A glimmer of hope for an end to Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine emerged Saturday, with a peace treaty draft “sufficiently developed” to allow the two countries’ leaders to meet for direct talks – but as officials in Kyiv claimed to have regained complete control of the capital region, locals made horrifying reports of Russian atrocities.

David Arakhamia, the head of Ukraine’s negotiating team in Istanbul, claimed the Russian delegation was on board with a plan that would guarantee its neutral status going forward, news agency Interfax Ukraine reported – although the question of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, remained a sticking point.

Russian negotiators “also confirmed our thesis that the draft documents are sufficiently developed to conduct direct consultations between the two leaders,” Arakhamia said – adding that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is looking to broker a tete-a-tete between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul or Ankara.

The news came as deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar announced on Facebook that “the whole Kyiv region” was back in Ukrainian hands after the retreat of Russia’s invading forces.

In a video address early Saturday, Zelensky said Russian troops had moved toward the northeastern city of Kharkiv and the Donbas, the contested region on his country’s eastern border where Russian-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian troops since 2014.

But Zelensky claimed that as they are retreating, Russian forces are leaving mines and booby traps behind — hidden around homes, on abandoned equipment and even on corpses.

“It’s still not possible to return to normal life, as it used to be, even at the territories that we are taking back after the fighting,” Zelensky said in his nightly video message. “We need to wait until our land is de-mined, wait till we are able to assure you that there won’t be new shelling.”

Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have found gruesome evidence of the Russian brutality, the Sunday Times of London reported.

“We found 18 bodies in there,” Sergeiy Torovik, 53, said of the scene inside a home in the forest outside Kyiv. “They had been torturing people. Some of them had their ears cut off. Others had teeth pulled out. There were kids like 14, 16 years old, some adults.”

In other developments:

In southeastern Ukraine, efforts to evacuate up to 100,000 Ukrainian civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol resumed Saturday — but the Red Cross convoy that had been dispatched to the battered port town was unable to reach it before night fell.

The rescuers were “spending the night en route to Mariupol and are yet to reach the city,” a spokesman for the International Committee for the Red Cross said.

Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said seven new evacuation corridors were opened on Saturday. One allows residents to escape to the town of Zaporizhzhya, in an area held by Ukraine; others lead to towns in the eastern separatist regions that have been claimed by Russia.

A total of 4,217 people were evacuated Saturday from the front lines, Vereshchuk said, including 1,263 who fled in their own vehicles from Mariupol and from the Russian-held city of Berdiansk.

But tens of thousands remain trapped with little access to food and water.

A Ukrainian presidential adviser urged the US to send more arms so that Ukraine can keep Russian forces from developing a stronghold in the Donbas.

“We definitely can’t do without heavy weapons if we want to unblock the east and Kherson and send [back] the Russians as far as possible,” said Mykhailo Podolyak.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pushing a plan to arm Ukraine with anti-ship missiles as part of a “gear change” that would save key ports like Odessa from becoming the next Mariupol.

“Boris says we don’t need another trigger,” a senior government source told the Sunday Times of London. “He [Putin] has already crossed the line.”

But Russia’s ambassador to the UK said the Kremlin would consider British artillery and anti-ship weapons “legitimate targets” if they are sent to the Ukrainian military.

“Any weapon deliveries are destabilizing,” Ambassador Andrei Kelin told Russian state news agency TASS. “They exacerbate the situation and make it bloodier.”

The Russian defense ministry said that its forces struck the last functioning oil refinery in Ukraine, in Kremenchuk, about 180 miles southeast of Kyiv.

Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the strike destroyed storage facilities holding gasoline and diesel fuels that were supplying Ukrainian troops in the country’s central and eastern regions.

The attack came a day after Russia accused Ukraine of sending helicopters over the border to bomb a Russian oil depot, which Ukraine denied.

Russia also struck military airfields in Poltava and Dnipro, cities to the east of Kremenchuk, using high-precision air-based missiles, Konashenkov said, CNN reported.

Meanwhile, Valentyn Reznichenko, the governor of the Dnipro region in south-central Ukraine, said a Russian rocket attack badly damaged a rail line Saturday – causing no deaths but forcing all traffic on the crucial freight hub to be suspended.

As Russian troops continued withdrawing from the region around Kyiv, the damage they wrought in five weeks of heavy fighting became increasingly apparent.

In Bucha, a commuter town northwest of Kyiv, the bodies of at least 20 men in civilian clothes were found strewn over several hundred yards of a residential street. The corpse of one of the men was found with his hands tied.

Nearly 300 local residents were buried in a mass grave, said mayor Anatoly Fedoruk.

Ukrainian troops examined the twisted remains of a bridge at the entrance of Irpin, near Kyiv, while nearby another soldier was seen snapping a photo of a charred body inside a Russian tank.

Civilians in the village of Dmitrivka near Kyiv picked their way along wrecked and muddy roads past Russian tanks that were demolished in the heavy fighting.

With Post Wires