Russia bombards areas where it pledged to scale back

Russian forces bombarded areas around Kyiv and another city just hours after pledging to scale back operations in those zones to promote trust between the two sides, Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday.

The shelling — and intensified Russian attacks on other parts of the country — tempered optimism about any progress in the talks aimed at ending the punishing war.

The Russian military's announcement Tuesday that it would de-escalate near the capital and the northern city of Chernihiv to “increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations” was met with deep suspicion from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the West.

Soon after, Ukrainian officials reported that Russian shelling hit homes, stores, libraries and other civilian sites in and around Chernihiv and on the outskirts of Kyiv. Russian troops also stepped up their attacks on the Donbas region in the east and around the city of Izyum, which lies on a key route to the Donbas, after redeploying units from other areas, the Ukrainian side said.

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Olexander Lomako, secretary of the Chernihiv city council, said the Russian announcement turned out to be “a complete lie”. “At night they didn't decrease, but vice versa increased the intensity of military action,” Lomako said.

Five weeks into the invasion that has left thousands dead on both sides, the number of Ukrainians fleeing the country topped a staggering 4 million, half of them children, according to the United Nations.

“I do not know if we can still believe the Russians,” Nikolay Nazarov, a refugee from Ukraine, said as he pushed his father's wheelchair at a border crossing into Poland. “I think more escalation will occur in eastern Ukraine. That is why we cannot go back to Kharkiv."

In other developments:

— US intelligence officials have concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about the poor performance of his military in Ukraine because they are too afraid to tell him the truth.

— US President Joe Biden announced an additional $500 million in aid for Ukraine.

— The German government said it received assurances from Russia that European companies won't have to pay for Russian gas in rubles. That prospect had raised fears that Russia could cut them off. Also, Poland announced steps to end all Russian oil imports by the end of the year.

— The UN is looking into allegations that some residents of the besieged and shattered southern city of Mariupol have been forcibly taken to areas controlled by Russian forces or to Russia itself.

At a round of talks held Tuesday in Istanbul, the faint outlines of a possible peace agreement seemed to emerge when the Ukrainian delegation offered a framework under which the country would declare itself neutral — dropping its bid to join NATO, as Moscow has long demanded — in return for security guarantees from a group of other nations.

Also Read: Ukraine preparing for new Russian offensive in the east, Zelenskyy says

Top Russian officials responded positively, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying Wednesday that Ukraine's willingness to accept neutrality and look outside NATO for security represents “significant progress", according to Russian news agencies.

After the Kremlin's announcement that it would scale back some of its military operations, Zelenskyy reacted by saying that when dealing with the Russians, “you can trust only concrete results”.

That assessment was echoed by Biden and by British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, who noted suspicions that Russia intends to regroup and attack again.

The scepticism seemed well-founded on Wednesday.

Oleksandr Pavliuk, head of the Kyiv region military administration, said Russian shells targeted residential areas and civilian infrastructure in the Bucha, Brovary and Vyshhorod regions around the capital.

Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Igor Konashenkov said the military also targeted fuel depots in two towns in central Ukraine with air-launched long-range cruise missiles. And Russian forces hit a Ukrainian special forces headquarters in the southern Mykolaiv region, he said, and two ammunition depots in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas.

In southern Ukraine, a Russian missile destroyed a fuel depot in Dnipro, the country's fourth-largest city, regional officials said.

The US said that over the last 24 hours, Russia had begun to reposition less than 20% of its troops that had been arrayed around Kyiv.

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that troops from there and some other zones have begun moving largely to the north, and some have gone into Belarus. Kirby said it appears Russia intends to resupply them and send them back into Ukraine, but it is not clear where.

Top Russian military officials have said in recent days that their main goal now is the “liberation” of Donbas, the predominantly Russian-speaking industrial heartland where Moscow-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014. Western officials say Moscow is reinforcing its troops in the Donbas.

Also Read: Nearly half of Ukraine 'polluted' by Russian explosives: Kyiv

Some analysts have suggested that the focus on the Donbas and the pledge to de-escalate may merely be an effort to put a positive spin on reality: Moscow's ground forces have been thwarted — and have taken heavy losses — in their bid to seize the capital and other cities.

Meanwhile, a missile destroyed part of an apartment block in the rebel-controlled city of Donetsk early Wednesday, and two people were reported killed. Separatists blamed Ukrainian forces for the attack.

“I was just sitting on the couch and — bang! — the window glass popped, the frames came off. I didn't even understand what happened,” said resident Anna Gorda.

The UN food aid agency said it is providing emergency assistance to 1 million people in Ukraine. It said the food includes 330,000 freshly baked loaves of bread for families in the heavily bombarded eastern city of Kharkiv.

“Children are suffering, and our city, and everything," Tetyana Parmynska, a 28-year-old from the Chernihiv region now at a refugee center in Poland, said as man played songs on a battered piano decorated with a peace emblem. "We have no strength anymore.”

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