Air raid sirens in Ukraine capital; Russians pressure cities

Lviv: Air raid sirens blared over Ukraine's capital on Wednesday as officials said they were bolstering defenses in key cities threatened by Russian forces. Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in almost two weeks of fighting since President Vladimir Putin's forces invaded. While Russian troops have seen their advance slowed by fiercer than expected Ukrainian resistance, they have laid siege to several cities, trapping civilians inside them with little or no food, water or medicine. Repeated efforts to establish safe evacuation routes out of several urban areas have failed, though a few thousand people managed to flee the northeastern city of Sumy via a safe corridor on Tuesday.

Residents of the encircled Azov Sea port of Mariupol were not so lucky: Some of the worst desperation of the war is unfolding there, but an attempt to evacuate civilians and deliver badly needed supplies failed, with Ukrainian officials saying Russian forces had fired on the convoy before it reached the city. Ukrainian authorities announced Russia has agreed to a new daylong cease-fire along several evacuation routes for civilians fleeing besieged or occupied cities Wednesday, though it is unclear whether Russian forces will respect it. Meanwhile, Ukraine's general staff of the armed forces said in a statement that it was building up defenses in cities in the north, south and east, and that forces around Kyiv, the capital, were resisting the Russian offensive with unspecified strikes and "holding the line."

In the northern city of Chernihiv, Russian forces are placing military equipment among residential buildings and on farms, the Ukrainian general staff said. And in the south, it said Russians dressed in civilian clothes are advancing on the city of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding center of a half-million people. It did not provide any details of new fighting.

Talks aimed at ending the fighting have so far yielded little, but the foreign ministers from Russia and Ukraine are expected to meet in Turkey on Thursday, according to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. The meeting was to take place on the sidelines of a summit hosted by Turkey, a NATO member nation, but no further details were announced. In Kyiv, back-to-back air alerts Wednesday morning urged residents to get to bomb shelters as quickly as possible over fears of incoming Russian missiles.