Russia continues to pound Kyiv, other Ukrainian cities despite pledge to scale back

Russian forces bombarded areas around Kyiv and another city just hours after pledging to scale back military operations in those places to help movepeace negotiations along, 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.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he stressed to U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday that the war is at a "turning point." He thanked the United States for an additional $500 million in aid announced Wednesday, but he also said Ukraine needs more help to resist the Russian invasion.

"If we really are fighting for freedom and in defence of democracy together, then we have a right to demand help in this difficult turning point. Tanks, aircraft, artillery systems. Freedom should be armed no worse than tyranny," Zelensky said in his nightly video address to the nation, which he delivered standing in the dark outside the dimly lit presidential offices in Kyiv.

Talks between Ukraine and Russia were set to resume on Friday by video, according to the head of the Ukrainian delegation, David Arakhamia. But there seemed to be little faith that a resolution would emerge any time soon.

The Russian military reneged on its pledge made on Tuesday to de-escalate near Kyiv, the capital, and Chernihiv to "increase mutual trust and create conditions for further negotiations."

The announcement was met with deep suspicion from Zelensky and the West. And 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 around the eastern city of Izyum and inthe eastern Donetsk region after redeploying some units from other areas, the Ukrainian side said.

Olexander Lomako, secretary of the Chernihiv city council, said the Russian announcement turned out to be "a complete lie."

"At night, they didn't decreasebut vice versa increased the intensity of military action," Lomako said.

"Civilian infrastructure facilities, libraries, shopping centres, many houses were destroyed in Chernihiv,"said Chernihivgovernor Viacheslav Chaus, adding there were also strikes in Nizhyn, about 100 kilometres to the south.

Of Russia's statement that it would cut back its military activity, he said: "Do we believe that? Of course not."

WATCH | Ukraine's deputy prime minister onnegotiating with Russia:

'No words can be trusted when it comes to negotiations with the Russian side,' Ukraine's deputy PM says

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Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olha Stefanishyna says fighting continues near Kyiv despite Russia's pledge to pull troops away from the capital.

Zelenskysaid negotiations with Russia were continuing, but for now they were only "words without specifics."

"We know that this is not a withdrawal but the consequences of being driven out," hesaid of Russia's pledge. "But we also are seeing that Russia is now concentrating its forces for new strikes on Donbas, and we are preparing for this."

Zelenskyalso said he had recalled Ukraine's ambassadors to Georgia and Morocco, suggesting they had not done enough to persuade those countries to support Ukraine and punish Russia for the invasion.

"With all due respect, if there won't be weapons, won't be sanctions, won't be restrictions for Russian business, then please look for other work," he said.

Zelensky has rarely gone a day without addressing the lawmakersof another country and speaking to a number of world leaders.

Russia targetingresidential, government buildings

Oleksandr Pavliuk, head of the capitalregion military administration, said on Wednesday that there were 30 Russian shellings of the residential areas and civilian infrastructure in the Bucha, Brovary and Vyshhorod regions around Kyivover the previous 24 hours.

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. Russian forces also 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 U.S. said that over the last 24 hours, Russia had begun to reposition less than 20 per centof 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.

Children among the wounded

In Kyiv, staff at a children's hospital are dealing with an influx of seriously wounded children, on top of young patients being treated for other illnesses and disease.

Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital press secretary Anastasia MagerramovatoldCBC News that she and the doctors have moved into the hospital, working under the threat of bombings every day.

"Rockets fly over the children's hospital. People die every day. And we see it every day," she told Heather Hiscox."We see wounded children, wounded people, our doctors see terrible things every day. Bullets in children's bodies, shrapnels in children's legs, heads and ribs."

Magerramovasaid she is documenting what is happening because she wants people around the world to know what is happening in 21st-century Ukraine.

WATCH | Inside a children's hospital in Kyiv:

Ukraine's youngest victims of war

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Inside Okhmatdyt Childrens Hospital in Kyiv, exhausted medical staff remove shrapnel, reset limbs and sew up the physical wounds of war in Ukrainian children. Hospital press secretary Anastasia Magerramova says the hospital is showing images of the children to let the world know the truth about the war in Ukraine.

Economic repercussions

Five weeks into the invasion, with death tolls estimated to be in the thousandson both sides, the number of Ukrainians fleeing the country topped a staggering fourmillion, or about a 10thof the population,according to the United Nations. Half of those who have fled are children, the UN said.

"I do not know if we can still believe the Russians," saidNikolay Nazarov, a refugee from the northeastern city of Khakriv, which has seenheavy shelling since the start of the Feb.24 invasion, 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."

Meanwhile, the economic repercussions from the war and the West's sanctions against Moscow widened.

Russia typically provides Europe with about40 per centof its gas, but the possibility of supply disruption since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine has increased over the past week, with G7 nations rejecting a demand for payment in rubles.

Germany and Austria activated early warning plans on Wednesday amid concerns that Moscow could cut natural gas deliveries, while Poland announced steps to end all Russian oil imports by year's end.

The German government said it was establishing a crisis team to step up monitoring of the gas supply, and it called on companies and households to conserve energy.

But hours later, German officials said Chancellor Olaf Scholz had received assurances from Russian President Vladimir Putin that European companies won't have to pay for Russian gas supplies in rubles but could continue to pay in euros, as stipulated by existing contracts.

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Former CAF member helped evacuate six Ukrainian children with cancer to Canada

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Jason Brisebois, advance team leader with Reticle Ventures Canada, was instrumental in the operation to bring Ukrainian children battling cancer from a hospital in Poland to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Here he describes the work he has been doing on the ground in both Poland and Ukraine.

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. It would drop its bid to join NATO, as Moscow has long demanded,in return for security guarantees from a group of other nations.

Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation, said Ukraine's readiness to consider neutral status would meet a key Russian demand.

Ukraine's delegation on Tuesday offered neutrality in exchange for security guarantees by a group of third countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Turkey, China and Poland, in an arrangement similar to NATO's "an attack on one is an attack on all" principle.

Ukraine said it would also be willing to hold talks over a 15-year period on the future of the Crimean Peninsula, seized by Russia in 2014.

Medinsky said in televised comments that the proposals signalled Ukraine's readiness to reach agreement "for the first time in years." If Ukraine makes good on its offer, he said, "the threat of creating a NATO bridgehead on the Ukrainian territory will be removed."

Kremlin spokespersonDmitry Peskov sounded a positive note as well but included a caveat:"We can't say there has been something promising or any breakthroughs."

Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation, said negotiators would take Ukraine's proposals to Putin, and then Moscow would provide a response, but he did not say when.

The talks had been expected to resume on Wednesday, but with what Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu called "meaningful" progress made, the two sides decided to return home for consultations.

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.

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.

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that 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.

WATCH |Experienceserving Ukrainian soldiers well, trainer says:

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Canada's training of Ukrainian soldiers and their fighting experience in the Donbas is serving them well in the war with Russia, says former military trainer Lt.-Col. Melanie Lake, but so is their powerful motivation, she said. 'I do believe that they're going to win.'

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," resident Anna Gordasaid.

Refugee count surpasses 4 million

Meanwhile, theUNrefugee agency on Wednesday saidmore than fourmillion people have now fled Ukraine following Russia's invasion, a new milestone in the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

The UNHigh Commissioner for Refugees posted on a website that tracks refugee flows around the world that 4.01 million people have now fled Ukraine. Of those, 2.3 million have entered Poland.

WATCH | Survivors describe what they've lost:

Heartbreaking stories of loss and survival from the war in Ukraine

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Two refugees share their personal stories of fleeing the Ukraine war Olga Sairova lost her husband and parents in a Russian missile strike, and Lesia Bondarenko narrowly survived shelling as she escaped with her nine-month-old baby.

Aid workers say the flow has eased in recent days as many people await developments in the war. An estimated 6.5 million people have also been displaced from their homes within Ukraine.

The UNfood aid agency said it is providing emergency assistance to onemillion people in Ukraine. It said the food includes 330,000loaves of bread for families in Kharkiv.

"Children are suffering, and our city, and everything," saidTetyana Parmynska, a 28-year-old from the Chernihiv region who is now at a refugee centrein Poland, as a man played songs on a battered piano decorated with a peace emblem.

"We have no strength anymore."