What you need to know right now By Reuters

(Reuters) – Artillery rocked Kyiv’s suburbs and a besieged city in northern Ukraine, a day after Russia promised to scale down operations there. Ukraine’s government and Western allies said the pullback was a ploy to regroup by invaders taking heavy losses.

FIGHTING

* Russian forces in Ukraine are regrouping and preparing for renewed offensive operations, Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said.

* The mayor of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, Vladyslav Astroshenko, said Russian bombing had intensified over the past 24 hours, with more than 100,000 people trapped with supplies to last about a week. Bombings were also reported in the west of the country.

* Russia is shelling nearly all cities along the frontline separating Ukrainian government-controlled territory from areas held by Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donetsk region, the regional Donetsk governor said.

DIPLOMACY

* Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said he felt optimistic after the talks in Istanbul at which Moscow said it would scale down military operations near Kyiv and Chernihiv.

* Russia’s lead negotiator at the Istanbul talks, Vladimir Medinsky, said Kyiv had stated a willingness to meet core Russian demands, but that Moscow’s position on the Donbas region and annexed Crimea remained unchanged.

* Moscow and Beijing are “more determined” to develop bilateral ties and boost cooperation, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, after talks in China with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, as the Ukraine crisis rages.

ECONOMY

* President Vladimir Putin is being misled by his advisers about how damaging Western sanctions have been to Russia’s economy, a US official said, citing declassified intelligence.

* All Russia’s big exports could soon be in rubles, the Kremlin signaled

* Germany triggered an emergency plan to manage gas supplies that could see Europe’s largest economy ration power if a standoff over a Russian demand to pay for fuel with roubles disrupts or halts supplies.

HUMANITARIAN CONCERNS

* The number of Ukrainians fleeing abroad is now 4,019,287, the United Nations’ Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said.

* Russia’s bombardment of Ukrainian cities could amount to war crimes, said the top UN human rights official, Michelle Bachelet, adding her office had received “credible allegations” that Moscow had used cluster munitions in populated areas at least 24 times.

QUOTAS

“Ukrainians are not naive people,” said President Zelenskiy. “Ukrainians have already learned during these 34 days of invasion, and over the past eight years of the war in Donbas, that the only thing they can trust is a concrete result.”