Kyiv April 19, 1:58 a.m.
Moscow April 19, 1:58 a.m.
Washington April 18, 6:58 p.m.
Ukraine Live Updates: Russian Offensive in East Has Started, Ukraine Says
Russia said it had hit hundreds of targets around Ukraine with missiles and artillery, apparent preparation for the onslaught in eastern Ukraine.
LVIV, Ukraine — Ukraine said Monday that Russian forces had launched a ground assault along a nearly 300-mile front in the east after hitting the country with one of the most intense missile barrages in weeks, including the first lethal strike on Lviv, the western city that has been a refuge for tens of thousands of fleeing civilians.
The missile strikes, which killed at least seven people in Lviv alone, punctured any illusions that the picturesque city of cobbled streets and graceful squares near Poland’s border was still a sanctuary from the horrors Russia has inflicted elsewhere in Ukraine over the past two months.
The Lviv attack followed 300 missile and artillery strikes that Russia claimed to have carried out, mainly in the east, in what appeared to be a campaign to terrorize the population and intimidate Ukraine’s military before the new ground offensive had begun in the part of the country known as the Donbas.
The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said on national television that the Russian ground assault, which had been anticipated for weeks, stretched along nearly the entire front line, from the northern Kharkiv region south to the besieged port of Mariupol.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said, “A very significant part of the Russian army is now concentrated for that offensive,” adding, “No matter how many servicemen get thrown there, we will fight, we will defend ourselves.”
The overnight missile barrage targeted fuel depots, warehouses, and other infrastructure, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry. Russian forces also appeared to be finally seizing the entire port of Mariupol, where outnumbered Ukrainian fighters defied demands to lay down their weapons at a vast steel plant that has become a kind of industrial Alamo.
Mariupol, a once-vibrant city in southeast Ukraine, is the last obstacle to Russia’s drive to secure a “land bridge” to Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula seized by Russian forces eight years ago.
The intensified attacks came amid signs that international sanctions were beginning to choke Russia’s economy — and in the process, opening fissures between the country’s leaders. President Vladimir V. Putin insisted that “the strategy of an economic blitzkrieg has failed.” But Moscow’s mayor warned that 200,000 people risked losing their jobs in the capital alone, while the head of the central bank warned that the effect of Russia’s isolation was just starting to be felt.
While Ukraine’s east remained the focus of Russia’s recalibrated military ambitions, the strike on Lviv was a lethal reminder that no Ukrainian city, even one scarcely 50 miles from the Polish border, lies outside the range of Moscow’s rockets.
Gray smoke billowed from what remained of the red roof of a long concrete garage on the city’s western outskirts, a sign outside advertising “carwash” and “tire replacement.” A hole in the roof indicated that the building had taken a direct hit from a missile. Air raid sirens wailed continuously as firefighters struggled to extinguish the flames and ambulances ferried away the wounded.
While the garage burned, a train rumbled by toward Lviv’s nearby railway station, carrying passengers fleeing the fighting in the eastern city of Dnipro. It stopped briefly and the train’s conductors and other workers tried to reassure anxious passengers as they started hearing about the airstrikes by phone.
“It was panic,” said Anna Khrystiuk, a volunteer who was handing out information to displaced people, several of whom ran to a shelter in the station when the missiles hit. “Many people were from Kharkiv and other places and they were so afraid of rockets already. They thought that it was safe to stay here.”
In Kharkiv, a northeastern city shelled relentlessly since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, a fresh artillery strike killed at least one person in a residential area. The victim was standing a few yards from an apartment building that was struck. It came after a concerted missile barrage on Sunday killed at least five people in the city’s center.
“It was the first time this neighborhood was hit,” said Lubov Ustymenko, 72, who wore a winter coat and stood a few yards from a discarded umbrella and a puddle filled with a mix of blood and the morning’s light rain. “Our life is decided in one second — you go outside, and then you’re gone.”
Russia’s ground onslaught — a push to seize more of the Donbas — got underway after weeks of setbacks, including Russia’s retreat from areas surrounding the capital, Kyiv, and the sinking of a major Russian warship in the Black Sea.
Having failed in the early weeks of the war to destroy the Ukrainian military’s network of fuel and ammunition depots — perhaps under the erroneous assumption that Ukrainian forces would surrender wholesale — Russia has intensified its attacks against those facilities, as well as against transportation infrastructure.
But Russia’s puzzling failure to do so earlier has left its forces with costly unfinished business, and given Ukrainian troops an unexpected advantage. Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst, said that while Russia has hit railway facilities, so far it has avoided aiming missiles at bridges over big rivers.
“If Russia plans to expand its presence on Ukraine’s territory — and the end goal since 2014 has been the destruction of Ukrainian statehood as such — it would need the railway too,” Mr. Luzin said.
Besides targeting Kharkiv, Russian forces have unleashed further destruction on eastern cities like Mykolaiv, which lies in Russia’s pathway to the Black Sea port of Odesa. Those attacks have tied up Ukrainian forces and prevented them from joining the fight farther east, while sowing terror among civilians after Russia failed to conquer these cities early in the war.
In Mariupol, devastated by weeks of siege warfare, a band of Ukrainian fighters remained ensconced in the Azovstal steel plant after having rejected Russian demands to surrender. Russia intensified its bombing of the factory, and it was unclear and how long the Ukrainians could endure in the plant’s labyrinthine underground tunnels. Officials on both sides said Russia could control the city soon.
Even with much of Mariupol now a wasteland, the city’s capture would represent a key strategic prize for Russia and would free up forces for its Donbas offensive.
Still, British defense intelligence officials said the grinding battle for the city has become a source of anxiety for Russian commanders.
“Concerted Ukrainian resistance has severely tested Russian forces and diverted men and matériel, slowing Russia’s advance elsewhere,” said Mick Smeath, a British defense attaché. He likened Russia’s treatment of Mariupol to its brutal tactics in Chechnya in 1999 and Syria in 2016.
After two months of fighting, pro-war commentators in Russia are pushing the army for tangible military victories that would cover up some of the embarrassments Moscow has suffered, including the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet, and the retreat from around Kyiv. So far, Russia has been able to claim only the capture of Kherson, a regional capital, as a significant battlefield achievement.
On Russia’s state-run television, commentators have enthusiastically promoted the Donbas offensive as a decisive battle that could be a turning point in the war. Many point toward May 9, the commemoration of Russia’s 1945 victory over Nazi Germany, as the date when Mr. Putin could claim a semblance of victory in Ukraine.
“The big battle for the Donbas has already started,” said Yuri Podolyaka, a pro-Russia analyst who publishes military reports on his popular channel on Telegram. “The activity of the Russian artillery and air forces has intensified again.”
On Monday, the head of the regional administration in Luhansk, which is part of the Donbas, said that Russian forces had gained control of the town of Kreminna, adding to territory in the region held by Moscow.
Still. those scattered Russian advances carry less psychological punch than lethal strikes on Lviv, a city that has become a critical gateway to safety for the millions of Ukrainians who have fled westward, trying to escape the worst of the fighting. In late February, it was quickly repurposed from a charming tourist destination into a base of operations for a vast relief effort, serving as a channel for humanitarian supplies, aid workers, foreign fighters making their way to frontline cities, and many foreign journalists.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people have passed through the city’s train and bus stations. For many others, it is a new — if fleeting — home. Lviv, which had about 720,000 residents before the war began, has since welcomed at least 350,000 people displaced from other parts of the country.
Until Monday, the only direct targets that had been hit in Lviv were a fuel storage site and tank facility in the city’s northeast, hit by several missile strikes about three weeks earlier. Before that, a pair of attacks targeted an airport facility and a military base near Lviv, killing at least 35 people.
In Monday’s strike, three missiles hit empty military warehouses while a fourth hit the garage, according to the head of Lviv’s military administration, Maksym Koztyskyy. He did not say whether all the casualties were from the strike on the garage. Besides the seven killed, he said 11 people were injured — a toll that could rise as rescue workers cleared rubble from the site. The missiles, Mr. Koztyskyy said, had been launched by warplanes from the direction of the Caspian Sea.
Orest Maznin, a police officer, said he had been driving to work past the garage when the missiles struck, and he narrowly escaped shrapnel. The windshield of his car had a large hole from the impact of a piece of metal.
“It happened too quickly for me to be afraid,” Mr. Maznin said.
Jane Arraf reported from Lviv, Ukraine, Ivan Nechepurenko from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Mark Landler from London. Reporting was contributed by Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kharkiv, Ukraine, Michael Schwirtz from Kyiv, and Anton Troianovski and Neil MacFarquhar from Istanbul.
HOSTOMEL, Ukraine — The firefighters worked for hours amid the debris, delicately sawing through wooden planks and pushing aside bricks of a collapsed house before they finally found what they had been searching for: the body of a man who had spent days crying out for help before falling silent.
There were 11 of them, a patchwork of American, German and Australian firefighters who had taken time off their day jobs to come help Ukrainian rescue workers recover bodies from buildings and houses brought down by the fighting in the seven weeks since Russian forces invaded.
The man, whose body they found on Sunday, had been pinned to a couch when a rocket or missile or some other kind of projectile struck his house. Neighbors told the firefighters that his name was Vlodymyr, they said he was 42, and they described listening to him plead for help in the days following the attack.
His cries had ceased by the time the firefighters found him, a gray backpack filled with water strapped to his back. They paused for a moment of silence — a nearly universal practice among first responders — and then carried on unearthing his body so it could be collected and given a proper burial.
For one American firefighter, it was something he felt he had to do.
“I felt guilty. Normal people were dying,” said David Zalutskiy, 29, who was born in Ukraine and emigrated to the United States as a toddler. “I was sitting at church, and I couldn’t pay attention because I felt I needed to do something.”
He found a way to help when he saw a Facebook post by another American firefighter, Eric Hille, who was looking for volunteers to travel with him to Ukraine. The two of them, and nine others, arrived last week and immediately got to work, digging bodies out of the rubble in recently liberated towns and villages around Kyiv.
The work is grim, but rewarding. “We have brought closure to multiple families,” Mr. Zalutskiy said. “We weren’t able to rescue people to help them survive, so we brought closure.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Putin awarded an honorary title to the brigade of Russian soldiers that Ukraine says committed mass atrocities against civilians in Bucha. He commended the unit’s “skillful and resolute actions” in Ukraine as an example of “high professionalism.”
High-profile prisoners held by both Russia and Ukraine, including two British fighters believed captured in Mariupol, appealed on Monday to be exchanged.
Viktor Medvedchuk, one of the richest tycoons in Ukraine and close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, appeared in a 34-second video posted on Twitter by the Security Service of Ukraine. Mr. Medvedchuk, 67, the leader of a Ukrainian political party, asked both Mr. Putin and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to exchange him for the people defending Mariupol as well as any civilians trapped in the besieged, shattered southern port city.
Mr. Medvedchuk, who had been under house arrest on treason charges when the war started but escaped, had been shown after he was captured on April 12, handcuffed, in military fatigues, and looking disheveled and dazed. In his appeal on Monday, his hair was combed, and he was wearing a zippered sweater.
Mr. Medvedchuk was considered particularly close to Mr. Putin, who was godfather to his youngest daughter.
Two British fighters for Ukraine apparently captured in Mariupol appeared on Russian state television, asking to be released in exchange for Mr. Medvedchuk. All three men seemed to be speaking while in detention. The two Britons made the suggestion at the prompting of a man not identified on camera, who showed them a clip from a news conference that Mr. Medvedchuk’s wife, Oksana, gave over the weekend asking that he be freed. That prompted speculation that the Russians, who controlled the interview process, had come up with the exchange idea.
It was unclear how free the Britons were to say what they wanted. The two — Shaun Pinner, 48, and Aiden Aslin, 28 — spoke separately in interviews broadcast Monday on Rossiya 24, a state channel. Both men requested that the British government offer assistance toward an exchange for Mr. Medvedchuk. “I’d like to appeal to the government to send me back home; I’d like to see my wife again,” Mr. Pinner said, addressing Prime Minister Boris Johnson directly in saying that both men needed help.
The two fought on the Ukrainian side in Mariupol, which Russian forces have almost captured entirely, other than the vast Azovstal steelworks complex. Both seemed in good health, if a bit battered and dirty, and Mr. Aslin had a gash in his forehead. The Geneva Conventions bar coerced interviews with prisoners of war.
VENICE — The 78 bronze funnels were ready, the pump tested and the backdrop was almost done. So when it looked as if war was most likely coming to Ukraine, Maria Lanko, one of the curators of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, was determined to get the artist Pavlo Makov’s fountain sculpture safely out of the country.
In a recent interview in New York, Lanko described how she loaded the funnels in three boxes and packed them into her car. “We expected something might start,” she said. “There was a lot of tension and Putin gave us many hints.”
On the evening of the war’s first day, as explosions shook the city, Lanko set off driving from Kyiv with her dog and a colleague, the pavilion’s art director, Sergiy Mishakin. “I started the journey without a precise route,” said Lanko. “I had to decide which road was safest.”
So began a harrowing three-week journey — driving 10 hours a day on back roads, staying in places without heat — that ultimately took Lanko out of Ukraine and to Vienna, where the sculpture’s materials were sent onward to Italy.
Since arriving in Venice a month ago, Makov said he has taken on the unexpected role of national spokesman. “I don’t feel myself an artist here, I feel much more a citizen of Ukraine, and that it’s my duty that Ukraine is represented at the Biennale,” he said.
Lanko said that this year’s Biennale was an important moment for Ukraine, the chance to showcase the country’s artistic talent and convey the message that a nation under siege can still make a creative contribution.
“There is no knowledge about Ukrainian culture and art in the world,” she said. “It’s still considered to be part of the Russian cultural space. Being in places such as Venice, we can speak up with our art and our words.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
“Now we can state that the Russian forces have started the battle for the Donbas that they have been getting ready for a long time,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a video address. “A very significant part of the Russian Army is now concentrated for that offensive. No matter how many servicemen get thrown there, we will fight, we will defend ourselves. We will do that every day.”
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
Russia has launched its expected large-scale offensive in Ukraine’s east, a top Ukrainian security official said in televised comments. “This morning, along almost the entire front line in Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, the occupiers attempted to break through our defenses,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council. “Our servicemen are holding out,” he said, adding that the Russian forces could only break the front at two points.
Intense fighting continued around a large steel factory in the southern city of Mariupol, in what appeared to be one of the last redoubts of Ukrainian forces in the besieged city, an adviser to the mayor said on Monday.
Pyotr Andryushchenko, an aide to Mayor Vadym Boychenko, said that some 2,000 civilians were trapped along with the soldiers inside the Azovstal steel plant, one of Europe’s largest metal factories.
Mr. Andryshchenko insisted that street fighting was continuing throughout Levoberezhny, the district that includes the factory.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that its forces had completely surrounded the steel plant, and that the Ukrainian forces holding out “forbade negotiations about surrendering,” citing an intercepted radio transmission. The Ministry repeated a demand that the Ukrainians put down their weapons. “In case of further resistance,” the ministry said, “all of them will be eliminated.”
“In reality it is not surrounded,” Mr. Andryushchenko said on Monday. “For the past few days our troops have been engaged in intense street fighting throughout Levoberezhny.” He said the majority of the fighting was taking place along a main road, called Tahanrozka, that led from the plant to the outskirts of the city.
He described the steel plant as a “fortress,” but would not disclose how many troops were inside. And he denied reports that the factory held the last concentration of Ukrainian forces, claiming troops were still holed up at a pair of factories, Azovmash and Illich, elsewhere in the city.
Mr. Andryushchenko and other officials left Mariupol weeks ago, and his statements could not be verified. Communication with people still in the city is extremely limited, making it impossible to get a clear picture.
Taking Mariupol, a port city in southern Ukraine, is critical to Russian designs to form an unbroken land corridor stretching from the Donbas region bordering Russia to the Crimean peninsula.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said Russian forces would likely use “overwhelming firepower” to try to force the holdouts at the Azovstal factory to capitulate in the coming week. But the institute predicted in its latest assessment that the final battle with the Ukrainian defenders, who “appear intent on staging a final stand,” could cost Russia dearly.
The presence of civilians in the plant, which was confirmed by the chief of the Mariupol patrol police, Mykhailo Vershynin, raised concerns about a potential humanitarian calamity stemming from both fighting and hunger.
“There was not a lot of food inside the plant to begin with because it was for our troops,” Mr. Andryushchenko said. “But now they are needing to feed 2,000 people.”
Many of the civilians who have gathered there arrived after their homes were destroyed by shelling or they were evicted by Russian forces, he said, and have sheltered with troops in a network of tunnels beneath the plant.
“These people, many wanted to avoid being displaced or deported, so they found protection with our troops, in the basement of the plant,” Mr. Andryushchenko said.
The Ukrainian army had arranged two operations over the past two weeks to bring food to the plant, he said. But the situation will likely grow more dire as Russian troops have blocked anyone from entering or leaving the city.
As fighting intensifies, Ukrainian officials have warned that Russian forces may turn to chemical weapons to flush the holdouts from the tunnel network under the factory.
In anticipation of possible atrocities, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine accused Russia of “deliberately trying to destroy everyone” at the plant. He said he would refuse further peace talks with Moscow if its forces committed more atrocities.
Mr. Andryushchenko raised disturbing reports that Russian forces were using Ukrainian civilians as human shields, putting them at risk of being killed.
Outside the plant, Russian soldiers were leading civilians to the front line, he said, forcing them to register for “mobile passes” at an office close to the line of fighting, about three miles from the steel plant.
The office had been installed last week by Konstantin Ivashchenko, who was recently named the “new mayor” of Mariupol by the Kremlin-backed separatist government calling itself the Donetsk People’s Republic. The passes, the existence of which has also been reported by Mariupol’s police, are required for residents to walk outside.
“Some are walking long distances to the office, up to 10 miles, and then they are waiting in long lines,” Mr. Andryushchenko said. The civilians are required to wear white bands on their arms and legs. Russian solders typically wear such bands, he said, raising the possibility that they are intentionally endangering the Ukrainian civilians.
Neil MacFarquhar and
In a small parish in northern Italy affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, the mostly Ukrainian worshipers — IT specialists, migrant factory laborers, nurses and cleaners — decided to repudiate the full-throated support for the war in Ukraine from Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.
The Moscow Patriarch had repeatedly bestowed blessings on the Russian military, giving a historical golden icon of the Virgin Mary to a senior commander, for example, and casting the war as a holy struggle to protect Russia from what he called Western scourges like gay pride parades. He has been a vocal supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin, with the church receiving vast financial resources in return.
“We saw that the Moscow Patriarchate was not engaged in theology, it was simply interested in supporting the ideology of the state,” said Archpriest Volodymyr Melnichuk of the Church of the Elevation of the Cross in Udine, Italy, “In essence the patriarch betrayed his Ukrainian flock.”
So on March 31, the Ukrainian cleric wrote a letter severing all ties to the Moscow Patriarchate.
With the Eastern Orthodox Easter approaching this Sunday, similar tensions are rippling through the church’s more than 200 million faithful, concentrated in eastern and southern Europe. Around the world, the war is dividing national churches, parishes and even families as they reassess relations with Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church.
In the United States, some believers are switching churches. In France, Orthodox seminary students petitioned their bishop to break with the Moscow Patriarchate. In the Netherlands, the police had to intervene at a Rotterdam church after parishioners came to blows over the war.
The Ukraine war has pitted combatants under the Moscow Patriarch against each other, and has placed Ukrainian worshipers in an especially untenable position. By tradition, Orthodox worshipers pray for their patriarch at all services.
“How can you accept prayers for the patriarch who is blessing the soldiers trying to kill your son?” said Andreas Loudaros, editor of Orthodoxia.info, an Athens-based website that covers church affairs.
Doctrinal disputes and intrigues within the Eastern Orthodox Church often spool out over decades, if not centuries. But with remarkable speed, the war has widened schisms long kept below the surface.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, with its single, uncontested leader, each of the 15 Orthodox branches enjoys significant sovereignty. Heated debates have erupted within the Eastern Orthodox Church in numerous countries whether to openly ostracize Patriarch Kirill and Russia.
The Moscow Patriarchate has sought to anoint itself the true seat of Orthodoxy ever since Constantinople, now Istanbul, fell to Islamic invaders in 1453. So Moscow has been at loggerheads for centuries with the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, always the spiritual leader of the church. But, the testy relations between Kirill and the current ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew, burst into the open over the war.
“He should not have identified so much with President Putin and even called Russia’s war against Ukraine ‘sacred,’” the patriarch recently told a group of students.
“It is damaging to the prestige of the whole of Orthodoxy because Orthodoxy doesn’t support war, violence, terrorism,” Bartholomew said in an interview in Istanbul.
Ukraine has been a particular source of antagonism between the two hierarchs. In 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew granted independence, called “autocephaly,” to a previously unsanctioned church in Ukraine, which had been subordinate to Moscow since 1686.
Afterward, the Russian church severed contacts with Bartholomew. More than half Ukraine’s parishes rejected the decision and stayed under Moscow’s jurisdiction.
Of the 45 dioceses in Ukraine, encompassing nearly 20,000 parishes, about 22 have stopped mentioning Patriarch Kirill during prayers, said Sergei Chapnin, a Russian religious scholar and frequent church critic.
That is the first step toward breaking with Moscow, though still far from a formal rupture. But the dispute makes it difficult for many Ukrainian bishops to switch allegiances now.
Some faithful in Ukraine question the silence of the bishops, wondering aloud whether they are fans of Mr. Putin, have been bribed or blackmailed to stay quiet or are hedging their bets lest Moscow prevails in the war.
Archpriest Andriy Pinchuk, 44, the former mayor of a small agricultural village just south of the central city of Dnipro, said the hesitancy dismays many parish priests. Russian troops have destroyed countless churches.
“We are ashamed to look into the eyes of regular Ukrainians, we are ashamed of the horrible aggressive words that Patriarch Kirill is saying constantly, we are ashamed of the Ukrainian bishops who put their heads in the sand and fear a rupture with the Moscow Patriarch,” said Father Pinchuk. Ukrainians constitute a significant part of the Moscow Patriarch’s flock, so losing them would be a blow.
Father Pinchuk is the author of a petition signed by some 400 Ukrainian clerics asking church hierarchs to declare as heresy Kirill’s support for the Kremlin’s Russkii Mir or “Russian World,” project, which among other things has tried to extend church influence outside Russia as a foreign policy tool.
“The future of any church in Ukraine will not be linked to Moscow unless it wins this war,” said Christophe D’Aloisio, a visiting professor of Eastern Christian and Ecumenical Studies at the University of Louvain in Belgium and an Orthodox parish priest, who signed a declaration in March against the “Russian World” project by more than 1,300 Orthodox scholars and theologians. “But it is the wrong moment to position yourself for or against.”
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has provoked widespread anger with a series of sermons and speeches, including saying that the country is battling the Antichrist, and urged Russians to rally around the government. Kirill has avoided condemning widely documented attacks on civilians, many of whom are his parishioners. Most national churches have not condemned Kirill.
One possible reason emerges on the website of the Foundation for the Support of Christian Culture and Heritage, which is funded by Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy corporation. It lists church projects financed around the world in Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, Serbia and the United States, among others.
Numerous recipients have not denounced the war. “When you get money from Moscow it is not easy to be critical,” said Mr. D’Aloisio.
About 300 priests, mostly inside Russia, signed a petition against the war. Three Lithuanian priests who were outspoken critics were just fired.
In the United States, some adherents expressed anger that although the two main American branches of Russian origin, the Orthodox Church in America and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, had condemned the fighting and worked to help refugees, they avoided criticizing Patriarch Kirill directly.
An influx of converts in recent years, drawn by President Putin portraying himself as a bulwark against the West’s moral collapse, has intensified the wrangling.
“It has torn the church apart in some ways,” said the Very Rev. Dr. John Jillions, a retired associate professor of religion and a former parish priest in Bridgeport, Conn. “I think that they are too hesitant, they need to come out much more forcefully that they are against Putin’s aggression and Patriarch Kirill’s apparent support.”
Many people are questioning why St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers accepted a $250,000 donation from the Russian state religious foundation to name a chair in biblical studies after Kirill, suggesting that the money be returned or spent on Ukrainian refugees.
The Very Rev. Dr. Chad Hatfield, the president of the seminary, said that the donation was received before the invasion and was under review, and that the Orthodox Church of America had condemned the war.
Archpriest Victor Potapov in Washington, D.C., speaking for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, called it wrong to single out Russia for blame, and said the church was offering fervent prayers for the war to end.
Some parishioners are switching churches over the issue. “This is not my church, I cannot go to a church headed by a patriarch who is supporting war,” said Lena S. Zezulin. She left her church, St. Seraphim’s Russian Orthodox Church in Sea Cliff, Long Island, where she was baptized. She cannot convince her mother, aged 90, to quit.
By all accounts, a serious cleavage in the church appears inevitable, but the course of the war will determine its depth and the scar tissue left behind.
On Palm Sunday, sitting in the courtyard of an Orthodox church frequented by Ukrainians in Istanbul, Nadiia Kliuieva reeled off the terrible legacy from a conflict sanctified by Kirill, including children killed, women raped and the pain of Ukrainians everywhere.
“I don’t know what kind of Ukrainian you would have to be to keep an association with the Moscow Patriarchate,” she said. “I think many people have opened their eyes.”
Neil MacFarquhar from Istanbul and Sophia Kishkovsky from Long Island.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
WASHINGTON — The United States in the next few days will begin training Ukrainian troops to operate powerful howitzers that the Biden administration is sending to Ukraine to help it fight the next major phase of the war, a senior Pentagon official said on Monday.
President Biden last week announced an $800 million military aid package for Ukraine that for the first time included more-powerful weaponry, including 18 155-millimeter howitzers and 40,000 rounds of artillery ammunition.
The Ukrainians will need training to use the American weapons, but their commanders are loath to spare many troops from the current fighting. So a small group of Ukrainian soldiers — most likely experienced with artillery and familiar with the Soviet-designed 152-millimeter counterpart to the American howitzer — will be brought to a neighboring country to learn the new system, the Pentagon official said.
After they are trained over a number of days, the Ukrainians will return to their units to instruct their comrades, a common practice the Pentagon calls “train the trainers.”
“We do expect to be able to move forward here, in the next few days, on training trainers on the howitzers outside of Ukraine,” the senior Pentagon official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details.
In the new phase of the war, American military analysts expect the Russian and Ukrainian armies to try to flank and surround each other on the wide-open flatlands of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, firing fierce barrages of artillery at each other from a distance.
The Ukrainians will need a new arsenal of weapons, particularly long-range artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, U.S. and other Western military officials said. They will also require more armored vehicles to protect their forces and to tow artillery pieces to the front lines.
The 18 American howitzers bound for Ukraine will come from existing Army and Marine Corps inventories in the United States, the senior Pentagon official said. They will be flown to a staging base near Ukraine, most likely in Poland, Romania or Slovakia, where the training will take place. “We’re moving with all haste to get them there,” the Pentagon official said.
John Ismay contributed reporting.
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had used air-based missiles to destroy Ukraine’s 124th Joint Logistics Support Center in the Lviv area. In a statement, the ministry said that “large-scale shipments of foreign weapons” were stored in the facility, a claim that could not immediately be confirmed. Ukrainian officials had said that empty warehouses were struck.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen will call on American allies to increase economic pressure on Russia in response to its “reckless” war in Ukraine at the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington this week.
LVIV, Ukraine — The mayor of Lviv, in western Ukraine, pleaded on Monday with the city’s residents to go to bomb shelters when air-raid sirens sound, on a day when a Russian missile attack that included a strike on a garage breached the city’s relative calm and killed seven people.
Almost three months into the war, many Lviv residents take for granted the frequent sirens that indicate the city’s airspace has been breached. Apart from those in government buildings and shelters for the displaced, few people retreat to shelters.
“I reiterate my call to all the residents: Whenever you hear a siren, please, we mourn the fallen but we have to be vigilant because the enemy is getting more and more atrocious,” said the mayor, Andriy Sadovyi. “You have to protect yourselves.”
At least four Russian missiles struck Lviv on Monday morning. Ukrainian officials said three hit empty military warehouses while a fourth struck a garage near railway tracks in the western part of the city. At least 11 people were injured, including two who had critical injuries and a child who was among those less seriously wounded.
Mr. Sadovyi said the strike on the garage also shattered windows at a school and at a nearby hotel that had been turned into a shelter for Ukrainians fleeing fighting in the east.
The attacks prompted a realization that even hundreds of miles from the front lines, this city known as a tourist destination and the cultural capital of Ukraine could be attacked at any time.
In western Lviv, gray smoke billowed from what remained of the red roof of the long, concrete garage, which had signs reading “carwash” and “tire replacement.”
The hole in the roof indicated that the building, which overlooks a railway line in a ravine below, had suffered a direct hit from a missile. As another air-raid siren sounded, firefighters tried to extinguish the flames while ambulances ferried away the wounded.
A few streets away from the burning building, a resident hung her laundry out to dry while others walked small dogs wearing sweaters.
“If the garage was the ultimate target, maybe they were aiming at the railway station,” said Maksym Koztsykyy, head of Lviv’s military administration. “There are no longer any safe or unsafe locations.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyRussia’s central bank chief warned on Monday that the consequences of Western sanctions were only beginning to be felt, and Moscow’s mayor said that 200,000 jobs were at risk in the Russian capital alone, stark acknowledgments that undermined President Vladimir V. Putin’s contention that sanctions had failed to destabilize the Russian economy.
The bleak assessments from two senior officials align with the forecast of many experts that Russia faces a steep economic downturn as its inventory of imported goods and parts runs low. How Russians react to the financial hardships resulting from Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will determine in part whether anything can weaken the Russian leader’s grip on power or sap support for the war.
Russia’s economy has avoided a crippling collapse for now, but more sanctions are on the way that would further increase the economic pain. The European Union is formulating a plan to curb imports of Russian oil. And Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen is expected to call on American allies to increase economic pressure on Russia at the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington this week, according to a Treasury official.
Estimates from international financial organizations of the contraction in the Russian economy range from 10 to 15 percent. On Monday, the Russian central bank said on its website that consumer prices on average were 16.7 percent higher than they were a year ago.
Wally Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury, predicted during an economic conference on Monday that Russian inflation would soar and imports would plummet, leaving the Kremlin “with fewer resources to prop up the Russian economy, pursue its invasion in Ukraine and project power in the future.”
But Mr. Putin projected an entirely different scenario on Monday, using the fact that the Russian economy had avoided a full-fledged panic to bolster his claim that the West’s punishing sanctions would not deter him.
Western penalties, he said in a televised videoconference with senior officials, were meant to “rapidly undermine the financial and economic situation in our country, provoke panic in the markets, the collapse of the banking system and a large-scale shortage of goods in stores.”
“But we can already confidently say that this policy toward Russia has failed,” he went on. “The strategy of an economic blitzkrieg has failed.”
Mr. Putin was in part addressing a domestic audience, seeking to reassure Russians who have had to endure fears of cash shortages, a battered stock market and the shuttering of popular Western retailers like Ikea. He has a powerful state propaganda machine to amplify his message.
Mr. Putin said he was prepared to increase government spending to stimulate the economy, an indication that continued revenues from energy exports were giving the Kremlin the flexibility to soften the blow of sanctions. Europe’s energy purchases inject more than $800 million each day into the Russian economy, according to Bruegel, an economics institute in Brussels.
Aggressive capital controls imposed by the central bank have helped the ruble recover from its crash in the days after the invasion. The central bank has also raised interest rates to induce savers to keep their money in the bank, although the high rate makes it more expensive to borrow money to invest. And there are few reports of major layoffs or extensive food shortages in grocery stores.
But contrary to Mr. Putin’s optimism, two top officials cautioned on Monday that more economic hardship was looming. Mayor Sergei S. Sobyanin of Moscow announced a $40 million program to help people laid off by foreign companies find temporary employment and new jobs. According to his office’s estimates, he said, “around 200,000 people are at risk of losing their jobs” in the city of 13 million.
Mr. Sobyanin wrote in a blog post that the newly unemployed could work in the city’s parks, service centers and public health pavilions, “an opportunity to do useful work and acquire new skills.”
In an appearance at the lower house of Parliament, Elvira Nabiullina, the chairwoman of the Russian central bank, gave a more far-reaching, negative assessment. She told lawmakers that while the sanctions’ impact had largely been on the financial markets at first, they “will now begin to increasingly affect the real sectors of the economy.”
For example, she said, “practically every product” manufactured in Russia relies on imported components. Factories for now may still have them in stock. But because of new Western export restrictions, Russian companies will be forced to shift their supply chains or start making their own components, she said.
“At the moment, perhaps this problem is not yet so strongly felt, because there are still reserves in the economy, but we see that sanctions are being tightened almost every day,” she said. “The period during which the economy can live on reserves is finite.”
Ms. Nabiullina, an internationally respected central banker who reportedly tried to resign in the days after the war, said about half of the central bank’s $600 billion foreign currency and gold reserves remained frozen because of sanctions. Those reserves that the bank still controlled, she said, were mainly gold and Chinese yuan — of little use in trying to stabilize the ruble — forcing the bank to resort to capital controls like limiting how much foreign currency could be taken out of the country.
“They just cannot continue because they don’t have Western inputs, and it will take years and trillions of dollars to create their own supply chains,” said Michael S. Bernstam, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
“Even their most important industries are in trouble,” Mr. Bernstam said, referring to gas and oil.
The central bank is talking about recapitalizing banks and reducing capital requirements to half of what they were previously, which Mr. Bernstam interpreted as a sign that banks risk insolvency.
In his televised videoconference later in the day with Ms. Nabiullina and several other officials, Mr. Putin acknowledged that the Russian economy did face some problems, including inflation. He said he had already directed the pensions and salaries of state employees — part of Mr. Putin’s political base — to be adjusted for inflation, and he indicated that he supported greater government spending to stimulate the economy.
“The budget should actively support the economy, saturate the economy with financial resources, and maintain its liquidity,” Mr. Putin said. “There are opportunities for this. Of course, we need to act carefully.”
But as he has in the past, Mr. Putin couched the acknowledgment of economic challenges in Russia with the insistence that its adversaries were faring far worse. He told officials that because of its sanctions against Russia, the West was seeing “the growth of inflation and unemployment” and “the decline in the standard of living of Europeans.”
It was an echo of a common refrain on Russian state television, which has been airing frequent reports on rising energy prices in Europe and the United States. The Kremlin’s message to the Russian public is that it is only a matter of time before Western unity over the invasion of Ukraine collapses.
On Sunday, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s security council, wrote in a social media post that “hyperinflation” in Europe would soon stoke protests in the form of “smelly bonfires made of tires on the streets of well-groomed European cities.”
He added: “Then the Brussels aunts and uncles will have to change their rhetoric.”
Anton Troianovski reported from Hamburg, Germany, and Patricia Cohen from New York. Alan Rappeport contributed reporting from Washington.
LVIV, Ukraine — Russian missiles struck Lviv on Monday, killing at least seven people in the first reported deaths of the war in the western city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have fled to escape the fierce fighting in other parts of Ukraine.
The head of Lviv’s military administration, Maksym Koztyskyy, said three missiles hit empty military warehouses while a fourth hit a garage, killing and injuring civilians. He did not say whether all the casualties were from the garage strike, which hit a few hundred feet from a set of railway tracks.
“If the garage was the ultimate target, maybe they were aiming at the railway station,” he said. “There are no longer any safe or unsafe locations.”
The head of Ukraine’s railway service, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, said he had no proof that the attack was aimed at the railway, which has some facilities near military sites.
For many in Lviv, the attacks opened a new page in the conflict: a realization that even hundreds of miles from the front lines, this city known as a tourist destination and the cultural capital of Ukraine could be attacked at any time.
“We have to be vigilant because the enemy is getting more and more atrocious,” said Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi. “You have to protect yourself,” he said, pleading with residents to go to bomb shelters when air raid sirens sounded.
At one of the impact sites, gray smoke billowed from what remained of the red roof of a long, concrete garage with a sign reading “carwash” and “tire replacement.” The hole in the roof indicated that the building, which overlooks railway tracks in a ravine below, had suffered a direct hit from a missile. As another air raid siren sounded, firefighters tried to extinguish the flames while ambulances ferried away the wounded.
A few streets away from the burning building, a resident hung her laundry out to dry while others walked small dogs wearing sweaters.
As the garage burned, a train from the eastern city of Dnipro rumbled slowly by on its way to the nearby Lviv train station, carrying passengers fleeing the fighting in Dnipro and headed to the city of Truskavets in western Ukraine. It stopped briefly in Lviv and one of the conductors said he had tried to reassure the passengers as they started hearing about the airstrikes by phone.
“People were getting information from their relatives in Lviv” about the attacks, said the conductor, Fedir, leaning out of the railway car to talk before it pulled away. “They weren’t panicked, but they were worried. I told them to stay calm,” he added, asking that he be identified by his first name only.
Inside the train station, Anna Khrystiuk, a volunteer staffing an information desk for displaced people flooding into the train station, said most people had ignored the air raid siren until the first explosion.
“We told people to go to the shelter but they didn’t listen to us,” said Ms. Khrystiuk, 23. But with the sound of the explosion, she said, passengers ran to the underground level of the station that serves as a shelter.
“It was panic,” she said. “Many people came from Kharkiv and other places and they were so afraid of rockets already. They thought that it was safe to stay here.”. While they were underground, they heard three more explosions.
“Many people cried,” she said. “We told them to keep calm and everything would be OK.”
Orest Maznin, a police officer, said he had been driving to work past the garage when the missile struck and he narrowly escaped being hit by shrapnel. His car windshield had a large hole from the impact of a piece of metal.
He said he and other drivers slammed on the brakes and took cover near their cars when the missiles struck.
“It happened too quickly for me to be afraid,” said Mr. Maznin, who joined the police force just six months ago.
In addition to the seven killed, Mr. Kozytskyy said 11 people were injured, but that toll could rise as rescue workers cleared rubble from the impact site. At least two people were critically injured, and a child was among those with more minor injuries.
Mr. Kozytskyy said the missiles were launched by aircraft coming from the direction of the Caspian Sea.
The Lviv mayor said earlier on Monday that five missiles were fired.
A month ago, Russian missiles struck a military base outside the city that was used extensively for training Ukrainian forces. And Russian missile attacks hit a fuel storage site and a tank repair facility in Lviv in late March.
“The world knows that Lviv is the biggest hub for those fleeing from shelling and over 100 embassies moved to Lviv,” said Mr. Sadovyi, the mayor. “This is an attempt to intimidate.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyRussia claimed Monday that it had struck a wide array of targets in Ukraine overnight amid signs that its forces were making final preparations to launch a large-scale offensive in the country’s east.
The Russian Defense Ministry said most of the strikes, conducted by high-precision missiles, hit areas in eastern Ukraine. The air force, missile forces, artillery and air-defense systems had hit more than 300 targets, the ministry added, one of the broadest series of strikes reported in recent weeks.
The intensified attacks claimed by the ministry — which did not include the missile strike in the western city of Lviv on Monday morning that killed at least seven people — came as Russian forces were close to a complete capture of the southeastern port city of Mariupol, where they have surrounded the last remaining Ukrainian troops at a sprawling steel plant and have bombarded the facility for days.
The capture of Mariupol would constitute a huge strategic prize for Russia as it would secure an overland route to Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in 2014, and would free up forces for the offensive in the eastern region known as Donbas. The situation in the two breakaway areas of the Donbas, under the control of Moscow-backed separatists since 2014, has been cited by President Vladimir V. Putin as one of the key justifications for his decision to launch the war.
The Defense Ministry said its air-based missiles had hit command points, fuel depots and ammunition warehouses in five eastern Ukrainian towns, as well as in the southern city of Mykolaiv. Targets included military facilities in the towns of Barvinkove and Huliaipole, two strategic locations that military experts predict could be launching points for Russia’s eastern offensive.
Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst, said that while Russia has hit railway infrastructure in Ukraine, so far it has avoided targeting its missiles at bridges over big rivers.
“If Russia plans to expand its presence on Ukraine’s territory — and the end goal since 2014 has been the destruction of Ukrainian statehood as such — it would need the railway too,” Mr. Luzin said.
Also on Monday, the head of the regional administration in Luhansk, which is part of Donbas, said that Russian forces had gained control of the town of Kreminna, adding to territory in the region held by Moscow.
“We see that they have accumulated enough forces and resources and have launched mass offensives in several directions,” the official, Serhiy Haidai, said of the Russian forces.
Pro-Russia military analysts and talking heads on state-run television have been promoting the Donbas offensive as the decisive battle that could be a turning point in the war.
“The big battle for the Donbas has already started,” said Yuri Podolyaka, a pro-Russia analyst, who regularly publishes his military reports on his popular channel on Telegram. “The activity of the Russian artillery and air forces has intensified again.”
After almost two months of fighting in Ukraine, many pro-war commentators in Russia have been pushing the army to press harder to produce tangible victories that would cover up some of the embarrassments Moscow had to suffer, including the sinking of a warship in the Black Sea last week and the retreat from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
So far, Russia has been able to claim only the capture of Kherson, a regional capital, as its biggest military achievement. It took weeks for Moscow’s forces to squeeze Ukrainian fighters out of urban areas in Mariupol, which happened only after Russian bombardment nearly destroyed the port city.
HUSARIVKA, Ukraine — It was in early March when the spent warhead of a cluster munition rocket landed next to Yurii Doroshenko’s home in eastern Ukraine, having dispensed its lethal bomblets over his village.
“They were shelling and it hit the street,” he said.
These types of internationally banned weapons have been repeatedly used by the Russian military since it invaded Ukraine in February. Human rights groups have denounced their use. Western leaders have linked their presence to a bevy of war-crimes allegations leveled at Moscow.
But the cluster munition that landed to next to Mr. Doroshenko’s house was not fired by Russian forces. Based on evidence reviewed by The New York Times during a visit to the area, it is very likely to have been launched by the Ukrainian troops who were trying to retake the area.
Nobody died in that strike in Husarivka, an agricultural hamlet surrounded by wheat fields and natural-gas lines, though at least two people were killed as Ukrainian forces shelled it for the better part of month, targeting Russian forces.
As the war approaches its eighth week, both sides have relied heavily on artillery and rockets to dislodge each other. But the Ukrainians’ decision to saturate their own village with a cluster munition that has the capacity to haphazardly kill innocent people underscores their strategic calculation: This is what they needed to do to retake their country, no matter the cost.
Cluster munitions — a class of weapon comprising rockets, bombs, missiles, mortar and artillery shells — split open midair and dispense smaller bomblets over a wide area. The hazard to civilians remains significant until any unexploded munitions have been located and properly disposed of by experts.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which took effect in 2010, bans their use because of the indiscriminate harm they can cause to civilians: Humanitarian groups have noted that 20 percent or more of antipersonnel submunitions fail to detonate on impact, yet they can explode later if they are picked up or handled.
More than 100 nations have signed the pact, though the United States, Ukraine and Russia have not.
“It’s not surprising, but it’s definitely dismaying to hear that evidence has emerged indicating that Ukraine may have used cluster munitions in this current conflict,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. “Cluster munitions are unacceptable weapons that are killing and maiming civilians across Ukraine.”
An adviser to the Ukrainian armed forces and the Ministry of Defense declined to comment.
Russian troops had seized Husarivka from Ukrainian units in the first few days of March, occupying buildings on its outskirts and near its center. The 220-millimeter Uragan artillery rocket that landed near Mr. Doroshenko’s home — fired from a truck-mounted launcher many miles away — struck on either March 6 or 7, said Mr. Doroshenko, the town’s informal leader.
By that point, the village was well under Russian control.
During a visit around the property and Mr. Doroshenko’s street on Thursday, Times reporters viewed large pieces of the artillery rocket that dispensed the cluster munitions, confirming the type of weapon that had been fired. It landed near the Russian army’s makeshift headquarters in an adjacent farm workshop, residents said, meaning the Russian forces were almost certainly the target.
Throughout the occupation, Ukrainian forces incessantly shelled the Russian troops there, and at least two of the same type of cluster munition were lodged in a field by Mr. Doroshenko’s home, just a few hundred yards away from the Russians’ headquarters.
The rockets fell around a small neighborhood of a dozen or so single-story homes interspersed with small gardens.
As the rockets neared the farm, their warheads — probably carrying 30 antipersonnel bomblets apiece — would have separated from the weapons’ solid rocket motors, breaking open and casting their deadly cargo across the neighborhood.
These small munitions each contain the equivalent of about 11 ounces of TNT, slightly less than twice as much as a standard hand grenade.
The attack on the Husarivka farm appears to be the first use of a cluster munition by Ukrainian troops since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24. In 2015, Ukrainian forces used cluster munitions during the opening months of their war against Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.
When confronted with the prospect that the Ukrainian military had shelled his village with cluster bombs, Mr. Doroshenko, 58, seemed indifferent.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The main thing is that after those rockets everybody comes out alive.”
The hazard posed by small undetonated munitions prevented Times reporters from closely examining all the weapons that landed. They visually verified from a distance two of the three rocket remnants as being Uragan cluster munitions, which leave behind the rocket’s nose cone followed by a long skeletal metal frame that held the bomblets together in flight.
On April 8, The Times verified that a similar kind of Uragan rocket, loaded with anti-vehicle land mines, was fired by Russian troops in a strike against the town of Bezruky, a suburb of Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second-largest city.
Much has been said about the Russian shelling of Ukrainian towns — frequent artillery barrages that wound and kill residents and push the ones who remain in these contested areas into basements or shelters. The danger to civilians is no different under the barrels of Ukrainian artillery, as their forces desperately try to retake the parts of the country under Russian control.
Lubov Dvoretska, 62, lost her husband, Olexandr, during the shelling of Husarivka by Ukrainian forces at the end of March, just days before Russian troops retreated from there.
“Ones are shooting this way, others another way,” she recounted. “My God, everything is thundering. And on March 10, it was said that half of Husarivka had left for Chepelivka. Pack up and leave because it will get worse. And then I left.”
Ms. Dvoretska fled, but her husband, Olexandr, stayed behind to tend their livestock. Later, residents told her that Olexandr was injured in a mortar strike on March 22 and most likely died the next day.
“He was discovered dead in the house on the 23rd, and on the 24th they could barely reach me on the phone to notify me,” she said. “Just as he was, in the same clothes, he was buried inhumanly, like an animal.”
Another man, Volodymyr Strokov, was killed during the shelling on March 22, residents said.
Before the war, Husarivka had a population of just over 1,000. It is now down to around 400, after hundreds packed what they could and left. Ukrainian forces retook the village around March 26. Now, the village — about three miles from the front line near the eastern city of Izium — is attacked daily by both Russian artillery and aircraft, residents said.
Through tears, Ms. Dvoretska pointed to where her neighbors had buried her husband in a raised dirt grave in their backyard, marked with a homemade wooden cross.
“I never thought it would happen this way,” she yelled. “It never got in my head that I will be left alone at my old age. Alone.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Husarivka, Ukraine, and John Ismay from Washington. Natalia Yermak contributed reporting from Husarivka.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyVlada Belau believed she had finally established a semblance of normalcy in the city of Lviv after fleeing from Kyiv, nearly 300 miles to the east, when it was bombarded in the early days of the war.
One month later, she was going to cafes and dinners with friends and had even started a job at a local media office. But when Russian missiles killed seven people on Monday, it disrupted the sense of security that she had painstakingly constructed.
“I saw the smoke drifting and the anxiety started exploding inside of me,” said Ms. Belau, who has been staying with the parents of a friend at a place about three miles from one of the explosions.
“It was then that I truly felt that there is no place to be completely safe in this country,” she said, explaining that it was the first time since the war started that she had considered fleeing across the border to Poland.
Many in Lviv, like Ms. Belau, have learned to acclimate to the sounds of air raid alarms and even occasional strikes on military facilities. But the scenes of billowing smoke from the center of the city were a stark reminder that the violence now razing cities and villages to the east could be at their doorstep, too, at any moment.
The city, no more than 50 miles from the western border with Poland, has been largely spared direct attacks as Russia has focused its attention on larger and more strategic areas to the east. It has turned into a critical gateway to safety for the millions of Ukrainians who have fled westward to escape the worst of the fighting, which is concentrated in the east.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people have passed through the city’s train and bus stations as they look to cross the border and reach foreign lands. For others, it is a new home, if fleeting. The city, which had about 720,000 residents before the war began, has since welcomed at least 350,000 more people who were displaced from other parts of the country.
Until Monday, the only direct targets that had been hit in Lviv were a fuel storage site and tank facility in the city’s northeast, struck by several missile strikes about three weeks ago. Before that, a pair of attacks targeted an airport facility and a military base just outside the city, killing at least 35 people.
The war, nonetheless, has transformed the city.
Known for its quaint cobbled streets flanked by historic architecture and statues — a UNESCO world heritage site — Lviv was quickly repurposed from a tourist hub to a vital base of operations. Since the war began in late February, it has served as a channel for humanitarian supplies, aid workers and foreign fighters to front line cities.
The new arrivals in Lviv have transformed the face of city and the signs of the change are omnipresent. Residents have been rapidly trying to acclimate to living on the periphery of the war and at the center of a massive humanitarian crisis that has enveloped its neighborhoods.
Roman Trubchaninov, 31, arrived in the city only a week ago, after fleeing his home in Mariupol, which has been pummeled by Russian bombs since the first days of the war, destroying many of the homes on his street. He had sheltered in a basement for weeks before he was offered a ride out of the city by his wife’s relatives. It took him two weeks to traverse the country and reach Lviv.
The quiet in the city was unnerving at first, he said. But then his anxiety subsided.
“I started to feel human again,” Mr. Trubchaninov said. “I had a home, groceries — it felt like a chance at a new life.” He has even started playing saxophone with a local band. But he said that part of his mind is always thinking about the war. “I’ve relaxed here but my mind-set, it is forever changed from this war. I am never fully at ease,” he said. Monday’s missile strike was an ominous affirmation of the reality he could not shake.
The attack, which seemed to fit a pattern of Russian strikes on military infrastructure across the country over the past four days, was an ominous indication that the war could be moving closer to Lviv.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Monday that its military had struck 108 areas where Ukrainian military and forces were located over the past 24 hours.
It also said that it had used missiles to destroy a Joint Logistics Support Center in the Lviv region that was used to store “large-scale shipments of foreign weapons that had arrived to Ukraine over the past six days from the U.S. and Europe.” Ukrainian officials said that empty warehouses were hit.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
The head of Lviv’s military administration said in a news briefing that three missiles struck empty military warehouses on Monday morning, while a fourth hit a civilian garage. He said that at least seven people had been killed and 11 injured, but added that more victims might still be found under the rubble.
The Kremlin said that Russia remained engaged on a low level in peace talks with Ukraine, but that little progress was being made. “Contacts in the framework of the negotiating process are indeed continuing on the expert level,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters. “Unfortunately, the Ukrainian side is not demonstrating much consistency on agreed-upon issues. Their position is changing frequently.”
KHARKIV, Ukraine — An artillery strike on Monday killed at least one person and wounded another in a residential area in southeastern Kharkiv, Ukraine.
“It was the first time this neighborhood was hit,” said Lubov Ustymenko, 72, wearing a winter coat and standing a few yards from a discarded umbrella and a puddle filled with a mix of blood and the morning’s light rain. “Our life is decided in one second — you go outside, and then you’re gone.”
The person who was killed was a few yards from the front of an apartment building that was struck.
The death comes a day after a concerted rocket barrage on Sunday killed at least five people in the city’s center.
Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second largest city, in the country’s northeast, has been shelled by Russian forces incessantly since their invasion began in February.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyThree of the strikes in Lviv hit military infrastructure, causing severe damage, according to the city’s regional military.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Ambulances continued to arrive near the railway complex in Lviv. A few hundred meters away, white and gray smoke billowed from a building with a tire shop advertisement. A police officer said a restaurant and mini-market were located in the complex.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Six people were killed and eight were injured, including a child, in attacks in Lviv on Monday morning, according to the regional military administration.
Jane Arraf and
Russian forces targeted the city of Lviv in western Ukraine with as many as five missiles on Monday, local officials said, causing large explosions and sending dark plumes of smoke into the air. The extent of the damage or any casualties was not immediately clear.
Lviv, which has been a center for people fleeing violence in the north and east of Ukraine, has been relatively untouched during the war. But the area has not been completely immune to attack. A month ago Russian missiles struck a military base outside the city that was used extensively for training Ukrainian forces. And Russian missile attacks hit a fuel storage site and a tank repair facility in Lviv in late March.
Witnesses saw flames and smoke rising from what appeared to be at least three impact sites on the outskirts of a train complex in the western part of the city.
Damage from the attack was still being assessed, Andriy Sadovyi, the mayor of Lviv, said on Telegram.
“Five powerful missile strikes at once on the civilian infrastructure of the old European Lviv,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, wrote on Twitter. “The Russians continue barbarically attacking Ukrainian cities from the air, cynically declaring to the whole world their ‘right’ to … kill Ukrainians.”
Cora Engelbrecht contributed reporting.
Railroad infrasture was “destroyed” in the Pavlohrad district on Monday after an attack in the region of Dnipro, according to the region’s governor.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
At least four missiles struck the vicinity of the train station in Lviv in western Ukraine on Monday morning. Witnesses saw flames and gray smoke rising from what appeared to be at least three impact sites on the outskirts of the train complex in the western part of the city.
Reporting from Seoul
South Korea plans to donate another $30 million in humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Four missiles struck the Lviv area in western Ukraine on Monday morning, according to a Lviv military administration official.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Witnesses said they saw smoke rising and heard explosions on the outskirts of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv shortly after an air raid siren sounded on Monday morning.
The much-anticipated Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine has begun, top Ukrainian officials said on Monday, after Russia pummeled Ukraine with one of the broadest barrages of missile attacks in weeks.
“Now we can state that the Russian forces have started the battle for the Donbas that they have been getting ready for a long time,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address.
The Russian assault stretched along nearly the entire roughly 300-mile front line in the Donbas and Kharkiv regions, but “our servicemen are holding out,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council. He said Russian forces had broken through the front at only two points.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces used more tentative language, saying that “there are signs that offensive action in the eastern operational zone has begun.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that it had hit hundreds of targets in preparation for the offensive, including attacks on the western city of Lviv, where seven people were killed in the first fatalities that city has suffered in the war. The targets, it said, included fuel depots, warehouses and other infrastructure mainly in eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces were also closing in on the capture of the southeastern port city of Mariupol, where outnumbered Ukrainian fighters were defying demands to lay down their weapons at a sprawling steel plant that is the last obstacle to Russia’s completion of a “land bridge” to occupied Crimea.
After failing to capture Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, Russian officials said weeks ago that they were shifting their focus to the southeastern Donbas region, where Kremlin-backed separatists already hold a wide area and have laid claim to much more. Ukrainians have braced since then for brutal fight there.
Though they have suffered severe setbacks, including the sinking of a powerful warship last week, Russia still has a major advantage in personnel and weapons. Having failed in the early weeks of the war to destroy the Ukrainian military’s network of fuel and ammunition depots — perhaps under the mistaken assumption that Ukrainian forces would quickly surrender en masse — Russia has intensified its attacks against those facilities, as well as transportation infrastructure.
At the same time, Russian forces have unleashed further destruction on major cities including Mykolaiv and Kharkiv, where six people were killed in attacks in residential areas on Sunday and Monday, local officials said. Those attacks have tied up Ukrainian forces and prevented them from joining the fight farther east, while sowing terror among civilians after Russia failed to conquer these cities earlier in the war.
Here are some other major developments:
The head of Russia’s central bank and the mayor of Moscow gave bleak assessments of where the Russian economy is headed, despite President Vladimir V. Putin’s insistence that his country has successfully absorbed the blow from Western sanctions.
The deadly attack in Lviv on Monday upended the sense of relative security in the picturesque city in western Ukraine, which has been a haven for those fleeing the war in other parts of the country.
Based on evidence reviewed by The New York Times, it is likely that Ukrainian troops used cluster munitions, banned by many countries for the harm they can cause to civilians, in an eastern village that they were attempting to retake from Russian forces.
Questions continued to mount over the sinking of the Moskva, a key Russian warship that Ukraine said it hit with missiles, but Russia insisted was destroyed by an accidental fire.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment