Kyiv May 8, 9:21 a.m.
Moscow May 8, 9:21 a.m.
Washington May 8, 2:21 a.m.
Ukraine Live Updates: Zelensky to Meet Virtually With G7 Leaders
The countries with the world’s largest economies have pledged billions to finance Ukraine’s fight against Russia in recent weeks, sensing an opportunity to tip the war.
President Volodymyr Zelensky is scheduled to meet virtually with the leaders of the world’s biggest economies on Sunday, following weeks in which the United States and its allies have promised billions of dollars in military aid to tip the war against Russia in Ukraine’s favor.
The meeting of the Group of 7 nations comes as Russia prepares its annual May 9 celebration to honor the Soviet victory against Nazi Germany. Mr. Zelensky has warned that Russian forces will likely intensify their attacks this weekend and leading into Monday.
But the apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, contradicted the Russian narrative of victory in Ukraine and illustrated the complicated picture along the 300-mile front in eastern Ukraine.
The Russians have been trying to advance in the east for the past few weeks, pushing especially hard as Victory Day has approached. But Ukrainian forces — armed with new weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations — have mounted a counteroffensive.
Mr. Zelensky has often used these forums before lawmakers and world leaders to plead Ukraine’s case, asking for financial and military support and for Mr. Putin and his allies to be punished, usually in the form of sanctions.
Here are the latest developments:
Now that civilians have been evacuated from the steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine is working to get the wounded and medics out. Mr. Zelensky said officials were also trying to evacuate the military forces holed up at the plant, but “this is extremely difficult.”
A Russian bomb hit a school in the village of Bilogorivka where about 90 people had taken shelter. About 30 people have been rescued so far, according to a local official. Rescue operations were suspended on Saturday night and were to resume on Sunday, officials said.
C.I.A. Director William J. Burns said that Mr. Putin is “in a frame of mind that he thinks he cannot afford to lose,” and so the stakes are high.
President Volodymyr Zelensky lamented the loss of cultural treasures in his nightly address. After more than two months of war, he said, “nearly 200 cultural heritage sites already” had been destroyed or damaged.
SLOVIANSK, Ukraine — Russia’s push to give its president a showcase victory in Ukraine appeared to face a new setback on Saturday, as Ukrainian defenders pushed the invaders back toward the northeast border and away from the city of Kharkiv, with the Russians blowing up bridges behind them.
With less than 48 hours before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia aimed to lead his country in Victory Day celebrations commemorating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, the apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, contradicted the Russian narrative and illustrated the complicated picture along the 300-mile front in eastern Ukraine.
The Russians have been trying to advance in eastern Ukraine for the past few weeks and have been pushing especially hard as Victory Day approaches, but Ukrainian forces — armed with new weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations — have been pushing back in a counteroffensive.
The destruction of three bridges by Russian forces, about 12 miles northeast of Kharkiv, reported by the Ukrainian military, suggested that the Russians not only were trying to prevent the Ukrainians from pursuing them, but had no immediate plans to return.
A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the fighting, said Russian forces were destroying bridges not to retreat but because “we are pushing them out.”
He said the fight for Kharkiv was not over, and that although “at the moment we are dominating,” Russian forces were trying to regroup and go on the offensive.
Some military analysts said the Russian actions were similar to what Russia’s military had done last month in a retreat from the city of Chernihiv north of Kyiv.
Frederick W. Kagan, a military historian and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based public policy research group, said Russia’s strategy near Kharkiv could be an indicator that “the order to retreat to somewhere had been given and they were trying to set up a defensive line.”
Ukrainian forces have retaken a constellation of towns and villages in the outskirts of Kharkiv this past week, putting them in position to unseat Russian forces from the region and reclaim total control of the city “in a matter of days,” according to a recent analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group.
The setback is now forcing the Russian military to choose whether to send reinforcements intended for elsewhere in eastern Ukraine to help defend the positions on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the institute said.
The back-and-forth around Kharkiv is part of a more complex battlefield in eastern Ukraine that has left an increasing number of towns and cities trapped in a “gray zone,” stuck between Russian and Ukrainian forces, where they are subject to frequent, sometimes indiscriminate, shelling.
“The Russian occupiers continue to destroy the civilian infrastructure of the Kharkiv region,” the region’s governor, Oleh Sinegubov, said in a Telegram post on Saturday, adding that shelling and artillery attacks overnight had targeted several districts, destroying a national museum in the village of Skovorodynivka.
For Russia, perhaps the best example of anything resembling a victory was the long-besieged southeastern port city of Mariupol. Although much of the city has been destroyed by Russian bombardments, there were growing indications on Saturday that Russia’s control of the city was nearly complete.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s intelligence directorate said in a Saturday statement that Russian officers were being moved from combat positions and sent to protect a Russian military parade being planned in Mariupol.
Petro Andrushchenko, an adviser to the city council, posted a series of photos to Telegram on Friday that appeared to show how Russian forces were restoring “monuments of the Soviet period” across the city.
One image appeared to show a Russian flag flying above an intensive care hospital. Another image, posted on Thursday, showed municipal workers replacing Ukrainian road signs with signs in Russian script. The images could not be verified.
On Friday, 50 people were evacuated from the city’s Azovstal steel plant, the final holdout of Ukrainian forces and a group of civilians in the city. Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed on Friday during an attempt to evacuate civilians from the plant, said Mikhailo Vershinin, the chief of the city’s patrol police.
Mr. Vershinin, who was at the plant, said via a messaging app on Saturday that a rocket and a grenade were to blame. “Six were wounded, some seriously,” he said, and in the factory’s makeshift hospital, “there is no medicine, no anesthesia, no antibiotics and they may die.”
Both Ukrainian and Russian officials said Saturday that all civilian evacuations from the Mariupol factory had been completed.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Red Cross or United Nations, which have been helping to coordinate recent evacuations from the factory. A spokeswoman for the Red Cross said earlier on Saturday that efforts to evacuate the remaining civilians were “ongoing.”
Elsewhere, Russia launched six missile strikes on Saturday aimed at Odesa, Ukraine’s Black Sea port, according to the city council. Four hit a furniture company and destroyed two high-rise buildings in the blast, and two missiles were fired on the city’s airport, which already had been rendered inoperable by a Russian missile that knocked out its runway last week.
The goal of Russian forces — for now at least — appears to be seizing as much of the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas as possible, by expelling Ukrainian forces that have been fighting Russian-backed separatists for years in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Since Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24, about 80 percent of those two provinces have fallen under the Kremlin’s control.
The regional governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Haidai, said on Facebook on Saturday that a Russian bomb hit a school in the village of Bilogorivka where about 90 people had taken shelter. About 30 people have been rescued so far, he said. The bodies of at least two people were recovered from the rubble, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. Rescue operations were suspended on Saturday night and were to resume on Sunday, officials said.
Russian forces are trying to break through Ukrainian lines and encircle troops defending the area around the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk but are for now being held in check, Mr. Haidai said on Saturday.
“It is a war, so anything can happen, but for now the situation is difficult but under control,” Mr. Haidai said in a telephone interview. “They have broken through in some places and these areas are being reinforced.”
The Russians seemed “unlikely to successfully surround the town,” according to the latest update from the Institute for the Study of War.
The apparent aim of Russia’s military is to seize Sievierodonetsk or cut it off from the bulk of Ukrainian forces fighting in the east, and continue a push south to the major industrial city of Kramatorsk.
Mr. Haidai said Russia’s military had deployed units with better training and more combat experience than the Russian soldiers who were initially thrown into the invasion.
“In the beginning, they sent in newly mobilized soldiers from occupied territory,” he said. “But they can’t fight. They aren’t dressed in flack jackets. And so they just died by the dozen or the hundred. But they’re running out of these.”
Mr. Haidai said he had urged anyone who could to evacuate, but that about 15,000 people remained in Sievierodonetsk. Some, he said, are older and “want to die in the place where they were born.”
By contrast in the capital, Kyiv, and much of the country’s west, the atmosphere seemed worlds away from the constant bombardment of the war — despite the occasional and unpredictable Russian missile strikes. Cars have returned to Kyiv’s streets and people living there have resumed some semblance of their normal routines.
In an apparent concern over complacency, President Volodymyr Zelensky reminded residents to heed local curfews and take air raid sirens seriously.
“Please, this is your life, the life of your children,” he implored Ukrainians in an overnight address.
Residents of towns and villages in the country’s east have often been shaken awake with bomb attacks, typically between 4 and 5 a.m.
On Saturday morning, the small village of Malotaranivka became a target. A bomb struck at about 4:15 a.m., blasting apart homes and a small bakery, leaving a crater at least 15 feet deep and a wide radius of destruction. While no one was killed, residents expressed fury at the Russians.
“What kind of military target is this?” said Tatyana Ostakhova, 38, speaking through the gaping hole in her goddaughter’s apartment where she was helping to clean up. “A store that bakes bread so people don’t die of hunger?”
Such strikes have occurred with more frequency in the prelude to Victory Day in Russia, which Mr. Putin was expected to use as a platform for some kind of announcement about what he has called the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
“It’s like we’re in a dream,” said Svetlana Golochenko, 43, who was cleaning up the remnants of her son’s house. “It’s hard to imagine that this is happening to us.”
Malotaranivka is a small village of single-family homes and wood-framed apartment buildings about eight miles from Kramatorsk. Residents said that aside from a few checkpoints there was no military presence in the area, making the bombings by Russians even more incomprehensible.
“Who knows what they have in their empty heads,” said Artur Serdyuk, 38, who was covered in dust and smoking a cigarette after spending the morning cleaning up what was left of his home.
Mr. Serdyuk said he had just returned to bed after going out for a middle-of-the-night cigarette when the explosion hit. The blast blew the roof off his home and incinerated his outhouse, leaving nothing but a roll of toilet paper sitting in a pile of dust near the hole for the latrine.
His neighbor’s home was opened like a dollhouse, allowing a reporter to peer into the remains of the kitchen decorated with wallpaper featuring green peacocks.
Michael Schwirtz reported from Sloviansk, and Cora Engelbrecht and Megan Specia reported from London. Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Tblisi, Georgia.
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Continue reading the main storyIn his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that with civilians evacuated from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukrainian officials were preparing a “second stage” to evacuate the wounded and medics. He said officials were also trying to evacuate the military forces holed up at the plant, but “this is extremely difficult.” A Mariupol police official said Saturday that there was no anesthesia, antibiotics or other medicine to treat them.
The regional governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Haidai, said on Facebook that a Russian bomb hit a school in the village of Bilogorivka where about 90 people had taken shelter. About 30 people have been rescued so far, he said. The bodies of at least two people were recovered from the rubble, according to Ukraine's State Emergency Service. Rescue operations were suspended on Saturday night and were to resume on Sunday, officials said.
Cora Engelbrecht and
All the women, children and elderly people who were trapped for weeks in the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol have been evacuated, Russian and Ukrainian officials said on Saturday, after days of start-and-stop efforts to get the last civilians out.
“This part of the Mariupol humanitarian mission has been completed,” Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said on Telegram. Her statement did not provide further details.
Hours later, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that “a humanitarian operation to evacuate civilians” from the complex was completed on Saturday, with help from representatives of the United Nations and the Red Cross.
The office of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine thanked the two international groups for helping with the “first phase” of evacuations. The office said on Telegram that the civilians who had been in the plant were rescued, more than 300 in all. The next goal would be to evacuate the wounded and medics, the office said.
There were no immediate details from Mariupol city officials, the Red Cross or the United Nations, which have been helping to coordinate recent evacuations from the steel factory, the last holdout of Ukrainian fighters in the ruined southern city. A spokeswoman for the Red Cross earlier on Saturday had said efforts to evacuate the remaining civilians were “ongoing.”
About 50 civilians were evacuated in a humanitarian convoy on Friday, and officials said at the time that about 200 were still believed to be holed up with the last Ukrainian fighters in the devastated complex.
Despite the mediation of international groups, there was still bloodshed, a Ukrainian official said. Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed during an evacuation attempt from Azovstal, according to Mikhailo Vershinin, the chief of the city’s patrol police. He said six other soldiers were wounded, some seriously.
“In the hospital there is no medicine, no anesthesia, no antibiotics and they may die,” he said in a voice message.
Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s City Council, said on Telegram that it was incomprehensible for soldiers to be killed “in the middle of an evacuation.”
“Politicians and world leaders are thanking each other for the successful evacuation of civilians,” he said on Telegram, adding that the Ukrainian soldiers “gave their lives for others to enjoy the fresh air.”
Evacuation efforts so far have not taken out Ukrainian fighters, many of whom are believed to be wounded. The Azovstal steel plant is the last bastion of resistance in Mariupol and has come under heavy bombardment from Russian forces.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s military said Russian forces were continuing to conduct “assault operations” in the area of the Azovstal plant, backed by artillery and tank fire.
Russian officials had declared a three-day cease-fire, starting on Thursday, to allow more civilians to exit the complex, though Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of attacks despite that announcement.
The United Nations and Red Cross teams have managed to extricate some 500 civilians in recent days from Mariupol, according to António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general.
Those who have made it out have shared harrowing accounts of the weekslong siege they had endured, describing how they had sheltered in the near-darkness of underground bunkers, with little food or water, as explosives of all shapes and sizes rained down day and night, slowly chipping away the steel and concrete overhead that was their only protection.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
The current phase of the war in Ukraine, as Russia focuses on trying to capture the country’s east and south, could prove at least as dangerous as Moscow’s first failed attempt to quickly seize major northern cities and topple the government, the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, said on Saturday.
The stakes are just as high in this phase, in large measure because President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is “in a frame of mind that he thinks he cannot afford to lose,” Mr. Burns said.
Mr. Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has studied Mr. Putin for decades and in recent appearances has spoken about the risks the Russian president is willing to take to exert control over Ukraine.
“He’s convinced right now that doubling down still will enable him to make progress,” Mr. Burns said, speaking at an event in Washington sponsored by The Financial Times.
Mr. Burns repeatedly praised Ukraine’s fierce resistance to the Russian invasion, arguing that Mr. Putin’s biggest mistake so far in the war was to underestimate the Ukrainians’ will to fight and their ability to defend themselves.
Mr. Burns did not discuss in detail the American intelligence provided to the Ukrainians. Senior U.S. officials have said U.S. intelligence had helped Ukrainian forces target high-ranking enemy officers and sink Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.
But Mr. Burns said Ukrainians have supplemented the information they have received from American intelligence with their own knowledge and insights.
“It’s a big mistake to underestimate the significant intelligence capabilities that the Ukrainians themselves have,” Mr. Burns said. “This is their country. They have a lot more information than we do.”
Mr. Burns said China was closely monitoring the events in Ukraine, both the country’s strong resistance and the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the international community.
The Russian invasion has not eroded the ambitions of President Xi Jinping of China to take control of Taiwan, he said. But Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders, he added, are trying to look carefully at what lessons to “draw from Ukraine about their own ambitions and Taiwan.”
Mr. Burns said the C.I.A. spends a lot of time focusing on China’s reaction to the war in Ukraine and Beijing’s relationship with Moscow. He suggested driving a wedge between the two countries would not be easy.
“I would not underestimate Xi Jinping’s commitment to his partnership with Putin’s Russia,” Mr. Burns said.
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Continue reading the main story
Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said that all women, children and elderly people had been evacuated from Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant. Her statement, posted on Telegram, did not provide further details. There was no immediate confirmation from the Red Cross, which earlier Saturday said efforts to evacuate the remaining civilians were “ongoing.”
Reporting from Washington
C.I.A. Director William J. Burns said that the new phase of the Ukraine war, with Russia’s offensive in the country’s east, is at least as dangerous as the first parts of the invasion. Speaking at an event in Washington sponsored by the Financial Times, Burns said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is “in a frame of mind that he thinks he cannot afford to lose,” and so the stakes are high.
Efforts to retrieve the remaining civilians from the Azovstal plant in the southern city of Mariupol were “ongoing” on Saturday, according to a spokeswoman for the Red Cross, which worked with the U.N. to coordinate the first large evacuation from the steel complex this week. The spokeswoman would not share further details “until the situation allows, as it could seriously jeopardize the operation,” she said in a statement. About 50 civilians were evacuated in a humanitarian convoy on Friday, while about 200 were holed up in the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the city.
Reporting from Ukraine
Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed on Friday during an attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol’s Azovstal steel factory, said Mikhailo Vershinin, the chief of the city’s patrol police. Vershinin, who is at the factory, said a rocket and a grenade were to blame. “Six were wounded, some seriously,” he added in a voice message on Saturday. “In the hospital there is no medicine, no anesthesia, no antibiotics and they may die.”
Reporting from Irpin, Ukraine
Workers operate an iron ore mine belonging to the Metinvest Group in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. The company also owns the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where beleaguered Ukrainian soldiers have been trapped by Russian troops along with many civilians. The iron and coal industries have shaped the history of southeastern Ukraine, which has become the war's main arena.
Russia launched six missiles at Odesa, the city council said in a statement. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Four missiles targeted a furniture company and damaged two nearby high-rise buildings, the council said, adding that the other two missiles hit the city’s airport, which had already been demolished in a separate strike.
Reporting from Paris
In his inauguration speech, President Emmanuel Macron of France vowed to “act first to avoid any escalation following the Russian aggression in Ukraine.” Macron made clear that he would fight so that “democracy and courage prevail” in the struggle for “a new European peace and a new autonomy on our continent.”
BUCHAREST — Jill Biden, the first lady, met with Ukrainian refugees in Romania on Saturday, listening to harrowing stories from women who fled Russian bombs and visiting with children as young as 5 years old who told her that their only wish was to return home.
Dr. Biden visited the Scoala Gimnaziala Uruguay school, a public school in the country’s capital that has taken in Ukrainian students. She and Carmen Iohannis — the Romanian first lady and a fellow teacher — spoke to children who were practicing lesson plans in English, including a student who picked up the language on YouTube. They also heard from educators, some of them refugees themselves, who spoke emphatically of the journey they had taken.
“I crossed the border with my 3-year-old son and everything I was thinking about was how to save my child from a city that was bombed,” Anastasia Konovalova, a Ukrainian refugee teaching at the school, told the first lady. “Thank God the Romanian people were here. I think even the Romanians didn’t expect that they could be so wonderful, because you don’t expect that from people.”
The first lady looked touched.
“We stand with you,” Dr. Biden said. “I hope you know that.”
In another classroom, Dr. Biden guided a 7-year-old girl named Mila over to a group of American journalists who had traveled to the country with the first lady and asked if they wanted to hear her message. The girl, who school officials said was from Kyiv, held up a paper cutout of a hand that was colored blue and yellow — like her country’s flag.
“I want to return to my father,” she said through a translator.
The Ukrainian students are among the more than 2.5 million children who have been displaced since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February, according to figures shared by the United Nations. Roughly 30,000 child refugees from Ukraine are in Romania now.
Romania has taken in some 850,000 of the more than five million Ukrainian refugees who have left the country since Russia’s invasion. Dr. Biden was there as part of a four-day tour of Eastern Europe meant to show the Biden administration’s increasing support for Ukraine and to highlight work by the United States and other organizations to help refugees in Europe.
The first lady plans to travel Sunday to a border crossing in Vysne Nemecke, Slovakia, near Ukraine’s western border.
The Biden administration is under pressure to accept more Ukrainians within America’s borders. In April, President Biden said that the United States would accept up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine. The United States is not considering airlifting Ukrainians into the country, as it did during the military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The first lady visited the U.S. embassy in Bucharest earlier Saturday, meeting with humanitarians who briefed her on their efforts to assist Ukrainians. Pablo Zapata, a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told her that 7,000 Ukrainians arrive in Romania each day.
In the meeting, Dr. Biden, a college English professor, focused on mental health resources for children and training for teachers. Officials told her that they were searching for ways to better equip educators to support children who had been traumatized.
“We do not believe that clustering or segregating them or offering only online Ukrainian education will be enough,” Madalina Turza, an adviser with the Romanian prime minister’s office, told her. “We are doing our best with our other partners.”
Amid fears that Russian forces will escalate their assault on Ukraine ahead of Victory Day, an annual holiday marking the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany, Dr. Biden said that she worried that the refugee crisis was nowhere near its end.
“It’s amazing. It’s solidarity here in Romania that you’re all working together,” Dr. Biden told the group at one point. “I think this is really, unfortunately, just the beginning. Just the beginning.”
news analysis
PARIS — In the past, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has used the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over the Nazis in 1945 to cement his steady militarization of Russian society, extol the values of heroic patriotism, and contrast Russia’s warrior spirit with what he sees as the moral decadence of the West.
This year, he will no doubt try to conjure “victory” from the indiscriminate destruction he has wrought in Ukraine. He will find some justification for a war that has gone far less well than expected against a Western-backed “Nazi” threat in Kyiv that he has invented.
As he does so, May 9 will be marked otherwise in Western Europe. President Emmanuel Macron will salute Europe Day in Berlin and Strasbourg, seat of the European Parliament, laying out his ambitious vision of a 27-nation European Union now compelled to move beyond mere economic heft toward becoming a more federal, and more forceful, world power.
“It will be a split-screen effect,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French foreign policy analyst. “On one screen, a magnificent Moscow military parade, on the other something more cumbersome and slow, but perhaps we in the European Union should celebrate not having a dictator laying down the law.”
Two Europes now face each other on a Continent where, for Mr. Putin’s Russia, the defeat of Nazi Germany in the “Great Patriotic War” enshrines the sacredness and glory of war, whereas in Paris and Berlin it symbolizes the imperative of peace.
The confrontation is between 19th- and 21st-century worldviews, with potential consequences that the 20th century illustrated at Verdun, Hiroshima and elsewhere. Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine has demonstrated that the risk of great conflagrations has not been consigned to the past.
From flattened Aleppo in Syria to besieged Azovstal, the steel mill that is the last outpost of resistance in the ruins of the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, his message has been consistent: Military force is effective in changing geostrategic reality in Russia’s favor.
Citing a Russian proverb, he said in 2014 that “for the community, even death is beautiful,” a trait that explained the nation’s “mass heroism in military conflicts.” He contrasted “the superior moral truths” pursued by the Russian people with the belief in the West that all that counts is economic success.
That, of course, is to misread Europe’s reasoning and long commitment to integration, undertaken not merely for the pursuit of prosperity, but to secure peace by doing so.
On May 9, 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, proposed fusing French and German steel production so that “any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.” So was the seed of a borderless Europe with a single currency planted and the Continent’s repetitive suicides ended.
It is this anniversary that Mr. Macron will recognize on Monday, in a Europe where hymns to bloodshed are shunned.
But Mr. Putin, after 22 years in power that have led him to a smoldering resentment of the West, is convinced that the French president, and all of Europe, should be recognizing something else: the immense Soviet sacrifice, involving the death of 27 million of its citizens, that saved Europe from Nazism.
“Our people were alone, alone on the difficult, heroic and sacrificial road to victory” over fascism, he said last year.
“He believes that Europe is ungrateful and that if the European Union was built, it was only through Russian sacrifice,” Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin,” said. “And he is utterly contemptuous of the idea that commerce can bring peace to nations.”
That, of course, is precisely what a European Union of 450 million citizens, with its economy of more than $17 trillion, is all about. As an alternative, Mr. Putin has offered his Eurasian Union to the likes of Ukraine, but Belarus as model is a hard sell if Berlin and Barcelona are on the table.
The magnetism of European democratic success, whatever its flaws, appears more life-threatening to Mr. Putin than NATO because it challenges the autocratic kleptocracy he has built around a web of oligarchs beholden to him.
Hence his violent reaction to Ukraine’s association with the European Union, and his horror at the E.U. flag draped down the facade of the Ukrainian foreign ministry in 2014, after the country drove out Mr. Putin’s corrupt toady president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.
From the start of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, it has been clear that Mr. Putin is not merely at war to restore Moscow’s empire by subjugating, or dismembering, Ukraine. He is also at war against the United States and its European allies that he has come to regard as godless agents whose humiliation of Russia at the Soviet Union’s breakup in 1991 can never be forgiven.
This wider war promises to be a long one, obliging Europe to restore at least some of the military focus it has largely shunned in the more than three decades since the end of the Cold War.
“The whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same ‘empire of lies,’” Mr. Putin said in his speech announcing a war to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, a state with a Jewish leader.
At one point in his long rule, Mr. Putin was prepared to recognize Soviet military crimes. As prime minister, he visited the Katyn Forest in 2010 to commemorate the Soviet murder there of thousands of Polish officers at the start of World War II.
He denounced the “cynical lies” that had hidden the truth of the slaughter in Katyn and said “there was no justification for these crimes” of a “totalitarian regime.”
“We should meet each other halfway, realizing it is impossible to live only in the past,” Mr. Putin said.
But in Europe a dozen years later, a “halfway” compromise between Russian militarism elevated to mystical, quasi-religious intensity and Franco-German “peace through union” appears almost unthinkable.
Mr. Putin has elevated Stalin once again to heroic status. Far from admitting any of its crimes, in Katyn or elsewhere, he has reconstituted the Red Army as the connective tissue of the new expansionist Russia.
Each year on Victory Day, Russian citizens parade bearing photographs of their heroic forbears in a spectacle known as “the immortal regiment.” On occasion, Mr. Putin, whose father was badly wounded in the war, has joined them. This time, a direct connection is being established between the war against Hitler and the current war on the fictive “Nazis” of Kyiv.
Against this blaze of militarist nationalism from a nuclear power, evoking what the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska called “magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns,” what does the pallid European Union have to counter Mr. Putin? What magnetism does its May 9 hold?
War in Ukraine has galvanized Europe. It generally views with urgency bringing Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova into the European Union. Calls are multiplying for an acceleration of decision-making on foreign and defense policy. Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister, called this month for “pragmatic federalism” in defense and other areas.
Federalism, a word associated with the idea of a United States of Europe, eventually under a federal government of some kind, suggests fast-forwarding European unity in ways that have seemed unthinkable for many years.
“We must overcome this principle of unanimity, which leads to a logic of crossed vetoes, and move towards decisions taken by a qualified majority,” Mr. Draghi said, alluding to a procedure that would allow approval once a certain threshold of support is attained. He added: “Protecting Ukraine means protecting ourselves and the project of security and democracy we have built together over 70 years.”
Germany’s coalition government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz supports majority voting on security and defense policy, but France is more hesitant.
Russian aggression has shifted Poland toward support for strengthening the union. Mr. Macron’s defeat of Marine Le Pen, the nationalist friend of Mr. Putin, in the presidential election last month has isolated the illiberal Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, in his connivance with Russia. The European Union, always querulous, seems bent on transformative change.
“It’s a spectacular coincidence of dates,” Dominique Moïsi, a French political scientist, said of May 9. “What is more real? Russian might and Mariupol destroyed, or normal European life in Strasbourg? We will have to fight like hell to stop him, as if our very future is at stake.”
Mr. Macron has been the leading proponent of a sovereign Europe, independent enough to claim “strategic autonomy,” and backed by the bolstering of European military power alongside and in coordination with NATO.
It appears certain that Mr. Macron will use May 9 to elaborate on this vision and to make clear the contrast between Mr. Putin’s model of war and the European peace magnet Mr. Schuman set in motion 72 years ago.
At the same time, however, Mr. Macron believes there is no alternative to negotiation with Mr. Putin.
Three years ago, he invited Mr. Putin to the presidential summer residence at Brégancon and declared that “Russia is European, very profoundly so, and we believe in this Europe that stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”
The Ukraine war has jolted, if not undone, that idea. “Mr. Macron knows Ukraine cannot resist without the United States,” Mr. Moïsi said. “You cannot build Europe as a power without America because you lose half of Europeans if you try. The unity of the West is the key to the unity of Europe.”
Whatever Mr. Putin declares on May 9, that unity has proved effective in defending Ukraine and hurting Russia. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III wants to see Russia permanently weakened, “to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
This will not happen overnight and it carries evident risks.
In “First Person,” the autobiography he published more than 20 years ago, Mr. Putin described cornering a rat in his dilapidated St. Petersburg apartment building as a boy.
“So, he turned around and jumped on me,” Mr. Putin wrote. “It surprised me and I was very afraid. It pursued me, jumping downstairs,” before the boy who would become president managed to slam a door on the rat.
“On that stairwell I understood once and for all what it is to be cornered,” Mr. Putin wrote.
If, as it seems to be, the rat story is any indication of the convictions of the man who now controls Russia’s nuclear arsenal, then direct, even reckless, attack is Mr. Putin’s response to feeling cornered.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Katyn Forest. It is in Russia not Poland.
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