LVIV, Ukraine -- Russia and Ukraine kept a fragile diplomatic path open with a new round of talks Monday even as Moscow's forces pounded away at Kyiv and other cities across the country in a punishing bombardment the Red Cross said has created "nothing short of a nightmare" for civilians.
Meanwhile, a convoy of 160 civilian cars left the encircled port city of Mariupol along a designated humanitarian route, city officials reported, in a rare glimmer of hope from the lethal siege that has pulverized homes and other buildings and left people desperate for food, water, heat and medicine.
The latest negotiations, held via video conference, were the fourth round involving higher-level officials from the two countries and the first in a week. The talks ended without a breakthrough after several hours, with an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying the negotiators took "a technical pause" and planned to meet again today.
The two sides had expressed some optimism in the past few days. Mykhailo Podolyak, the aide to Zelenskyy, tweeted that the negotiators would discuss "peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops & security guarantees."
Previous discussions, held in person in Belarus, produced no lasting humanitarian routes or agreements to end the fighting.
In Washington, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that while the Biden administration supports Ukraine's participation in the talks with Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin would have to show signs of de-escalating in order to demonstrate good faith.
"And what we're really looking for is evidence of that, and we're not seeing any evidence at this point that President Putin is doing anything to stop the onslaught or de-escalate," she said.
Overall, nearly all of the Russian military offensives remained stalled after making little progress over the weekend, according to a senior U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon's assessment. Russian troops were still about 9 miles from the center of Kyiv, the official said.
The official said that Russian forces have launched more than 900 missiles but that Ukraine's airspace is still contested, with Russia not achieving total air superiority.
Russia's missile attack on a Ukrainian military base near the Polish border was launched from long-range bombers flying inside Russian airspace, the Pentagon said Monday, detailing its latest assessment of the strike that killed at least 35 people and marked a significant escalation in the nearly three-week war.
The attack Sunday in Yavoriv in western Ukraine, about 15 miles from NATO territory, did not disrupt shipments of Western military aid, despite Russia's claims to the contrary, said a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon.
But it has amplified fears in the region, and in the United States, that a miscalculation could drastically widen the war.
The senior U.S. defense official said Russia's fusillade targeting the International Peacekeeping and Security Center has not altered the U.S. force posture in Poland. The official said that "more than a couple dozen" missiles were launched.
The facility has been used in the past by U.S. and NATO troops to provide training for the Ukrainian military, and currently houses about 1,000 foreign volunteers who have traveled to Ukraine to aid in its war with Russia.
The senior defense official said the Pentagon would "not have a way of knowing or tracking" whether any American citizens were among those killed or wounded in the attack, though he affirmed earlier statements indicating that no U.S. troops, government officials or defense contractors were at Yavoriv when the strike occurred.
The facility is not a transit point for Western military aid, the senior U.S. defense official said, contradicting Russian Defense Ministry claims the base was used as a weapons and equipment depot.
U.S. and European officials have not disclosed any shipment routes into Ukraine, so it is unclear whether the facility had been a hub for weapons in the past.
"I would just tell you that we have multiple routes to get security assistance into the hands of the Ukrainians," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters during a news briefing Monday afternoon. "This was not one of them."
U.N. ACCUSATIONS
Overnight, air raid alerts sounded in cities and towns around the country, from near the Russian border in the east to the Carpathian Mountains in the west, and fighting continued on the outskirts of Kyiv. Ukrainian officials said Russian forces shelled several suburbs of the capital.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres accused Russia of attacking 24 health facilities and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without water or electricity. Having once predicted there would be no war in Ukraine, he now warned there could be a calamitous cascade of world hunger and food inflation because Ukraine is one of the world's foremost grain producers.
The impact on civilians, Guterres said, was "reaching terrifying proportions."
Ukrainian authorities said two people were killed when the Russians struck an airplane factory in Kyiv, sparking a large fire. The Antonov factory is Ukraine's largest aircraft plant and produces many of the world's biggest cargo planes.
Russian artillery fire also hit a nine-story apartment building in the northern Obolonskyi district of the city, killing two more people, authorities said.
And a Russian airstrike near a Ukrainian checkpoint caused extensive damage to a downtown Kyiv neighborhood, killing one person, Ukraine's emergency agency said.
Kateryna Lot said she was in her apartment as her child did homework when they heard a loud explosion and ran to take shelter.
"The child became hysterical. Our windows and the balcony were shattered. Part of the floor fell down," she said. "It was very, very scary."
In an area outside Kyiv, Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall was injured while reporting and was hospitalized, the network said.
The live main evening news program on Russian state television was briefly interrupted by a woman who walked into the studio holding a poster against the war. The OVD-Info website that monitors political arrests said she was a Channel 1 employee who taken into police custody.
A town councilor for Brovary, east of Kyiv, was killed in fighting there, officials said. Shells also fell on the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, which have seen some of the worst fighting in Russia's stalled attempt to take the capital, local authorities said.
Airstrikes were reported across the country, including the southern city of Mykolaiv, and the northern city of Chernihiv, where heat was knocked out to most of the town. Explosions also reverberated overnight around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson.
Nine people were killed in a rocket attack on a TV tower in the western village of Antopol, according to the region's governor.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, firefighters doused the smoldering remains of a four-story residential building. It was unclear whether there were casualties.
In the southern city of Mariupol, where the war has produced some of the greatest suffering, the City Council didn't say how many people were in the convoy of cars headed westward for the city of Zaporizhzhia. But it said a cease-fire along the route appeared to be holding.
Previous attempts to evacuate civilians and deliver humanitarian aid to the city of 430,000 were thwarted by fighting.
Ukraine's military said it repelled an attempt Monday to take control of Mariupol by Russian forces, who were forced to retreat. Satellite images from Maxar Technologies showed fires burning across the city, with many high-rise apartment buildings heavily damaged or destroyed.
The Kremlin-backed leader of the Russian region of Chechnya said on a messaging app that Chechen fighters were spearheading the offensive on Mariupol.
Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the war has become "nothing short of a nightmare" for those living in besieged cities, and he pleaded for safe corridors for civilians to leave and humanitarian aid to be brought in.
"The situation cannot, cannot continue like this," he said. "History is watching what is happening in Mariupol and other cities."
Mariupol residents including Natalia Koldash rushed to shelter inside a building Sunday as an unidentified plane passed overhead.
"We have no information at all," Koldash said. "We know nothing. It looks like we are living in a deep forest."
Associated Press video showed debris from a damaged residential building and another building that a young man named Dima described as an elementary school.
"There was no military at this school," he said. "It's unclear why it was hit."
The Russian military said 20 civilians in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine were killed by a ballistic missile launched by Ukrainian forces. The claim could not be independently verified.
Casualty figures are difficult to confirm in the conflict. The United Nations has estimated that at least 596 civilians have been killed, but that figure is considered low because of the organization's inability to gain access to all areas of fighting. Millions more have fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million crossing into Poland and other neighboring countries in what the U.N. has called Europe's biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
"All day crying from the pain of having to part with loved ones, with my husband, my parents," 33-year-old refugee Alexandra Beltuygova said in the Polish border town of Przemysl after fleeing the industrial Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
"I understand that we may not see them. I wish this war would end," she said.
REPORTER INJURED
Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall was injured Monday in Ukraine while reporting outside Kyiv and has been hospitalized, the network said.
Executives at Fox News said they had only sparse information about the nature of the journalist's injuries. Hall, 39, is a longtime war correspondent who has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and other countries.
He joined Fox News in 2015 and became a State Department correspondent for the network last year.
"We have a minimal level of details right now, but Ben is hospitalized and our teams on the ground are working to gather additional information as the situation quickly unfolds," Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott wrote in a memo to employees. "This is a stark reminder for all journalists who are putting their lives on the line every day to deliver the news from a war zone."
Psaki acknowledged Hall's injuries during a White House press briefing Monday.
"Our thoughts, the president's thoughts, our administration's thoughts are with him, his family and all of you at Fox News as well," she told Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich.
The State Department Correspondents' Association also issued a statement, saying its members were "horrified" to learn of Hall's injuries.
"We wish Ben a quick recovery and call for utmost efforts to protect journalists who are providing an invaluable service through their coverage in Ukraine," wrote the group's president, Shaun Tandon, who is the State Department correspondent for Agence France-Presse.
CHERNOBYL LINE RE-HIT
A high-voltage power line at the former Chernobyl nuclear plant has once again been damaged by Russian forces, Ukraine's nuclear agency said Monday, just one day after Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko announced that power had been restored following a Russian attack last week that disconnected the site from the electricity grid.
"Reliable power supply to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is critical from the point of view of nuclear safety," Ukraine's nuclear agency said.
Ukrenergo, the Ukrainian utility that carried out the repairs over the weekend, said in a Facebook post Monday that the power line has again been damaged by "the occupants." The company said its workers would have to return to the site to continue restoration.
Officials have expressed concern that a lack of power at the closed plant and surrounding area would jeopardize cooling systems for more than 20,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that remain at the site.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was captured by Russian forces on Feb. 24. Since then, the International Atomic Energy Agency and other international organizations have expressed concern about the conditions in which the closed plant is being kept.
On Sunday, the Ukrainian regulator informed the agency that staff at the Chernobyl power plant were no longer performing repair and maintenance duties of safety-related equipment, the agency said in a statement. This was partially because of their fatigue after working continuously for close to three weeks.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has warned that the situation violates a safety pillar established by the agency that employees operating in power plants should be able to make decisions "free of undue pressure."
Information for this article was contributed by Yuras Karmanau, Lolita C. Baldor and staff members of The Associated Press, by Michael M. Grynbaum, Mark Landler and David E. Sanger of The New York Times and by Alex Horton, Jennifer Hassan and Maite Fernandez Simon of The Washington Post.
A Ukrainian firefighter helps a man remove belongings from a destroyed building after it was hit by artillery shelling in Kyiv in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
A refugee fleeing the war from neighbouring Ukraine looks out a bus window after crossing the border, at the Romanian-Ukrainian border, in Siret, Romania, Monday, March 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)
Volunteers sew Ukrainian flags and first aid kits at a workshop in Lviv, western Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. Russian forces have continued their assault on Ukraine, firing on suburbs around the capital of Kyiv and other cities, even as the two countries held another round of diplomatic talks. The fighting is now in its third week. Thousands of soldiers and civilians have died and the war has forced more than 2.8 million people to flee Ukraine. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
A group of people fleeing Ukraine arrive at the border crossing in Medyka, Poland, on Monday, March 14, 2022. Russia's military forces kept up their punishing campaign to capture Ukraine's capital with fighting and artillery fire in Kyiv's suburbs Monday after an airstrike on a military base near the Polish border brought the war dangerously close to NATO's doorstep. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
People retrieve belongings from an apartment in a block which was destroyed by an artillery strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. Russia's military forces kept up their punishing campaign to capture Ukraine's capital with fighting and artillery fire in Kyiv's suburbs Monday after an airstrike on a military base near the Polish border brought the war dangerously close to NATO's doorstep.(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
In this photo released by Ukrainian State Emergency Service press service, firefighters evacuate an elderly woman from an apartment building hit by shelling in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. (Ukrainian State Emergency Service via AP)
Ukrainian soldiers and firefighters search in a destroyed building after a bombing attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
A women stands near a broken window in her apartment after a Russian bombing attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A group of people fleeing Ukraine stand in a line after arriving at the border crossing in Medyka, Poland, on Monday, March 14, 2022. Russia's military forces kept up their punishing campaign to capture Ukraine's capital with fighting and artillery fire in Kyiv's suburbs Monday after an airstrike on a military base near the Polish border brought the war dangerously close to NATO's doorstep. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
