Russian rocket attacks killed dozens of people in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv as ceasefire talks between Kyiv and Moscow got under way, with the Kremlin facing unprecedented international sanctions that have created “a new economic reality” for Russia.

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”.

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”.

With fighting continuing around several cities and the Russian rouble in free fall, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, urged Russian troops to abandon their equipment and leave the battlefield to save their lives, claiming 4,500 were already dead.

A day after his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, faced with a barrage of western reprisals, ordered his defence chiefs to put the country’s nuclear forces on high alert, Zelenskiy said he was sceptical about the talks’ prospects for success, but added: “Let them try.”

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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.

According to TheGuardian, western analysts said they were alarmed, however, by a referendum vote in neighbouring pro-Russian Belarus that could result in nuclear weapons being stationed on Belarusian soil for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union.

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.

The Star