ATHENS — With multiple crises gripping Ukraine, the coming week will likely see further Russian entrenchment in the embattled country despite tough resistance from Ukrainian forces and a new warning from Britain for Vladimir Putin. 

“Don’t Test Us,” is the Daily Telegraph’s front page headline Sunday, above a photo of a Ukrainian woman fleeing the town of Irpin, northwest of Kiev, under Russian bombardment. “The thing to say to Putin is don’t underestimate us, don’t test us. History is littered with authoritarian leaders underestimating the wider west and the United Kingdom,” the British defense minister, Ben Wallace, told the London newspaper. 

Among that litter is of course Adolf Hitler, or his ghost, but whether Mr. Putin gets the reference is a question.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is taking a different tack. He phoned Mr. Putin again today, and they spoke for one hour and 45 minutes. It was the 14th conversation between the two leaders since December 14 — in other words, the relationship extends back long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a fact that prompted  Le Point magazine to christen these chats “a dialogue of the deaf.” 

The French report does say that Mr. Putin reassured Mr. Macron that Russia was not targeting nuclear reactors while repeating his conditions for a cease-fire that include a neutralization of Ukraine, which in the Russ’s book means NATO must be a no-go for Kiev and the country must be demilitarized. 

The start of the war week means the fighting on the ground, at least, is only escalating. Western governments have decided not to send troops to aid the embattled Ukrainian army and have refused to enforce a no-fly zone in the skies, the Financial Times reports, but they have backed President Zelensky’s call for foreign fighters to join his “International Legion of Territorial Defense” and that may be gaining traction. 

The article is accompanied by a photo released by Ukraine’s military showing four former British Royal Marines, in full military uniform with Ukrainian flag insignia, who arrived in the country Sunday to join the fight. 

Energetic Ukrainian resistance has contributed to the stalled Russian advance on Kiev, says another report in the Sunday Telegraph, according to which American-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles have destroyed Russian tanks and blocked portions of the road, adding to existing problems of Russian vehicles without enough fuel. Ukrainian counter-attacks are reported to have pushed the front line further away from Kiev in towns to the west of the capital, which have been seeing heavy fighting.

One of the things Mr. Putin specifically told Mr. Macron today, according to the article in Le Point, is that there are no civilian victims in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, despite mounting evidence to the contrary almost everywhere one looks. 

The Ukrainian news agency Inerfax reported  that the mayor of Irpin, Oleksandr Markushin, said eight civilians were killed in the city on Sunday.  In a video message Mr. Markushin said, “The Russian occupiers fired on our civilians. A family was killed, a shell hit it, and two small children and two adults were killed in front of my eyes.”  In total, the mayor added, “about eight people were killed during today’s shelling.” 

A Sky News report on the situation in Ukraine late on Sunday mentioned an incident involving Russian troops firing on a group of anti-Russian demonstrators near Kiev, but whether this was the same incident reported by Interfax was not  immediately clear. 

Irpin’s mayor also said an evacuation of residents was scheduled for Monday morning.  Whether that will proceed according to plan also remains to be seen — evacuations from Ukrainian cities and towns under Russian attack or siege has proved to be a harrowing, sometimes deadly undertaking in recent days. The ongoing Russian assault on the port city of Mariupol has been so fierce that at least one rescue mission had to be aborted over the weekend, the Telegraph’s Roland Oliphant reported from Zaporizhzhya. 

A convoy of yellow school buses preparing to depart Zaporizhzhya’s Dnieper river embankment to rescue civilians farther away in Mariupol ended up going nowhere, he said, due to the scale of violence under way. The temporary humanitarian truce that Russian forces had announced collapsed almost as soon as it was presented, leading to widespread speculation that it was simply a ruse. 

Many of the rockets falling on Mariupol have been fired from Russian’s Grad truck-mounted multiple rocket launchers, wreaking destruction in largely residential areas. The brutality is gut-wrenching:  “Mangled corpses lie uncollected on the ground. Buildings have been pulverized by salvoes of missiles, rockets and artillery fire. There is no water or electricity,” Mr. Oliphant writes. 

All this in a city of 465,000 people that was until last week a thriving industrial center contributing up to 10 percent of Ukraine’s GDP.  Why? According to an article in the weekend Financial Times headlined, “We are under siege: They are trying to exterminate us,” some residents of Mariupol are certain that Russian forces have the city in their crosshairs “because of its status as as stronghold of the Kyiv government in a part of eastern Ukraine that has long been a hotbed of pro-Russian separatism.” 

Or, as one local official put it succinctly, “It’s pure vengeance.”