Ukrainian president’s statement comes as three EU leaders arrive in city to express solidarity amid heavy bombardment
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has acknowledged that Ukraine will not become a Nato member, in a significant concession on a day when Kyiv was pounded by Russian shells and missiles and the invading force tightened its grip on the capital.
At least five people were killed in the latest artillery barrage on Kyiv, prompting its city hall to impose a 35-hour curfew from Tuesday night amid further signs that the focus of the Russian campaign has shifted to the destruction of residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
Zelenskiy made his remarks about Nato while addressing leaders from the new Joint Expeditionary Force, a UK-led initiative bringing together 10 north Atlantic countries to create a capability for responding rapidly to crises.
“It is clear that Ukraine is not a member of Nato; we understand this,” the Ukrainian president said. “For years we heard about the apparently open door, but have already also heard that we will not enter there, and these are truths and must be acknowledged.”
One of Vladimir Putin’s demands before unleashing his offensive on Ukraine was that its membership of Nato should be ruled out indefinitely. However, the size of the invasion force Putin amassed and his own justifications for the attack, have been widely seen as evidence he would have settled for nothing less than regime change and Russia’s unchallenged dominance of its smaller neighbour.
The White House announced on Tuesday that Joe Biden would travel to Europe next week to attend an extraordinary Nato summit on 24 March “to discuss ongoing deterrence and defence efforts” in the face of the Russian invasion, and also join a scheduled European Council summit. There were reports Biden would also visit eastern Europe on the same trip.
As the Polish, Czech and Slovenian prime ministers arrived by train in the embattled city on Tuesday in a symbolic show of European solidarity, Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said it faced “a difficult and dangerous moment”.
After repeated bombardments and almost encircled by Russian forces, about half of Kyiv’s 3.5 million pre-war residents have fled, officials have said, with many of those who remain spending their nights sheltering in underground stations.
Klitschko promised it would not surrender. “The capital is the heart of Ukraine, and it will be defended,” he said. “Kyiv, which is currently the symbol and the forward operating base of Europe’s freedom and security, will not be given up by us.”
The series of four heavy pre-dawn explosions rocked residential districts of Kyiv on Tuesday, hours before talks between Ukraine and Russia were set to resume. “Streets have been turned into a mush of steel and concrete,” said the head of the capital region, Oleksiy Kuleba. “People have been hiding for weeks in basements.”
One strike on Kyiv hit a 16-storey housing block, where fire raged and smoke billowed from the shattered skeleton of the building, as emergency services and stunned locals navigated an obstacle course of glass, metal and other debris littering the road.
Residents in Kyiv’s northern Podil district, which is close to Russian positions, told the Guardian that they had heard an increase in shelling between the two sides over the past two days.
On Tuesday morning Daria Kloichko came home to her flat in north Kyiv city, which was all but destroyed by a rocket at 5am. Kloichko’s flat was strewn with glass and little was salvageable. There was hardly a flat in the block untouched by the attack.
A refugee from the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine against Russian proxy forces, she and her husband hugged and cried as they took pictures off the wall – the only objects which somehow survived the attack.
“Luckily, we weren’t here,” Kloichko said with a tear-stained face.
Another man, Andriy, who lived in the block but declined to give his surname, said the blast somehow jammed the door to his child’s bedroom and he had to break the door down.
In the east, the airport in Dnipro also sustained massive damage overnight, while Russian forces launched more than 60 strikes on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, according to the regional administration chief, Oleh Sinehubov. The strikes hit the city’s historic centre, including the main marketplace.
The UN said that nearly 1.4 million children – almost one every second – had left Ukraine since the invasion began on 24 February. According to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), 3,000,381 people have now fled Russia’s onslaught in what NGOs have called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since the second world war.
The UNHCR expects the refugee total to reach 4 million. The number of people displaced within Ukraine is estimated at 1.85 million, the UN said last week, warning that number could rise to nearly 7 million in coming months.
Ukraine was “fighting for life”, Zelenskiy said. “We are fighting against tanks, planes and mortars that Russia is using to destroy us. But Russia is also destroying itself. Every shot against Ukraine, this is a step that Russia takes to destroy itself, to self-isolate … everybody leaves Russia now, all who can think.”
He warned that Russia’s “war machine” would inevitably target more western countries if it was not stopped by coordinated international action. “We can stop Russia,” he said. “We can stop the killing of people. Else they will also come to you.”
Civilian evacuations from some of Ukraine’s hardest-hit cities continued on Tuesday. More than 100 buses carrying several thousand civilians left the besieged city of Sumy in north-east Ukraine in a “safe passage” operation, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.
Authorities in the devastated southern port of Mariupol said 2,000 civilian vehicles had also left the city using a 260km (160-mile) “humanitarian corridor” to the Ukraine-held city of Zaporizhzhia.
Another 2,000 cars were waiting to leave Mariupol which has been under heavy bombardment for more than two weeks and is largely without power, heating or water. But Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said a convoy with supplies for Mariupol was stuck outside the city.
Russian forces were also reported to have taken hostage patients and medical staff at one of the city’s hospitals. Deputy mayor Sergei Orlov said Russian troops had “captured our biggest hospital … We received information there are 400 people there.”
Peace talks between the two sides resumed on Tuesday, meanwhile, with Zelenskiy sounding cautiously optimistic. The Russians had “begun to understand they will not achieve anything by war”, he said, adding that Monday’s round was “pretty good … but let’s see. They will continue.”
While previous talks focused on humanitarian issues, the latest aim to achieve a ceasefire, secure Russian troop withdrawals and establish security guarantees for Ukraine, Kyiv has said. The Russian delegate, Leonid Slutsky, suggested draft agreements may not be far off.
Russia again claimed on Tuesday, without evidence, that US advisers in Ukraine were helping Kyiv develop biological and nuclear weapons. The secretary of Russia’s security council, Nikolai Patrushev, said foreign consultants in Ukraine represented “a new threat” to Russia’s security and were potentially raising the risk of nuclear war.
The US has categorically denied Russian accusations that Washington was operating biowarfare labs in Ukraine, calling the claims “laughable” and suggesting Moscow may be laying the groundwork to use a chemical or biological weapon itself.