By Maksym Levin and Pavel Polityuk
BORODYANKA/LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – Russia and Ukraine have agreed on the need to organize humanitarian corridors and a possible ceasefire around them for Ukrainian civilians to flee the war, negotiators on both sides said after talks on Thursday.
But while Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said the talks had “progressed substantially”, invading forces from Russia have once again surrounded and bombed Ukrainian cities, with the conflict entering its second week.
A Ukrainian negotiator said the talks had not yet delivered the results Kiev had hoped for, but that the two sides had reached an understanding on the evacuation of civilians.
In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin, rejecting worldwide condemnations of the invasion, said the military operation was going according to plan.
Ukrainian soldiers and civilians maintained resistance to the invading force, and the capital Kiev and other major cities remained under Ukrainian control on Thursday night.
But the humanitarian crisis has deepened, with the UN saying that a million people have fled their homes so far.
Those left behind are facing shelling and missile attacks in several cities, often in residential areas. Slashes of central Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city with 1.5 million people, were destroyed.
The talks between Russia and Ukraine, at an unspecified location, marked the first time the two sides agreed on any progress on any issue since the invasion of Russia.
Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the two sides were anticipating a possible temporary ceasefire to allow for the evacuation of civilians and the creation of humanitarian corridors for civilians to exit.
“I mean, not everywhere, but only in the places where the humanitarian corridors themselves were located, will it be possible to have a ceasefire during the evacuation,” he said.
They also came to an understanding about the delivery of medicine and food to places where the fiercest fighting is taking place.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said earlier that Kiev and Moscow could find a way to stop the war if the Kremlin treats Ukraine on an equal footing and enters the talks with a willingness to negotiate in good faith.
“There are things where some middle ground needs to be found so that people don’t die, but there are things where there is no middle ground,” Zelenskiy said in a televised interview, saying he was willing to have an open conversation with Putin.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Natalia Zinets, Aleksandar Vasovic, Ukraine, and other Reuters newsrooms)
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