By YURAS KARMANAU

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia widened its military offensive in Ukraine on Friday, striking near airports in the west of the country for the first time, as observers and satellite photos indicated that its troops, long stalled in a convoy outside the capital Kyiv, were maneuvering in an attempt to encircle the city.

The U.S. and its allies prepared to step up their efforts to isolate and sanction Russia by revoking its most favored trading status. But with the invasion now in its third week, the new moves on the ground pointed to Russia forces trying to regroup, bombarding new cities as they tightened their 10-day-old siege on the key Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, where tens of thousands were struggling to find food.

The new airstrikes in western Ukraine were likely a message from Russia that no area was safe. Western and Ukrainian officials have said the Russian forces have struggled in the face of heavier-than-expected resistance and supply and morale problems. So far, they have made the most advances on cities in the south and east while stalling in the north and around Kyiv.

Strikes on the western Lutsk airfield killed four Ukrainian servicemen and wounded six, according to Lutsk Mayor Ihor Polishchuk. In Ivano-Frankivsk, residents were ordered to shelters after an air raid alert, Mayor Ruslan Martsinkiv said.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Russia used high-precision long-range weapons Friday to put military airfields in Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk “out of action.” He did not provide details.

In another potentially ominous movement, new satellite photos appeared to show that the massive Russian convoy outside the Ukrainian capital had fanned out into nearby towns and forests.

Howitzers were towed into positions to open fire, and armored units were seen in towns near the the Antonov Airport north of the city, according to Maxar Technologies, the company that produced the images.

The 40-mile (64-kilometer) line of vehicles, tanks and artillery had massed outside Kyiv early last week. But its advance had appeared to stall amid reports of food and fuel shortages while Ukrainian troops also targeted it with anti-tank missiles.

The new moves suggest the convoy forces were now moving west around the city, making their way south to encircle it,, according to Jack Watling, a research fellow at British defense think-tank Royal United Services Institute.

“They’re about half-way around now,” he told BBC radio. He said they were likely preparing for a “siege rather than assault” on Kyiv because of continuing low morale and logistical problems. A missile Friday hit the town of Baryshivka, on Kyiv’s eastern perimeter, significantly damaging buildings, according to the regional administration.

The British Ministry of Defense said that after making “limited progress,” Russian forces were trying to “re-set and re-posture” their troops, gearing up for operations against Kyiv.

Moscow also indicated it plans to bring fighters from Syria into the conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin approved bringing in “volunteer” fighters and told his defense minister to help them “move to the combat zone.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the “volunteers” include fighters from Syria.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia knew of “more than 16,000 applications” from countries in the Middle East, many of them from people he said had helped Russia against the Islamic State group, according to a Kremlin transcript.

Since 2015, Russian forces have backed Syrian President Assad against various groups opposed to his rule, including Islamic State. Opposition activists in Syria have also reported Russian recruitment efforts in the country for the Ukraine war. But they estimate the number of volunteers so far is in the hundreds or a few thousand.

Revoking Russia’s “most favored nation” trade status by the U.S. and other nations would allow higher tariffs to be imposed on some Russian imports. Western sanctions have already dealt a severe blow to Russia, causing the ruble to plunge, foreign businesses to flee and prices to rise sharply.

Putin has insisted Russia can endure sanctions. After meeting in Moscow with the president of Belarus, Putin said there have been “certain positive developments” in Russia-Ukraine negotiations. But he offered no details.

Meanwhile, the offensive on Ukrainian cities has expanded.

In Syria, Russia backed the government in imposing long, brutal sieges on opposition-held cities, wreaking heavy destruction on residential area and causing widespread civilian casualties. That history, along with the ongoing siege of the Azov Sea port of Mariupol, has raised fears of similar bloodshed in Ukraine.

Russian airstrikes Friday targeted for the first time the eastern city of Dnipro, a major industrial hub and Ukraine’s fourth-largest city in a strategic position on the Dnieper River. Three strikes hit, killing at least one person, according to Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Heraschenko.

In images of the strikes’ aftermath released by Ukraine’s state emergency agency, firefighters doused a flaming building and scattered ash fell on bloodied rubble. Smoke billowed over shattered concrete and collapsed sidings where buildings once stood.

The Ukrainian general staff said Friday that the attacks in the west and in Dnipro were launched because the Russians were “unable to succeed” on other fronts. It said Russian efforts Friday remain concentrated around Kyiv and Mariupol, and that Russian forces are regrouping in the north and around the eastern cities of Sumy and Kharkiv.

Temperatures sank below freezing across most of Ukraine and were forecast to hit -13 degrees Celsius (8 Fahrenheit) in Kharkiv, which has come under heavy bombardment. Some 400 apartment buildings were cut off from heating supplies, and Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov appealed to remaining residents to descend into the subway system or other underground shelters where authorities and volunteers were distributing blankets and hot food.

A deadly strike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol this week sparked international outrage and charges of a possible war crime.

Mariupol residents said bombardment continued Friday. Konashenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, said Russian-backed fighters have advanced up to 800 meters from Mariupol from the east, north and west, further squeezing the city which has the Azov Sea to its south. He said the advance was being conducted by fighters from the separatist-held Donetsk region, the standard Russian line for fighting in the east.

Ukrainian authorities are planning to send aid to Mariupol, home to some 430,000, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a video message.

Repeated previous attempts have failed as aid and rescue convoys were targeted by Russian shelling, even as residents have grown more desperate, scrounging for food and fuel.

More than 1,300 people have died in the siege, Vereshchuk said. “They want to destroy the people of Mariupol. They want to make them starve,” she added. “It’s a war crime.”

Residents have no heat or phone service. Bodies are being buried in mass graves. Grocery stores and pharmacies were emptied days ago by people breaking in to get supplies, according to a local official with the Red Cross, Sacha Volkov. A black market is operating for vegetables, meat is unavailable, Volkov said.

Residents, Volkov said, are turning on one another: “People started to attack each other for food.”

Vereshchuk also announced efforts to create new humanitarian corridors to bring aid to people in areas occupied or under Russian attack around the cities of Kherson in the south, Chernihiv in the north and Kharkiv in the east.

Some 2.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the invasion began, the International Organization for Migration said Friday. Millions more have been driven from their homes. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said about 2 million people, half the metropolitan area’s population, have left the capital.

___

Associated Press journalists Felipe Dana and Andrew Drake in Kyiv, Ukraine, along with other reporters around the world contributed.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

By EVGENIY MALOLETKA and MSTYSLAV CHERNOV

MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — A Russian airstrike on a Mariupol maternity hospital that killed three people drew outrage on Thursday, with Ukrainian and Western officials branding it a war crime. As talks to reach a broad cease-fire failed, emergency workers renewed efforts to get vital food and medical supplies into besieged cities, and to get traumatized residents out.

Ukrainian authorities said a child was among the dead in Wednesday’s attack in the crucial southern port of Mariupol. Another 17 people were wounded, including women waiting to give birth, doctors and children buried in the rubble.

Images of pregnant women covered in dust and blood dominated news reports in many countries, and brought a new wave of horror at the 2-week-old war sparked by Russia’s invasion, which has killed thousands of soldiers and civilians, driven more than 2 million people from Ukraine and shaken the foundations of European security.

Millions more have been displaced inside the country. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday that about 2 million people — half the residents of the capital’s metropolitan area — have left the city, which has become virtually a a fortress.

“Every street, every house … is being fortified,” he said in televised remarks. “Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands.”

Bombs also fell on two hospitals in a city west of Kyiv on Wednesday, its mayor said. The World Health Organization said it has confirmed 18 attacks on medical facilities since the Russian invasion began two weeks ago.

As the war entered its third week, Western officials said Russian forces have made little progress on the ground in recent days. But they have intensified the bombardment of Mariupol and other cities, trapping hundreds of thousands of people, with food and water running short.

Temporary cease-fires to allow evacuations and humanitarian aid have often faltered, with Ukraine accusing Russia of continuing their bombardments. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 35,000 people managed to get out on Wednesday from several besieged towns, and more efforts were underway on Thursday from towns and cities in eastern and southern Ukraine — including Mariupol — as well as the Kyiv suburbs.

The Mariupol city council posted a video Thursday showing buses driving down a highway, with a note saying that a convoy bringing food and medicine was on the way despite several days of thwarted efforts to reach the city.

“Everyone is working to get help to the people of Mariupol. And it will come,” said Mayor Vadym Boychenko.

Images from the city, where hundreds have died and workers hurried to bury some of the bodies in a mass grave, have drawn condemnation from around the world. The living have resorted to breaking into shops for food or melting snow for water. The city has been without heat for days as nighttime temperatures fall below freezing and daytime ones hover just above it.

When the series of blasts hit the children’s and maternity hospital in Mariupol, the ground shook more than a mile away. Explosions blew out windows and ripped away much of the front of one building. Police and soldiers rushed to the scene to evacuate victims, carrying a bleeding woman with a swollen belly on a stretcher past burning and mangled cars. Another woman wailed as she clutched her child.

Britain’s Armed Forces minister, James Heappey, said that whether hitting the hospital was “indiscriminate” fire into a built-up area or a deliberate targeting, “it is a war crime.”

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, on a visit to Ukraine’s neighbor Poland, backed calls for an international war-crimes investigation into the invasion, saying “the eyes of the world are on this war and what Russia has done in terms of this aggression and these atrocities.”

Polish President Andrzej Duda called the strike on the hospital an “act of barbarity” and said “it is obvious to us that in Ukraine Russians are committing war crimes.”

Regional Ukrainian police official Volodymir Nikulin, standing in the ruins, called the Mariupol attack “a war crime without any justification.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed concerns about civilian casualties as “pathetic shrieks” from Russia’s enemies. He claimed without providing evidence that the Mariupol hospital had been seized by far-right radical fighters who were using it as a base — despite the fact that photographs from the aftermath show pregnant women and children at the site.

Several rounds of talks have not stopped the fighting, and a meeting in a Turkish Mediterranean resort between Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba failed to yield much common ground.

In their highest-level talks since the war began, the two sides discussed a 24-hour cease-fire but did not make progress, Kuleba said. He said Russia was still seeking “surrender from Ukraine.”

“This is not what they are going to get,” he said, adding that he was willing to continue the dialogue.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for an “immediate cease-fire” in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.

Lavrov also said Russia was ready for more negotiations but showed no sign of softening Moscow’s demands. He said Putin could meet with Zelenskyy but only after further negotiations about Russia’s broader grievances.

Russia has alleged that western-looking, U.S.-backed Ukraine posed a threat to its security — but Western officials suspect Putin would like to install a government friendly to Moscow in Kyiv as part of efforts to draw the ex-Soviet state back into its orbit.

Russia’s military is currently struggling, facing stronger than expected Ukrainian resistance and heavier losses of its own troops. But Putin’s invading force of more than 150,000 troops retains possibly insurmountable advantages in firepower as it bears down on key cities.

Despite often heavy shelling on populated areas, American military officials reported little change on the ground over the previous 24 hours, other than Russian progress against the cities of Kharkiv in the east and Mykolaiv in the south, in heavy fighting.

Western countries have sought to hasten the war’s end by imposing punishing sanctions on Russia, and a cascade of global companies have abandoned the country, plunging its economy into isolation.

Britain added more oligarchs to its sanctions list on Thursday, including Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Premier League soccer club Chelsea. The government said Abramovich’s assets — including Chelsea — were frozen, he was banned from visiting the U.K. and barred from transactions with U.K. individuals and businesses.

The fighting has repeatedly raised the specter of a nuclear disaster. It knocked out power to the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant on Wednesday, raising fears about the spent radioactive fuel stored there that must be kept cool. But the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said it saw “no critical impact on safety.”

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk pleaded Thursday with the Russian military to allow access for repair crews to restore electricity to the plant, and to fix a damaged gas pipeline in the south that left Mariupol and other towns without heat.

___

Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Felipe Dana and Andrew Drake in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed along with other reporters around the world.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

By ALAN FRAM

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional leaders reached a bipartisan deal early Wednesday providing $13.6 billion to help Ukraine and European allies plus billions more to battle the pandemic as part of an overdue $1.5 trillion measure financing federal agencies for the rest of this year.

Though a tiny fraction of the massive bill, the money countering a Russian blitzkrieg that’s devastated parts of Ukraine and prompted Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II ensured the measure would pass with robust bipartisan support. President Joe Biden requested $10 billion for military, humanitarian and economic aid last week, and Democratic and Republican backing was so staunch that the figure grew to $12 billion Monday and $13.6 billion just a day later.

“We’re going to support them against tyranny, oppression, violent acts of subjugation,” Biden said at the White House.

Party leaders planned to whip the 2,741-page measure through the House on Wednesday and the Senate by week’s end, though that chamber’s exact timing was unclear. Lawmakers were spurred by the urgency of helping Ukraine before Russia’s military might makes it too late.

They also faced a Friday deadline to approve the government-wide spending measure or face a weekend election-year federal shutdown. As a backstop against delays, the House planned to pass a bill Wednesday keeping agencies afloat through March 15.

Over $4 billion of the Ukraine aid was to help the country and Eastern European nations cope with the 2 million refugees who’ve already fled the fighting. Another $6.7 billion was for the deployment of U.S. troops and equipment to the region and to transfer American military items to Ukraine and U.S. allies, and there was economic aid and money to enforce economic sanctions against Russia as well.

“War in Europe has focused the energies of Congress to getting something done and getting it done fast,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the measure would provide loan guarantees to Poland to help it replace aircraft it is sending Ukraine. “It’s been like pulling teeth” to get Democrats to agree to some of the defense spending, he said. But he added, “It’s an important step. It needs to be passed. It needs to be passed quickly.”

The bipartisan rallying behind the Ukraine aid was just one manifestation of Congress’ eagerness to help the beleaguered country, though not all of it has been harmonious.

Republicans accused Biden of moving too slowly to help Ukraine and NATO allies and to impose sanctions against Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Democrats countered that time was needed to bring along European allies that rely heavily on Russian energy sources. And a bipartisan push to ban Russian oil imports had become nearly unstoppable before Biden announced Tuesday that he would do that on his own.

The huge overall bill was stocked with victories for both parties.

For Democrats, it provides $730 billion for domestic programs, 6.7% more than last year, the biggest boost in four years. Republicans won $782 billion for defense, 5.6% over last year’s levels.

In contrast, Biden’s 2022 budget last spring proposed a 16% increase for domestic programs and less than 2% more for defense — numbers that were doomed from the start thanks to Democrats’ slender congressional majorities.

The bill was also fueled by large numbers of hometown projects for both parties’ lawmakers, which Congress had banned since 2011 but were revived this year. The spending — once called earmarks, now dubbed community projects — includes money for courthouses in Connecticut and Tennessee and repairs to a post office in West Virginia. And it names a federal building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, after Sen. Richard Shelby, the state’s senior GOP senator, a chief author of the bill who’s retiring after six terms.

Democrats won $15.6 billion for a fresh round of spending for vaccines, testing and treatments for COVID-19, including $5 billion for fighting the pandemic around the world. That was below Biden’s $22.5 billion request.

Republicans said they’d forced Democrats to pay for the entire amount by pulling back money from COVID-19 relief bills enacted previously. Much of the money was to go to help states and businesses cope with the toll of the pandemic.

There’s added money for child care, job training, economic development in poorer communities and more generous Pell grants for low-income undergraduates. Public health and biomedical research would get increases, including $194 million for Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” effort to cure the disease.

Citizenship and Immigration Services would get funds to reduce huge backlogs of people trying to enter the U.S. There would be fresh efforts to bolster renewable energy and curb pollution, with some of that aimed specifically at communities of color.

There is added funding to build affordable housing. And the measure distributes billions of dollars initially provided by the bipartisan infrastructure bill enacted last year for road, rail and airport projects.

The bill “delivers transformative federal investments to help lower the cost of living for working families, create American jobs, and provide a lifeline for the vulnerable,” said House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn.

The bill renews programs protecting women against domestic violence and requires many infrastructure operators to report significant cyber attacks and ransomware demands to federal authorities. The Defense Department would have to report on extremist ideologies within the ranks.

The measure retains strict decades-old curbs against using federal money for nearly all abortions. It has $300 million in military assistance for Ukraine and $300 million to help nearby countries like the Baltic nations and Poland. Service members would get 2.7% pay raises, and Navy shipbuilding would get a boost in a counter to China.

It “rejects liberal policies and effectively addresses Republican priorities,” said Shelby, top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Since the government’s fiscal year began last Oct. 1, agencies have been running on spending levels approved during Donald Trump’s final weeks in the White House. Congress has approved three short-term bills since then keeping agency doors open.

___

Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.