KYIV (NYTIMES) - A day after a Russian strike reduced to rubble a theatre in southern Ukraine where hundreds of people had been huddling for shelter, rescuers wading through the debris - even as Russian shells kept falling - began pulling out survivors one by one.
"Adults and children are emerging from there alive," Ukraine's human rights ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova reported early Thursday (March 17) as the rescue effort continued at the Drama Theatre in Mariupol, a southern port city under siege by Russian forces.
But information was scarce from the desperate city, which has been squarely in Moscow's crosshairs since the invasion began three weeks ago.
With as many as 1,000 people, many of them children, reported to have taken shelter at the theatre and still unaccounted for, fears remained that whatever hope emerged from the rescue scene on Thursday would eventually be eclipsed by despair.
"Our hearts are broken by what Russia is doing to our people, to our Mariupol," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an overnight public address.
The rescue efforts at the theatre came against a fearsome backdrop of thousands of civilian casualties across much of Ukraine. Taking heavy losses on the battlefield, Russian forces have increasingly been aiming bombs and missiles at towns and cities. Unable to capture urban centres, they are levelling them instead, and the toll on civilians is worsening.
In Mariupol, it was people sheltering in a theatre where the word "children" was written in huge letters on the pavement on both sides of the building, clearly visible from the air.
In Chernihiv, it was people waiting in a bread line.
In Kyiv, it was a 16-storey apartment building pierced by a missile fragment, and, amid the debris and broken glass outside, a man with a sweatshirt pulled over his head kneeling silently beside a body under a bloody sheet, holding a lifeless hand for several minutes and then staggering away in grief.
As a fourth consecutive day of peace talks on Thursday yielded no announcements, and the United Nations Security Council held an emergency session on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, Western officials portrayed the Russian advance as bogged down.
While Russian forces have made a bit of progress in the south and east, said one of the officials, they are stalled outside Kyiv, the capital, where they have taken heavy casualties and - perhaps most surprising - have failed to achieve dominance in the air. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.
Given all the setbacks, the Western officials said they were no longer confident that Russia planned a ground assault on Kyiv, a major objective.
"An ill-judged assault on a city as well-prepared and well-defended as Kyiv would be a very costly business," one said. They cautioned that Russia could still decide to assault the city or, failing that, strangle it in a prolonged siege.
As cruise missiles hammered their capital, Ukrainian fighters described several successful, if modest, counteroffensives against Russian forces.
To the east of Kyiv, in the suburban town of Brovary, the thrust of the counterattack focused on artillery, according to Lieutenant Pavlo Proskochilo, military commander in the town. He said Ukrainian artillery strikes had in some places forced the Russians to dig in, assuming more of a defensive than offensive posture.
"We hit them in the teeth," he said. "They are now waiting for reinforcements."
'Murderous dictator'
In recent days, an increasingly brutal war of attrition has been unfolding on the ground and in the air, with fierce battles raging in the suburbs of Kyiv, and Russian warships on the Black Sea launching missiles at towns around the southern city of Odessa. Eyewitness accounts, official statements and satellite imagery paint a picture of destruction on a vast scale. More than 3 million people have fled the country.
On Thursday, United States President Joe Biden heaped unrestrained scorn on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the invasion. A day after labelling Mr Putin a war criminal, Mr Biden, speaking at the Capitol, called him a "murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine".
On Friday, Mr Biden will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping and plans to warn Beijing not to aid Moscow, his spokesman said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that Mr Putin "may be growing more desperate" and warned that Moscow might be preparing to use chemical weapons and had begun to kidnap local officials in Ukraine and replace them with Mr Putin's allies.
The US House of Representatives voted, 424-8, to suspend normal trade relations with Russia, another blow to a country whose economy is already staggering under Western economic penalties.
In recent days, Mr Zelensky has been taking his case directly to Western lawmakers, urging them to help Ukraine fight Russia. To the British Parliament, he recalled the Nazis' campaign of terror. To Congress, he spoke of Pearl Harbour. On Thursday, it was Germany's turn: Mr Zelenskyy, addressing the Bundestag, offered multiple references to German atrocities inflicted on Ukraine and Russia, among others, in World War Two, and analogies to the Berlin Wall.
"You are like behind the wall again," he said. "Not the Berlin Wall but in the middle of Europe, between freedom and slavery."
A British intelligence report said that Russian forces have "made minimal progress on land, sea or air in recent days", and that they "continue to suffer heavy losses".
US assessments have put Russian military deaths at 7,000, although the figure cannot be independently confirmed.
If Russia has miscalculated, the cost may not be limited to the battlefields of Ukraine. On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron, who once famously accused the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military alliance of "brain death", said the war had reinvigorated it, giving the military alliance "an electric shock, a wake-up call".