KYIV, March 3, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - The United States raised the alarm
Wednesday over the "staggering" human cost of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine,
as the apparent deployment of cluster bombs and other treaty-violating
weapons raised fears of a brutal escalation in the week-old conflict.

  The American warnings came as Russia revealed 498 of its troops had been
killed in the assault on ex-Soviet Ukraine -- the first official death toll
it has given and one Kyiv says is by far an undercount.

  And they came on the eve of the resumption of ceasefire talks after a first
round Monday failed to produce a breakthrough.

  On the ground in Ukraine, Russia appeared despite determined resistance to
be intensifying the offensive ordered seven days earlier by President
Vladimir Putin -- in defiance of almost the entire international community.

  "Today was the hardest, cruellest of the seven days of this war," said
Vadym Boychenko, the mayor of the key southeastern port of Mariupol who said
Russian forces pummelled the city for hours and were attempting to block
civilians from leaving.

  "Today they just wanted to destroy us all," he said in a video on Telegram,
accusing Russian forces of shooting at residential buildings.

  Boychenko said more of the city's vital infrastructure was damaged in the
assault, leaving people without light, water or heating.

  In Washington, top US diplomat Antony Blinken warned the human costs were
already "staggering," accusing Russia of attacking places that "aren't
military targets."

  "Hundreds if not thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded," said
the secretary of state, who will travel to eastern Europe next week to shore
up support for Ukraine -- and for efforts to secure a ceasefire.

  Kyiv is sending a delegation to the Thursday ceasefire talks, at an
undisclosed location on the Belarus-Poland border, but has warned it would
not accept "ultimatums."

   - UN rebuke -

  At the United Nations, the General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a
resolution Wednesday that "demands" Russia "immediately" withdraw from
Ukraine, in a powerful rebuke of Moscow by a vast majority of the world's
nations.

  After more than two days of extraordinary debate, which saw the Ukrainian
envoy accuse Russia of genocide, 141 out of 193 member states backed the non-
binding resolution -- with only Eritrea, North Korea, Syria and Belarus
joining Russia against.

  At least 350 civilians including 14 children have so far been killed,
Ukrainian authorities say, and hundreds of thousands have fled the country
since the invasion began, triggering punishing Western sanctions intended to
cripple Russia's economy.

  The UN rights office, OHCHR, said it had registered 752 civilian casualties
including 227 deaths -- but believes the reality is "considerably higher."

  "The humanitarian consequences will only grow in the days ahead," Blinken
warned.

  At the UN, the US ambassador echoed Blinken's alarm about mounting civilian
deaths -- accusing Moscow of moving cluster munitions and other arms banned
under international conventions into its neighbour.

  "It appears Russia is preparing to increase the brutality of its campaign
against Ukraine," Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the General Assembly.

  Russia said Wednesday it had captured the Black Sea port of Kherson,
population 290,000, though the claim was not confirmed by mayor Igor
Nikolayev who appealed online for permission to transport the dead and
wounded out of the city and for food and medicine to be allowed in.

  "Without all this, the city will die," he wrote.

  AFP witnessed the aftermath of apparent Russian bombing on a market and a
residential area in Zhytomyr in central Ukraine, and in Kharkiv, Ukraine's
second biggest city.

  "There is nowhere in Kharkiv where shells have not yet struck," said Anton
Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, after Russian
airborne troops landed in the city before dawn.

  Shelling in the northeastern city of 1.4 million a day earlier drew
comparisons to the massacres of civilians in Sarajevo in the 1990s.

  - 'Erase us all' -

  As Russian artillery massed outside Kyiv, the former champion boxer turned
city mayor Vitali Klitschko vowed to stand strong.

  "The enemy is drawing up forces closer to the capital," he said. "Kyiv is
holding and will hold. We are going to fight."

  Residents have been hunkered down in Kyiv for a week and dozens of families
were sheltering Wednesday in the Dorohozhychi metro station.

  In a video address, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian
forces wanted to "erase our country, erase us all".

  Five people were killed in an attack a day earlier on the Kyiv television
tower at Babi Yar, the site of a Nazi massacre in which over 33,000 people
were killed -- most of them Jews.

  The 44-year-old Zelensky, who is himself Jewish, urged Jewish people around
the world to speak up.

  "Nazism is born in silence. So, shout about killings of civilians. Shout
about the murders of Ukrainians," he said.

  - New US sanctions -

  With the civilian toll mounting, opposition to the conflict is also growing
within Russia.

  Dozens of anti-war demonstrators were detained in Moscow and Saint
Petersburg after jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny called Russians to the
streets, dismissing Putin as "an insane little tsar".

  Internationally, meanwhile, the United States announced a new set of
sanctions, this time targeting Russian ally Belarus and Russia's defense
industry.

  Authoritarian Belarus and Russia are closely linked and Belarus has been
used as a key staging ground for the invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

  Western countries have already imposed heavy sanctions on Russia's economy
and there have been international bans and boycotts against Russia in
everything from finance to tech, from sports to the arts.

  In France, President Emmanuel Macron said in an address to the nation
Europe had entered a "new era," and would need to both invest in its defences
and wean itself off reliance on Russian gas.

  EU and NATO members have already sent arms and ammunition to Ukraine,
although they have made clear that they will not send troops and the EU has
dampened Zelensky's hopes of membership of the bloc.

  - Chelsea for sale -

  In its latest move to isolate Russia, the European Union banned broadcasts
of Russian state media RT and Sputnik and excluded seven Russian banks from
the global SWIFT bank messaging system.

  London, meanwhile, Chelsea's Russian owner Roman Abramovich said he had
made the "incredibly difficult" decision to sell the Premier League club,
pledging proceeds would go to Ukraine war victims.

  Abramovich, alleged to have close links to Putin, has not been named on a
British sanctions list targeting Russian banks, businesses and pro-Kremlin
tycoons.

  But the Chelsea owner's concern about potential seizing of assets is
understood to have sparked his move.