Ukrainian officials have said Kyiv is “ready to fight” as Russian forces renewed their bombardment on the capital and observers warned of “an unimaginable tragedy” unfolding after more than two weeks of war.

Air raid sirens and shelling rang out over Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities on Saturday morning amid warnings from western defence officials that the Russians were beginning to gain ground around the capital.

There were reports of loud explosions in Dnipro in the country’s east on Saturday, as well as Mykolaiv, Nikolaev and Kropyvnytskyi.

But Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said the capital was “ready to fight”. He called it a “city under siege”, with checkpoints prepared and supply lines in place. “Kyiv will stand until the end.”

Satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies on Saturday has shown homes and buildings on fire and Russian artillery battalions appearing to fire on towns surrounding to the north-west of the Ukrainian capital as forces advance. The Guardian has not independently verified the images.

A senior US defence official said at a Pentagon briefing on Friday: “We do assess that the Russians are beginning to make more momentum on the ground towards Kyiv, particularly from the east.”

The UK Ministry of Defence said on Saturday morning that “the bulk of Russian ground forces” were around 25km from the centre of Kyiv, while the cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Mariupol remain encircled and continued to suffer heavy Russian shelling.

However, the Institute for the Study of War, a US thinktank, said that Russian operations around Kyiv “remained largely stalled over the past 24 hours” to “resupply and refit frontline units” – an assessment shared by Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych, who said on Friday that the Russian advance had been halted over the past day.

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Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called on Ukrainians to continue fighting, but said living conditions in the Kyiv region had deteriorated into a “humanitarian catastrophe” with disrupted gas, heating and water. The Ukrainian president said his country had reached a “strategic turning point” in the conflict. “It is impossible to say how many days we still have [ahead of us] to free Ukrainian land. But we can say we will do it,” he said. “We are already moving towards our goal, our victory.”

About 2 million people – half the population of the metropolitan area – had left the capital, the Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said on Friday, and those who remained continued to prepare for its defence.

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

Ukrainian soldiers described fierce fighting for control of the main highway leading into the capital, while missile strikes were reported hitting just outside Kyiv’s city limits on Friday.

“It’s frightening, but what can you do?” said Vasil Popov, a 38-year-old who works in advertising sales. “There is nowhere to really run or hide. We live here.”

Continuing Russian bombardments and attacks on civilians in cities across Ukraine have prompted warnings of “an unimaginable tragedy” and a new flurry of alarm from the UN that Russia is committing war crimes.

“We are really heading towards an unimaginable tragedy,” Stephen Cornish of Doctors Without Borders told Agence France-Presse, insisting “there is still time to avoid it, and we must see it avoided”.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians remain trapped and under fire in Ukrainian cities, but the situation in Mariupol is especially dire. Ten days into Russia’s siege, its population has no access to electricity or mobile phone networks, and water and food are running out. On Friday 7,144 people were evacuated from four Ukrainian cities, Zelenskiy said in a televised address – a much lower number than managed to leave in each of the two previous days.

Zelenskiy accused Russia of refusing to allow people out of Mariupol and said Ukraine would try again to deliver food and medicines there on Saturday.

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Ukraine has repeatedly raised concerns that Moscow’s ally Belarus, which has served as a staging point for Russian forces, will soon have its troops drawn into the invasion. Ukraine’s state centre for strategic communications said Belarus might launch an invasion of Ukraine today, after a meeting in Moscow between the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko. Ukraine accused Russia of staging “false flag” air attacks on Belarus from Ukraine to provide an excuse for an offensive.

Putin and Lukashenko agreed on Friday that Moscow would supply its smaller neighbour with military equipment and mutual support against western sanctions, including on energy prices, the official Belarus state news agency BelTA said.

Foreign combatants have already entered the Ukrainian conflict on both sides, but the Kremlin has ramped up efforts to bring in reinforcements from Syria. Syria’s military has begun recruiting troops from its own ranks to fight alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, promising payments of $3,000 a month – a sum of up to 50 times more than a Syrian soldier’s monthly salary. A furious Zelenskiy accused Russia of hiring “murderers from Syria, a country where everything has been destroyed … like they are doing here to us”.

As the war continues, Russia faces an expanding net of sanctions. Western governments have announced plans to impose punitive tariffs on Russian trade to further isolate Moscow from the global economy. The G7 group of wealthy nations said it would strip Russia of “most favoured nation” status under World Trade Organization rules. The US president, Joe Biden, announced plans to ban the import of seafood, vodka and diamonds from Russia, and the UK government says it is planning to ban exports of luxury goods to Russia.

Deutsche Bank and Sony Pictures have joined the exodus of western businesses from Russia. In a statement posted on its website, Deutsche Bank said it was “in the process of winding down our remaining business in Russia” and that there “won’t be any new business in Russia”. Russia has moved to block Instagram after its parent company, Meta, said it would allow calls for violence against Putin and Russian soldiers involved in the invasion of Ukraine to appear on the social media platform. Russian prosecutors demanded that access to Instagram be blocked, and authorities moved to recognise Meta as an “extremist organisation”.

The US has also imposed sanctions on a group of Russia’s elite, including billionaire Viktor Vekselberg, three family members of Putin’s spokesman and members of parliament.

THE GUARDIAN

With Agence France-Presse