KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Talks to stop the fighting in Ukraine resumed Friday, as another desperate attempt to rescue civilians from the shattered and encircled city of Mariupol failed and Russia accused the Ukrainians of launching a helicopter attack on a fuel depot on Russian soil.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said a fiery cross-border raid by two helicopter gunships left two people wounded, though state oil company Rosneft denied anyone was hurt.
“Certainly, this is not something that can be perceived as creating comfortable conditions for the continuation of the talks,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, five weeks after Moscow began sending upwards of 150,000 of its own troops across Ukraine’s border.
The Russian claim could not immediately be verified, and Ukraine denied responsibility.
“For some reason they say that we did it, but in fact this does not correspond with reality,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, said on Ukrainian television.
Russia has reported cross-border shelling from Ukraine before, including an incident last week that killed a military chaplain, but not an incursion of its airspace. The Rosneft depot is about 35 kilometers (21 miles) from the Ukraine border.
Meanwhile, Russia continued withdrawing some of its troops from areas around Kyiv, three days after Moscow said it would reduce military activity near the Ukrainian capital and the northern city of Chernihiv to promote trust at the bargaining table.
While Russian forces kept up their bombardment of those two zones, Ukrainian troops exploited the pullback on the ground by mounting counterattacks and retaking a number of towns and villages.
Still, Ukraine and its allies warned that the Kremlin is not de-escalating but resupplying its troops and shifting them to the country’s east for an intensified assault on the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region, which includes Mariupol.
The latest negotiations, which took place by video, followed a meeting Tuesday in Turkey, where Ukraine reiterated its willingness to abandon a bid to join NATO and declare itself neutral — Moscow’s chief demand. In return, Ukraine proposed that its security be guaranteed by several other countries.
The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said on social media that Moscow’s positions on retaining control of the Crimean Peninsula — seized from Ukraine in 2014 — and expanding the territory in eastern Ukraine held by Russia-backed separatists “are unchanged.”
The invasion has left thousands dead and driven more than 4 million refugees from Ukraine.
On the outskirts of Kyiv, where Russian troops have withdrawn, damaged cars lined the streets of Irpin, a suburban area popular with young families, now in ruins. Emergency workers carried elderly people on stretchers over a wrecked bridge to safety.
Three wooden crosses next to a residential building that was damaged in a shelling marked the graves of a mother and son and an unknown man. A resident who gave her name only as Lila said she helped hurriedly bury them on March 5, just before Russian troops moved in.
“They were hit with artillery and they were burned alive,” she said.
