Moscow and Kyiv made little progress toward easing the conflict on Monday, as Russian forces pressed on with their sieges and bombing of Ukrainian cities.

Amid intensified shelling, a Russian airstrike hit a bread factory in northern Ukraine on Monday, killing at least 13 civilians, Ukrainian officials said.

A third round of talks between the two sides ended with a top Ukrainian official saying there had been minor, unspecified progress toward establishing safe corridors that would allow civilians to escape the fighting. Russia’s chief negotiator said he expects those corridors to start operating Tuesday.

But that remained to be seen, given the failure of previous attempts to lead civilians to safety amid the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II.

The strike on the bread factory in Makariv, just west of the capital Kyiv, took place as the number of refugees fleeing across borders from the Russian assault passed 1.7 million, according to United Nations figures.

Well into the second week of the invasion, with Russian troops making significant advances in southern Ukraine but stalling in some other regions, a top U.S. official said multiple countries were discussing whether to provide the warplanes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been pleading for.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces continued to pummel cities with rockets, and fierce fighting raged in places on the 11th day of the war.

In one of the most desperate cities, the encircled southern port of Mariupol, an estimated 200,000 people – nearly half the population of 430,000 – remained trapped without food and water, hoping to flee, and Red Cross officials waited to hear when a corridor would be established.

"They’re bombing the life out of everything that is moving," Zelenskyy said.

Local emergency services said the bodies of at least 13 civilians were recovered from the rubble after the bakery attack. Five people were rescued of the 30 believed to have been there at the time. Russia denies targeting civilians.

Zelenskyy, speaking on a zoom call with a Jewish group in the United States, said: "The bakery was eliminated. And this is happening in different cities."

In the eastern city of Kharkiv, police said a further 10 people had been killed over the past day, taking the total death toll there from the Russian bombardment to 143 since the start of the invasion. It was not possible to verify the toll.

Small progress

After the third attempt to ease the bloodshed at talks in Belarus, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said that although small progress on agreeing logistics for the evacuation of civilians had been made, things remained largely unchanged.

Podolyak said "there were some small positive shifts regarding logistics of humanitarian corridors" to allow civilians to flee some besieged Ukrainian cities. He said that consultations will continue on ways to negotiate an end to hostilities.

"As of now, there are no results that significantly improve the situation," he said in a video statement, while Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky, told journalists the talks were "not easy."

"We hope that from tomorrow these corridors will finally work," Medinsky said. He noted that no progress has been made on a political settlement, but voiced hope that the next round could be more productive.

A fourth round of talks will take place very soon, Russian negotiator Leonid Slutsky told Russian state television.

‘Completely immoral’

Russia had offered Ukrainians escape routes to Russia and Belarus, its close ally, early on Monday after weekend evacuation cease-fire attempts failed.

A spokesperson for Zelenskyy said the Russian proposal was "completely immoral."

In the capital, Kyiv, soldiers and volunteers have built hundreds of checkpoints to protect the city of nearly 4 million, often using sandbags, stacked tires and spiked cables.

Some barricades looked significant, with heavy concrete slabs and sandbags piled more than two stories high, while others appeared more haphazard, with hundreds of books used to weigh down stacks of tires.

"Every house, every street, every checkpoint, we will fight to the death if necessary," said Mayor Vitali Klitschko.

In Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, with 1.4 million people, heavy shelling slammed into apartment buildings.

"I think it struck the fourth floor under us," Dmitry Sedorenko said from his Kharkiv hospital bed. "Immediately, everything started burning and falling apart." When the floor collapsed beneath him, he crawled out through the third story, past the bodies of some of his neighbors.

Klitschko reported that fierce battles continued in the Kyiv region, notably around Bucha, Hostomel, Vorzel and Irpin.

In the Irpin area, which has been cut off from electricity, water and heat for three days, witnesses saw at least three tanks and said Russian soldiers were seizing houses and cars.

A few miles away, in the small town of Horenka, where shelling reduced one area to ashes and shards of glass, rescuers and residents picked through the ruins as chickens pecked around them.

"What are they doing?" rescue worker Vasyl Oksak asked of the Russian attackers. "There were two little kids and two elderly people living here. Come in and see what they have done."

In the south, Russian forces also continued their offensive in Mykolaiv, opening fire on the Black Sea shipbuilding center of a half-million people, according to Ukraine’s military. Rescuers said they were putting out fires caused by rocket attacks in residential areas.

Russia calls the campaign it launched on Feb. 24 a "special military operation" to disarm Ukraine and remove leaders it describes as neo-Nazis.

Ukraine and its Western allies call this a transparent pretext for an invasion to conquer a nation of 44 million people.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Reuters Moscow would halt operations if Ukraine ceased fighting, amended its constitution to declare neutrality and recognized Russia's annexation of Crimea and the independence of regions held by Russian-backed separatists.

Oil ban mulled

Western nations have placed heavy sanctions on Moscow to isolate it from global commerce and are now considering banning Russian oil imports. Oil prices spiked to their highest levels since 2008 amid the prospect of less supply from Russia, the world's biggest exporter of oil and gas.

International businesses and sports bodies have suspended ties, and wider economic disruption is likely as Russia and Ukraine are both among the world's main exporters of food and industrial metals.

Prices of nickel, which is used to make stainless steel and batteries for electric vehicles, surged about 60% on Monday and have now nearly doubled since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Russian forces were "beginning to accumulate resources for the storming of Kyiv," after days of slow progress in their main advance south from Belarus.

In Mariupol, deputy mayor Sergei Orlov said there had been continuous air raids overnight.

Orlov told CNN authorities were ready to evacuate 6,000 people on Saturday but the Russians had bombed 29 big municipal buses that were to transport them. Moscow has accused the Ukrainians of blocking the planned evacuations.

The U.S. ambassador to the OSCE, Michael Carpenter, told a meeting of its 57 participating states that Russia had bombed agreed evacuation routes out of Volnovakha and Mariupol just as civilians were fleeing.

"It is pure evil," he said.

Ukraine said on Monday its forces had retaken control of the town of Chuhuiv in the northeast after heavy fighting and of the strategic Mykolayiv airport in the south, which the regional governor said was under tank fire. Neither claim could immediately be verified.

In a humanitarian update, the U.N. described one psychiatric hospital 60 kilometers (40 miles) from Kyiv running out of water and medicine with 670 people trapped inside, including bedridden patients with severe needs.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said at least nine people had been confirmed killed in 16 attacks on health care facilities since the start of the war.

Pick up pace

A senior U.S. defense official said Putin had now deployed into Ukraine nearly 100% of the more than 150,000 forces that he had pre-staged outside the country before the invasion.

An analyst with Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, Ed Arnold, said Russia would need to try to consolidate the gains it has already made and pause to mobilize more forces unless the pace of its assault picked up.

Moscow has acknowledged nearly 500 deaths among its soldiers, but Western countries say the true number is much higher and Ukraine says it is many thousands.

Death tolls cannot be verified, but footage filmed across Ukraine shows burnt-out wreckage of Russian tanks and armor, and parts of Ukrainian cities reduced to rubble by Russian strikes.