Ukraine’s defence lines were holding against the Russian attack, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in his latest video on Thursday, adding there had been no respite in Moscow’s shelling of Ukraine since midnight.

“We have nothing to lose but our own freedom,” Zelenskiy said, adding Ukraine was receiving daily arms supplies from its international allies.

As reported by Reuters, Zelenskiy said Russia’s changing tactics and shelling of civilians in cities proved Ukraine was successful in resisting Moscow’s initial plan of claiming a quick victory through a land assault.

More than 1 million people have fled Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, in the swiftest refugee exodus this century, the United Nations said Thursday, as Russian forces pressed their assaults on the country’s second-largest city and two strategic seaports.

The tally the U.N. refugee agency released to The Associated Press was reached Wednesday and amounts to more than 2% of Ukraine’s population being forced out of the country in seven days. The mass evacuation could be seen in Kharkiv, a city of about 1.5 million people where residents desperate to escape falling shells and bombs crowded the city’s train station and pressed onto trains, not always knowing where they were headed.

With a column of tanks and other vehicles apparently stalled for days outside the capital of Kyiv, fighting continued on multiple fronts across Ukraine. A second round of talks aimed at ending the fighting was expected later Thursday in neighboring Belarus — though the two sides appeared to have little common ground.

Russia’s forces claimed to have taken complete control of Kherson, which would be the biggest city to fall in the invasion thus far. Britain’s Defense Ministry said that was possible, though not yet verified. The mayor said there were no Ukrainian forces in the city — but he said the Ukrainian flag was still flying over it.