Treacherous ground conditions tempered hopes of humanitarian relief on Friday for the bomb-ravaged southern city of Mariupol, where tens of thousands of Ukrainians remained trapped under Russian siege as aid workers tried desperately to reach them.
About 6,200 civilians, many of whom apparently had fled Mariupol on their own in recent days and weeks, were transported Friday from Russian-held territory outside the city into the relative safety of a Ukrainian-controlled area. But the International Committee of the Red Cross said its nine-person team was unable to enter Mariupol itself, despite earlier assurances from Moscow of a cease-fire and safe passage for civilians. The team would try again Saturday, the Red Cross said.
Ukrainian officials said the proposed humanitarian corridor was "essentially not operational" and accused Russia of breaking its promise to allow aid into the sealed-off port city, where witnesses have described families starving and buried in rubble.
"Our forecasts remain disappointing," Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser in the Mariupol mayor's office, said in a Telegram post about the chances of safely moving people and supplies. "We are working."
The thwarted relief mission was emblematic of the bleak state of play as the war grinds into a sixth week with no diplomatic breakthrough or decisive military outcome on the horizon. Negotiators met for online peace talks Friday, as Ukrainian officials announced a prisoner exchange, Russia announced missile strikes, and the death toll from an earlier attack on a municipal building in the southern city of Mykolaiv ticked higher. A murky early-morning helicopter raid inside Russia signaled what may have been Ukraine's first cross-border attack of the conflict.
For weeks, Mariupol has been a focus of humanitarian efforts, with aid workers urgently searching for suitable routes in and out of the area encircled by Russian troops. Even as the Red Cross failed to enter the sealed-off city, about 1,800 displaced people from the area that includes Mariupol arrived on 42 buses in Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhzhia on Friday evening, officials said. The buses picked up passengers on the outskirts of Berdyansk, which is also currently controlled by the Russian military, and stayed there overnight Thursday until they could safely leave Friday.
More than 4,000 other civilians, mostly from Mariupol but some from elsewhere, were able to travel out of Russian territory and into Zaporizhzhia in private cars, according to the Zaporizhzhia press service.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the death toll from a missile strike Tuesday on Mykolaiv's main government building rose to 28, officials said, with dozens unaccounted for. More than 30 people were injured, and rescue operations are ongoing, said Dmytro Pletenchuk, a press officer for the regional government. About 200 of the 700 people who normally work at the government office had kept coming in during the war, he said, and could have been in the building when it was hit.
"We keep looking; there are dozens of people under there still," Pletenchuk said. "Those under the rubble are the people who were having breakfast and the canteen staff."
Funerals were held Friday for many of the victims. At Mykolaiv's oldest cemetery, men and women dressed in military fatigues moved from one service at a small Orthodox church to another scheduled just after it.
Andrii Tanulin, a 51-year-old volunteer with the Territorial Defense Forces, died guarding the regional state administration building.
"Forgive me," his mother sobbed over his casket at the funeral Friday. "I couldn't protect him."
Since Russian forces captured the southeastern port of Kherson, they have been unable to advance westward past Mykolaiv. Ukraine's military, instead, has driven the Russians back and retaken some territory around the southern front line, pushing Russian artillery out of range of Mykolaiv's downtown. Tuesday's strike on the administration building came from a cruise missile that originated from Russia's naval fleet on the Black Sea, Pletenchuk said.
"It's because they can't succeed in fighting us, the military," he said. "So they resort to common terrorism."
In Russia early Friday, low-flying attack helicopters swept over the southern city of Belgorod, firing rockets and blowing up fuel tanks, according to Russian media. The local governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, immediately blamed Ukraine for the operation. Ukraine's foreign minister, when asked about the allegations of Ukrainian involvement, said he could not confirm or deny the claim because he did not have all the relevant military information.
Footage of the attack, verified by The Washington Post, surfaced early Friday on Russian Telegram channels. Local media reported that eight fuel tanks were burning, with a risk the fire could spread, and that at least 19 residents from adjacent areas were evacuated.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that President Vladimir Putin had been informed about the incident, which he called an escalation, adding: "This is not something that can be perceived as creating conditions comfortable for the continuation of negotiations."
In an interview Friday with Fox News, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to comment about the helicopter attack, saying: "I do not discuss any of my orders as commander in chief."
Speaking through a translator, Zelensky -- who has been making the rounds of Western media and addressing legislatures in multiple countries -- reiterated his pleas for the Biden administration to send planes and heavy weapons that could tip the scales of a conflict that many national security analysts now consider a war of attrition.
"If we don't have heavy weapons, how can we defend ourselves? How can we fight against one of the strongest armies in the world?" Zelensky asked Fox News's Bret Baier.
Washington has been walking a line between supporting Ukraine and not taking steps that it believes could result in Russia attacking NATO allies.
Also Friday, Russia's Defense Ministry spokesman said cruise missiles had struck a Ukrainian army headquarters in the Donetsk region, "destroying up to 40 personnel and five units of armored equipment and various automobiles."
In other developments, 86 Ukrainian service members from the Zaporizhzhia region, including 15 women, have been freed in a prisoner exchange with Russian forces, Ukrainian presidential adviser Yulia Tymoshenko and Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced Friday. Neither side disclosed the number of Russian prisoners released.
A round of peace talks took place online Friday, David Arakhamia, a senior Ukrainian diplomat participating in the negotiations, said on his Telegram channel. The talks, the first since tentative progress in discussions in Istanbul on Tuesday, yielded no major announcements from either side.
Negotiators have been exploring ways for Ukraine to become a neutral country as part of a broader peace deal. Ukrainian officials have demanded a cease-fire and the withdrawal of Russian forces to the borders that existed on Feb. 23 -- a day before the invasion.
Reports Friday suggested more territory loss for Russia, whose advance has stalled because of setbacks including harsh terrain, faulty equipment, poor morale and fierce Ukrainian resistance, according to analysts and officials. No Russian troops were near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site, Ukraine's State Agency on Exclusion Zone Management said, following reports Thursday that the site had been handed back to Ukrainian personnel.
"At the present moment there are no outsiders at the Chernobylka NPP site," the agency said in a Facebook post, referring to Russian troops and using a Ukrainian spelling for the defunct nuclear facility.
Ukraine's state-owned atomic energy firm, Energoatom, said in a statement on Telegram that all technological equipment at the plant and systems for monitoring radiation were "working normally."
Meanwhile, the governor of the Chernihiv region said Russian troops have pulled back from the Ukrainian city, about 95 miles north of Kyiv. But he warned residents to brace for further bombardment. "The enemy, thanks to our armed forces, is leaving the Chernihiv region, but why he is actually doing it is known only to him," Gov. Viacheslav Chaus said on Telegram.
Chaus said Ukrainian forces have begun ridding the area of mines and clearing out the "foulness" left behind by the retreating Russians. "We still have a lot of work to do, and we still have a war," he said.
On the international stage, Western powers kept up the pressure on China and India to take tougher stances on Russia's invasion. During a virtual summit Friday that was meant to focus on E.U.-China relations, European Union leaders called on China to do more to help end hostilities. Chinese leaders insisted Beijing would pursue peace "its own way."
In New Delhi, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar held talks with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. The visit came a day after the U.S. deputy national security adviser for international economics, Daleep Singh, suggested in Delhi that there would be "consequences" for countries trying to "circumvent" sanctions against Moscow.
Also Friday, UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, warned of a grave risk to Ukraine's historic sites. The agency said it has no knowledge of damage to Ukraine's seven official world heritage sites, which include the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv and Lviv's historic center. But at least 53 other culturally significant sites have been damaged or destroyed since Feb. 24.
"Humanity's heritage is at risk" in Ukraine, UNESCO official Ernesto Ottone said at a news conference in Paris.
The Washington Post