Xi urges world for 'maximum restraint' over Ukraine

Chinese President Xi Jinping yesterday urged "maximum restraint" over Ukraine, calling the crisis "deeply worrying" in a video summit with his French and German counterparts, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz.

Xi's comments come almost two weeks after Russia launched a "special military operation" in Ukraine.

The UN says the number of people fleeing the violence has now crossed 2 million.

Xi said he wanted "the two sides to maintain the momentum of negotiations, overcome difficulties and continue the talks to achieve results," according to state broadcaster CCTV.

"We would like to call for maximum restraint to prevent a large-scale humanitarian crisis," he said.

"The current situation in Ukraine is deeply worrying," he said, adding that China is "grieved that there is renewed war on the European continent."

China has also said it will send humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

On Monday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters that Beijing was open to helping mediate peace.

Russian and Ukrainian negotiators failed to achieve major breakthrough during their third round of peace talks in Belarus on Monday.

A senior Russian negotiator said the fourth round will take place in "the very near future."

"The discussions continued on political and military aspects," said Russian presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation.

"However, it remains difficult.

"It is too early to talk about something positive," Russian negotiators brought specific agreements to the talks.

"But the Ukrainian side refused to sign them on the spot and took the documents home for further study," he told reporters.

"To be honest, our expectations from the talks were not met.

"But we hope that next time we will be able to take a more significant step forward," Medinsky said after the meeting, which lasted nearly three hours at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha on the Belarus-Poland border.

Both sides addressed the issue of civilian evacuation.

And the Ukrainian side assured Russia that the humanitarian corridors would start working yesterday, he said.

"There were some small positive shifts regarding logistics of humanitarian corridors," said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president.

He did not elaborate.

Ukrainian officials said the talks did not provide much momentum on a ceasefire or an end to hostilities.

Leonid Slutsky, member of the Russian delegation and head of the International Affairs Committee of the lower house of the Russian parliament, said that the fourth round of talks would take place soon.

"And the next round, given that the rounds take place almost every other day, so the next, fourth round will take place in Belarus in the very, very near future. I can't name the exact date yet," Slutsky said.

Thousands more people fleeing fierce fighting in Ukraine streamed into central and eastern Europe yesterday amid renewed efforts to create safe evacuation routes from cities being bombarded by Russian forces.

Two million people – mostly women and children – have now fled Ukraine since the beginning of the war on February 24, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said.

Evacuations from Sumy to the city of Poltava further west have also begun.

"We have already started the evacuation of civilians from Sumy to Poltava, including foreign students," Ukraine's foreign ministry said in a tweet.

"We call on Russia to uphold its ceasefire commitment, to refrain from activities that endanger the lives of people and to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid."

Residents were also leaving the town of Irpin, a frontline Kiev suburb where families fled for their lives under fierce bombardment on Sunday.

Residents ran with their young children in strollers or cradling babies in arms, while others carried pets and plastic bags of belongings.

"The city is almost ruined, and the district where I'm living, it's like there are no houses which were not bombed," said one young mother, holding a baby beneath a blanket, while her daughter stood by her side.

"Yesterday was the hardest bombing, and the lights and sound is so scary, and the whole building is shaking."

With fighting around many of Ukraine's main cities intensifying under Russian missile and artillery attacks, authorities across eastern Europe are struggling to accommodate the swelling wave of refugees.

"As far as the accommodation is concerned, there are indeed times when it gets very crowded," said Witold Wolczyk, from the mayor's office of Przemysl, a town near Poland's busiest border crossing that has become a transit hub for Ukrainian refugees.

"Last night we managed to get 30 buses out of Przemysl, they went in different directions ... We are trying to do our best to make this traffic flow smoothly," he said.

At the Medyka border crossing, east of Przemysl, where refugees have been arriving by foot and by car, the line of waiting vehicles stretched about 6 kilometers with waiting times on the Ukrainian side of the border running at 20 hours, two women said after they made it across.

Nearly two weeks into what Russia insists is a "military operation," the head of the UNCR warned that the initial burst of refugees was likely to be followed by a second wave of more vulnerable people, without resources or connections.

5 million refugees?

"That will be a more complex situation to manage for European countries going forward, and there will need to be even more solidarity by everybody in Europe and beyond," Filippo Grandi told a news conference in Oslo.

European Union officials have said the bloc could see the arrival of some 5 million people. So far, most of those fleeing remain in the countries bordering Ukraine, led by Poland, which has taken in well over a million so far.

After several aborted efforts to create "humanitarian corridors" for civilians fleeing some of the fiercest fighting, Ukrainian officials said evacuations had begun from the besieged city of Sumy, as well as from the town of Irpin on the outskirts of Kiev.

Nearly 300,000 people have crossed into Romania since the conflict began, roughly half of whom have entered from non-EU member Moldova.

More than 140,000 had reached Slovakia and almost 200,000 crossed into Hungary, officials say.

Authorities said more than 100,000 people had gone to the Czech Republic, where Prague's refugee assistance center reopened after a closure due to over-capacity on Monday.

More than 43,000 had entered Bulgaria.

As of Monday, the UN had confirmed the deaths of 406 civilians in Ukraine.

But it said the real figure was likely to be much higher, while hundreds of thousands of people had been cut off from aid due to the fighting.