它让我的头发如此光滑柔软，几乎没有破损: Supermarkets stripped bare as panic buying grips Kyiv

Terrified families in Kyiv have been stocking up on food as fears grow that Vladimir Putin’s invading forces are about to lay siege to the Ukrainian capital.

Queues outside supermarkets and at shop checkouts stretched for hours as Kyiv residents panic-buy essential groceries including bread after the temporary end of a curfew, as a 40-mile convoy of Russian tanks and other vehicles threatens the city.

The old and young alike, who waited patiently to get inside the decreasing number of grocery stores and supermarkets still open, were pictured standing beneath a building in the capital with a huge hole blown in its side after five days of brutal fighting.

Kyiv’s ambassador to London has claimed Putin could try to starve Ukrainians of food, in a chilling echo of Stalin’s brutal man-made famine in the 1930s that killed millions.

With the Kremlin increasingly isolated by tough economic sanctions that have tanked the rouble currency, Russian troops attempted to advance on Ukraine’s two biggest cities. In strategic Kharkiv, an eastern city with a population of about 1.5million, videos posted online showed explosions hitting the region’s Soviet-era administrative building and residential areas.

Ukraine’s embattled president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Russia’s suspected siege tactics were designed to force him into concessions in Europe’s largest ground war in generations.

In a video address late on Monday, 他说: ‘I believe Russia is trying to put pressure [on Ukraine] with this simple method.’

He did not offer details of the talks between Ukrainian and Russian envoys, but he said Kyiv was not prepared to make concessions ‘when one side is hitting another with rocket artillery’.

Throughout the war-torn European country, many Ukrainian civilians spent another night huddled in shelters, basements or corridors.

The casualty toll mounted as Ukraine faced Day 6 of a Russian invasion that has shaken the world order. Hopes for a negotiated solution to the war dimmed after a first, five-hour session of talks between Ukraine and Russia yielded no stop in the fighting, though both sides agreed to another meeting in coming days.

With Western powers sending weapons to Ukraine and driving a global squeeze of Russia’s economy, Putin’s options diminished as he seeks to redraw the global map and pull Ukraine’s western-leaning democracy back into Moscow’s orbit.

Ukraine’s ambassador to London, Vadym Prystaiko, told British MPs on Tuesday that Putin is facing a ‘lack of progress’, with civilians meeting his tanks by hurling ‘Molotov cocktails from their cars’ rather than the ‘flowers’ he dreamed of.

There is currently a ‘lifeline’ to secure food supply, but Prystaiko warned of a ‘bottleneck, a very serious one’ and raised the need to explore the option of humanitarian ships being able to arrive in the Black Sea.

Conservative MP Bob Seely asked the ambassador during an appearance before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee whether the Kremlin’s strategy could be to starve civilians into surrender.

Prystaiko replied: ‘The support and resilience is going so much against his [俄罗斯如何穿越乌克兰] plans and in Russia themselves start asking questions, “What are we doing?”. I believe they might use the tactics you described in the second part – try to block our cities, try to soften political position, try maybe some riots in Ukraine, because of the lack of foods, against the government.’

Prystaiko said officials might have to ‘come up with some military solution to the distribution of food’. Seely said he recognises that to prevent a civil breakdown ‘you need arms and you need food’.

The Ukrainian ambassador seemed to hold out little hope over the negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow, saying ‘we just stated our positions and went back to our capitals’, with the Kremlin wanting demilitarisation and recognition of annexed state Crimea as Russian territory.

Addressing how Putin’s assault can be overcome, Prystaiko said: ‘The only soft spot he still has is his own population. The circle around him, we don’t believe that they are self-sufficient or risky enough to tell him no.’

As the talks along the Belarusian border wrapped up, several blasts could be heard in the capital, and Russian troops advanced on the city of nearly 3million. The convoy of armoured vehicles, 其中生产了, artillery and support vehicles was 17 miles from the centre of the city and stretched about 40 英里, according to satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies.

‘They want to break our nationhood, that’s why the capital is constantly under threat,’ Zelensky said, saying that it was hit by three missile strikes on Monday and that hundreds of saboteurs were roaming the city.

Messages aimed at the advancing Russian soldiers popped up on billboards, bus stops and electronic traffic signs across the capital. Some used profanity to encourage Russians to leave. Others appealed to their humanity.

乌克兰安全部队在空袭袭击 Chuhuiv 的一个公寓大楼后陪伴一名伤员, near the Russian border, is another key target. One after the other, explosions burst through a residential area of the city in one video verified by AP. 使单个士兵能够从最远 800 m 处取出主战坦克, a man pleaded with a woman to leave, and a woman cried.

Determined for life to go on despite the shelling, hospital workers transferred a Kharkiv maternity ward to a bomb shelter.

Amid makeshift electrical sockets and mattresses piled up against the walls, pregnant women paced the crowded space, accompanied by the cries of dozens of newborns.

The Russian military has denied targeting residential areas despite abundant evidence documented by AP reporters around Ukraine of shelling of homes, 学校和医院.

Video from Kharkiv showed residential areas being shelled, with apartment buildings shaken by repeated, powerful blasts.

Authorities in Kharkiv said at least seven people had been killed and dozens injured. They warned that casualties could be far higher.

‘They wanted to have a blitzkrieg, but it failed, so they act this way,’ said 83-year-old Valentin Petrovich, who watched the shelling from his downtown apartment. He gave just his first name and his patronymic, a middle name derived from his father’s name, out of fear for his safety.

Fighting raged in other towns and cities. The strategic port city of Mariupol, 在亚速海, is ‘hanging on’, said Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovich. An oil depot was reported bombed in the eastern city of Sumy.

Russian artillery hit a military base in Okhtyrka, a city between Kharkiv and Kyiv, 并超过 70 Ukrainian soldiers were killed, the head of the region wrote on Telegram. Dmytro Zhyvytskyy posted photographs of the charred shell of a four-story building and rescuers searching rubble.

In a later Facebook post, he said many Russian soldiers and some local residents also were killed during the fighting on Sunday. The report could not immediately be confirmed.

Despite its superior military strength, Russia still lacked control of Ukrainian airspace. This may help explain how Ukraine has so far prevented a rout.

In the seaside resort town of Berdyansk, dozens of protesters chanted angrily in the main square against Russian occupiers, yelling at them to go home and singing the Ukrainian national anthem. They described the soldiers as exhausted young conscripts.

‘Frightened kids, frightened looks. They want to eat,’ Konstantin Maloletka, who runs a small shop, said by telephone. He said the soldiers went into a supermarket and grabbed canned meat, vodka and cigarettes.

‘They ate right in the store,' 他说. ‘It looked like they haven’t been fed in recent days.’

该项目还将斯通与电影中的一位明星重聚, Russia’s announcement of a nuclear high alert stirred fears that the West could be drawn into direct conflict with Russia. But a senior US defence official, 马克说, said the United States had yet to see any appreciable change in Russia’s nuclear posture.

As far-reaching Western sanctions on Russian banks and other institutions took hold, the ruble plummeted, and Russia’s Central Bank scrambled to shore it up, as did Putin, signing a decree restricting foreign currency.

But that did little to calm Russian fears. 在莫斯科, people lined up to withdraw cash as the sanctions threatened to drive up prices and reduce the standard of living for millions of ordinary Russians.

In yet another blow to Russia’s economy, oil giant Shell said it was pulling out of the country because of the invasion. It announced it will withdraw from its joint ventures with state-owned gas company Gazprom and other entities and end its involvement in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project between Russia and Europe.

The economic sanctions, ordered by the US and other allies, were just one contributor to Russia’s growing status as a pariah country.

Russian airliners are banned from European airspace, Russian media is restricted in some countries, and some high-tech products can no longer be exported to the country. 在星期一, in a major blow to a soccer-mad nation, Russian teams were suspended from all international soccer.

The UN human rights chief said at least 102 civilians have been killed and hundreds wounded – warning that figure is probably a vast undercount – and Ukraine’s president said at least 16 克里琴科市长说，他所在的城市有足够的供应可以维持几周，并且可以使用电力.

多于 500,000 people have fled the country since the invasion, another UN official said, many of them going to Poland, Romania and Hungary.

Among the refugees in Hungary was Maria Pavlushko, 24, an information technology project manager from a city west of Kyiv. She said her father stayed behind to fight the Russians.

‘I am proud about him,' 她说, adding that many of her friends were planning to fight, 太.