‘Tear down’ the new wall in Europe

It's not a Berlin Wall -- it is a Wall in central Europe between freedom and bondage and this Wall is growing bigger with every bomb. … Dear Mr Scholz, tear down this Wall. Give Germany the leadership role that you in Germany deserve.

— Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tells German parliament

Ukraine's leader yesterday charged Moscow with building a new Cold War wall across Europe "between freedom and bondage", as his government said Russian shelling had killed 21 civilians near one city.

Three weeks in to their devastating invasion, Russian forces also stood accused of bombing a theatre sheltering many civilians and marked with the word "children".

Kyiv emerged from a 35-hour curfew to new destruction, as Russian troops try to encircle the Ukrainian capital as part of their slow-moving offensive.

Beneath a Kyiv apartment block damaged by a downed rocket, AFP journalists saw a distraught man crouched over a body draped in a bloodstained cloth, after the latest in a series of early-morning attacks.

The 21 were killed when overnight artillery fire pounded a school and a cultural centre in the town of Merefa outside the hard-hit eastern city of Kharkiv, regional prosecutors said.

In besieged Mariupol to the south, searchers were combing through the smoking rubble of the Drama Theatre where more than 1,000 civilians had been sheltering in a basement bomb shelter, and Ukrainian officials said that Russian shelling was continuing.

Kremlin denied it had targeted the theatre, and also rejected an order by the top UN court to halt its Ukraine invasion.

President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday addressed the German parliament a day after a speech to the US Congress, when he secured $1 billion in new US military aid, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles used against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Zelensky reached back to that Cold War era as he drew on a 1987 speech in Berlin by US president Ronald Reagan: "Dear Mr Scholz, tear down this Wall," he implored German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

"It's not a Berlin Wall -- it is a Wall in central Europe between freedom and bondage and this Wall is growing bigger with every bomb."

US President Joe Biden called Putin a "war criminal", triggering fury in the Kremlin, as the Russian leader also lashed out at "traitors" at home who he said were undermining the war effort.

British military intelligence said in an update yesterday that the invasion had "largely stalled on all fronts", and Russian forces were suffering heavy losses from a staunch and well-coordinated Ukrainian resistance, reports Reuters.

Nato members, meanwhile, resisted Zelensky's pleas for direct involvement through a no-fly zone over Ukraine, warning it could lead to World War III against nuclear-armed Russia.

More than three million Ukrainians have fled across the border, mostly women and children, with 103 children killed in the war, authorities said.

With stop-start peace talks ongoing, officials in Kyiv said Russia had agreed to nine humanitarian corridors yesterday for fleeing refugees, including one out of Mariupol.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said a "compromise" outcome in the talks would centre on Ukraine becoming a neutral state comparable to Sweden and Austria -- an idea roundly rejected by Kyiv.