Kyiv April 5, 3:56 a.m.
Moscow April 5, 3:56 a.m.
Washington April 4, 8:56 p.m.
Ukraine Live Updates: Atrocities Prompt Calls for More Sanctions as Russia Pummels South
Images of dead civilians prompted widespread outrage as the E.U. weighed tougher penalties against Moscow. Russian forces continued to bombard southern Ukraine, but left the door open for peace talks.
The images of dead Ukrainians, some with their hands tied and others haphazardly buried in pits, spurred shocked Western leaders on Monday to promise even tougher sanctions against Russia, including possibly on energy, as the Kremlin dug in and showed signs of preparing a new assault.
The growing evidence that Russian soldiers killed scores of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, leaving their bodies behind as they withdrew, prompted President Biden to call for President Vladimir V. Putin to face a “war crime trial.” Germany and France expelled a total of 75 Russian diplomats, and President Emmanuel Macron of France said the European Union should consider sanctions against Russian coal and oil.
“This guy is brutal,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Putin. “And what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it.”
In Moscow on Monday, Mr. Putin said nothing about his war in Ukraine, but his spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said the Kremlin “categorically” denied “any allegations” of Russian involvement in the atrocities. Instead, Russia’s state media aired relentless conspiracy theories about what it said was a Ukrainian fabrication, while the authorities threatened to prosecute anyone who publicly blamed Russians for the Bucha killings.
Russia said the bodies had been placed only recently on the streets after “all Russian units withdrew completely from Bucha” around March 30. But a review of videos and satellite imagery by The New York Times shows that many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago, when Russia’s military was in control of the town.
The war in Ukraine may now be headed for an even more dangerous phase, despite Russia’s withdrawal last week from areas near Kyiv.
Ukrainian and Western officials said that Russia appeared to be positioning troops for an intensified assault in the eastern Donbas area, where the port city of Mariupol remains under a brutal siege. And in Kharkiv, roughly 30 miles from the Russian border, unrelenting bombardment has left parts of the city of 1.4 million unrecognizable.
The systematic destruction produces little military gain, but is part of a broader strategy to seize the country’s east, analysts and U.S. military officials say.
With the Russian economy showing some signs of resilience after the initial shock of the wide-ranging Western sanctions put in place after Mr. Putin’s invasion in February, the Kremlin appeared to be girding for a continuation of the war, despite talk in European capitals of now possibly banning Russian coal, oil or, less likely, gas.
“They are not going to stop,” Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said in a statement on Monday. “Putin’s order given to his soldiers to destroy our state has not disappeared.”
In a visit to Bucha on Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine left the door open to a negotiated peace, despite the horrific scenes uncovered over the weekend. In a camouflage bulletproof vest, surrounded by soldiers and journalists, Mr. Zelensky accused Russia of “genocide,” but said he was still hoping to meet with Mr. Putin to try to stop the war.
“Ukraine must have peace,” Mr. Zelensky said. “We are in Europe in the 21st century. We will continue efforts diplomatically and militarily.”
Mr. Biden, speaking to reporters in Washington after returning from Delaware, said that “information” needed to be gathered for a trial of Mr. Putin, calling the Russian leader a “war criminal.” Mr. Biden said he would at some point be announcing more sanctions against Russia, without specifying what they would be.
In Europe, the growing evidence of Russian atrocities also appeared to be paving the way for more sanctions, even as divisions remained among E.U. members of whether to impose a broad ban on Russian energy imports.
“Today there are very clear signs of war crimes,” Mr. Macron, the French president, told France Inter radio. “Those who were responsible for those crimes will have to answer for them.”
European Union ambassadors will meet on Wednesday to discuss another package of sanctions against Russia, but the extent of the new measures is still very much in flux, diplomats and officials said. A meeting of NATO defense ministers is also scheduled to take place that day.
Since the start of the conflict, European leaders, along with the United States, have pursued a strategy of putting sanctions in place a piece at a time, gradually toughening them to leave themselves more cards to play in case Russia escalates the conflict.
But the outrage over the new revelations of atrocities may force their hand.
One version of a new E.U. sanctions package under consideration could include a ban on Russian coal, but not oil and gas, E.U. officials said. Bans on Russian goods entering E.U. ports are also under consideration, as well as smaller measures to close loopholes in existing sanctions, European diplomats and officials said.
While Mr. Macron said the new sanctions should target both coal and oil, Christian Lindner, the German finance minister, indicated that coal would be the only Russian energy export included in the sanctions package. The European Union, he said, needed to “differentiate between oil, coal and gas.”
Coal, which is largely mined by private companies in Russia, is less critical to the Kremlin’s coffers than the oil and gas industry, in which state-owned companies play the leading role.
Germany is the key country holding the bloc back from an outright ban on oil and gas, though the idea is also unpopular in other, smaller European nations that largely rely on Russian supplies. Berlin has consistently argued that sanctions against Russia ought to hurt Russia more than they hurt Europe.
Germany’s hesitation to endorse oil and gas sanctions was on display Sunday, when cracks appeared in the coalition government’s position on such a move.
Christine Lambrecht, the defense minister, said the bloc should consider banning gas imports, while the economy and energy minister, Robert Habeck said such a move would not be useful because Mr. Putin has “already practically lost the war.”
“The horrifying news from Bucha will certainly pile more pressure on the E.U. to impose energy sanctions on Moscow this Wednesday, but hard-hitting import bans on oil and gas remain unlikely for now,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a consultancy.
“Internal momentum is building over stopping Russian coal,” Mr. Rahman said, “If anything, that’s likely to be the first thing Brussels targets on the energy side.”
Mr. Rahman said that, for now, the economic and political costs of a sudden stop of Russian oil and gas imports were too high for most E.U. leaders. He said it could take Russia using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Ukraine to lead the E.U. to impose sanctions on oil and gas imports.
Still, the Bucha revelations did prompt Germany and France — two countries that have long been careful to avoid provoking Russia — to escalate the confrontation with Moscow.
Germany said it would expel 40 Russian diplomats, an unusually high number for a single round of expulsions that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said was necessitated by the “incredible brutality on the part of the Russian leadership and those who follow its propaganda.”
France said it, too, would expel “many” Russian diplomats stationed in the country; a Foreign Ministry official put the number at 35.
And Lithuania expelled the Russian ambassador and recalled its own from Moscow, the first time that a European country has made such a move since the start of the war.
Russia promised to retaliate against the expulsions and dismissed the reports of the atrocities in Bucha, describing them as fabricated pretexts for more sanctions. State television even claimed that Western operatives had chosen Bucha for their “provocation” because the town’s name sounded like the English word “butcher.”
It was the latest instance in which the Kremlin’s media machine has tried to parry overwhelming evidence of Russian involvement in an atrocity with a flood of conspiracy theories sowing confusion among casual consumers of the news.
It appeared likely that, inside Russia, the approach would work. The Kremlin narrative is increasingly the only one being heard by regular Russians, with independent news media shut down, access to Facebook and Instagram blocked, and a new censorship law punishing any deviation from that narrative with as much as 15 years in prison.
Driving the point home, the Russian general prosecutor’s office issued a statement on Monday indicating that anyone referring to the Bucha atrocities as Russia’s doing risked prosecution.
Anton Troianovski reported from Istanbul, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels. Reporting was contributed by Thomas Gibbons-Nefffrom Kharkiv; Megan Specia from Krakow, Poland; Constant Méheut and Aurelien Breeden from Paris; Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin; and Katie Rogers from Washington.
In his nightly video address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that more than 300 people have been tortured and killed in Bucha, a suburb of the capital Kyiv, adding that the list of victims is likely to grow.
Mr. Zelensky said that the Ukrainian government had opened an investigation into what Russian forces did during their occupation of Bucha. He visited Bucha on Monday along with other cities near Kyiv, including Stoyanka and Irpin, which had been the scene of intense fighting over several days.
“The bodies of killed people — killed Ukrainians — have already been taken from most streets, but in the yards, in the houses, the dead still remain,” Mr. Zelensky said in a translation of his remarks shared by his office. “The cities are simply ruined.”
Images of dead civilians in Bucha have prompted widespread outrage from leaders across the globe, including the European Union, which is weighing tougher penalties against Russia.
In his remarks, Mr. Zelensky said any sanctions against Russia “must finally be powerful.”
“But was it really necessary to wait for this to reject doubts and indecision?” Mr. Zelensky asked. “Did hundreds of our people really have to die in agony for some European leaders to finally understand that the Russian state deserves the most severe pressure?”
Mr. Zelensky said that the government wants to provide journalists with “maximum access” to Bucha and other liberated regions of Ukraine.
“We are interested in having thousands of journalists there — as many as possible — for the world to see what Russia has done,” Mr. Zelensky said.
Mr. Zelensky said that information indicates that the number of victims could be even higher in other cities that have been retaken by Ukraine, such as Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv.
“In many villages of the liberated districts of the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions, the occupiers did things that the locals had not seen even during the Nazi occupation 80 years ago,” he said.
In cities back under the control of Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky said that the government has begun preparing to “restore normal life” by clearing areas of mines and neutralizing explosive devices, and that eventually electricity and water would be restored across the country.
“We will rebuild roads, bridges, infrastructure,” he said. “Life will come again to every city, to every community that the occupiers tried to destroy.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyRussian forces tortured and killed more than 300 people in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine alleged in his nightly video address. He said the list of victims is likely to grow.
Spanish authorities seized a $90 million yacht owned by the Russian oligarch Viktor F. Vekselberg at the request of American officials, the Justice Department said on Monday.
The seizure is the first by a task force created last month to enforce sweeping sanctions the United States imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Over one week last month, Spain seized three superyachts believed to belong to Russian oligarchs. One such vessel, the Crescent, was valued at $600 million. British authorities also detained a Russian-owned superyacht worth about $50 million in London last week.
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland vowed to “do everything possible to hold accountable any individual whose criminal acts enable the Russian government to continue its unjust war.”
An F.B.I. affidavit submitted in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia said that investigators believe Mr. Vekselberg and co-conspirators had conspired to commit bank fraud. Mr. Vekselberg, the president of the Renova Group, a conglomerate with interests in the energy and mining sectors, hid his ownership of the 255-foot yacht, known as the Tango, by laundering money through shell companies, court documents say.
The Tango was docked at Palma de Mallorca, on an island about 125 miles off the coast of mainland Spain.
The United States imposed sanctions on Mr. Vekselberg in 2018 in retaliation for Russian interference in the 2016 election and other aggressions. American officials have described him as a Kremlin insider and an ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Vekselberg drew additional scrutiny for his potential links to President Donald J. Trump and his campaign, including meetings he had with Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer at the time, before the presidential inauguration.
American officials issued a new wave of measures last month targeting Russian oligarchs, including Mr. Vekselberg, saying that they were directed at those who had backed Mr. Putin’s “brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine.”
NOVA BASAN, Ukraine — Badly frightened and hungry, residents of Nova Basan, a town east of Kyiv, emerged from their cottages and farmhouses on Monday, and described living through the terrifying ordeal of the Russian occupation — detentions, threats and a strict curfew that confined them to their homes with no outside communication for more than a month.
Nova Basan, about 60 miles east of the Ukrainian capital, is one of a stretch of towns and villages retaken from Russian control after battles through the last week of March, and just now coming back to life.
“It was terrible,” said Mykola Dyachenko, the official responsible for the administration of the town and surrounding villages. “People were not expecting such things.” He said he was among some 20 men who were held prisoner by Russian troops for 25 days during the occupation.
He looked exhausted, his face waxy and pale. He said he had been put through what he called a mock execution 15 times while being questioned about local Ukrainian territorial defense forces and ammunition stored in the area.
His interrogators fired an assault rifle over his head during the questioning, he said. His eyes were bound with sticky tape but he heard and felt the gunshot above his head. “It was psychological pressure,” he said. “They were trying to kick out of me information that I was not sharing.”
Two other men also described being detained by Russian troops and told of soldiers beating them with rifle butts, and punching and kicking them. One described being tied up with his arms suspended. Another, Oleksiy Bryzgalin, 38, a construction worker, said he was strapped to a chair with a grenade between his legs for 30 hours and also had a gun fired beside the side of his head during interrogation.
The detainees were moved around and held in barns and cellars and fed only two potatoes a day, with only one toilet break daily, Mr. Bryzgalin said.
The detainees said they escaped from their makeshift jail as the Russian troops were preparing to withdraw last Wednesday. Five days later Mr. Bryzgalin said he still had pain in his legs from the cramped conditions and had trouble sleeping.
The community administrator, Mr. Dyachenko, said he did not know the level of civilian casualties yet and said he was only just starting to organize search teams to check on residents. On Monday, he was heading out to investigate the report of an execution on Feb. 28 of six people by Russian soldiers in a nearby village, he said. That was just after Russian troops had arrived in the area, he said.
Mr. Dyachencko said he also knew of a civilian killed in his car at a gas station when the Russian troops first entered the town. And, he said, a wounded member of the territorial defense had been held prisoner with him but was taken away and not seen since. The Kremlin has denied any Russian involvement in atrocities.
Despite the fear and rough treatment of the civilian population, in the end Russian troops may have suffered more casualties than the townspeople. The Russian departure was part of a planned withdrawal announced by Moscow a week ago but it ended in a chaotic and bloody retreat after a fierce tank battle last Thursday, said soldiers and volunteers who took part, and residents of the town.
On Monday Ukrainian soldiers were piling the bodies of dead Russian soldiers into a trailer pulled by an army jeep. The soldiers were killed when a Ukrainian tank sneaked close to the entrance of the town and opened fire on the Russian checkpoint guarding the main intersection, according to soldiers and volunteers who took part.
“It’s the first lot we have picked up,” said Sr. Sgt. Andreiy Soroka, 38, the Ukrainian soldier in charge. “Nine and a half bodies,” he said matter-of-factly.
Four of the men had died in the armored personnel carrier blown up by a Ukrainian tank, he said. Others among the dead Russian soldiers were a captain found in a nearby building, and an 18-year-old conscript in the garden of a house who had been shot, Sergeant Soroka said.
A destroyed tank and armored vehicle on the road were leftovers of the battle, when a Ukrainian tank opened fire on the Russian vehicles. They were the tail end of the Russian presence, which had begun packing and leaving the town a day earlier.
Russian troops had suffered a major defeat days earlier in the town of Lukyanivka, and had failed to retake that town, said the commander of a volunteer battalion, Oleksiy Serediuk, who took part in the fighting. “They were disappointed and they started moving out of several places,” he said of the Russian troops. That led the Ukrainian army command to pursue the retreating army, he said.
“The military command made a very smart decision, first to make their withdrawal a chaotic rout and second to cut their escape route.”
He said the battle in Nova Basan was chaotic as the Russians had to fight their way out and the Ukrainians tried to cut their escape route. In the battle, a Russian armored vehicle crashed into a line of shops and another tumbled off the road, he said.
“Most Ukrainians did not believe in this operation,” he said, adding that the Ukrainians were far fewer and outgunned by the Russians. “But it was successful. We created real chaos with just a few people and a few vehicles.”
As he spoke soldiers were dragging out the Russian armored vehicle that had crashed into the line of shops. A group of men, retired taxi drivers, examined the damage, while a line of women waited for the first sale of fresh meat in more than a month.
On Monday, it had been four days since the Ukrainian troops regained control of the town, but many of the residents were only just starting to venture out of their homes. The relief on their faces was heartfelt.
“I have been sitting at home and trembling,” said Maria Rudenko, 82, who peered nervously round the corner of her street before approaching a car handing out food assistance. “I was so frightened at the shooting that I am scared to walk around.”
During the occupation, Russian troops searched houses and confiscated cellphones and computers and ordered people to stay indoors, residents said. With communications and utilities down, and with people unable to go to the shops, they began to feel hungry and scared.
“Sometimes I sat three nights without a candle,” Ms. Rudenko said. The electricity was down in most of the town, and the gas was still out. “Everyone ran away here and I was left. I had only potatoes and some cucumbers to eat.”
Further down the street toward the southern edge of town, three women friends began to weep as they collected bags of food from a group of volunteers.
“Every day was hard but the hardest day was when we were being liberated,” said Olha Vdovichenko, 70. “Everyone was hiding inside and we were praying. The shelling started at six in the morning and went on until seven in the evening without pause.”
By the time everything fell quiet, Ukrainian soldiers were already in the town searching for Russians soldiers left behind. A woman, who gave her name as Tania, said one of them asked her if there were any of the enemy around. “I was trembling and I said, ‘Who are you?’” she recounted. “He said ‘Ours.’” She ended up cooking borscht in two big pots for the whole Ukrainian unit.
The Ukrainian soldiers also told Olha Maysak, 66, that the town was freed. “At 6 p.m. the lads came by to tell us,” she said.
But her neighbor, Ms. Vdovichenko, did not realize it was over. She woke at 7 the next morning and heard some men talking outside.
“He said we are free, we are liberated,” she said. “That’s how I knew.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
BUCHA, Ukraine — For the past three days, my colleagues and I have been walking and driving through the streets of this town, following the Russian army’s retreat.
We’d heard reports of possible war crimes, and we had set out on Saturday to see what Russians left behind. We passed a number of bodies throughout the town; locals flagged down our cars and directed us to others.
While en route to investigate on Monday, a colleague of ours directed us to one home in particular.
We walked into the back garden of that home, and that’s where I saw the bodies of Serhiy, his brother-in-law Roman and another man on the ground.
Serhiy had a blue cloth over his face; Roman had a gunshot wound to the head. The third man, a civilian, was unknown to the neighbors who filtered into the garden — they didn’t recognize him.
Moments after we’d arrived, Tatyana Petrovna, 72, a close relative, walked into the garden in tears. She had brought yellow flowers, some cookies and poppy seed crackers — she placed them, crying, beside Roman’s body. She called him “Romanchek,” little Roman.
Ira — the wife of Serhiy and the sister of Roman — arrived later, moving between the garden to the house and speaking with neighbors.
Neighbors told us Serhiy had stayed in Bucha to look after his dogs. Not far from his body, we found two dogs, dead. They had been shot.
Allegations of Russian war crimes by Ukraine and its allies could hamper peace talks, Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said, and so could attempts to suspend Russia from the United Nations Human Rights Council. “This is unprecedented and this will not facilitate or encourage or be helpful to what is happening between Russian and Ukraine,” Mr. Nebenzya said.
KHARKIV, Ukraine — Soldiers waved off traffic, emerging from trenches dug into the side of a multistory apartment building, telling motorists to turn around. Firefighters arrived soon after, unfurling hoses to combat a growing blaze ignited by an artillery round that hit a nearby housing complex.
More than 30 days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine there is little chance that Russian forces can soon seize Kharkiv, a city of 1.4 million roughly 30 miles from the Russian border. But every day howitzer shells, rockets and guided missiles slam into its neighborhoods. Parts of the city are now unrecognizable. Many people have fled or live underground.
This systematic destruction produces little military gain, but is part of a broader strategy to seize the country’s East, analysts and U.S. military officials say.
The devastation of Kharkiv is a template for Russia’s shifting strategy as it turns its attention to Ukraine’s Donbas region, a swath of land in the East that is roughly the size of New Hampshire. It encompasses two breakaway enclaves located southeast of Kharkiv, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian government forces for eight years. A significant amount of Ukrainian forces are still entrenched there.
Having failed to score a quick victory or capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, Russia has resorted to shelling large population centers like Kharkiv in the north and Mariupol in the south, to ensure that Ukrainian resources, manpower and civil services are occupied away from the front lines where the Russians are looking to take territory.
“They’re trying to tie up Ukrainian forces so they can focus on the northern and southern part” of the country’s east, said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va.
It’s a critical goal for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gaining control of the Donbas would effectively partition off a piece of Eastern Ukraine, and the Russian leader could sell it to his country as a victory — perhaps by May 9, Russia’s Victory Day, when the country honors its triumph over Germany in World War II.
At the same time, Mr. Putin also has aides engaged in peace talks that could serve as something of a backup option if Russia falls short of a decisive battlefield victory. A peace agreement that includes significant Ukrainian concessions could give Mr. Putin a way to declare that Russia’s mission was accomplished, even if its forces failed to topple the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city and once home to a vibrant social scene, is practically a ghost town. At 8 p.m. shades are drawn and a citywide blackout lasts until sunrise. Stars are easily seen in the night sky.
Some neighborhoods are untouched by the shelling, while others are completely decimated. Apartments in the hard-hit areas are burned out, cars flipped over, wires severed and shrapnel litters what seems like every square foot of some thoroughfares, easily popping car tires.
The shelling diverts resources that might otherwise go toward fighting. Soldiers have to dig trenches around the city’s perimeter waiting for a ground attack that will likely never come. Police dart around the city, pulling people over and arresting those suspected of being Russian saboteurs. The city’s fire department logs an average of 10 to 20 calls a day, often just to deal with the damage from the shelling, and is frequently forced to rely on its own water tankers because of the extensive damage to hydrants.
Russia’s initial attempts to completely seize Ukraine failed almost as soon as they began, an outcome that surprised many analysts. The conventional thinking was that Ukraine, with the far smaller and less equipped military, would be outmatched and that the Russians would end up fighting an insurgency instead of a standing military.
The opposite turned out to be true. As Russian forces have retreated around Kyiv, Ukrainian forces have gained ground in the country’s northeast and south. The southern city of Mariupol has been encircled and under siege by Russian troops for weeks, but has not been captured. Neither has another southern coastal city, Mykolaiv, also a target of Russian attacks. Dueling artillery battles have become the norm as infantry forces on both sides dig in.
But even though Russia was plagued by low morale, logistical problems and casualties, its units, for the most part, did not surrender en masse or flee.
The Russian failure boiled down to one point, analysts said: doing too much at once.
“Eventually it became clear their initial campaign was a completely unworkable military strategy,” Mr. Kofman said. “They were competing along axes of advancement, and they were basically advancing in opposite directions on the way. There was no way they were going to succeed.”
Russia’s repositioning has created, in some ways, a pause in the war. With its first phase over and the second phase just beginning, both sides are trying to prepare for each other’s next move.
“To attempt an assault in the Donbas, the Russians will need access to all the forces they’ve stuck around Kyiv,” Mr. Kofman said, a conclusion that military officials in Washington have also reached.
By shifting forces to the east, Moscow has limited the amount of pressure on its forces; the occupied separatist regions and the heavily mined front lines there provide a natural backstop for any future Russian advances. The separatist forces there have also provided willing backup troops that helped Russia make progress earlier in the war.
But even with modest Russian gains around the Donbas and the reshuffling of forces from Kyiv, it remains unclear if Russia has enough forces to complete its strategy of encircling the Ukrainian forces entrenched in the Donbas, seizing the region and completing a land bridge to occupied Crimea, which it seized in 2014.
The number of Russian losses in the war remains unknown, though Western intelligence agencies put the number at around 10,000 killed and 30,000 wounded. Losses of armored vehicles — key pieces of equipment necessary in any kind of offensive in this type of war — number in the hundreds, according to military research groups.
What remains even murkier is the current state of Ukrainian forces.
Ukraine’s government has severely restricted information about its casualty numbers, and front-line access to its forces is practically nonexistent for most news organizations. But what is clear is that Ukrainian units are involved in a protracted fight, and on the receiving end of advanced armaments, air support, heavy artillery and a determined enemy. This leaves the question: How long can they hold?
Around Izium, a city of roughly 45,000 some 75 miles southeast of Kharkiv, Russian forces suffered less severe losses than did Ukrainian fighters, according to a U.S. military official, enabling Russian troops to solidify their front lines. Despite the city’s strategic importance, Ukrainian forces could not withstand the attack.
“The Ukrainian military has lost a substantive amount of equipment and will need a significant amount of ammunition for its artillery units,” Mr. Kofman said. “The Ukrainian government has also mobilized a significant amount of their reserves; they just don’t have enough equipment for them.”
Though Western-supplied weapons, such as the Javelin anti-tank missile, have received a lot of attention, the war in Ukraine has also turned heavily on indirect fire: mortars, howitzers and rockets. So far, the Russian strategy has been to use heavy shelling to help take territory, then build fortifications and defend it until their casualties become unsustainable.
That strategy has worked for the Ukrainians too. This was apparent in Trostyanets, a town in northeastern Ukraine that was retaken from the Russians several days ago. The tide of the battle turned, residents said, when Ukrainian forces successfully shelled and destroyed the Russian artillery position in one of the town’s squares.
Analysts say this dynamic will continue to play out in the Donbas, a less populated area compared with western Ukraine, with small towns, road networks that stretch for miles and mostly flat fields.
“The Ukrainian forces have had a lot of success where Russian forces have been really degraded and have had to retreat because of their losses,” Mr. Kofman said. “But there are still major battles to come.”
Natalia Yermak contributed reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine, and Anton Troianovski from Istanbul.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyRussia’s U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, accused Ukraine of “staging” the bodies of dead civilians in Bucha, calling the images and videos of them “brute forgery.” "Western leaders have already lined up to promote this false narrative” blaming Russian forces for the killings, he said at a news conference at the U.N.
Reporting from Washington
Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said that while Russia is refocusing offensive operations on eastern and southern Ukraine, Moscow will likely continue to strike the rest of the country “to cause terror.”
“The next stage of this conflict may very well be protracted,” he told reporters, and "will likely continue to include wanton and brazen attacks on civilian targets.”
An analysis of satellite images by The New York Times rebuts claims by Russia that the killing of civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, occurred after its soldiers had left the town.
When images emerged over the weekend of the bodies of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha — some with their hands bound, some with gunshot wounds to the head — Russia’s Ministry of Defense denied responsibility. In a Telegram post on Sunday, the ministry suggested that the bodies had been recently placed on the streets after “all Russian units withdrew completely from Bucha” around March 30.
Russia claimed that the images were “another hoax” and called for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on what it called “provocations of Ukrainian radicals” in Bucha.
But a review of videos and satellite imagery by The Times shows that many of the civilians were killed more than three weeks ago, when Russia’s military was in control of the town.
One video filmed by a local council member on April 1 shows multiple bodies scattered along Yablonska Street in Bucha. Satellite images provided to The Times by Maxar Technologies show that at least 11 of those had been on the street since March 11, when Russia, by its own account, occupied the town.
To confirm when the bodies appeared, and when the civilians were likely killed, the Visual Investigations team at The Times conducted a before-and-after analysis of satellite imagery. The images show dark objects of similar size to a human body appearing on Yablonska Street between March 9 and March 11. The objects appear in the precise positions in which the bodies were found after Ukrainian forces reclaimed Bucha, as the footage from April 1 shows. Further analysis shows that the objects remained in those position for over three weeks.
Where Bodies Were Found in a Kyiv Suburb
Bucha
UKRAINE
16 miles to downtown Kyiv
Mass
grave
Bucha
Bucha
train station
Vokzal St.
Satellite images show more than 12 bodies along this stretch of road.
Yablonska St.
1/2 MILE
Bucha
UKRAINE
16 miles to downtown Kyiv
Mass
grave
Bucha
Vokzal St.
Bucha
train station
Yablonska St.
Satellite images show more than 12 bodies along this stretch of road.
1/2 MILE
The causes of death are unclear. Some of the bodies were beside what appears to be an impact crater. Others were near abandoned cars. Three of the bodies lay beside bicycles. Some have their hands bound behind their backs with white cloth. The bodies were scattered over more than half a mile of Yablonska Street.
A second video taken on Yablonska Street shows three more bodies. One lies beside a bicycle, another near an abandoned car. Satellite imagery shows that the abandoned cars and the nearby body appear between March 20 and 21.
These are just some of the civilian bodies discovered since Saturday. The Associated Press published images of at least six dead men lying together in the rear of an office building, some with hands tied behind their backs. The building is one mile west of the other victims found along Yablonska Street.
Another mile further along, a photographer with The Times discovered the body of a man with a gunshot wound to his head lying beside a bicycle.
Reporting from Washington
Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, called the images from Bucha “tragic” and “shocking” but “unfortunately, not surprising.” Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Sullivan said the images show “further evidence of war crimes” and that the United States will be working with allies to develop further sanctions against Russia.
BUDAPEST — Savoring the election victory of a rare European leader who has not condemned him as a war criminal, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday congratulated Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for winning a fourth term and said he looked forward to an expansion of “partnership ties.”
At a time when Russia’s relations with the European Union and the United States are unraveling over the war in Ukraine, Hungary, a member of the European bloc, has mostly sat on the fence in response to the Russian invasion, in part to avoid upsetting a natural gas deal cemented by Mr. Orban during talks with Mr. Putin in Moscow shortly before Russia invaded.
A thumping victory in Sunday’s election for Mr. Orban’s party, Fidesz, suggested that the Hungarian leader would stick with a policy strongly endorsed by voters.
But following a vote that independent election observers said was unfairly tilted in the governing party’s favor, there is also growing pressure on Mr. Orban to change course or risk not only alienating Hungary’s allies but losing billions of dollars in badly needed funding from the European Union for failing to uphold the rule of law.
Guy Verhofstadt, a prominent liberal in the European Parliament, described the election as “a dark day for liberal democracy, for Hungary and the E.U., at a perilous time.”
Mr. Putin got more mixed news from elections Sunday in Serbia, where Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s populist pro-Russia president, won re-election, according to preliminary official results issued on Monday. But it looked as if President Vucic could lose his increasingly authoritarian grip on power after his governing party failed to win a clear majority in Parliament.
The Kremlin congratulated Mr. Vucic nonetheless, calling for a strengthening of what it described as a “strategic partnership” in the interests of “brotherly Russian and Serb people.”
Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party has been divided over how to respond to Russia’s aggression, with its more traditional nationalist wing, steeped in the history of Hungary’s own past suffering at Russia’s hands, uncomfortable with cozying up to Mr. Putin.
But its hopes that Mr. Orban, who went from being an anti-Kremlin liberal firebrand in 1989 to Mr. Putin’s closest partner in Europe, might again change direction after the election seems to have been diminished by the scale of his party’s victory. It won more than two-thirds of the seats in Parliament while an openly pro-Putin, far-right party, Our Homeland Movement, secured enough votes to enter Parliament for the first time.
“Putin is right. Ukraine is getting what it deserves,” Janos Horvath, a supporter of the far-right party, said after casting his vote. Ukraine, he said, echoing a favorite Kremlin talking point, mistreats its ethnic minorities, including Russians and Hungarians, and “must be stopped.”
The crushing defeat of Mr. Orban’s opponents, who campaigned on pledges to show more solidarity with Ukraine and Hungary’s allies, makes it unlikely that Hungary will now join NATO and the European Union in condemning Mr. Putin over his military onslaught or in supplying weapons to help Ukraine defend itself. Hungary, unlike Poland, has steadfastly refused to let weapons pass through its territory to Ukraine.
While increasingly isolated from his foreign allies, Mr. Orban won strong domestic support for his neutral stance on the war, turning what had initially threatened to become an electoral liability into a vote-getter. He did this through relentless misrepresentation of his opponents’ position, deploying a vast apparatus of loyal media outlets to convince voters that his rivals wanted to send Hungarian troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia, something that nobody has suggested doing.
At the opposition’s final rally in Budapest on election eve, Fidesz activists masquerading as journalists presented the opposition’s main candidate, Peter Maki Zay, with a white T-shirt emblazoned with a red target, shouting that this was what Hungary would become if he won. A video of the encounter was later posted online by Fidesz-friendly media outlets, which repeatedly cast the election as a choice between “war and peace.”
Soon after Mr. Putin offered his congratulations, election observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe complained that, while well organized, the election had been tilted in favor of the Mr. Orban’s governing party by “blurring the line between state and party.” The vote, the organization said in a statement issued Monday, had been “marred by the absence of a level playing field.”
With his rivals in shock over their defeat, despite having forged a united front for the first time in an effort to unseat Mr. Orban, the victorious prime minister showed no sign of stepping back from his battles with the European Union. “This is not the past, this is the Europe of the future,” he told jubilant supporters early Monday.
Gloating early over a Fidesz win that he said was so big it “could perhaps be seen from the moon,” and “certainly from Brussels,” Mr. Orban, who has declined to criticize Mr. Putin over his invasion, took aim at Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, placing him alongside Brussels bureaucrats and the mainstream media as among his “many opponents.”
Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly criticized Hungary for resisting sanctions on Russian energy exports and for refusing to let weapons pass through to Ukraine.
Hungary has long had strained relations with Ukraine, which Mr. Orban has accused of persecuting its ethnic Hungarian minority by restricting the use of Hungarian-language teaching in state schools. His complaints echo those of Mr. Putin with regard to ethnic Russians living in Ukraine and have made Mr. Orban more sympathetic than other European leaders to Russia’s narrative of the war.
Hungarians living in Ukraine number only around 150,000 but they form part of a much larger diaspora that, granted the right to vote in Hungarian elections and lavished with funding by Budapest, has become an important source of support for Fidesz, and a constant source of friction between Hungary and its neighbors.
In a sign that Fidesz, emboldened by its election victory, would press on with supporting ethnic Hungarians in countries like Ukraine, Mr. Orban’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, on Monday thanked the 315,000 voters outside Hungary who he said had cast a vote. “We stand up for our Hungarian compatriots beyond the borders,” he said. “They can count on us just like we can count on them in important decisions like this one,” a reference to Sunday’s election.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Images from the Ukrainian town of Bucha “suggest these atrocities are not the act of a rogue soldier. They are part of a broader, troubling campaign,” the State Department spokesman Ned Price said. “Those responsible for atrocities must be held accountable.”
The United Nations' Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine is trying to gain access to Bucha without delay to investigate reports that civilians were killed and subjected to horrific violence there, the U.N. deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, said Monday. The Security Council will meet on Tuesday to discuss the reported atrocities and the overall situation in Ukraine.
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators have been holding intermittent peace talks since a few days after the war began, but it has not been clear that they would amount to anything — or that the Kremlin was serious about negotiating.
Now, the prospects for talks are more in doubt than ever with the reported discovery of hundreds of corpses of civilians in Kyiv suburbs as Russian forces retreated.
Standing in Bucha, where the largest number of bodies has been revealed, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday, referring to Russian troops, that it was “very hard to talk, when you see what they have done here.”
“The longer Russia would delay the process of a meeting the worse it will be for them,” he told journalists.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters that he had no information about when the talks, which were last held last week, would resume, and whether the events in Bucha would affect their progress.
“The situation is serious, there is no doubt,” Mr. Peskov said.
Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government, said that the events in Bucha will certainly make progress even more difficult.
“It is hard to sit at a table and shake hands when such things happen,” he said.
While the talks are important, Mr. Kortunov said, they primarily depend on the military situation on the ground, where both sides are still waiting for more favorable conditions to emerge for them to press harder from the position of strength.
“As of today, there isn’t much hope,” he said.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that, while Mr. Putin alone can dictate Russian policy, in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky is dependent on public opinion and a multitude of political actors in the country.
“The events in Bucha would make him even more constrained,” Mr. Kortunov said, referring to Mr. Zelensky.
Throughout the war, Russian officials have given inconsistent statements about Moscow’s aims, about Ukrainian proposals, and about the prospects for a cease-fire, a summit meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky, or an ultimate peace deal. Several times, different high-level Russian officials have contradicted each other. Some Western officials and analysts have concluded that for the Kremlin, the negotiations are purely for show.
Mr. Zelensky has accepted what Russia has described as its central demand, that Ukraine not join the NATO alliance, and he and his negotiators have expressed openness to other Russian demands. Last week, they presented a set of proposals describing the outlines of a peace deal, but Russia has not formally responded.
Reporting from Paris
France's foreign ministry said it would expel several Russian diplomats stationed in France, saying in a statement that their “activities are contrary to our security interests.” The ministry did not say how many diplomats it would expel.
Lithuania is expelling the Russian ambassador and recalling its own ambassador to Moscow, in response to revelations of atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine. While many countries have ordered Russian officials to leave their territory since the war began, Lithuania appears to be the first to expel an ambassador.
WASHINGTON — President Biden on Monday said reports of indiscriminate killings of civilians in the town of Bucha constituted a “war crime” and that the United States would bring additional sanctions against Russia.
In his first remarks since images emerged showing bodies lining the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Mr. Biden said he wanted President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to face charges.
“You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” Mr. Biden said to reporters at the White House on Monday morning. “Well, the truth of the matter — we saw it happen in Bucha — this warrants him — he is a war criminal.”
When asked if he thought what had occurred was a genocide, the president replied: “No, I think it is a war crime.”
But he stressed that “we have to gather the information” — evidence of the sort required to charge Mr. Putin with a war crime.
“We have to continue to provide Ukraine with the weapons they need to continue the fight, and we have to get all the detail so this can be an actual — have a war crime trial,” Mr. Biden added.
His remarks echoed those of France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, who on Monday told France Inter radio that the pictures showed “very clear signs of war crimes.”
Mr. Biden did not provide details about what further sanctions the United States would bring against Russia. Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, will answer questions from reporters at the White House on Monday afternoon.
Last month, the State Department formally concluded that the Russian government had committed war crimes in Ukraine, but had not personally named Mr. Putin.
The president has gone further with his recent comments, going so far as to declare in a visit overseas last month that Mr. Putin “cannot remain” in power. Asked whether he had been too forceful in saying Mr. Putin should not remain in power, Mr. Biden has been defiant, saying he was speaking in personal terms about Mr. Putin.
“I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel, and I make no apologies for it,” Mr. Biden told reporters last week.
On Monday, he again disparaged Mr. Putin as a “brutal” criminal.
“This guy is brutal,” Mr. Biden said. “And what’s happening in Bucha is outrageous, and everyone’s seen it.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Reporting from Berlin
Germany said it is expelling 40 Russian diplomats over the actions of Russian forces in Bucha, Ukraine. “The images from Bucha are evidence of incredible brutality on the part of the Russian leadership and those who follow its propaganda,” Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, said, adding that further sanctions would be announced soon.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
The mayor of Mariupol says some 130,000 residents remain trapped in the city. Vadym Boychenko, the mayor, said in a statement that “everything” is destroyed in the city — including all of the city’s municipal buses.
A desperately needed evacuation convoy and humanitarian aid has again been unable to reach the besieged southern city of Mariupol on Monday, the fourth day of trying, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
The possibility of evacuations from Mariupol had loomed large earlier in the day after a planned I.C.R.C. convoy faltered over the weekend. Ukrainian government officials had initially issued hopeful messages that a convoy was on its way to the city.
But the team from the I.C.R.C. was stopped by the local police not far from Mariupol in the town of Mangush, where it had been carrying out humanitarian work, according to Jason Straziuso, a spokesman for the organization. He said the I.C.R.C. was in contact with all sides of the conflict.
On previous days, the organization had said the necessary conditions and security guarantees were not in place to proceed on to Mariupol.
At least 130,000 people have remained in Mariupol, according to the latest statement from the city’s mayor, caught in a Russian bombardment of the city that has left many without consistent access to food, water, electricity or medicine.
Vadym Boychenko, the mayor of Mariupol, said Monday that all of the city’s municipal buses had been destroyed in recent weeks but that people had been able to evacuate by private car.
“Everything was destroyed,” he said. Some sporadic humanitarian corridors have opened from the city since March 13, despite the lack of a cease-fire, and people have managed to drive from the city to nearby Berdyansk.
Some were able to do that again on Monday, though with interruptions, while another route from Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia has also been used in recent days. Around 90,000 people from Mariupol have traveled to Berdyansk and onto Zaporizhzhia since the middle of the month, Mr. Boychenko said.
“We urge the international community to unite for the complete evacuation of Mariupol residents,” he added.
Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said early on Monday that 15 buses had already left Zaporizhia for Mariupol “to evacuate our people,” adding that a delegation from the I.C.R.C. planned to continue on to Mariupol from the nearby town of Mangush with seven buses.
But by the evening, those hopes had again been dashed.
Ms. Vereshchuk also noted that there were plans to evacuate civilians from several cities in the Luhansk region, a number of which are under Russian control, including Severodonetsk, Popasna, Lysychansk, Rubizhne and Nyzhne.
She said Russian forces had been violating cease-fire agreements and “shelling humanitarian columns,” but that, despite this, “courageous police, military and drivers” under military direction had helped civilians to evacuate.
Reporting from Istanbul
The Russian general prosecutor’s office warned that anyone describing the Bucha atrocities as Russia’s doing could face prosecution, claiming, without offering proof, that the accusations of Russian killings of civilians were a “cynical lie” perpetrated by Ukraine and the West.
Reporting from Washington
In his first remarks since images emerged from Bucha, President Biden declined to call what was happening in Ukraine a genocide but said it constituted a “war crime” and noted the importance of gathering evidence in those situations. He told reporters at the White House that the United States would be adding “more sanctions” against Russia, but did not provide details.
Released Ukrainian prisoners of war have spoken of “inhumane” treatment while in Russian captivity, according to Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmila Denisova. Some suffered frostbite and spoke of being starved, she said in a Telegram post, suggesting Russia may have violated the Geneva Convention protecting prisoners of war. There was no immediate response from Moscow.
Reporting from Brussels
Germany’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, said the European Union should differentiate between oil, gas and coal imports from Russia when thinking about further sanctions. Arriving at an E.U. finance ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg, he said cutting off Russian gas wasn’t an option for Germany right now, making it likelier that energy sanctions against Russia because of the Bucha massacre would focus on coal and oil.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the town of Bucha, where emergency workers were still gathering bodies of civilian victims from streets and backyards, Ukrainska Pravda reported. It said that Mr. Zelensky spoke with locals and saw the site of a major Ukrainian attack on a Russian armored column early in the war.
Reporting from Brussels
The European Union will send investigators to Ukraine to help the local prosecutor general “document war crimes,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, tweeted Monday. She said the E.U. would also support Ukraine’s efforts through the European police agency, Europol, and the criminal justice agency, Eurojust.
I spoke with President @ZelenskyyUa about the atrocious murder of civilians in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine.
— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) April 4, 2022
The EU is ready to send Joint Investigation Teams to document war crimes in coordination with the Ukrainian Prosecutor General.@Europol and @Eurojust will support.
The United States and its allies will seek to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council, according to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “The images out of Bucha and devastation across Ukraine require us now to match our words with action,” she said.
In close coordination with Ukraine and other Member States and partners at the UN, the United States is going to seek Russia’s suspension from the UN Human Rights Council.
— Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield (@USAmbUN) April 4, 2022
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Residents carried flowers toward the Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church in Lviv, Ukraine, on Monday for the funerals of two Ukrainian soldiers, Oleksandr Simakov, 41, and Volodymyr Tereshko, 44, who were killed during the war.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said evacuations from Mariupol and a number of other cities in the country’s southeast were planned on Monday.
“Fifteen buses have already left Zaporizhia for Mariupol to evacuate our people,” Ms. Vereshchuk said, adding that a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross planned to continue its own journey to Mariupol from a nearby town with seven buses.
BRUSSELS — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine lambasted the former leaders of Germany and France, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, in a video address released late on Sunday, seemingly blaming them for the deaths of Ukrainian civilians.
“I invite Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha, to see what the policy of 14 years of concessions to Russia has led to,” Mr. Zelensky said, referring to the Kyiv suburb where images surfaced over the weekend of bodies lying in the streets after Russian forces withdrew. “See with your own eyes the tortured and slain Ukrainians.”
Mr. Zelensky was speaking, he said, on the 14th anniversary of the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, where, after a major internal debate, NATO promised membership in the alliance to Georgia and Ukraine but without specifying when.
He blamed NATO country politicians for harboring an “absurd fear” of Russia, adding: “They thought that by refusing Ukraine, they could appease Russia, to convince it to respect Ukraine and live normally alongside us.”
Later, he insisted that he did not blame the West or anyone else except the Russian soldiers who he said committed crimes against Ukrainians and those who gave them their orders. “But we have the right to talk about indecision,” he said.
The Bucharest summit was marked by a debate over whether to give Ukraine and Georgia a formal “membership action plan” to guide them toward qualifying for NATO membership. President George W. Bush favored doing so. Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy were not alone in arguing that neither country was ready, and that to extend membership plans to them would severely hurt relations with Russia and President Vladimir V. Putin.
Mr. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, told him that offering Georgia and Ukraine NATO membership “was truly overreaching” and, according to his memoir, a case of “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”
Mr. Putin made the same point in Bucharest, saying that Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO were red lines for him.
In a late-night compromise, all NATO member states agreed that the two countries should not be offered a membership action plan, but were promised membership at some point in the future.
Fiona Hill, a Russia scholar who was then a U.S. government intelligence analyst, said that the intelligence community tried to persuade Mr. Bush not to make that promise, but failed. Four months later, Russia went to war in Georgia. As for Ukraine, Ms. Hill said, Mr. Putin “has been trying to shut that door ever since.”
Even after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and helped sponsor separatist rebels in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, NATO made no effort to bring Ukraine into line for membership. NATO countries helped Ukraine train and equip its army, and provided significant economic and political support, but without membership, the country remained unprotected by the alliance’s commitment to collective defense — leaving it in a “gray zone,” Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday.
Ms. Merkel responded on Monday through a spokeswoman, who said that she stood “by her decisions in connection with the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest.”
But Ms. Merkel also supported the efforts “to stand by Ukraine and to put an end to the barbarism and the war by Russia against Ukraine,” the spokeswoman added.
Mr. Sarkozy had no immediate comment. But Germany and France — and NATO as a whole — have made it clear even during this war that they have no interest in fighting a nuclear-armed Russia on behalf of Ukraine. Both countries, along with other NATO allies, have given Ukraine the weapons and other support that Mr. Zelensky has used to try to beat back the Russian invasion.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
In his annual letter to shareholders, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said complying with sanctions as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine was an “enormous undertaking.” He said the bank could lose $1 billion “over time” because of its exposure to Russia.
A residential area of the city of Mykolaiv, in Ukraine’s south, was targeted by Russian forces on Monday, according to the city’s mayor, the latest strikes on a city that has been under constant shelling for days.
Alarms had rung throughout the night in Mykolaiv, a once-thriving industrial city that was home to half a million people before the Russian invasion. The assault on the city and others in Ukraine’s south came amid a broader push by Russian forces to refocus their operation there and in the east after withdrawing from areas in the north and northeast.
In a statement posted on social media, Oleksandr Syenkevych, Mykolaiv’s mayor, said a number of missiles had targeted Mykolaiv since the early hours of Monday, and he later told CNN that at least one person had been killed. He also shared a video that he said showed damage to a hospital as a result of weekend strikes, but he added that no doctors or patients had been injured.
Russian shelling on Sunday killed at least one person and injured more than a dozen others, including a 15-year-old, regional officials said. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general detailed attacks on Mykolaiv and the nearby city of Ochakiv, where it said shelling had killed at least eight people, destroyed houses and vehicles and damaged civilian infrastructure.
The office said in a statement posted on the messaging app Telegram that it would investigate whether the attacks on Sunday amounted to war crimes, “on the fact of violation of the laws and customs of war combined with premeditated murder.”
Last week, a missile strike blasted a gaping hole into a regional government building in Mykolaiv, killing at least 36 people, according to an update Sunday night from Mr. Syenkevych, the city’s mayor.
Russian forces continued to batter Ukraine’s southern coastline with airstrikes on Monday in an apparent effort to seize key port cities and control a stretch of land around Russia-annexed Crimea and its strongholds in the east of Ukraine.
Rockets were also fired in the Odesa region, further west in Ukraine, overnight, but regional military officials said the only damage was to nonresidential buildings and that there were no casualties.
In the nearby Kherson region, southeast of Mykolaiv, residential areas were left without electricity, communications, medicine, food or water, according to Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmila Denisova, in a statement posted to Telegram on Sunday.
One community, Stanislav, had been “under constant fire from enemy artillery” and is “already half-destroyed,” Ms. Denisova said.
“Most of the houses and the school were destroyed,” she said. “People are forced to live in broken houses, hide in basements.”
Reporting from Geneva
United Nations human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, expressed horror at the images emerging from Bucha, and called for an independent investigation of possible war crimes. “All measures should be taken to preserve evidence,” she added, saying that bodies should be exhumed from mass graves to assist families with identification and to aid in the investigation.
BRUSSELS — Growing evidence of apparent atrocities against civilians during the Russian occupation of some Ukrainian towns is paving the way for new sanctions by the European Union, but divisions remain over whether they will go as far as to include a ban on Russian energy.
Statements by E.U. leaders — after images and videos from Bucha, a town near Kyiv, appeared to show civilian bodies scattered on the streets after Russia withdrew its troops from the area — revealed just how split the bloc was on imposing sanctions on Russian oil and gas, even in the face of what could be Russian war crimes.
“Further EU sanctions & support are on their way,” Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, wrote in a tweet on Sunday. E.U. ambassadors will meet on Wednesday to discuss another package of sanctions against Russia, but the extent of that new set of measures is still very much in flux, diplomats and officials said. A meeting of NATO defense ministers is also scheduled to take place that day.
One version of the E.U. sanctions package could include a ban on Russian coal, but not oil and gas. There are also bans on Russian goods from E.U. ports under consideration, as well as smaller measures to close loopholes of existing sanctions, E.U. diplomats and officials said.
President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Monday that images of dead civilians in Bucha were “unbearable” and that he was in favor of imposing new sanctions on Russia. “Today there are very clear signs of war crimes,” Mr. Macron told France Inter radio. “Those who were responsible for those crimes will have to answer for them.” He said the new sanctions should target coal and oil.
Germany is the key country holding the bloc back from an outright ban on oil and gas, but the measure is also unpopular in other smaller European nations that largely rely on Russian supplies. Berlin has consistently advanced its position within the bloc by arguing that sanctions against Russia ought to hurt Russia more than they hurt Europe.
Germany’s intransigence on oil and gas sanctions was on display Sunday, when cracks appeared in the coalition government’s position on such a move. Christine Lambrecht, the defense minister, told local news media that the bloc should consider banning gas imports, but the economics minister, Robert Habeck, also speaking Sunday, said such a move would not be useful because President Vladimir V. Putin has “already practically lost the war.” Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a televised address Sunday, also called for new sanctions but stopped short of matching his defense minister’s support for an oil or gas ban.
Polish leaders, who have been driving the hardest-line group within the European Union against Russia, said it was high time that the bloc banned Russian energy, and singled out Germany as responsible for holding the 27 member countries back.
“You can’t constantly support a great power like Russia with billions in payments from the purchase of energy,” Jarosław Kaczynski, Poland’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag: “This is inadmissible from a political and moral point of view. This must come to an end, and Germany should finally take a clear stance on this,” he said.
“The truth is that E.U. capitals are still very reluctant to ban Russian oil and gas — despite the terrible images emerging from Bucha,” said Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group consulting firm. “Still, I would say there is now significant upward pressure on the likelihood that some form of energy sanctions are included in the next — the fifth — or subsequent sanctions packages,” he said.
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyReporting from Krakow, Poland
Local government leaders in the Chernihiv and Kharkiv regions have warned residents to be wary of mines as they return to areas where Russian forces have retreated. In the Kharkiv region, four people were recently killed by mines left behind, Sergei Bolvinov, a lead police investigator in the region, told a local news outlet. And the head of the Chernihiv regional military administration, Vyacheslav Chaus, urged people to “have patience and wait” until military units had finished demining, adding that “we must avoid new victims,” in a statement posted to Telegram.
Reporting from Istanbul
The Kremlin denied any Russian involvement in atrocities in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, repeating Sunday’s contention by the Russian Defense Ministry that video evidence published by Western journalists and by Ukrainian officials was fake. “We categorically deny any allegations,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters on Monday.
Reporting from Paris
President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Monday that images of dead civilians in Kyiv suburbs were “unbearable” and that he was in favor of imposing new sanctions on Russia. He told France Inter radio that the pictures showed “very clear signs of war crimes.”
Reporting from Hong Kong
Russian forces fired rockets at the city of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine early Monday. An attack by Russian forces there a day earlier killed at least one person and injured more than a dozen, the head of the Mykolaiv regional military administration said. (An earlier version of this update misstated the day the reported casualties occurred; it was Sunday, not Monday.)
The call to hold Russia accountable for apparent atrocities in Ukraine was intensifying on Monday after Russian forces retreating from a Kyiv suburb left behind dead civilians lining the streets — some with their hands bound, some with gunshot wounds to the head.
Amid growing global horror at what President Biden called a war crime in the suburb of Bucha, some European leaders were demanding tougher sanctions against Russia, including a total ban on Russian fuel imports. While European Union nations were sharply divided over taking such a drastic step, Mr. Biden told reporters in Washington that the United States would be adding “more sanctions” against Moscow. He didn’t provide further details.
The outrage in Washington and in some European capitals was met with broad denials from the Kremlin, and accusations that the West had fabricated evidence of violence against civilians. But satellite imagery analyzed by The New York Times refuted claims by Russia that the killing of civilians in Bucha occurred after its soldiers had left the town. Satellite images showed that at least 11 bodies had been on Yablonska Street in Bucha since March 11, when Russia, by its own account, occupied the town.
Russia, meanwhile, continued to bombard key southern cities including Mykolaiv and the besieged city of Mariupol. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that an evacuation convoy carrying desperately needed humanitarian aid had been unable to reach the city on Monday, the fourth day of trying.
Here are some other major developments:
The Russian general prosecutor’s office warned that anyone describing the Bucha atrocities as Russia’s doing could face prosecution. It claimed, without offering proof, that the accusations of Russian killings of civilians were a “cynical lie” perpetrated by Ukraine and the West.
Germany said it was expelling 40 Russian diplomats over the actions of Russian forces in Bucha. “The images from Bucha are evidence of incredible brutality on the part of the Russian leadership and those who follow its propaganda,” Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, said.
In a speech released late Sunday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, directly addressed the Russian people about the reports of civilian deaths. “I want every mother of every Russian soldier to see the bodies of the killed people in Bucha, in Irpin, in Hostomel,” he said in Russian. “What did they do? Why were they killed?”
Russia battered Ukraine’s southern coastline with airstrikes on Monday, firing rockets at the city of Mykolaiv, regional officials said. The mayor of Mykolaiv told CNN that at least one person was killed.
Elections on Sunday in Hungary and Serbia appear to have extended the tenures of Europe’s two most Kremlin-friendly leaders, both populist strongmen fortified by their overwhelming control of the news media and cheap energy from Russia.
Dani Blum and
Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, addressed the Grammy Awards in a video, giving an emotional plea for support in his country’s war against Russia.
“What is more opposite to music?” Zelensky said. “The silence of ruined cities and killed people.”
The leader’s aides had lobbied for an appearance at the Academy Awards last week, but organizers did not commit to it, drawing some backlash.
In his brief address, Zelensky, an actor turned wartime leader, emphasized that many of the musicians in his country were fighting in the battle against the Russian invasion.
“Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos,” he said. “They sing to the wounded in hospitals. Even to those who can’t hear them.”
“Support us in any way you can,” he added. “Any, but not silence.”
After Zelensky’s address, John Legend performed his song “Free,” featuring a Ukrainian singer, Mika Newton, and a poet, Lyuba Yakimchuk, who fled the country days ago.
Here is Zelensky’s full speech:
The war. What is more opposite to music? The silence of ruined cities and killed people. Our children draw swooping rockets, not shooting stars. Over 400 children have been injured and 153 children died. And we’ll never see them drawing. Our parents are happy to wake up in the morning in bomb shelters. But alive. Our loved ones don’t know if we will be together again. The war doesn’t let us choose who survives and who stays in eternal silence. Our musicians wear body armor instead of tuxedos. They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can’t hear them. But the music will break through anyway. We defend our freedom to live, to love, to sound on our land. We are fighting Russia, which brings horrible silence with its bombs. The dead silence. Fill the silence with your music. Fill it today to tell our story. Tell the truth about the war on your social networks, on TV. Support us in any way you can. Any — but not silence. And then peace will come. To all our cities the war is destroying — Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Volnovakha, Mariupol and others — they are legends already. But I have a dream of them living and free. Free like you on the Grammy stage.
Many in the music industry have made public statements opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and showing support for the Ukrainian people. On Sunday night at the Grammys, the Recording Academy teamed up with Global Citizen to highlight its “Stand Up for Ukraine” initiative.
The three major record conglomerates — Sony, Warner Music and Universal Music — have all suspended operations in Russia in response to the war, along with the touring behemoth Live Nation, which released a statement saying the company will “cease work with any and all Russian-based suppliers.” Spotify suspended its streaming service in Russia and closed its office in Moscow.
Musicians have also pledged solidarity with Ukraine, canceling shows and speaking out on social media. Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Björk, the Killers, AJR, Iggy Pop and others pulled out of shows in the region. Pink Floyd and David Gilmour yanked some of their music off digital providers in Russia and Belarus, writing in a statement on Twitter that the move was an effort “to stand with the world in strongly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
And artists have hosted benefit concerts across the globe. Arcade Fire held a last-minute benefit show in New Orleans in March, donating all proceeds of the pay-what-you-can event to a relief fund for citizens in Ukraine. Days later, the band said it raised over $100,000 after donating the proceeds from additional shows in New York. Ed Sheeran, Camila Cabello, Nile Rodgers and others played a benefit concert in England last week. At a New York fund-raiser where she performed alongside Gogol Bordello, a band with Ukrainian roots, Patti Smith announced a $50,000 donation to Doctors Without Borders on behalf of Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon.
Rachel Sherman contributed reporting.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment