Russia-Ukraine updates: Putin says 'certain positive movements' in negotiations

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy broke with former President Donald Trump on Wednesday when he was asked whether he supported Trump's comments praising Putin as a "genius."

“I do not think anything is savvy or genius about Putin," McCarthy, R-Calif., said during a news conference. "I think Putin is evil, he is a dictator and I think he is murdering people right now."

On Feb. 23, a day before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump praised Putin and slammed his successor President Joe Biden in an appearance on a conservative talk radio program.

"This is genius. Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine ... Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful," Trump said of the Russian president's decision to recognize the two provinces of the Donbas Region of eastern Ukraine as independent republics and claimed rebels there asked him to send troops into Ukraine to protect them from Ukrainian military attacks.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on the Kremlin to immediately allow Ukrainian civilians to safely depart the cities and towns of Ukraine that are besieged by Russian forces.

Blinken accused Russia of destroying critical civilian infrastructure and blocking people's safe exodus, describing the Kremlin's proposed corridors to Russia "absurd" and "offensive” in a press conference Wednesday.

"Russia's relentless bombardment, including of civilians trying to flee, prevents people from safely escaping the hellish conditions that they've created,” Blinken said.

-ABC News' Conor Finnegan

While Poland has been welcoming refugees fleeing the destruction in Ukraine, the country will eventually meet its limit on how many people it can take in, Konrad Fijolek, president of Rzeszow, Poland, a city about 60 miles from the Ukrainian border, told ABC News.

Like many cities that border Ukraine, Rzeszow, a town of about 180,000 people, has become a pathway to safety and a lifeline for millions of refugees flooding across the border from Ukraine.

Poland will be able to receive about 1.5 million people, but any more will put the country under strain, Fijolek said.

"If a million or more come, we won't be able to cope," he said.

Some estimates suggest as many as 4 million people could leave Ukraine due to the conflict, but most of the major cities in the country are already full — and officials are attempting to move refugees into smaller cities, a feat that is "not easy," Fijolek said.

So far, all the shelters set up in Poland are temporary, he added.

"We would like to avoid the view of refugee camps here," he said. "We would like people who are escaping from the war to think that what awaits here is proper camp not camps."

In addition, the mental state among the people in Poland is continuing to deteriorate, Fijolek said.

"We as local leaders would like to send the message that if there's any possible action to stop the war [find it] and then try to negotiate, because every day at the border we can see the human tragedy," he said.

-ABC News' Chris Donato and Marcus Moore

The city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine is without power or water after more than a week of heavy shelling and aerial attacks from Russian forces, Serhiy Orlov, deputy mayor of Mariupol, said in a press briefing Wednesday.

More than 1,200 Mariupol residents have been killed in the bombardments, Orlov said, adding that half of those killed are ethnic Russians whom Russia claims it is saving.

A huge steel mill that employs 30,000 people and a maternity hospital with 600 beds are among the obliterated structures in the strategic port city, Orlov said.

Orlov accused Russia of indiscriminately bombarding the city because its forces were unable to break through its defenses, saying that Mariupol would not surrender and calling on the outside world to help save it by imposing a "no-fly" zone.

"We understand that Mariupol was a showroom of free Ukraine -- a dynamic bustling city compared to ghost towns of the so-called DNR," Orlov said. "We must not fall. We must win and then rebuild. We can only live and develop in a free and independent Ukraine."

-ABC News' Patrick Reevell