A delegation led by Ukraine’s defense minister arrived Monday for talks with Russian officials at the Ukrainian border with Belarus, as Ukrainian forces repelled a series of Russian attacks on the capital, Kyiv, and said they had cleared the city of Russian infiltrators.
The talks on the fifth day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine come after Russian forces have struggled to make headway in most of the country, and failed so far to take any of Ukraine’s major cities as they faced fierce resistance.
Despite Russia’s military difficulties so far, and mounting international sanctions and pressure on Russia’s currency and economy, the chances of a cease-fire being agreed to at Monday’s talks were uncertain.
Russia continued to throw more troops into Ukraine, while Kyiv bolstered its military by mobilizing 100,000 new troops and arming its units with sophisticated new weaponry flowing in from the West.
Authorities in Kyiv, which was under curfew starting Saturday afternoon while Ukrainian forces engaged in firefights in several neighborhoods with Russian infiltrator units wearing civilian clothes or Ukrainian uniforms, allowed residents to move around on Monday morning. Long lines snaked around grocery stores and pharmacies as Kyivites patiently waited for their turn.
The city was calm, with no looting or violence, as regular troops and volunteers with yellow armbands manned checkpoints at key intersections.
“Neighborhood people gave us all this—old washing machines, tires, roofing, anything they could throw out of their windows—to create this barricade,” said one of the volunteers, 30-year-old Taras Oleksandovych, who joined the new Territorial Defense force on Sunday, after a shootout with Russian infiltrators in his neighborhood of high-rises on Kyiv’s western edge. “We will resist.”
Sturdier tank traps, concrete blocks, and orange garbage trucks blocked key roads. Electronic billboards that once advertised nightclubs and sushi restaurants beamed black-and-white messages to the enemy. “Russian soldier, go f— yourself,” said one in central Kyiv.
On the front lines along the city’s northern and western edges, soldiers were buoyed by recent victories. “The famed Russian special forces came here, and ran away so fast that
they left us three vehicles as trophies,” said a Ukrainian trooper as he readied to leave on a mission.
In a sign that Russia doesn’t so far have control of the skies, convoys carrying Ukrainian reinforcements rumbled in broad daylight through the city, including several long-range artillery pieces followed by truckloads of shells.
“On the fifth day of the full-scale Russian war against the people of Ukraine, we’re standing firm,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday. “Every crime that the occupiers commit against us brings us closer and closer to each other. Russia never imagined that it would face such solidarity.”
While air-raid sirens sounded through the early hours of Monday, the intensity of Russian airstrikes was much lower than in previous nights.
Russian President Vladimir Putin refused to take a call from Mr. Zelensky on the eve of Thursday’s invasion, which he said seeks to oust the Ukrainian government and “demilitarize” the country.
Russian officials said shortly after the war began that they would talk to Kyiv only once Ukrainian troops laid down their arms. Mr. Putin later urged the Ukrainian army to stage a 
coup against the country’s democratically elected president. The fact Moscow now seeks unconditional talks was celebrated by Ukrainian officials as an achievement for Ukraine and its armed forces.
Russia sent a delegation to the southern Belarusian city of Gomel on Sunday, but Mr. Zelensky initially said he refused to meet in a country that has become a launchpad for Russia’s attacks.
Mr. Zelensky did, however, speak by phone to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko later on Sunday, and said that he agreed to have his envoys meet with the Russian delegation on the river Prypiat along the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Mr. Lukashenko pledged during the conversation, the two men’s first in two years, that no Russian military activity would be carried out from Belarus in the meantime, Mr. Zelensky said.
Because of continued fighting, the team sent by Mr. Zelensky had to travel to the talks on a circuitous route via Poland. The group includes the Ukrainian minister of defense, Oleksii Reznikov, and the majority leader in the Ukrainian parliament, David Arakhamia.
The Russian delegation includes presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky; Russia’s deputy ministers of defense and foreign affairs; Leonid Slutsky, the head of the International Committee of Russia’s State Duma; and Russia’s ambassador to Belarus, Boris Gryzlov,
said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Mr. Medinsky told Russian state news agency RIA that Russia’s representatives were ready for negotiations at any time. “Every hour for us is a saved life,” the agency cited him as saying.
In the five days of the offensive, Russia so far hasn’t seized any big Ukrainian city, and dozens if not hundreds of Russian troops have been taken prisoner, their videos posted on social media so that their families in Russia could find out about their fate. Russia’s military on Sunday acknowledged for the first time that its forces suffered fatal casualties in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said they wouldn’t accept anything short of Russia withdrawing its forces and restoring the country’s territorial integrity. “The enemy is losing steam,” said Mr. Zelensky’s adviser Oleksiy Arestovych. “Another day or two, and the offensive will collapse.”
Ukraine, which has standing armed forces of about 200,000 service members, said it had mobilized an additional 100,000 troops in the past 48 hours. Russia massed some 190,000 on Ukrainian borders before the invasion, according to U.S. estimates.
Russia acknowledged on Sunday for the first time that it had suffered fatal losses in the war on Ukraine, but didn’t release numbers and claimed that Ukrainian losses were several times higher. Ukraine has adopted a policy of not releasing military casualty figures. Russian military spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Russia has hit 1,067
Ukrainian military targets since the war began, denied that Moscow was striking civilian targets, and called on Ukrainian forces to surrender.
Mr. Arestovych warned Sunday that, despite promises made by Mr. Lukashenko to Mr. Zelensky, Kyiv had information that Belarusian armed forces were ready to enter the conflict on Russia’s side. He dismissed the military significance of such a move, saying that Belarus had only some 45,000 troops, with 17,000 of them combat-capable, and that many would be reluctant to fight their Ukrainian neighbors. A ballistic missile fired from Belarus hit the Zhytomir airport west of Kyiv on Sunday afternoon, Ukrainian officials said.
With each day, Ukraine’s government has projected growing confidence, saying that heavy resistance throughout the country had thwarted Mr. Putin’s plan to overthrow the Ukrainian leadership and destroy its command-and-control capabilities in a lightning strike.
“These three days have forever changed our country and the world,” Mr. Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense minister, said Sunday morning. “These will be trying times ahead. But now we are no longer the only ones to believe in our victory. And that is why we are receiving the aid that was unthinkable three days ago.”
Several countries that had previously declined to supply Ukraine with sophisticated weapons to help offset Russia’s military advantage have changed their minds in recent days, and the EU on Sunday made an unprecedented decision to fund Ukraine’s arms purchases. Antitank and antiaircraft missiles supplied to Ukraine by the U.S., the U.K., Poland and Baltic states before the war’s breakout have already helped to redress the balance, Ukrainian officials have said.
