Kyiv April 11, 6:14 a.m.
Moscow April 11, 6:14 a.m.
Washington April 10, 11:14 p.m.
Ukraine Live Updates: Civilians Rush to Flee as Russian Troops Mass in the East
U.S. military officials said they expect Russia to carry out a major offensive from the city of Izium to Dnipro, a strategic target in eastern Ukraine. At a train station where dozens were killed in a missile strike on Friday, one survivor said, “The town is dead now.”
Russian forces attacked civilian areas in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as terrified residents joined an exodus of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing westward, heeding warnings by authorities that Russian troops were massing for a major assault.
On Sunday morning, two residential buildings and a school were hit in the city of Sievierodonetsk, in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, though no casualties were reported. And a barrage of Russian strikes rained down on the airport in Dnipro, a city in east-central Ukraine, wounding five Ukrainian rescue workers, a local official said.
Analysts predict Russian troops, refocusing on the east after being thwarted in the capital, will carry out a major offensive stretching from Dnipro to Izium, a city almost 150 miles northeast where fighting has already been heavy, U.S. military officials said Sunday. Satellite images showed hundreds of military vehicles moving through the town of Velykyi Burluk toward Izium on Friday.
The authorities have urged Ukrainians in the east to flee — but the road to safety, too, is fraught with peril.
On a highway near Kyiv, the capital, as many as 50 bodies of civilians who appeared to be trying to escape danger were discovered, a local mayor said Sunday.
“Some were burned,” the mayor, Taras Didych, told The New York Times. “Others had their hands tied. Others were shot in the head outside their cars.”
A tableau of horror emerged from photographs taken by Mr. Didych, the mayor of Dmytrivka, where most of the bodies were found. He said it was not clear when the killings took place, or if they had happened all at once.
But the photos revealed what appears to have been a massacre on the M06 highway, which runs west from Kyiv to the city of Zhytomyr, possibly of drivers seeking safety in Kyiv. Most of the bodies appear to have been shot and burned.
Most of the dead were found near a hotel called Babushkin Sad, or Granny’s Garden,
“I now call it the road of death,” Mr. Didych said.
Some Ukrainians in the east vowed to stay put, though at times it appeared more out of fatalism than hope. Others were looking desperately for a way out.
In the region where Kramatorsk is located, Donetsk, an estimated 1,000 volunteers have stepped forward to drive a rapidly assembled fleet of 400 buses and vans to help evacuate residents, according to one local aid group.
“We don’t have much time,” said Yuroslav Boyko, a Kramatorsk resident who heads the group, Everything Will Be Fine.
Mr. Boyko said Sunday that he had been inundated with calls from people offering assistance, and that the drivers are fanning out daily to towns and villages across Donetsk to retrieve residents. The organizers have redrawn evacuation routes to keep big groups from gathering in open spaces.
“We are doing everything now to avoid mass casualties,” Mr. Boyko said.
For security reasons, passengers must contact volunteers directly to book tickets and are not given pickup locations or instructions until two hours before departure. Local officials have also been instructed not to advertise bus routes or schedules on social media too far in advance of departures.
“We could see another Mariupol here,” Mr. Boyko said, referring to the southern city that has been encircled and bombarded by Russian forces for weeks. “We are hoping that our armed forces can hold their positions, but they are outnumbered.”
Mr. Boyko, who said he lost a volunteer in the train station attack in Kramatorsk on Friday, said the number of casualties could have been much worse. Many trains had been canceled because of railway damage from a Russian missile strike the night before, he said.
In Lviv, in western Ukraine, the train and bus station continued to receive a steady stream of people fleeing their homes.
For many, realization has set in that the war will most likely last longer than they originally anticipated. Some said they had already had to relocate two or three times since they first left home.
“We thought it would last a week only,” said Tatiana, a manicurist who said she left eastern Ukraine when Russia invaded, and was waiting on a platform to board a train as an air-raid siren sounded. She declined to provide her last name.
On an underground level of the train station late at night last week, Natalia Neradenko was waiting for the all-clear siren to sound as she tried to calm her crying 4-year-old-daughter, Veronika.
“The bombing at first was far from us and then it started approaching,” said Ms. Neradenko, a cleaner from near Lysychansk, Ukraine. “I was scared for my children, so I took them and we left.”
Ms. Neradenko’s 14-year-old son, Kirill, was also with her.
“This is his second war,” she said, recalling the 2014 battles between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces. “We are going to go to Poland, and then we are going to decide what to do.”
Russian forces on Saturday prevented buses from evacuating civilians in three cities in the east, breaching an agreement brokered by the Red Cross. More than 4,000 people were evacuated Saturday through other corridors, according to the Ukrainian official in charge of corridors.
The departing residents are part of the fastest-moving exodus of European civilians since World War II, according to the United Nations. More than seven million Ukrainians have fled their homes since Russia launched its invasion Feb. 24, with more than 4.5 million leaving the country altogether.
More than half went to neighboring Poland. Of those, about 90 percent are women and children, because Ukraine generally prohibits men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country.
In addition to forcing vast population shifts, the war, now in its seventh week, has also reached deep into the fertile plains of a Ukrainian region known as Europe’s breadbasket. It has paralyzed harvests, destroyed granaries and crops, and brought potentially devastating consequences to a country that produces a large share of the world’s grain.
Ukraine has already lost at least $1.5 billion in grain exports since the war began, the country’s deputy agriculture minister said recently. And Russia, the world’s leading grain exporter, has been largely unable to export food because of international sanctions.
The combination is creating a global food crisis “beyond anything we’ve seen since World War II,” the chief of the United Nations World Food Program has warned.
Ukraine’s economy is expected to shrink by roughly 45 percent this year, the World Bank said on Sunday. Russia’s economy is already in “deep recession” and expected to fall by 11.2 percent, the bank reported.
Despite persistent Russian attacks on civilians, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said Sunday that his country would continue to pursue peace talks with Russia. Mr. Kuleba told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that while it was “extremely difficult” to think about sitting down with people who commit “atrocities,” if doing so could help prevent even one massacre, “I have to take that opportunity.”
After withdrawing troops following a failed attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, Russia has regrouped its forces for an anticipated onslaught against the Donbas region in the east and south. Ukrainian forces there have battled Russian troops and pro-Russian separatists in two breakaway enclaves since 2014.
Western military officials say Russia’s military has suffered devastating casualties and has been crippled by poor morale and logistical failures. Britain’s latest defense intelligence update said Sunday that Moscow was attempting to bolster its military with personnel discharged up to 10 years ago, along with recruits from Transnistria, the Russian-backed separatist region of Moldova.
But Western officials have also warned that Russia’s military remains a potent threat, even as Ukraine has redeployed many of its forces away from the capital region to defend eastern and southern regions threatened by Russian forces.
On Sunday morning, the American national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the United States, which like other Western nations has accused Russia of war crimes, would provide more weapons to Ukraine.
“We’re going to get Ukraine the weapons it needs to beat back the Russians and stop them from taking more cities and towns where they commit these crimes,” Mr. Sullivan said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“Weapons are arriving every day, including today,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, expressed skepticism in a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast Sunday night on CBS. “I have 100 percent confidence in our people and in our armed forces,” he said, “but unfortunately I don’t have the confidence that we will be receiving everything we need.”
Harking back to World War II, he said, there was blame to go around.
“Are those countries who did not participate in the war responsible?” Mr. Zelensky said. “The countries who let German forces march throughout Europe? Does the world carry responsibility for the genocide? Yes. Yes, it does.”
Reporting was contributed by Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kramatorsk, Ukraine; Amanda Taub from Warsaw; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Jesus Jiménez from New York.
This past week, as Ukrainian forces retook the town of Bucha to find its streets littered with the bodies of bound and shot civilians, and as rockets rained on a train station packed with fleeing families, killing dozens, two words were on the lips of diplomats, world leaders and rights groups: war crimes.
But as investigators comb Ukraine for evidence, which could be used to bring charges, an uncomfortable fact hangs over their work.
Members of sitting governments and their militaries, no matter how horrifying the evidence against them, virtually never face international prosecution for their country’s conduct in war.
There have been many successful war crimes trials since the foundations of such proceedings were laid at the end of World War II. But look closely and a pattern emerges that is not encouraging to hopes that the perpetrators in this war will be similarly held to account.
In practice, justice for war crimes has been applied by conquerors, as in postwar Germany or American-occupied Iraq; by victors in civil war, as in Rwanda or Ivory Coast; or by a new government overthrowing an old one, as in Serbia or Sierra Leone.
Champions of international law argue that the International Criminal Court and similar bodies apply rulings dispassionately and transparently. Trials typically stretch on for years and sometimes end in acquittals: It is hardly brute victor’s justice.
Still, the fact remains that perpetrators almost never arrive in the dock unless they are delivered there by the victors in a war or power struggle that has deposed them.
This means that as long as a government remains in power, any war crimes charges against it, however well proven, are likely be little more than symbolic. If those in power act as if they are immune to the laws of war, it is because, in practice, they often are.
This problem has long bedeviled the world’s efforts to police war, with atrocities going largely unpunished in Syria, Myanmar and many other conflicts where the accused remain in power.
The limits of international justice stretch back even to the Nuremberg tribunals, set up in Germany after World War II, and which became a basis for the international rules of war.
The tribunal was meant to establish that conduct in war can be punished as a crime, but would be done so under principles of due process and impartiality.
Ever since, global treaties and a body of international law have forbade deliberate attacks on civilians or population centers, among other acts, including torture and genocide.
Still, Nuremberg’s tribunal only considered atrocities by the vanquished Nazis. Conduct by the victorious allies was left to those countries’ own judicial systems, which, unsurprisingly, faulted some individual soldiers but not their governments.
This model has largely held ever since.
When Rwanda’s civil war toppled its government, widely accused of genocide, it may have been the United Nations that set up a tribunal, but it was the new Rwandan government that decided who was handed over. It was mostly the defeated who stood trial.
Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s wartime leader, faced trial in The Hague only after opposition leaders deposed and extradited him. Milosevic, off Serbian soil, would be out of the picture. And outsourcing his punishment would keep the oppositions’ hands clean.
The International Criminal Court, or I.C.C., the pre-eminent body for prosecuting war crimes, has indicted about 40 people. All are from Africa. Many are leaders or rebels who lost a war or power struggle. Many, like Milosevic, were shipped over by those who’d deposed them.
While the court’s rulings are considered credible, it is perceived at times as rubber-stamp for the outcome of a civil war or power struggle by helping the victors banish their opponents to a faraway prison.
The reach of such courts and tribunals is often restricted by the countries in which they were called to investigate. The courts had access to Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia because those countries’ governments wanted them to.
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The world bears responsibility for Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday. Making a comparison to World War II, he asked, “Are those countries who did not participate in the war responsible? The countries who let German forces march throughout Europe? Does the world carry responsibility for the genocide? Yes. Yes, it does.”
LVIV, Ukraine — In the historic center of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, religious chants and prayers waft through the windows of churches, an ages-old counterpoint to the music of street performers staking out spots along the crowded cobblestone streets.
This is a city of churches: Ukrainian Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic and Armenian are just a few. Many of them are centuries-old, ornate architectural treasures.
The Soviet Union, which ruled Ukraine until 1991, had closed almost all the churches, turning some of them into storehouses. But Ukrainians are deeply religious. And today, perhaps particularly so, with a war raging in their country in the middle of Easter season.
Christmas tends to be seen as the big Christian holiday, but Easter is considered to be the most important holiday. The traditional Easter greeting, “Christ has risen,” and the response, “Indeed, he has risen,” go back to the words of wonder from the earliest Christians.
This Sunday was Palm Sunday for most churches around the world. (The commemoration falls a week later for Orthodox Christians and the Eastern Rite Catholics who make up the majority of Ukrainians.) It commemorates Jesus riding triumphantly into Jerusalem, with crowds laying palm fronds before him.
Even for a pretty much lapsed Catholic like me, there is still a pull to attend mass on Palm Sunday. And so I sought out a church.
At the Latin Cathedral, formally known as the Archcathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Lviv, the splendor of the 14th-century church made it a bit hard to focus on the mass. The service was in English, but there were few people there. Many had attended the Ukrainian-language mass earlier in the day.
The vaulted blue ceilings were dotted with gold stars. Baroque paintings glowed and gilded statues glittered under crystal chandeliers. The glorious stained-glass windows were boarded up in case of an airstrike.
The most treasured statues stood on their pedestals wrapped in protective padding, tightly secured with rope. The shrouded limbs of the statues straining against the binding made it appear as if they were trying to escape.
It was a sharp reminder of the war outside. When the priest walked down the aisle with a straw brush and a ceremonial bucket and flicked holy water at the congregation, it felt like a healing rain.
Ukraine’s economy is expected to shrink by roughly 45 percent this year, the World Bank said on Sunday. Russia’s economy is already in a “deep recession” and expected to fall by 11.2 percent, the bank reported. “The Ukraine war and the pandemic have once again shown that crises can cause widespread economic damage and set back years of per capita income and development gains,” said Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, the bank's chief economist for Europe and Central Asia.
Photographs from the Ukrainian village of Buzova make up a tableau of horrific images: charred corpses strewn across the road, mangled bodies piled on top of each other, one man lying in a field with a bullet in his head.
Together, the images confirm the accounts of local Ukrainians who say that Russian forces killed as many as 50 civilians as they tried to flee fighting northwest of Kyiv last month. The bodies lay along or near the M06 highway, which runs west from Kyiv, the capital, to the city of Zhytomyr.
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The scene, another potential example of Russian war crimes, was found 17 miles from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed hundreds of civilians during their occupation before pulling out of the area last week.
“I now call it the road of death,” said Taras Didych, the mayor of the district, Dmytrivka, where most of the bodies were found. The highway strings together the towns and villages that were recently retaken from Russian forces, who were pushed back and retreated after their failed attempt to take the capital. “We are just coming back to life,” he said.
Mr. Didych shared the grim findings he encountered when he returned to the road last week.
“Some were burned. Others had their hands tied. Others were shot in the head outside their cars,” Mr. Didych said. Those descriptions corresponded to images he shared with The New York Times that Mr. Didych said he had taken on his phone at the scene.
Most of the bodies appear to have been shot and burned, either because the vehicles they were riding in caught fire, or because the cars were intentionally torched.
“They were trying to flee,” Mr. Didych said. “Some could not manage to make it.”
Mr. Didych said it wasn’t clear when the killings took place, or if they had all happened at the same time. He said it was more likely that Russian forces killed families intermittently as they tried to escape their homes during the month that invading troops occupied this strip of territory outside of Kyiv.
Most of the dead were found near a hotel called Babushkin Sad, or Granny’s Garden, between the towns of Mriia and Myla, whose names in Ukrainian mean “dream” and “pleasant village,” the mayor said.
“My heart was bleeding,” he said when he discovered the scene on the road. “This may have been the worst experience of my life.”
Two other bodies, which the mayor said were Ukrainian soldiers, were found in a grave dug outside a nearby gas station. They were still wearing their uniforms, he said.
The mayor said that as of Sunday, 60 bodies had been found in his district, which includes 14 villages. Russian forces had destroyed at least 60 private homes and three supermarkets, as well as other as municipal water tanks and an ambulance facility, he added.
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Continue reading the main storyAfter the deadly strike on the train station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, those who stayed behind are grim about the future: “We think we will be swept off the face of the earth.”
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Two days after more than 50 people were killed on its platforms by a missile strike, the only sounds at the Kramatorsk railway station on Sunday morning were a distant air-raid siren and the rhythmic sweeping of broken glass.
“The town is dead now,” said Tetiana, 50, a shopkeeper who was working next to the station when it was attacked as thousands of people tried to board trains to evacuate the eastern city, fearing it would soon be besieged by Russian forces.
Friday’s strike was a gruesome turn for the city after nearly eight years of being near the front line of the country’s struggle against Russia-backed separatists in the region known as Donbas.
The station’s main hall was still filled with streaks of blood and luggage on Sunday morning, with the burned-out hulks of two sedans lying in the parking area outside.
Tetiana, who declined to provide her last name, was sure that more death was on the way.
“We are being encircled. We understand that,” added Tetiana, who has lived for 10 years in Kramatorsk, a city with a prewar population of around 150,000 people and once one of the industrial hearts of the Donbas. She said she would not leave because she must look after her 82-year-old mother, who is ailing. But she knows more than ever the danger that brings.
“We think we will be swept off the face of the earth,” she said.
She recalled ducking inside a nearby market on Friday to take cover when the missile struck the train station, with what she estimated was 2,000 people inside. A family that took shelter with her at the market was almost crushed by a piece of a falling roof that was sheared off in the blast.
“There were screams everywhere,” she said. “Nobody could understand anything, cars were burning and people were running.”
With Moscow’s decision to shift the focus of its war to eastern Ukraine, the people who remain in Kramatorsk fear that they will soon be shelled into oblivion, like the residents of Kharkiv and Mariupol, two other cities that have been ruthlessly assaulted by Russian forces. It feels like an assault here is inevitable: Cutting off Kramatorsk would partly cut off Ukrainian forces fighting in the eastern breakaway regions where Russia is consolidating.
At the city’s main hospital, City Hospital 3, the staff was preparing for the kind of destruction that has swept over other urban centers. Their supplies for mass trauma are ample, one doctor said. But, he added, many of the nurses have evacuated and there was a shortage of critical care physicians.
In Kramatorsk, residents have started to hunker down, preparing for a siege. Most small shops have been closed, a few grocery stores remain open and the city square, once teeming with people during these warm spring days, is all but empty.
Just after noon on Sunday, Tetiana closed the small candy and coffee confectionery where she worked. It would be shuttered for the foreseeable future, as its main source of income, the train station’s passengers, were gone.
Still, orange-vested maintenance workers tried to clean around the wreckage from the strike: parts of the train station itself, people’s shoes, a bag of potatoes and broken glass. A pack of stray dogs, frequent visitors to the area around the station, limped around the debris. The workers swept where they could until a water truck arrived, hosing down the blood that had pooled by the outside entrance.
In the distance, the thud of artillery reverberated, barely loud enough to hear but still easily felt.
“We’re closing down,” Tetiana said. “There is no point. There are no people.”
Evacuation vehicles were still leaving the city but not at the volume they had in the days before. One resident said that buses sent from western Ukraine were already leaving unfilled. Those who were staying in Kramatorsk, many of them older residents, were bracing what may lie ahead: making do without electricity, living in cold damp basements, cooking by fire and enduring the terror of incoming artillery fire.
But on Sunday, Lidia, 65, and Valentyna, 72, dear friends, dressed in nice clothes and decided to leave their lifelong homes together. Both women declined to provide their surnames.
“After what happened at the railway station, we can hear the explosions getting closer and closer,” Lidia said. Through tears, Valentyna added, “I can’t take these sirens anymore.” Their destination, as with millions of other Ukrainians since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, was somewhere vaguely west — just anywhere farther away.
“We need to leave because we can’t bear it anymore,” Lidia said.
Air-raid sirens in Kramatorsk are not the haunting, distant chorus you hear in the movies. They are, in most cases, just a loud single horn that seems inescapable, whether indoors or out. And if any kind of strike occurs, the sirens usually come afterward, too late, residents complained.
Kramatorsk and the neighboring, but smaller, city of Sloviansk are likely to be the first two cities that will be attacked by whatever Russian forces are able to reconstitute in the region following their defeat and withdrawal from around Kyiv, the capital. For now, the Russian front line traces like a jaw around the two cities.
Encircling and cutting off Kramatorsk and Sloviansk would allow the Russians to isolate the Ukrainian forces that are holding their old front lines in the two breakaway regions — a maneuver, if successfully carried out, that would mean disaster for the Ukrainian military, as much of their forces are there.
Sgt. Andriy Mykyta, a soldier in Ukraine’s border guard, was in Kramatorsk to try to head off that fate.
“There will be a serious fight,” Sergeant Mykyta said. “This is a tactic of the Russians: They take cities as hostages.”
On Sunday, as he bought an energy drink and some snacks from one of the remaining open grocery stores in the city, the sergeant looked much like every other uniformed Ukrainian service member: a blue stripe on his arm, weathered boots and a jagged tattoo jutting above his collar.
But he was, in fact, one of the most valuable members of the Ukrainian armed forces, a part of the select group that was quickly trained by NATO forces (a several-day course that was supposed to last at least a month, he said) to use some of the more complicated weapons that were helping push back Russian forces: the Javelin and NLAW antitank systems.
But he played down the missile systems’ importance, saying, “These weapons are like a doughnut at the end of the day.” He said that the real fight would come down to whatever side could withstand its enemy’s artillery the longest and who retained the will to fight.
“They have tanks and artillery, but their troops are demoralized,” he said.
Maria Budym, a 69-year-old resident of Kramatorsk, shrugged off the artillery and the evacuations. She was staying. When Russian-backed separatists briefly held Kramatorsk in 2014, they were welcomed to the city by some of the pro-Russian population before being driven off by Ukrainian defenders, she said.
This time, she added, the Russians will have to deal with her.
“Only cowards and people already displaced by the war have fled the city,” she said, standing in a blue fleece pullover in front of her hollowed-out Soviet-style apartment. “Our soldiers will defend this city to their last breath.”
Besides, Ms. Budym added, with anger in her eyes: “I have a pipe in my apartment. I’ll use it on whoever comes in that door.”
Tyler Hicks contributed reporting.
Nearly 2,200 Ukrainian men have been detained while trying to leave the country instead of staying to fight, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. Citing the national border guard agency, it said in a statement that some have attempted to use forged documents or bribe border guards. To maximize its forces, the government has barred men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country.
More than 4.5 million refugees have fled Ukraine since the war began, according to updated figures from the United Nations. The figures show that the majority of refugees from Ukraine — more than 2.5 million — have fled into neighboring Poland, while others have gone to Romania, Hungary and Moldova.
KRAKOW, Poland — Every week since the beginning of March, Evgeny has packed his car with box after box of medicine and driven from his home near Krakow to another Polish city, Rzeszow, near the border with Ukraine.
Evgeny said he was originally from Russia, but for the last 16 years, Poland has been his home. He lives there with his wife and is a Polish citizen. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in late February, he said he knew he had to do something.
He said he knows of other Russians in Poland who also have spent the last seven weeks, like many in their adopted country, joining grass roots efforts to provide housing, logistical support and other types of aid to those fleeing the war in neighboring Ukraine.
“For me, it's simple. It’s not an internal conflict for me,” he said of reconciling his Russian identity — and concerns for family still living in Russia — with his desire to help Ukrainians. “I do not treat it like two opposing sides, as if my family is an enemy of the other side. This is not true,” he added, asking that his last name not be used out of concerns for his family’s safety.
More than 2.5 million people have crossed the border from Ukraine into Poland — most of them women and children — since the Russian invasion began, and their needs are immense.
When news of the Russian invasion broke, Evgeny said he was shocked.
“You have mixed feelings — of feeling angry, embarrassed, and no idea what to do next,” he said. “For five or six days I was completely empty inside.”
But Evgeny said he has a close friend in Ukraine, Oleksandr, who he said had saved his life when he was in a bad car accident in Ukraine eight years ago and has become like a brother.
“We got to know each other during the worst day of my life. He is a fantastic person, a pure patriot of Ukraine and a good person,” Evgeny said. When he heard the news of the Russian invasion, he said one of his first calls was to Oleksandr to make sure he was alive and to see what he needed, and what Evgeny could do to help.
Oleksandr is in an area of Ukraine that has remained relatively stable so far, and he is helping with the war effort. Evgeny said he has been in close contact with his friend to see what the needs are on the ground and is working with a network of his contacts to coordinate aid.
Now, his home office has become a logistics hub, he said, and he has dedicated all of his spare time outside of work to helping Ukrainians. He makes the 3-hour round-trip to Rzeszow at least once a week.
Evgeny, whose wife is a pharmacist, said much of his attention has been focused on getting medicines to Ukrainian refugees in Poland and sending them across the border into the country.
“At least I feel like I can do something,” he said.
Other Russian nationals have also joined these efforts. Igor Gerbeev, 34, who had been living in Moscow but moved to Poland in 2020, is among them.
“This country became like a dictatorship with no ability to say your own opinion,” he said of Russia. As someone who spoke out against the Kremlin online, he said the atmosphere had grown increasingly difficult.
“Russia is like a beautiful facade,” he said, but behind it is a lack of opportunity for young people like him and he no longer saw a future for himself there.
Since he came to Poland and found a new job with an IT company, he said he had grown close to a community of Ukrainian friends who had welcomed him with open arms when he knew no one in Krakow.
So when the Russian invasion began, he felt he had to take a stand.
“This is my duty. I have principles and I have vision,” Mr. Gerbeev said.
He said he had welcomed a family of five Ukrainians into his home for weeks before they moved on to stay with their family members in Germany. When the family arrived, Mr. Gerbeev said, the mother was nervous when she realized he was Russian. But she soon warmed up and was incredibly grateful.
Mr. Gerbeev, who described himself as just one small part of a wider aid effort, said he has been inspired by the tireless work of Ukrainians helping their fellow countrymen, even as they suffer the ravages of war.
He said he believes that long term, the war will destroy the lives of Russians as well as Ukrainians, because of punishing sanctions and international isolation of Moscow. Still, he said the majority of the people he knows back home still support President Vladimir V. Putin.
“It’s hard to speak with them. To many people in Russia, I am a traitor,” he said, adding that that would not stop him from doing all he can to aid Ukrainians in need. “It’s my duty as a human.”
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WASHINGTON — Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, said on Sunday that the Russian government was engaged in a genocide in Ukraine, two days after more than 50 people were killed and many more wounded in a missile strike at the Kramatorsk train station.
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Ms. Cheney, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, pushed for more aggressive actions to try to halt the Russian invasion, including European embargoes on Russian oil and gas imports and the United States delivering “advanced weaponry” to Ukraine.
“I think this clearly is genocide,” she said. “I think that Europe needs to understand and grapple with the fact that you’ve got a genocidal campaign, the first horrific genocidal campaign that we’ve seen, certainly in recent decades. I think that also Europeans need to understand that they’re funding that genocidal campaign. I understand the economic consequences to countries in Western Europe, if they were to impose the kind of oil and gas embargo that the U.S. has imposed against Russian oil and gas, but they need to do it and we need to do everything we can to increase our own domestic production to help make sure that we can supply them with as much as possible.”
Appearing before Ms. Cheney, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, condemned Russia’s slaughtering of civilians as “evil” but argued that labeling it “genocide” was less important than stopping the violence.
“The label is less important than the fact that these acts are cruel and criminal and wrong and evil and need to be responded to decisively, and that is what we are doing,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And we’re doing that not just by supporting international investigations and gathering evidence to hold the perpetrators all the way to the highest levels accountable. We’re doing it by providing sophisticated weapons to the Ukrainians that are making a major difference on the battlefield.”
Ms. Cheney was one of two Republican lawmakers who spoke on Sunday morning news programs to call for the Biden administration to make it clear the United States supports a Ukrainian military victory over Russia, not simply a stronger hand in peace negotiations.
The other, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on “Fox News Sunday” that the administration had not been clear enough about America’s support for an outright Ukrainian victory.
“We want the Ukrainians to win — to win — to defeat the Russians. The Russians should withdraw from the country, and that ought to be our goal,” Mr. McConnell said. “I think the administration has gotten better, but they’ve had to be pushed every step of the way to get more aggressive sooner. They are stepping up their game, but principally because of bipartisan pressure from Congress on the administration to do more quicker.”
Congress so far has taken several steps to try to help Ukraine, including approving $13.6 billion in emergency aid. On Thursday, Congress voted to strip Moscow of its preferential trade status and to ban the import of Russian energy into the United States, sending the legislation to penalize Russia’s economy over the invasion of Ukraine to Mr. Biden’s desk.
CHISINAU, Moldova – Vova Klever, a young, successful fashion photographer from Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, did not see himself in this war.
“Violence is not my weapon,” he said.
So shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February and Ukraine prohibited men of military age from leaving the country, Mr. Klever sneaked out to London.
His mistake, which would bring devastating consequences, was writing to a friend about it.
The friend betrayed his trust and posted their conversation on social media. It went viral, and Ukrainians all over the internet exploded with anger and resentment.
“You are a walking dead person,” one Twitter message said. “I’m going to find you in any corner in the world.”
The notion of people — especially men — leaving war-torn Ukraine for safe and comfortable lives abroad has provoked a moral dilemma among Ukrainians that turns on one of the most elemental decisions humans can make: fight or flee.
Thousands of Ukrainian men of military age have left the country to avoid participating in the war, according to records from regional law enforcement officials and interviews with people inside and outside Ukraine. Smuggling rings in Moldova, and possibly other European countries, have been doing a brisk business. Some people have paid up to $15,000 for a secret night-time ride out of Ukraine, Moldovan officials said.
The draft dodgers are the vast exception. That makes it all the more complicated for them — morally, socially and practically. Ukrainian society has been mobilized for war against a much bigger enemy, and countless Ukrainians without military experience have volunteered for the fight. To maximize its forces, the Ukrainian government has taken the extreme step of prohibiting men 18 to 60 from leaving, with few exceptions.
All this has forced many Ukrainian men who don’t want to serve into taking illegal routes into Hungary, Moldova and Poland and other neighboring countries. Even among those convinced they fled for the right reasons, some said they felt guilty and ashamed.
“I don’t think I can be a good soldier right now in this war,” said a Ukrainian computer programmer named Volodymyr, who left shortly after the war began and did not want to disclose his last name, fearing repercussions for avoiding military service.
“Look at me,” Volodymyr said, as he sat in a pub in Warsaw drinking a beer. “I wear glasses. I am 46. I don’t look like a classic fighter, some Rambo who can fight Russian troops.”
He took another sip and stared into his glass.
“Yes, I am ashamed,” he said. “I ran away from this war, and it is probably my crime.”
Ukrainian politicians have threatened to put draft dodgers in prison and confiscate their homes. But within Ukrainian society, even as cities continue to be pummeled by Russian bombs, the sentiments are more divided.
A meme recently popped up with the refrain, “Do what you can, where you are.” It’s clearly meant to counter negative feelings toward those who left and assure them they can still contribute to the war effort. And Ukrainian women and children, the vast majority of the refugees, face little backlash.
But that’s not the case for young men, and this is what blew up on the young photographer.
In mid-March, Olga Lepina, who has worked as a modeling agent, said Mr. Klever sent her husband a message saying he had made it to London.
Her husband wrote back: “Wow! How?”
“Through Hungary with the smugglers for 5k $,” Mr. Klever replied, according to screenshots of the conversation provided by Ms. Lepina. “But that’s just between us, shush!”
Ms. Lepina said she and Mr. Klever had been friends for years. She even went to his wedding. But as the war drew near, she said, Mr. Klever became intensely patriotic and a bit of an online bully. When she found out he had avoided service, she was so outraged that she posted screenshots of the conversation on Instagram.
“For me, it was a hypocrisy to leave the country and pay money for this,” she explained, adding, “He needs to be responsible for his words.”
Mr. Klever, who is in his 20s, was bombarded with death threats. Some Ukrainians resented that he used his wealth to get out and called it “cheating.”
Responding to emailed questions, Mr. Klever did not deny skipping out on his service and said that he had poor eyesight and had “been through a lot lately."
“You can’t even imagine the hatred,” he said.
Mr. Klever gave conflicting accounts of how exactly he exited the country and declined to provide details. But for many other Ukrainian men, Moldova has become the favorite trap door.
Moldova shares a nearly 800-mile border with western Ukraine. And unlike Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, Moldova is not part of the European Union, which means it has significantly fewer resources to control its frontiers. It is one of Europe’s poorest countries and has been a hub of human trafficking and organized crime.
Within days of the war erupting, Moldovan officials said, Moldovan gangs posted advertisements on Telegram, a popular messaging service in Eastern Europe, offering to arrange cars, even minibuses, to spirit out draft dodgers.
Law enforcement officials said the typical method was for the smugglers and the Ukrainians to select a rendezvous point along Moldova’s “green border,” the term used for the unfenced border areas, and meet late at night.
On a recent night, a squad of Moldovan border guards trudged across a flat, endless wheat field, their boots sinking in the mud, looking for draft dodgers. There was no border post on the horizon, just the faint lights of a Ukrainian village and the sounds of dogs barking in the darkness.
Out here, one can just walk into and out of Ukraine.
Moldovan officials said that since late February they had broken up more than 20 smuggling rings, including a few well-known criminal enterprises. In turn, they have apprehended 1,091 people crossing the border illegally. Officials said all were Ukrainian men.
Once caught, these men have a choice. If they don’t want to be sent back, they can apply for asylum in Moldova, and cannot be deported.
But if they do not apply for asylum, they can be turned over to the Ukrainian authorities, who, Moldovan officials said, have been pressuring them to send the men back. The vast majority of those who entered illegally, around 1,000, have sought asylum, and fewer than 100 have been returned, Moldovan officials said. Two thousand other Ukrainian men who have entered Moldova legally have also applied for asylum.
Volodymyr Danuliv is one of them. He refuses to fight in the war, though it’s not the prospect of dying that worries him, he said. It is the killing.
“I can’t shoot Russian people,” said Mr. Danuliv, 50.
He explained that his siblings had married Russians and that two of his nephews were serving in the Russian Army — in Ukraine.
“How can I fight in this war?” he asked. “I might kill my own family.”
Myroslav Hai, an official with Ukraine’s military reserve, conceded, “There are people who evade mobilization, but their share in comparison with volunteers is not so large.” Other Ukrainian officials said men ideologically or religiously opposed to war could serve in another way, for example as cooks or drivers.
But none of the more than a dozen men interviewed for this article seemed interested. Mr. Danuliv, a businessman from western Ukraine, said he wanted no part in the war. When asked if he feared being ostracized or shamed, he shook his head.
“I didn’t kill anyone. That’s what’s important to me,” he said. “I don’t care what people say.”
What happens when the war ends? How much resentment will surface toward those who left? These are questions Ukrainians, men and women, are beginning to ask.
When Ms. Lepina shamed Mr. Klever, she was no longer in Ukraine herself. She had left, too, for France, with her husband, who is not a Ukrainian citizen. Every day, she said, she wrestles with guilt.
“People are suffering in Ukraine, and I want to be there to help them, to support them,” she said. “But at the same time I’m safe and I want to be here.”
“It’s a very ambiguous, complicated feeling,” she said.
And she knows she will be judged.
“Of course there will be some people who divide Ukrainian nationals between those who left and those who stayed,” she said. “I am ready for that.”
Siergiej Greczuszkin contributed reporting from Warsaw, and Daria Mychkovska from Przemysl, Poland.
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With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.
The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.
There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In the western region of Kaliningrad, the authorities sent residents text messages urging them to provide phone numbers and email addresses of “provocateurs” in connection with the “special operation” in Ukraine, Russian newspapers reported. A nationalist political party launched a website urging Russians to report “pests” in the elite.
“I am absolutely sure that a cleansing will begin,” Dmitri Kuznetsov, the member of Parliament behind the website, said in an interview, predicting that the process would accelerate after the “active phase” of the war ended. He then clarified: “We don’t want anyone to be shot, and we don’t even want people to go to prison.”
But it is the history of mass execution and political imprisonment in the Soviet era, and the denunciation of fellow citizens encouraged by the state, that now looms over Russia’s deepening climate of repression.
Mr. Putin set the tone in a speech on March 16, declaring that Russian society needed a “self-purification” in which people would “distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths.”
Reporting from Brussels
The Austrian chancellor, Karl Nehammer, said he will visit Moscow on Monday to meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “We are militarily neutral, but have a clear position on the Russian war of aggression against the Ukraine. It has to stop!” Mr. Nehammer, who on Saturday met with President Volodymr Zelensky of Ukraine, said in a tweet.
Analysts predict Russian troops will carry out a major offensive from Izium to the central city of Dnipro, a strategic target in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, U.S. military officials said on Sunday.
The assessment came as satellite images showed hundreds of military vehicles moving through the eastern town of Velykyi Burluk toward the city of Izium on Friday.
Fighting has intensified around Izium since Moscow announced its intention to focus its combat operations in the east, withdrawing tens of thousands of troops from the north after confronting a stiffer than expected Ukrainian resistance.
“We’ve been talking now for days and days about how Izium was so important to them because it lies almost in the middle of the Donbas region, to the west of it,” a senior Pentagon official said on Friday.
At the time, the senior Pentagon official said American intelligence analysts were seeing Russian troops in and around Izium preparing to push to the south and southeast to try to move deeper into the Donbas region.
Russian forces need Izium to hold their western-forward battle lines and allow them to push on to Dnipro and other strategic cities in the Donbas region, the U.S. officials said on Sunday.
Just south of the area is the city of Kramatorsk, where a Russian missile attack on the rail station Friday killed more than 50 people.
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Continue reading the main storyWorkers at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine have had their first staff rotation in three weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Sunday. The weekend staff rotation was only the second since Russian forces seized the site in late February. Russian forces withdrew from the site in late March.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said his country would continue to pursue peace talks with Russia despite Moscow's attacks on civilian areas. Mr. Kuleba told NBC's "Meet the Press" that while it was “extremely difficult” to think about sitting down with people who commit “atrocities,” if doing so could help prevent even one massacre, “I have to take that opportunity.”
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Five rescue workers were injured in the strikes on Dnipro airport, in central Ukraine, a local official reported on Sunday in a Telegram post.
Two days after a Russian missile strike hit a train station in eastern Ukraine’s city of Kramatorsk, killing more than 50 people, volunteer drivers across the Donetsk region are coming forward to help residents still looking to flee before an anticipated onslaught from Russian forces.
“We don’t have much time,” said Yuroslav Boyko, who is from Kramatorsk. He heads Everything Will Be Fine, a Ukrainian aid organization that has been working to evacuate people from Donetsk since the start of Russia’s invasion.
As Russia continued to amass forces near eastern Ukraine over the weekend and struck residential areas there on Sunday, thousands of civilians fled eastern and southern Ukraine at the urging of local officials, who have warned people to escape while there is still time.
“In my estimation, the Donetsk region could be encircled in three to four days,” Mr. Boyko said. “We need to make sure everyone who is looking to leave can get out.”
Mr. Boyko, 40, says he lost one of his volunteers, Roman Sementsov, in the Kramatorsk attack. In a Facebook post on Friday he praised Mr. Sementsov for helping thousands of people find safety.
Mr. Boyko says he believes that Russia intentionally targeted the station, since it had served as an evacuation hub since the start of the invasion. But the number of casualties could have been much worse, he added, noting that many trains had been canceled on the day of the attack due to railway damage from a Russian missile strike the night before.
“It was a happy coincidence that they were not functioning properly,” he said. Two train stations are still operational in the Donetsk region — in the towns of Sloviansk and Pokrovsk — but residents have become wary of gathering in stations since the attack, he said.
Since Friday, Mr. Boyko says he has been inundated with calls from people hoping to volunteer and help with evacuations. He estimated that he’d received close to 70 requests on Sunday alone from drivers who would be ready to start shuttling on Monday.
“Every day the number is increasing,” he said. “These are ordinary people, coming from all over Ukraine, who just want to help.”
The volunteer fleet consists of at least 400 vehicles — including city buses and private vans — operated by approximately 1,000 volunteer drivers, who fan out daily to towns and villages across Donetsk to retrieve passengers.
“We are doing everything now to avoid mass casualties,” he said, noting that organizers have redrawn evacuation routes to keep big groups from gathering in open spaces.
For security reasons, passengers must contact volunteers directly to book tickets and are not given pickup locations or instructions until two hours before departure. Local officials have also been instructed not to advertise bus routes or schedules on social media too far in advance of departures.
“We could see another Mariupol here,” Mr. Boyko said, referring to the southern city that has been encircled and bombarded by Russian forces for weeks. “We are hoping that our armed forces can hold their positions but they are outnumbered.”
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California led a bipartisan delegation of lawmakers to Poland over the weekend, his office said in a statement. It said the delegation met with Poland’s prime minister and defense minister in Warsaw, and U.S. troops and Ukrainian refugees elsewhere in northeast Poland.
When Marina Ermoshkina, a Russian TV presenter, learned that employees at a Chanel store in Dubai had refused to sell a high-end bag to a Russian customer, after asking her to sign papers attesting that she would not wear the bag in Russia, she reacted in shock.
Ms. Ermoshkina, 28, bought a pair of gardening scissors, took a video of herself as she cut her Chanel bag in half and posted it to Instagram.
“This is Russophobia,” she said in a phone call from Moscow. “This is the purest form of discrimination.”
Hundreds of thousands of people saw her video, which was also broadcast on Russian television. Soon afterward, Victoria Bonya, a Russian social media influencer with 9.3 million Instagram followers, followed suit, taking a pair of scissors to a Chanel bag that sells for thousands of dollars.
“If Chanel house does not respect the clients, why do we have to respect Chanel house?” she said as she butchered her bag from the iconic French brand on video.
Chanel, like many international companies, suspended operations in Russia in response to President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition to temporarily closing stores and suspending deliveries in Russia, Chanel also began asking customers in its global stores to attest that the items they were purchasing would not be used in Russia.
In a statement, the company said that it was attempting to comply with European Union and Swiss sanctions that prohibit the “sale, supply, transfer or export, directly or indirectly, of luxury goods to any natural or legal person, entity or body in Russia or for use in Russia.” The prohibition, the company said, applies to luxury goods whose value exceeds 300 euros per item (about $326), which applies to most of Chanel’s products.
This angered Ms. Ermoshkina, who said that while withdrawing from Russia was the company’s choice, its policy against customers bringing items into the country is discriminatory and humiliating.
“If all the women are the same, why does Chanel discriminate against women for their nationality?” she said.
Chanel declined to comment on the reactions of the Russian celebrities, but in the statement, it apologized “for any misunderstanding this may have caused, as welcoming all our clients, regardless of where they come from, is a priority for Chanel.” The company acknowledged that “this process of walking through the law has caused disappointment to some of our clients.”
Ms. Ermoshkina said she was glad Chanel apologized, but its response did not fully satisfy her. She has put up for sale all her other Chanel belongings and said she intends to donate the profits to an association that she said helps the people of Donbas, the region of eastern Ukraine that is home to many Russian-speaking people.
Other influencers have joined her in refusing to wear Chanel clothes and accessories. Some have reposted her words: “Not a single bag, not a single thing is worth my love for my motherland.”
Among them is the Russian D.J. Katya Guseva, who had always dreamed of owning a Chanel bag, like the Hollywood celebrities she admired. But she recently told her 500,000 Instagram followers that she no longer needed that bag. In a WhatsApp message, she wrote: “Without Chanel we will continue to live perfectly.”
Valeriya Safronova contributed reporting.
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Continue reading the main storyJake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, downplayed the importance of whether Russian atrocities in Ukraine should be labelled “genocide.” More important than the label, Mr. Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” is “the fact that these acts are cruel and criminal and wrong and evil, and need to be responded to decisively.”
The farmer was working in his field on a recent morning when a neighbor called to tell him that his warehouses had been shelled. He rushed back and found them on fire and one of his workers lying on the ground with shrapnel lodged in his head.
“In one word, it was destruction,” said the farmer, Yuriy Gumanenko, 48. “Everything was destroyed into pieces.”
The farmworker, 62, was hospitalized and had little chance of surviving, Mr. Gumanenko said. Three of Mr. Gumanenko’s four tractors were destroyed, and so were the roofs of his warehouses. The wheat he was hoping to sell and many of his seeds were lost.
“All my life went to growing my farm,” he said, adding, “Now it’s all gone.”
In the past six weeks, Russian shells have destroyed Ukrainian cities, homes, hospitals and schools. But the war has also reached deep into the fertile plains of a region known as Europe’s breadbasket, paralyzing harvests, destroying granaries and crops, and bringing potentially devastating consequences to a country that produces a large share of the world’s grain.
Ukraine has already lost at least $1.5 billion in grain exports since the war began, the country’s deputy agriculture minister said recently. And the economic fallout from the war has also disrupted supplies from Russia, the world’s leading grain exporter.
The combination is creating a global food crisis “beyond anything we’ve seen since World War II,” the chief of the United Nations World Food Program has warned.
In Ukraine, warehouses are filled with grain that cannot be exported. Russia has blocked access to the Black Sea, Ukraine’s main export route, cargo trains face logistical hurdles, and trucking is stymied because most truck drivers are men aged 18 to 60 who are not allowed to leave the country and cannot drive agricultural exports across the border.
Ukraine has also banned some grain exports to ensure that it has enough food to feed its people.
On Tuesday, the Agriculture Ministry said that six large granaries had been destroyed by Russian shelling. Farmers say they face shortages of fuel and fertilizer, and that some of their workers have gone to the battlefield.
Some farmers have been pushed off their lands by the fighting, with shells and rockets destroying their machines, wounding their workers and killing their cattle.
“My farm has turned to ruins,” said Grigoriy Tkachenko, a farmer in the village of Lukashivka, near the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv. “There is almost nothing left.”
His farm was shelled on a recent evening at milking time, he said. A rocket struck the milking hall, and the workers ran to another building for shelter. When the attack ended, Mr. Tkachenko’s farm had been reduced to rubble and scores of cows and small lambs lay dead.
The farm — his cattle, warehouses and machinery — was the product of his life’s work. After working in collective farms when Ukraine was under Soviet rule, Mr. Tkachenko bought about 15 acres of land and seven cows in 2005. Over the years, he expanded his operation to 3,700 acres and 170 cows, also producing corn, wheat, sunflowers and potatoes.
“What we built over decades,” he said, “they destroyed it over just a few days.”
Farmland covers 70 percent of the country and agricultural products were Ukraine’s top export, making up nearly 10 percent of its gross domestic product. Ukraine was one of the world’s main exporters of corn and wheat and the biggest exporter of sunflower oil.
The country now has 13 million tons of соrn and 3.8 million tons of wheat that it cannot export using its usual routes, primarily by sea, the deputy agriculture minister, Taras Vysotsky, said last week.
One farmer in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine said that he had 1,500 tons of grain and 1,000 tons of corn sitting in storage on his farm.
About 400 miles northwest, near Chernihiv, Ivan Yakub fled his farm after the area was occupied by Russia, leaving 100 tons of corn and wheat in his warehouse.
Farming has become impossible in several areas where there is heavy fighting or Russian occupation.
Farmers also worry whether they will be able to sow crops this spring, putting next season’s crops at risk. On Thursday, Ukraine’s prime minister, Denis Shmygal, said that the government expected a 20 percent decrease in crops to be sown this spring.
Russian forces have mined some farmland, blown up machines and destroyed fuel reserves, an effort, Ukrainian authorities say, to disrupt planting.
“I don’t know if I will sow,” said Oleksandr Kyrychyshyn, a farmer in the village of Blahodativka, in the Kherson region. “They told us that every car that drives out into the field will be shot.”
Mr. Yakub, who fled his farm near Chernihiv, still wakes up at 6 a.m. out of habit. He makes tea, but cannot reach his tractor and fertilize his land to prepare for sowing sunflower seeds. His fields, under Russian occupation, remain fallow.
“I paid for the seeds but I can’t put them in the ground,” he said. “I’m just a farmer, I want to grow what people need.”
In less affected areas farmers have started to sow, but many lack fuel, fertilizer and seeds because ports have been blocked and imports from Russia and Belarus halted. A government survey last month found that farmers had 20 percent of the fuel needed for the spring sowing.
Anatoly Guyvaronsky, who represents the Dnipro region in Ukraine’s association of farmers and private landowners, said that his grain truck driver and grain elevator operator had gone to fight in the war.
The Ukrainian government has temporarily exempted agriculture workers from military duties, but some have chosen to fight. Women and children are now helping in the fields, Mr. Guyvaronsky said.
Around Ukraine, farmers have shown great resilience and a determination to do everything in their power to sow and feed their people and the army.
Mr. Tkachenko, whose farm was destroyed in a Russian attack last month, had stayed on his land as long as possible, feeding Ukrainian soldiers and the local population with meat, milk and potatoes.
He, his wife, daughter and six grandchildren slept for a few hours a night in the cellar where they put up potatoes and preserves.
“This is our land, this is our farm, this is our village,” Mr. Tkachenko said. “Until the last moment we wanted to be with our people.”
They fled after their farm was attacked but returned last week, as soon as he heard that the Russian Army had withdrawn by a few miles.
“Our land is our land,” he said in a phone call as he drove home. “Everyone will rush back to get back to work as soon as they can.”
Mr. Gumanenko, whose farm near Dnipro had been destroyed, spent the days after the attack going through the rubble to see what he could save to start sowing as soon as possible. “If you don’t sow it in time, you lose the harvest,” he said. He said that he probably would not be able to find soy seeds, but that his friends would give him other kinds.
“They can shoot at us, but we’re going to keep working,” he said, adding, “I don’t know any other life. I was born a farmer and I’ll die a farmer.”
Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Russian shelling has destroyed the Dnipro airport in central Ukraine, said Valentin Reznichenko, the regional governor. “There is nothing left of it,” he said in a Telegram post, adding that casualties have not been confirmed. Analysts have described the city as a strategic target for Moscow.
Reporting from Rome
Pope Francis on Sunday called for a truce in Ukraine during Easter, leading to “real negotiation” to achieve peace. “Let the weapons be put down! Let the Easter truce begin,” Francis said at the end of a Palm Sunday celebration in St. Peter’s Square.
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Two days after more than 50 people were killed on its platforms by a missile strike, the only sounds at the Kramatorsk railway station on Sunday morning were a distant air-raid siren and the rhythmic sweeping of broken glass.
“The town is dead now,” said Tetiana, 50, a shopkeeper who was working next to the station when it was attacked as thousands of people tried to board trains to evacuate the eastern city, fearing it would soon be besieged by Russian forces.
Friday’s strike was a gruesome turn for the city after nearly eight years of being near the front line of the country’s struggle against Russia-backed separatists in the region known as Donbas.
The station’s main hall was still filled with blood and luggage on Sunday morning, with the burned-out hulks of two sedans lying in the parking area outside.
Tetiana, who declined to provide her last name, recalled ducking inside the market next to the station to take cover when the missile struck. A family that took shelter with her was almost crushed by a piece of a falling roof that was sheared off in the blast.
“There were screams everywhere,” she said. “Nobody could understand anything, cars were burning and people were running.”
She estimated that about 2,000 people were at the station when it was hit. With Moscow’s decision to shift the focus of its war to eastern Ukraine, the people who remain in Kramatorsk fear that they will soon be shelled into oblivion, like the residents of Kharkiv and Mariupol, two other cities that have been surrounded by Russian forces.
“We are being encircled. We understand that,” said Tetiana, who has lived in Kramatorsk for 10 years. She said she would not leave the city because she must look after her 82-year-old mother, who is ailing. But she knows more than ever the danger that brings.
“We think we will be swept off the face of the earth,” she said.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Krakow, Poland
Russian forces continued to shell civilian infrastructure in the eastern regions of Luhansk and Dnipro, injuring one person, local officials reported early Sunday. A pair of residential buildings and a school were hit in Sievierodonetsk, a city in the the region of Luhansk. “Fortunately no casualties,” the region’s governor, Serhiy Haidai, wrote in a post on Telegram. But one person was wounded in Dnipro after Russian forces hit an industrial facility, the region’s governor Valentyn Reznichenko, reported in a post.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Satellite images show hundreds of military vehicles on Friday moving through the eastern town of Velykyi Burluk toward the city of Izium in eastern Ukraine, according to Maxar Technologies. Russian forces seized Izium last week and have been using it as a staging ground for an apparent drive toward Sloviansk, a city critical to gaining full control of eastern Ukraine.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Russian forces on Saturday prevented buses from evacuating civilians in three cities in the east, breaching an agreement brokered by the Red Cross. More than 4,000 people were evacuated Saturday through other corridors, according to the Ukrainian official in charge of corridors.
Reporting from Hong Kong
Russia is seeking to bolster its military with personnel who were discharged up to 10 years ago and recruits from Transnistria, the Russian-backed separatist region of Moldova, Britain’s defense ministry said. Russia has suffered significant casualties, leading to a shortage of combat-ready forces, Pentagon officials said last week.
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 10 April 2022
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) April 10, 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/8yjYrVmzHe
🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/Xd1tmsCDme
Civilians in eastern Ukraine rushed to evacuate at the urging of local officials as Russian forces massed in the region and struck residential areas there on Sunday.
U.S. military officials said Sunday that they expect Russian troops to carry out a major offensive from the city of Izium to Dnipro, a central city that is considered a strategic target in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which encompasses two breakaway enclaves controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Across one of those enclaves, the Donetsk, a fleet of volunteer bus drivers was helping to evacuate residents before an anticipated onslaught by Russian forces.
More than 4.5 million Ukrainians have fled the country since Feb. 24, according to the United Nations.
Russian troops have escalated their attacks against civilian areas in Ukraine in recent days, including a rocket attack on a train station on Friday that killed more than 50 people who were trying to flee the east of the country.
A barrage of Russian strikes hit the airport in Dnipro, wounding five Ukrainian rescue workers, a local official reported Sunday.
As Ukrainian leaders and Western allies warned that the risk of civilian casualties was growing, Britain announced on Saturday that it would supply Ukrainian forces with missiles that can target aircraft, tanks and even ships, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson made an unannounced visit to Kyiv. Analysts say anti-ship missiles would be a notable addition to Ukrainian forces, which have struggled against Russian ships operating off Ukraine’s coast.
Here are some other major developments:
In the city of Kramatorsk, where the train station was attacked on Friday, residents were bracing for a renewed Russian offensive. The station’s main hall was still spattered with blood and littered with abandoned luggage on Sunday morning, as one resident who vowed to remain in the city said, “We think we will be swept off the face of the earth.”
As Western officials say Russian forces are grappling with devastating casualties in the war, British defense intelligence said on Sunday that Moscow was seeking to bolster its military with personnel who were discharged up to 10 years ago, along with recruits from Transnistria, the Russian-backed separatist region of Moldova.
On Sunday, the CBS News program “60 Minutes” will air an interview with Mr. Zelensky after coverage of the Masters golf tournament. In an excerpt from the interview, Mr. Zelensky spoke about evidence of Russian war crimes, saying: “We are defending the ability of a person to live in the modern world.”
Images reviewed by The New York Times confirmed the accounts of local Ukrainians who say that Russian forces killed as many as 50 civilians as they tried to flee fighting northwest of Kyiv last month. The bodies lay along or near the M06 highway, which runs west from Kyiv, the capital, to the city of Zhytomyr.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called again on Saturday night for sanctions targeting Russian oil and gas, saying the wealth provided by that business was paying for the Kremlin's war efforts and sustaining its “sense of impunity.”
Speaking in his nightly address, Mr. Zelensky pushed for “more painful restrictions” on Russia’s cash flows, saying an oil embargo “should be the first step.”
Although the European Union, the United States and other nations have imposed severe sanctions on the Russian government, banks and wealthy people, European nations reliant on Russian energy have resisted cutting themselves off from those imports.
Mr. Zelensky’s remarks capped a day of diplomacy that included a visit from Britain’s prime minister. The Ukrainian president renewed the argument over Russia’s gas industry on Saturday night.
“Russia can still afford to live in illusions and bring new military forces and new equipment to our land,” Mr. Zelensky said. He added: “Oil is one of the two sources of Russian self-confidence, their sense of impunity.”
European leaders approved a ban this week on Russian coal, the imported energy source that would be the easiest to replace. Europe’s largest economy, Germany, is among the states in the bloc most reliant on Russian energy overall, with gas heating one out of two German homes and powering much of Germany’s export industry.
Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, met this week with Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who urged his counterpart to shift away from Russian oil. “We are doing all we can, and we are doing a lot,” Mr. Scholz said on Friday, warning that it would require massive investments to install the infrastructure to import gas from other countries.
Mr. Johnson met with Mr. Zelensky in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Mr. Zelensky said that they had discussed new sanctions against Russia, though he did not describe them.
He framed support for Ukraine as a defense of Europe at large.
“Russian aggression was not intended to be limited to Ukraine alone, to the destruction of our freedom and our lives alone,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The whole European project is a target for Russia.”
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