Washington, Mar. 26: US President Joe Biden met the Ukrainian foreign and defence ministers at the Marriott Hotel in central Warsaw in his first talks with top Kyiv officials since Russia’s invasion began, news agency AFP reported. Biden is due to give a speech in the late afternoon on Saturday in Warsaw saying the “free world” opposes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He will argue in a speech that there is unity among major economies on the need to stop Vladimir Putin, the White House has stated.

The war in Ukraine has killed 136 children in the 31 days since the start of the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s office of the prosecutor general said Saturday in a message on the Telegram app. Meanwhile, Moscow signalled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions in Ukraine to focus on territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists in the east as Ukrainian forces went on the offensive to recapture towns outside the capital Kyiv.

In other news, about 300 people were killed in the Russian airstrike last week on a Mariupol theater that was being used as a shelter, Ukrainian authorities said, in what would make it the war’s deadliest known attack on civilians yet.

One month into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, fire rained down on a shopping mall and high-rise buildings in Kyiv, as the outnumbered Ukrainian military waged intense battles to defend the capital and other key cities from falling under Russian control. Russian forces have wreaked destruction on cities throughout Ukraine over the past four weeks, but they appear to have stalled in many places in the face of fiercer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance.

Nato estimated Wednesday that 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the war started on February 24. On Wednesday, the US made a formal determination that Russia has committed war crimes in Ukraine, as some of the millions who have fled recount tales of horror.

As one woman told The Associated Press: "People are being killed day and night." And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for people around the world to show support for Ukraine on Thursday, which will mark the start of the war's second month.-Agencies