Many killed as Russia hits Ukraine’s second largest city

Russian rocket attacks killed dozens of people in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv as ceasefire talks between Kyiv and Moscow got underway.

After four days of fighting and a slower Russian advance than many expected, the Ukrainian interior ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko said Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, had been “massively fired on”, leaving “dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded”.

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Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from the city of Lviv, in western Ukraine, said the reports of deadly Russian strikes on densely populated civilian areas were disturbing.

The news came hours after the Ukrainian presidency said it had begun negotiations with a Russian delegation on the border with Belarus, aimed at achieving “an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian forces”.

Pre-dawn blasts were again heard in the capital, Kyiv, in Kharkiv and in the port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, officials said, but they added that the attempts of Russian ground forces to capture major urban centres were still being repelled.

The country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, who recently backed Putin’s military assault on Ukraine after earlier playing an intermediary role, could also send troops to help Russia in the next 24 hours, according to a senior American intelligence official.

Terrified Ukrainian families huddled in shelters, basements or corridors, with millions thought to have fled their homes and more than 500,000 having left Ukraine to escape the biggest invasion of a European country since the second world war.