Rockets struck the outskirts of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Saturday for what appeared to be the first time since Russia's invasion, and Russian forces took control of a town where workers at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant live.
Intense fighting raged in several parts of Ukraine, suggesting there will be no swift let-up in the month-old war, and US President Joe Biden called Russia's Vladimir Putin a "butcher" after meeting Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
The Kremlin was cited by Russia's TASS news agency as saying such comments would further damage prospects for mending Russian-US ties.
After more than four weeks of fighting, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and the conflict has killed thousands of people, sent nearly 3.8 million abroad and driven more than half of Ukraine's children from their homes, according to the UN.
Moscow signalled on Friday it was scaling back its military ambitions to focus on territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists in the east.
But two rockets hit the outskirts of Lviv, some 60km from the Polish border, a city that so far has escaped the heavy bombardment and fighting that has devastated some Ukrainian cities closer to Russia.
Regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyy said five people had been wounded and residents were told to head to shelters after three powerful blasts in mid-afternoon. Reuters witnesses saw black smoke rising from the northeast side of the city and Lviv's mayor said an oil storage facility had been hit.
Russian troops seized Slavutych, a town where workers at the nearby Chernobyl plant live, the regional governor said.
He said Russian forces had fired into the air and thrown stun grenades to disperse residents who unfurled a large Ukrainian flag and shouted "glory to Ukraine" in protest. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
Slavutych sits just outside the so-called exclusion zone around Chernobyl, which was the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986.
Ukrainian staff have continued to work at Chernobyl after the plant was seized by Russian forces soon after the start of the February 24 invasion and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has expressed alarm about the situation if workers are unable to rotate.
In the encircled southern city of Mariupol, Mayor Vadym Boichenko said the situation remained critical, with street fighting in the centre. Mariupol has been devastated by weeks of Russian fire.
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In an address to Qatar's Doha Forum, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy compared the devastation in Mariupol to the destruction inflicted on the Syrian city of Aleppo by combined Syrian and Russian forces in Syria's civil war.
"They are destroying our ports," Zelenskiy said, warning of dire consequence if his country - one of the world's major grains producers - could not export its foodstuffs. "The absence of exports from Ukraine will deal a blow to countries worldwide."
Speaking via video link, he also called on energy-producing countries to increase their output so that Russia cannot use its oil and gas wealth to "blackmail" other nations.
Laid waste
Footage from Mariupol, home to 400,000 people before the war, showed destroyed buildings, burnt-out vehicles and shell-shocked survivors venturing out for provisions. Residents have buried victims in makeshift graves as the ground thaws.
"It's scary, I don't know how we're going to survive," an elderly woman resident said, declining to identify herself by name. "We're lying there, hoping they won't bomb us. Look at how many dead bodies we've buried around the building."
To the north, battle lines near the capital Kyiv have been frozen for weeks with two main Russian armoured columns stuck northwest and east of the city.
The Russian defence ministry said its troops had seized a dug-in command centre in a Kyiv suburb and captured more than 60 Ukrainian servicemen. Reuters could not immediately verify this.
A UK intelligence report said Russian forces were relying on indiscriminate air and artillery bombardments rather than risk large-scale ground operations, a tactic the report said could limit Russian military casualties but would harm more civilians in Ukraine.
