Russia-Ukraine live updates: No agreement in high-level Ukraine-Russia talks; 3 killed in hospital strike

At train stations across Ukraine, servicemen have been kissing and hugging their loved ones goodbye as they make their way toward the fighting in Kyiv and elsewhere.

Photos captured this week show military personnel boarding crowded trains en route to Kyiv, the capital and the country’s largest city, and Dnipro in the east.

The parting embraces for the many couples and families are laced with fear, with no one sure when — or if — they will see each other again.

More than two dozen Internet experts on Thursday proposed creating an international committee that could impose targeted sanctions against Russian military and propaganda websites without knocking ordinary civilian sites offline.

The proposal comes at a time of growing isolation for Russia and a push by Ukrainian officials to impose broad sanctions against that country’s websites, further disconnecting Russia from the global Internet.

Thursday’s proposal — made in an open letter signed by politicians, Internet activists, networking experts, security researchers and others — opposes disconnecting all Russian websites as dangerously broad and likely to impede the ability of ordinary Russians to navigate the Internet. The signatories particularly worry about depriving Russians of news and information at a time when the government of President Vladimir Putin has almost totally choked off the nation’s free press.

Ukrainian officials said efforts to shuttle people out of cities under attack resumed Thursday after about 1,000 people trapped near a nuclear power plant in southeast Ukraine were evacuated overnight.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier that despite reports that Russian shelling violated temporary cease-fires, about 35,000 people were evacuated Wednesday from battle zones.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a news briefing that routes would open Thursday to take civilians to other places within the country, including for buses and private vehicles to move from the northeastern city of Sumy and head southwest to Poltava. She said corridors were also planned from the southern cities of Mariupol and Volnovakha, and from the city of Izyum, as well as passage from Bucha and Irpin on the outskirts of the capital toward Kyiv.

The regional governor of Sumy, Dmytro Zhivitsky, said in a Telegram message that buses had started departing Thursday morning. Many have already left since the evacuation in the region began this week.

For days, Ukraine has accused Russian forces of shelling escape routes after Moscow said it would enact cease-fires for battered cities to allow civilians safe passage through humanitarian corridors. In Mariupol, local officials said a Russian strike tore through a maternity hospital, killing at least three people, despite an evacuation deal for the encircled city.

Moscow had previously announced humanitarian corridors that would evacuate civilians from Ukrainian cities to Russia or its ally, Belarus, which Kyiv called unacceptable.

Ukraine’s national electricity grid operator, Ukrenergo, said Thursday that it has a team ready to restore power at the closed Chernobyl nuclear power plant and is waiting for a safe corridor to be created.

The site of a catastrophic 1986 nuclear accident was disconnected from the grid by Russian forces, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday, potentially jeopardizing the cooling of nuclear material still stored at the site and sparking global concern.

“Ukrenergo expects a safe corridor that will enable the reconstruction of the line to power Chornobyl,” it said in a Facebook post Thursday, using Ukraine’s spelling for the plant. “Our repair teams are ready to restore the line immediately, despite the threat of being shot by the enemy and are waiting for permission.”

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk also appealed in a video posted Thursday on Telegram for Russia to allow crews in to repair a “special power transmission line” that she said had been damaged.

“We demand that a repair team immediately be allowed access to get rid of the damage,” Vereshchuk said. “We ask the global community to focus its attention on this problem.”

Electricity is needed for cooling, ventilation and fire-extinguishing systems at the closed site. Emergency diesel generators are powering the plant for now but have limited fuel, according to Ukrenergo. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Wednesday demanded a cease-fire with Russia to allow for repairs.

Sony said Wednesday in a statement that it halted sales of its PlayStation hardware and software in Russia and shut down the PlayStation Store in the country — the latest video game maker to pare back its business in Russia as a show of support for Ukraine.

Sony Interactive Entertainment, the video-gaming arm of Sony, said it “joins the global community in calling for peace in Ukraine.” It said it halted the Russian market release of its latest video game, “Gran Turismo 7.”

About a week ago, Mykhailo Fedorov, one of Ukraine’s tech-savvy deputy prime ministers, issued a direct appeal for game developers to pull out of Russia. In an open letter, he wrote that “in 2022, modern technology is perhaps the best answer to the tanks, multiple rocket launchers (hrad) and missiles,” apparently referring to the Soviet-era BM-21 “Grad” 122 mm multiple rocket launcher used by Russian forces.

The list of companies that have limited or ended their business in Russia since its invasion of Ukraine is long and growing, touching many industries from retail to financial institutions and sports.

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — The city council of Mariupol, on the southeastern coast of Ukraine, said Thursday that three people, including a child, were killed when a Russian airstrike hit a maternity hospital, while 17 people — among them children, women and medical staff — were injured.

“Russian troops purposefully and ruthlessly destroy the civilian population of Mariupol,” the city council said on Telegram. “The whole world should know about Russia’s crime against humanity, against Ukraine and against the people of Mariupol!”

As many as 1,300 people have died in Mariupol since Russian forces besieged the city, according to Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor’s office. At least 3,000 have been injured, he said.

“Nine days without food, warmth, and dead bodies everywhere on the street,” he told The Post. “What can be worse than this? The only hospital that’s left [is] filled to the brim with people.”

With the city cut off from the outside world, the figures were not possible to independently verify. If accurate, they could represent a stark increase in the human toll of the conflict. As of Wednesday, the United Nations said 516 civilians were confirmed killed and more than 900 injured in the Russian invasion, tolls it acknowledges are incomplete. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights noted recent “allegations of hundreds of civilian casualties” in Mariupol and other cities but said those figures were not included in its tally and “are being further corroborated.”

Ukrainian officials had accused Russian forces of shelling the city for days, but early Wednesday they said that Russia had agreed to a local cease-fire to evacuate civilians from Mariupol and eight other places. (It was not clear whether Russia had agreed to the evacuation routes.)

Andryushchenko said rescue workers were not able to pull bodies from the streets in some areas because of the security situation. For days, local authorities and the Red Cross have been attempting to organize a humanitarian corridor out of Mariupol. But they say the route has been mined. “The only problem is that the Russians don’t want to guarantee safety,” he said. “There is bombardment and shooting.”

Hours before the airstrike on the maternity hospital, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Ukrainian forces of using the hospital as cover for launching military attacks. She alleged that “in Mariupol, the Ukrainian national battalions, having expelled the staff and patients from the maternity hospital, equipped combat positions in it.”

Videos and photos of the aftermath of the airstrike show children and injured pregnant women being led away from the hospital.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the airstrike an “atrocity.”

“What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals and maternity hospitals and destroys them?” he said in a video address late Wednesday.

The attack drew international condemnation. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said details about the incident were scarce but called it a “horrifying” example of “the barbaric use of military force to go after innocent civilians in a sovereign country.”

Timsit reported from London.

In India, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has refrained from denouncing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, describing it as a gripe between Moscow and NATO. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said his nation “will not take sides” in the conflict, even as he dismissed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky as “a comedian.” A senior South African official still calls Russia “a friend through and through.”

From a perch in the West, it’s easy to see a world standing against Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Russian forces lay brutal siege to Ukrainian cities, leaders in Washington and the capitals of Europe are slapping Moscow with sanction after sanction. In Western countries, Putin has come to be seen as a Bond villain caricature and antagonist to a heroic, beloved Zelensky. Even McDonald’s suspended operations in Russia. Surely you’re isolated if you can’t buy a Big Mac.

Look deeper, though, and the suggestion that Putin is isolated may still be something of a Western bias — an assumption based on a definition of the “world” as places of privilege, largely the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan. Of the 193 members of the United Nations, 141 voted to condemn Moscow’s unprovoked attack on its neighbor. But that majority vote doesn’t tell the more nuanced story.