Monday. “I would not declare any negotiating positions.”
Moscow also doubled down on its logic for sending its troops into Ukraine, saying Western arms supplies to Kyiv showed that Russia was right to try to demilitarize its neighbor.
Peskov accused the EU of hostile behavior toward Russia and said the arming of Ukraine was an “extremely dangerous and destabilizing factor.”
The spokesman told reporters, without providing evidence, that many Ukrainians were being used as human shields in what he called a crime by Ukrainian nationalists.
Putin aide Vladimir Medinsky, who traveled to Belarus for the talks, said Russian officials “definitely have an interest in reaching some agreements as soon as possible.”
The Russian leader had vowed to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine when he launched his offensive last week, accusing Kyiv of orchestrating an alleged “genocide” of Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president had said he was skeptical about the possibility of a breakthrough during the high-stakes talks.
The talks got underway Monday morning as Ukrainian officials said dozens of people had been killed in Russian rocket strikes on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
“Kharkiv has just been massively fired upon by grads [rockets]. Dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded,” Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko said in a Facebook post.
The Kremlin has so far declined to comment on the progress of Russia’s so-called “special military operation,” referring questions to the military, according to CNN.
“I don’t think this is the time to sum up the results of the [military] operation, we need to wait for completion of the operation,” the Kremlin’s spokesperson told journalists.
Russian forces had seized the towns of Berdyansk and Enerhodar in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhya region and the area around a nuclear power plant, the Interfax news agency reported Monday, but had run into stiff resistance elsewhere.
Ukraine denied that the nuclear plant had fallen into Russian hands.
The Russian military has acknowledged casualties but has not provided exact numbers.
Ukrainian officials started posting dozens of videos and photos online of captured bloodied Russian soldiers over the weekend, including some fighters who claimed they didn’t know they were being sent to invade.
One of Zelensky’s advisers said about 3,500 Russian soldiers had been killed or injured so far.
The latest toll for civilian deaths in Ukraine stands at 102, with 304 people injured, but the true figure is feared to be “considerably higher,” the UN’s human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, said Monday.
The dead include seven children, she said, adding: “Most of these civilians were killed by explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multi-launch rocket systems, and airstrikes.”
Bachelet also said 422,000 people have fled Ukraine, while other civilians still in the country are “forced to huddle in different forms of bomb shelters, such as underground stations, to escape explosions,” CNN reported.
The peace talks came as Russia continued to face deepening economic isolation as a result of the invasion.
Western-led sanctions have effectively cut off Russia’s major financial institutions from international markets, which sent the Russian ruble plummeting 30 percent against the dollar on Monday.
With Post wires
