Kyiv April 15, 8:54 p.m.
Moscow April 15, 8:54 p.m.
Washington April 15, 1:54 p.m.
Live Updates: Russia Warns U.S. to Stop Sending Arms to Ukraine
Moscow’s communiqué to the Biden administration said there would be “unpredictable consequences.” U.S. officials confirm that the Russian ship Moskva was sunk by Ukrainian missiles.
WASHINGTON — Russia has sent a series of warnings to the Biden administration, including a formal diplomatic protest this week, demanding that it halt shipment of advanced weapons to Ukraine that could strike into Russian territory, or risk unspecified “unpredictable consequences.”
The diplomatic note, called a démarche, was sent through normal channels, two administration officials said, and was not signed by President Vladimir V. Putin or other senior Russian officials. But it was an indicator, one administration official said, that the weapons sent by the United States so far were having an effect.
It also suggested that the Russians were concerned about the new tranche of more sophisticated offensive weaponry, part of an $800 million package that President Biden announced the day after the démarche was delivered by the Russian Embassy in Washington.
American officials said the tone of the note was consistent with a series of public Russian threats, including to target deliveries of weapons as they moved across Ukrainian territory.
Officials said the note did not prompt any special concern inside the White House. But it has touched off a broader discussion inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies about whether the “unpredictable consequences” could include trying to target or sabotage some of the weapons shipments while they are still in NATO territory, before they are handed off to Ukrainians for the final leg of their journey into the hands of Ukrainian troops. The delivery of the protest note was first reported by The Washington Post.
The weapons President Biden authorized this week for transfer to the Ukrainians include long-range artillery that is suited for what American officials believe will be a different style of battle in the open areas of the Donbas, where Russian forces appear to be massing for an attack in coming days.
While Pentagon officials were insistent in the run-up to the war in February that the United States provide only defensive weaponry that would avoid escalation, the nature of Russia’s attacks, including direct attacks on civilians and nonmilitary targets, appears to have muted that debate.
In other developments:
Two Ukrainian Neptune missiles hit Russia’s flagship Moskva in the Black Sea, a senior defense official said on Friday, providing the first American confirmation that the sinking of the Russian cruiser was the result of a Ukrainian strike.
Ukraine’s military said on Friday that Russian forces were using long-range bombers to attack Mariupol, as they intensified their efforts to seize complete control of the southern port city.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had struck a missile factory on the outskirts of Kyiv and threatened to increase the “number and scale of missile strikes against facilities” in Ukraine’s capital in response to any “terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage” on the Russian territory.
The C.I.A.’s director said on Thursday that “potential desperation” to extract the semblance of a victory could tempt Mr. Putin to order the use of a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon. The comments publicly voiced a concern that has coursed through the White House during the seven weeks of conflict.
The Russians are staging attack helicopters at the border with Ukraine and bringing in soldiers and artillery, according to the Pentagon, as both sides furiously prepare for what is expected to be a bloody battle to control the vast plains of the country’s east.
Reporting from Bucha, Ukraine
Funerals were held for two civilians found dead in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, after the Russian withdrawal from the town. The body of Oleksandr Volodymir Bondar, 32, was found lying in a garden after he was shot by a sniper in early March, friends and relatives said. Anatoly Kosyanchuk, 77, was killed by a heavy blow to the head, believed to be from a rifle butt, on the day before the Russians withdrew.
WASHINGTON — Two Ukrainian Neptune missiles hit Russia’s flagship Moskva in the Black Sea, a senior Defense official said on Friday, providing the first American confirmation that the sinking of the Russian cruiser was the result of a Ukrainian strike.
Moscow had said the ship sank in stormy seas after an accidental fire caused an explosion.
The official said that American intelligence assessments say there were a number of casualties as the ship was struck but could not provide a specific number. He said that there were also some Russian sailors who survived and were seen being picked up by lifeboats.
The ship was struck about 65 nautical miles south of Odesa and moved under her own power for some time after the initial strikes, before eventually sinking on Thursday. As the only Russian cruiser of that class in the Black Sea, Moskva’s sinking is a significant blow to Russia’s war plans, the official said.
“She had cruise missiles on that ship that are now at the bottom of the Black Sea,” the official said.
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Continue reading the main storyRussia has sent a series of warnings to the Biden administration, including a formal diplomatic protest this week, demanding that it halt shipment of advanced weaponry to Ukraine that could strike into Russian territory, or risk unspecified “unpredictable consequences.”
Ukraine’s defense minister goaded Russia on Friday over the sinking of its flagship in the Black Sea a day earlier, suggesting that the wreck would become a popular diving attraction.
The minister, Oleksii Reznikov, posted a photo on Twitter of a scuba diver swimming with a sea turtle, seizing on the loss of the Moskva, one of the Russian Navy's largest vessels.
“A ‘flagship’ Russian warship is a worthy diving site,” Mr. Reznikov wrote in English on Twitter. “We have one more diving spot in the Black Sea now. Will definitely visit the wreck after our victory in the war. BTW, I already have 300 scuba dives.”
The cause of the naval catastrophe is disputed, with Ukraine claiming it struck the ship with missiles and Russia attributing it to an accidental fire that spread to ammunition aboard the ship. But the vessel’s loss has emboldened Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry further mocked Russia in another tweet on Friday over the ship’s sinking. The ministry said it wanted to remind the Russian Navy that the straits into the Black Sea were “closed for entry only.” “The part of your fleet that remains afloat still has a way out,” it said.
Ukraine’s military said on Friday that Russian forces were using long-range bombers to attack Mariupol as they fight to seize complete control of the southern port city.
The remaining Ukrainian forces are holed up in two primary locations in Mariupol: at a sprawling steel plant and at the city’s port.
“The Russian Army is constantly involving additional units to storm the city,” Oleksandr Motuzianyk, the spokesman for Ukraine’s defense ministry, said at a news conference.
He claimed that “the Russians are not able to completely capture this city,” although after nearly two months of bombardment, he acknowledged that the remaining Ukrainian forces in the city face an increasingly difficult situation.
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Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine
Ukrainian firefighters responded to a warehouse that was set ablaze by a Russian airstrike in the eastern city of Derhachi on Friday. Much like its regional capital, Kharkiv, Derhachi has been under constant bombardment since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Simon Ostrovsky and
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, Moscow has ramped up its propaganda and disinformation efforts, crafting a through-the-looking-glass image of the war in which Ukraine and the West — not Russia — are to blame for Russia’s attack.
Transnistria is technically part of the former-Soviet country of Moldova, but the region’s separatist government is backed by some 1,500 Russian troops who are stationed there and its airwaves are dominated by Russian state-owned media outlets. Residents live just a few miles from the Ukrainian border, however, and have access to Ukrainian broadcasts as well.
A New York Times video team traveled to the breakaway region and spoke with people to find out what they believe about the war in Ukraine and to see how disinformation spreads beyond Russia’s borders.
Simon Ostrovsky is a Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow.
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
Russia’s communications watchdog had blocked access to the Russian-language website of The Moscow Times, citing an article about Russian guard officers who refused to join combat in Ukraine, the newspaper said. Based in Moscow, The Moscow Times has been a leading independent English-language news media outlet covering Russia and former Soviet republics.
As Russian forces move into position for a stepped-up assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, there are indications that they will be forced to confront an increasingly organized insurgency in places already under their control.
The Ukrainian military’s intelligence agency said this week that 70 Russian soldiers had been killed while on night patrols in the occupied city of Melitopol from March 20 to April 12. “So far, the units of the occupying forces have failed to identify those involved in the extermination of Russian servicemen,” the intelligence agency said.
And even as Russia tries to fortify its positions in the territories it controls, Aleksey Arestovich, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said on Friday that “several small villages in the Kherson region have been returned under the flag of Ukraine.”
He declined to go into detail so as to not compromise operational security.
Military analysts have warned that even if Russia manages to expand the territory it controls in eastern Ukraine, it may face an insurgency unlike anything it endured in other major conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Chechnya or Syria.
Writing for the Modern War Institute at West Point, Daniel Karr, a former intelligence analyst at the U.S. Defense Department, and Jacob Ware, a research associate for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the spirit and morale of the Ukrainian forces and public would “likely play an even more important role in the now-unraveling next phase, particularly if Russia ultimately succeeds in occupying parts of eastern Ukraine.”
“Insurgency and guerrilla warfare are notoriously difficult to prosecute, and are sapping to energy and spirit — guerrillas will face food and supply shortages, adverse weather, and relentless manhunts,” they wrote. “But the Ukrainian resistance will receive sustained financial and political support, including from an international diaspora movement. These are also excellent conditions for insurgency.”
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Continue reading the main storyRussian forces on Friday appeared close to capturing the strategic Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, military analysts said, an achievement that would culminate one of the bloodiest battles of the six-week war.
Despite being vastly outnumbered, Ukrainian forces in the city have withstood weeks of Russian bombardments from the land, air and sea, and continued to stage counterattacks. But now, the last of the Ukrainian forces have been largely isolated in two main locations: in the city’s port and at a nearby steel factory.
Petro Andryushenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, denied Russian reports of a mass Ukrainian surrender in the city but acknowledged that the Russians had taken some of the remaining forces prisoner.
He said that Russian troops were strictly controlling entry and exit in Mariupol and were “filtering” Ukrainian civilians — a term that military analysts say is used by Russian forces elsewhere in Ukraine to describe searches, interrogations and possible targeted killings of Ukrainian civilians.
The mayor, Vadym Boichenko, said this week that more than 20,000 civilians had been killed in the city over the course of the war, a number that could not be independently verified.
The Mariupol City Council released a statement on Friday alluding to reports from residents that Russian troops had begun exhuming bodies buried in the yards of residential buildings. The Ukrainians are accusing Russia of taking such steps as part of a broader effort to hide evidence of war crimes.
“The occupiers forbid the burial of people killed by them,” the council said in its statement.
Mr. Boichenko estimated that 120,000 people remained in the city, struggling to survive amid power outages and limited access to food and water.
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had struck a missile factory on the outskirts of Kyiv and threatened to increase the “number and scale of missile strikes against facilities” in Ukraine’s capital in response to any “terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage” on Russian territory. Over the past week, Moscow has accused Ukraine of attacking its border crossing points and towns and villages in their vicinity. Kyiv has dismissed the accusations as a ruse aimed at “ramping up anti-Ukrainian hysteria in Russia.”
The sinking of one of Russia’s most formidable warships, the Moskva, is a stunning blow for the country — whether the ship sank after an accidental fire, as Russia’s Defense Ministry maintains, or after being struck by missiles, as Ukraine has claimed.
More than 600 feet long and weighing 12,500 tons, according to Russian news agencies, the Moskva was one of the Russian Navy’s largest vessels and the flagship of its fleet in the Black Sea.
That body of water, whose coastline is shared with several other countries, including Ukraine, Georgia and Turkey, has been of strategic importance to Russia for centuries.
The Moskva was deployed to support Russian aircraft and troops in Syria in 2015, and in 2008, it patrolled the coast of Georgia during the Russian-Georgian war.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the Moskva — armed with 16 Vulkan missile launchers with a strike range of more than 400 miles, according to Russian state media — and the rest of the Black Sea fleet have launched missiles into Ukraine several times. The ships also cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea and the economic lifeline it provided.
Although military analysts said the loss of the Moskva was not likely to alter the course of the war, it was an embarrassment for Russia’s military, which has spent billions of dollars to modernize its weaponry.
The ship had the ability to do “significant damage” in the Black Sea, said Gary Roughead, a retired admiral and the former chief of naval operations for the United States. He added that with the Moskva’s demise, Russia has most likely lost a key communications and controls platform.
The loss of the Moskva has been estimated by Forbes Ukraine to have cost Russia $750 million and to be Russia’s most expensive military loss in the war to date.
The vessel was also a symbol of national pride. Its name was “Glory” when it was first put into service for the Soviet Navy in the early 1980s. It was renamed after the Russian capital in 1996, according to Russian state media.
“Picture the aircraft carrier USS George Washington going to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,” James Stavridis, a retired U.S. Navy admiral and a former supreme allied commander at NATO, said of the ship’s symbolism.
“It’s a significant hit to their prestige to lose something like that,” said Admiral Roughead, adding, “It calls into question the readiness of the fleet.”
The Moskva is the same ship, Ukrainian officials have said, that was famously and obscenely told off by Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island in February.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has said that all crew members on the Moskva — which usually number around 500 — had been evacuated. The ship will now join an unknowable number of other vessels, some more than a millennium old, on the floor of the Black Sea.
James Glanz contributed reporting.
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AMSTERDAM — Just days after the invasion of Ukraine, Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, posted an emotional statement on Telegram, the messaging app. “I am against war with all the fibers of my soul,” she wrote.
“I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia,” she added, “but now I feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after.”
That has certainly been true for Ms. Smirnova, 30. As the war got worse, and dissent in Russia was ruthlessly quashed, Ms. Smirnova, who had gone to Dubai to recover from a knee injury, realized that she could no longer return home. “If I were to go back to Russia, I would have to completely change my opinion, the way I felt about the war,” Ms. Smirnova said in a recent interview in Amsterdam, adding that returning would be, “quite frankly, dangerous.”
So she left the Bolshoi, the storied company whose name is synonymous with ballet, with its gilded theaters just blocks from the Kremlin, uprooted her life and moved to Amsterdam, where she joined the Dutch National Ballet.
The departure of Ms. Smirnova is a blow to the pride of a nation where, since the days of the czars, ballet has had an outsize importance as a national treasure, a leading cultural export and tool of soft power.
Her move is one of the most visible symbols of how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended ballet, as prominent artists shun Russia’s storied dance companies; theaters in the West cancel performances by the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky; and dance in Russia, which had opened up to the world in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, seems to be turning inward again.
LUBLIN, Poland — On a recent morning, I sat in the sun-filled dining room of a tidy house in eastern Poland, across from one of the most generous men I’ve ever met.
He was a Polish apple farmer who took in eight Ukrainian refugees, all complete strangers, and gave them a place to stay, cooked them meals, brought them armloads of fresh bread every morning and has been trying to find them jobs.
But when it came to talking about World War II, this is what he said: “The real disaster started when the Russians invaded. The Russians were worse than the Germans.”
“The Germans,” he said, “did not hurt ordinary people.”
My first reaction fell somewhere between disappointment and silent outrage: How could this farmer be so kind and so blind? How could he say the Germans didn’t hurt “ordinary people” when they murdered millions of Jews right here in Poland? The biggest death camps were in Poland, and the more I thought about it, the more I was shocked by what the farmer said.
But then I realized he and I were actually engaging in a similar type of thinking.
He couldn’t stop obsessing about Russia, which occupied Poland during World War II and controlled it for many decades afterward, and is now dropping bombs just a few miles from the border. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the Holocaust. Neither of us had lived through all that history ourselves — the trauma was handed down to us from our families — but both of us were trapped in the past.
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Continue reading the main storyBARENTSBURG, Norway — At first glance, Sergey Gushchin, 50, is perhaps not a man one would assume to be the Russian consul general at the world’s northernmost diplomatic mission: ponytail, bluejeans, bass player in a punk band.
Yet on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago located between mainland Norway and the North Pole, it has long been a point of pride to distinguish people from governments. Russians, Ukrainians and Norwegians have lived side by side for decades in this isolated and extreme wilderness known mostly for polar bears and a rapidly warming climate, not for divisive politics.
There is a saying in the high Arctic that if your snowmobile breaks down, no one asks for your nationality before helping to repair it. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has echoed at the top of the world, threatening longstanding personal and professional relationships, cultural interactions and even friendly sports rivalries.
The Svalbard tourist board has called for a boycott of Russian state-owned businesses in the coal mining settlement of Barentsburg. Mr. Gushchin, until now considered an inclusive, moderating figure, has surprised and angered many with comments concerning the Russian invasion and an accusation that Norwegian news media provide mostly “fake news.”
Marc Santora and
The Russians are staging attack helicopters at the border with Ukraine and bringing in soldiers and artillery, according to the Pentagon, as both sides furiously prepare for what is expected to be a bloody battle to control the vast plains of the country’s east.
The preparations come as Russia appears to be further narrowing its war aims, at least for the moment, having pulled back from the north around Kyiv, the capital, after its forces were pummeled. With the sinking on Thursday of its navy’s Black Sea Fleet flagship, possibly by a new Ukrainian missile, Russia may also have to scale back its immediate ambitions in the southeast, where analysts say it does not currently have the capacity to take the entire Black Sea coast.
Russian forces appear close to reaching one goal: capturing the besieged city of Mariupol, where Ukrainian forces who have held out for weeks against a punishing assault are largely holed up in the city’s port and a nearby steel plant. Its capture would free up more Russian forces to head north and try to surround Ukrainian forces on the eastern front.
But the heavy cost of the Mariupol battle for the Russians — who took weeks to subdue the city even after flattening much of it — speaks to their military limitations.
Analysts and U.S. officials fear that the fight for Mariupol is a harbinger of what is to come in the east — less of a lightning-fast war driven by special forces and more of a grinding, slower-moving war that seems to favor Russia’s bigger, better-armed military.
In other developments:
The C.I.A.’s director said on Thursday that “potential desperation” to extract the semblance of a victory could tempt President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to order the use of a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon. The comments publicly voiced a concern that has coursed through the White House during the seven weeks of conflict.
The European Union, which this month banned Russian coal for the first time, is now likely to adopt a similarly phased ban of Russian oil, E.U. officials and diplomats said. Mr. Putin acknowledged on Thursday that Western sanctions had hurt his country’s vital energy sector.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, a senior Russian security official, said on Thursday that if Sweden and Finland joined NATO, there would be “no more talk of a nuclear-free Baltics” region.
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DOBRA, Slovakia — Driving back to his village near the Ukrainian border last Thursday, the mayor had to stop to let a train pass, and assumed he wouldn’t have to wait long. But the flatbed wagons, stacked high with military equipment, just kept coming. He waited for nearly half an hour.
“It was a very long train, much longer than usual,” recalled Mikolas Csoma, the mayor of Dobra, a previously sleepy village in eastern Slovakia that, over the past month, has become a key artery funneling weapons and ammunition into Ukraine by rail from the West.
The train that delayed Mr. Csoma’s drive home was not only unusually long but also signaled a singular escalation in Western efforts to help Ukraine defend itself. It carried an air defense system made up of 48 surface-to-air missiles, four launchers and radars to guide the rockets to their targets, which in Ukraine means Russian warplanes and missiles.
As President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia vows to fight the war to its “full completion” and his forces regroup for an expected push in Ukraine’s east, NATO countries, including the United States, are scrambling to keep the weapons flowing and bulk up the country’s defenses.
Bolstering Ukraine’s long-range air defense capabilities is seen as especially critical. Ukraine already had its own S-300 and other air defense systems, but some of these have been destroyed, leaving Russia with a large degree of freedom to hit Ukrainian targets from the air with warplanes and cruise missiles.
Increasingly desperate to reverse this imbalance, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly pleaded with NATO to “close the sky over Ukraine” by imposing a no-fly zone. But NATO has been unwilling to send its own warplanes into Ukraine.
Instead, the United States offered Slovakia, a fellow NATO member, a substitute battery of American-made Patriot missiles if it would “donate” its aging S-300 system to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s defense ministry reported that two children injured in a strike on the Kramatorsk train station a week ago had died, bringing the death toll to 59, including seven children. The ministry posted an image on Twitter of a blood-soaked stuffed horse and said that Ukraine’s government would send “a bloody children’s toy” to the United Nations “as proof of this barbaric crime.”
President Biden acknowledged on Thursday that he might send a senior U.S. official to Kyiv, a day after reports emerged about a White House debate on the subject.
“We’re making that decision now,” Mr. Biden told reporters before boarding Air Force One for a trip to North Carolina.
Given the enormous security requirements for the president or vice president in a war zone, it is unlikely that either Mr. Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris would travel to the barricaded Ukrainian capital, U.S. officials say. But another top official, such as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, might more easily make the symbolic trip.
Spokesmen for both Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin on Thursday said they had no travel plans to announce. At a daily press briefing, however, the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, noted that Mr. Blinken speaks several times a week to his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba. Mr. Price also noted that the men have met in person twice since Russia invaded Ukraine: last week at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels and at the Ukraine-Poland border last month.
The Russian retreat from the Kyiv area and recent visits to the capital by European leaders, including a surprise weekend trip by the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, have prompted discussions about sending a senior American there to demonstrate U.S. support.
Such a trip would involve challenging logistics. British media reported that Mr. Johnson traveled by a combination of car, train, helicopter and military plane.
Mr. Price also said that U.S. diplomats who were evacuated from Ukraine in February remain across the border in Poland. He said the United States was “constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the safety and the security situation” in Ukraine and hoped to restore a diplomatic presence there “as soon as it would be safe and practical to have U.S. diplomats on the ground there.”
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In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made only a passing reference to the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet that Ukraine says it hit with a missile strike, and that Russia says was damaged by a fire and sank while being towed to port. In listing those who have defended Ukraine since Russia invaded, Zelensky acknowledged “those who have shown that Russian ships can go to the bottom only.”
A Russian warship that Ukraine said it had hit with a missile strike sank in the Black Sea on Thursday while being towed to port in a storm, the Russian Defense Ministry said.
The ministry said the guided-missile cruiser, the Moskva — the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet — had “lost its stability due to damage to the hull from the detonation of ammunition” from a fire.
“In stormy sea conditions, the ship sank,” the Defense Ministry said in a short statement, according to Russian news agencies.
The loss of one of the Russian Navy’s largest and most powerful ships, named after the Russian capital, was a major setback for the Kremlin and a victory for Ukraine as the 50-day-old war appeared to be entering a new phase. Russia has massed troops in the country’s east and appears to be poised for a new offensive there after withdrawing from the north and the region around the capital, Kyiv.
Ukrainian officials had said their forces hit the ship with missiles, but Moscow acknowledged only the fire and the detonation of ammunition. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said earlier on Thursday that President Vladimir V. Putin had been briefed on the situation.
The ship could carry 16 long-range cruise missiles and typically had a crew of about 500 sailors. It was also outfitted with modern air defense systems, making its loss — if Ukraine did indeed strike the ship — an embarrassment for Russia’s military, which has invested billions of dollars into modernizing its weaponry.
If the loss of the ship stemmed from an accidental fire, as the Defense Ministry suggested, the episode would become one of the most striking examples of the miscues and poor discipline that appear to have plagued Russia’s invasion from the start.
The Russian Defense Ministry did not acknowledge any casualties, asserting in its statement that the ship’s crew had been evacuated to “ships of the Black Sea fleet that were in the area.” There was no independent confirmation of that claim.
On Tuesday, the head of Odesa’s military forces, Maxim Marchenko, said on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had struck the ship with anti-ship Neptune missiles.
Although military analysts said the loss of the ship was not likely to alter the course of the war, it was likely to offer a morale boost for Ukrainian forces. In addition, an attack by the Neptune missile systems, if confirmed, would be a significant sign of Ukraine’s military capability and could serve as a deterrent to other Russian naval attacks.
Though Moscow has not confirmed the ship was hit by missiles, a half dozen other Russian ships in the Black Sea moved farther away from the Ukrainian coast on Thursday, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday, lending credence to the claim.
For its part, Ukraine seized the opportunity to mock the invader.
“Russian warship, what are you sinking?” the government wrote on Twitter.
The United Kingdom announced on Thursday that it would impose sanctions on Eugene Tenenbaum and David Davidovich, two Russian oligarchs who it says have close ties to Roman Abramovich.
Mr. Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, is close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and has himself been targeted with a robust set of British sanctions that have led him to seek to sell the team.
In announcing the move, which would freeze assets estimated to be worth up to £10 billion, or roughly $13 billion, the U.K. government said it amounted to “the largest asset freeze action in U.K. history.”
“We are tightening the ratchet on Putin’s war machine and targeting the circle of people closest to the Kremlin,” said Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary. “We will keep going with sanctions until Putin fails in Ukraine. Nothing and no one is off the table.”
The new measures also include a travel ban on Mr. Davidovich.
Mr. Tenenbaum is listed as a director on Chelsea Football Club’s website. The British announcement states that Mr. Tenenbaum took control of Ervington Investments Ltd., an investment company tied to Mr. Abramovich, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Mr. Davidovich then took over the company from Mr. Tenenbaum in March, according to the announcement.
The club declined to comment on the new sanctions.
European countries have been stepping up sanctions against Russia in recent days, and are also considering a larger ban on Russian oil imports, a step they have been reluctant to take because of the potential for a wider impact on the global economy.
Earlier in the week, authorities in Jersey, a British territory, froze $7 billion in assets believed to be tied to Mr. Abramovich.
The French government published a list this week of dozens of properties, many of them on the French Riviera, that it said it would be freezing as part of its sanctions on Russia. While the owners of the assets can still access the properties, they are forbidden to sell or rent them.
A Russian billionaire's superyacht has been impounded in Hamburg, Germany.
— German Embassy (@GermanyinUSA) April 14, 2022
Harsh sanctions in response to the invasion of #Ukraine brought the estimated $600-750 million yacht Dilbar out of 'offshore concealment', and into the hands of authorities. pic.twitter.com/GYkH6SmQk2
In Germany, authorities recently announced the seizure of the superyacht Dilbar after determining that it was tied to Alisher Usmanov, a Russian oligarch, according to The Associated Press. The United States previously targeted Mr. Usmanov in a batch of sanctions announced last month that designated the superyacht as blocked property, estimating its value to be between $600 and $735 million and noting that it was one of the world’s biggest superyachts, outfitted with two helipads and an indoor pool.
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.
An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of money Britain said it would freeze in Russian assets. It was up to £10 billion, which is the equivalent of about $13 billion, not $13 million.
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