Hundreds of Ukrainians flee besieged port of Mariupol as death toll mounts

Hundreds of people have finally fled the Ukrainian port of Mariupol but an aid convoy could not reach the besieged and ruined city, as Kyiv and Moscow accused each other's forces of killing and injuring dozens of civilians in missile and artillery strikes across Ukraine.

Local officials said more than 160 cars carrying residents escaped from Mariupol on Monday, some two weeks after the 400,000-strong port on the Azov Sea was surrounded by Russian troops and its supplies of food, water and power were severed.

The city authorities also accused Russian forces of breaking a temporary ceasefire deal and preventing trucks carrying humanitarian aid from reaching Mariupol, where they say the siege and relentless Russian shelling have killed some 2,500 civilians.

Housing, hospitals and schools in several Ukrainian cities have been severely damaged since Russia invaded on February 24th, and Ukrainian doctors said a pregnant woman injured in a bomb attack on a Mariupol maternity home last week had died along with her baby.

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Apartment block

Ukrainian officials said at least one person was killed and several were injured on Monday, when a shell hit an apartment block in a suburb of the capital, Kyiv, which is under increasing attack from Russian troops and armour massed on its outskirts.

At least nine people were killed and nine wounded in an airstrike on a television tower in Ukraine's northern Rivne region, according to its governor Vitaliy Koval, who said more victims could be buried under rubble at the site.

Russian officials accused Kyiv’s forces of killing 20 people and injuring 28 with a ballistic missile strike on Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine that since 2014 has been controlled by a Moscow-led separatist militia. Kyiv blamed Russia for the attack.

Some 2.8 million Ukrainians are believed to have sought refuge from the war in European Union states, and many more are displaced within Ukraine, which had a pre-war population of about 41 million.

‘Immediate ceasefire’

Ukrainian and Russian officials held a fourth round of tentative peace talks on Monday and said they planned to reconvene on Tuesday after making little obvious progress.

“Our positions are unchanged: an immediate ceasefire, the withdrawal of all Russian troops, and only after that we can talk about some kind of neighbourly relations and a political settlement,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian delegate to talks that he described as “difficult”.

Despite reports that Russia is making far slower progress than it expected in Ukraine and suffering far heavier losses than anticipated in the process, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted on Monday that "all the plans of the Russian leadership will be achieved on time and in full".

"The defence ministry of the Russian Federation, while ensuring the maximum safety of the civilian population, does not exclude the possibility of taking major population centres under full control," he added.

Russia and China also denied US reports, which cited officials in Washington, that Moscow has requested weapons from Beijing to bolster what the Kremlin calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine to "demilitarise" and "denazify" the pro-western democracy.

Meanwhile the Cabinet will on Tuesday take the unusual step of meeting, with Ministers abroad for St Patrick’s Day, to discuss Ukrainian refugee arrivals, accommodation and preparations in the education system as well as the situation in Ukraine itself.