Ukraine Live Updates: Put Sanctions on Russia Now, Zelensky Urges West
“What are you waiting for?” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine asked Western leaders in Munich, as Russian-backed rebels urged people to evacuate and shelling escalated in eastern Ukraine.
MUNICH — In an appeal that was at times bitterly critical of the West, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine urged allies on Saturday to begin imposing sanctions on Russia now rather than wait for an invasion, and he took aim at repeated American declarations that an attack would happen within days.
“What are you waiting for?” Mr. Zelensky asked a large audience at the annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference, which he attended despite warnings that his absence from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, could give Russia an opportunity to strike. “We don’t need your sanctions after” the economy collapses and “parts of our country will be occupied.”
By turns grateful for allied unity and frustrated by its apparent ineffectiveness, Mr. Zelensky described Europe’s security architecture as “brittle,” even “obsolete,” as he portrayed the plight of his country since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
He was emphatic that no deal to avert the crisis should be struck with Russia that did not include his country.
“It’s important for all our partners and friends to not agree about anything behind our back,” he said. “We’re not panicking. We’re very consistent that we are not responding to any provocation.”
Mr. Zelensky’s remarks contrasted with Vice President Kamala Harris’s portrayal earlier in the day of a united and vigorous NATO alliance that had shown its resolve at a time when Europe’s security was under “direct threat.”
A key element of the West’s strategy has been to expose Russian plans, and to make public their intelligence estimates about when Russian forces are expected to move across the Ukrainian border. But Mr. Zelensky argued that the daily predictions of an imminent invasion, most recently from President Biden on Friday, were scaring off investors, “crushing” the national currency, and terrorizing his population.
“Just putting ourselves in coffins and waiting for foreign soldiers to come in is not something we are prepared to do,’’ he said. “We cannot say on a daily basis that war will happen tomorrow.’’
Mr. Zelensky carefully navigated around one of the central complaints from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: that NATO would not give a “written guarantee” that it would never let Ukraine into the Western alliance. Mr. Zelensky made clear he would not back down on seeking membership, but blamed the West for foot-dragging on Ukraine’s interest in joining.
“We are told the doors are open,” Mr. Zelensky said, referring to NATO. “But so far, the strangers are not allowed. If not all members are willing to see us, or all members do not want to see us there, be honest about it. Open doors are good, but we need open answers.”
Ukraine, he added, does not need “years and years of closed questions” from NATO.
Mr. Zelensky repeatedly said he wanted to meet Mr. Putin, who has been curtly dismissive of that possibility and indeed of the entire Ukrainian government. Mr. Putin has made clear that he views Ukraine as part of Russia, or at least that the two countries form one “historical and spiritual space,” as he put it in a 5,000-word disquisition on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” published last summer.
Mr. Zelensky sounded bitter as he portrayed the West as having failed to live up to the commitments it made in 1994, when it offered vague security guarantees in return for Ukraine’s decision to give up a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons. The weapons had been left in silos on Ukrainian territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, he said, the signatories of the 1994 agreement, called the “Budapest Memorandum,” pretended it did not exist. “We have lost parts of our territory which are bigger in territory than Switzerland, Netherlands or Belgium.”
“We will protect our country,” Mr. Zelensky said, “with or without support.”
Appealing for calm, he said he had enjoyed breakfast in Kyiv and intended to be back home in time for dinner.
Artillery fire escalated sharply in eastern Ukraine on Saturday and thousands of residents fled the region in chaotic evacuations — two developments rife with opportunities for what the United States has warned could be a pretext for a Russian invasion.
Russian-backed separatists, who have been fighting the Ukrainian government for years, have asserted, without evidence, that Ukraine was planning a large-scale attack on territory they control.
Western leaders have derided the notion that Ukraine would launch an attack while surrounded by Russian forces, and Ukrainian officials dismissed the claim as “a cynical Russian lie.”
But separatist leaders on Saturday urged women and children to evacuate, and able-bodied men to prepare to fight. And the ginned-up panic was already having real effects, with refugees frantically boarding buses to Russia and refugee tent camps popping up across the Russian border.
At the same time, the firing of mortars, artillery and rocket-propelled grenades by separatist rebels along the front line roughly doubled the level of the previous two days, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs said. Two Ukrainian soldiers were killed and five wounded, the military said.
Ukrainian officials said the shelling came exclusively from the separatists, who are seen as a proxy for Russia.
New York Times reporters at the scene witnessed shelling from separatists and saw no return fire from the Ukrainian forces, although residents in the separatist regions said there was shelling from both sides.
“I have a small baby,” said Nadya Lapygina, who said her town in the breakaway region of Luhansk was hit by artillery and mortar fire. “You have no idea how scary it is to hide him from the shelling.”
In a pointed reminder of where this conflict could lead, Russia engaged in a dramatic display of military theater on Saturday, test-firing ballistic and cruise missiles. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia presided over tests of nuclear-capable missiles as part of what Russia insists are nothing more than exercises and not the precursor to an invasion.
Tensions between the United States and Russia have not been this high since the Cold War, and Russia’s nuclear drills appeared carefully timed to deter the West from direct military involvement in Ukraine.
Western leaders gathering in Munich issued repeated calls for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis, despite President Biden’s claim on Friday that Mr. Putin had already decided to invade Ukraine.
The leaders displayed a remarkably united front in what Vice President Kamala Harris called “a defining moment” for European security and the defense of democratic values.
But in Ukraine, the fighting edged perilously closer to a tipping point. And there were alarming signs of what American officials described as possible precursors to a pretext for a Russian invasion.
Intense artillery barrages targeted a pocket of government-controlled territory around the town of Svitlodarsk, a spot that has worried security analysts for weeks for its proximity to dangerous industrial infrastructure, including storage tanks for poisonous gas.
A stray shell from returning government fire risks hitting a chemical plant about six miles away in separatist-controlled territory. The plant, one of Europe’s largest fertilizer factories, has pressurized tanks and more than 12 miles of pipelines holding poisonous ammonia gas.
An explosion there could produce a toxic cloud that could serve as an excuse for a Russian invasion or, American officials have warned, Russia could stage its own explosion there to justify intervention.
Another potential flash point in the area, a water network that supplies drinking water to several million people on both sides of the conflict, may have been damaged by shelling on Saturday. Russia’s Interfax news agency cited a spokesman for the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic saying that shelling had struck a pumping station and the water supply was at risk.
A loss of water for residents in the Russian-backed areas would reinforce Russian assertions of dire conditions for civilians and would be a setback for Ukraine, which has tried to persuade residents that the government is not their enemy. A cutoff of that water supply amid fighting in 2014 hastened a flow of refugees from the city.
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Continue reading the main storyChina’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, called on Saturday for fresh negotiations to avoid major conflict over Ukraine, arguing that a set of moribund cease-fire agreements from 2014-15 could form the basis for a deal.
Speaking by video link to the Munich Security Conference, Mr. Wang suggested that it was still possible to find middle ground that respected Ukrainian sovereignty while accommodating the security concerns of Russia, an increasingly close geopolitical partner of China.
The template for a solution to the volatile tensions, Mr. Wang said, lay in cease-fire blueprints called the Minsk accords, which Ukraine accepted in 2014 and 2015 in an unsuccessful bid to defuse conflict in its east. Russia-backed separatists attacked and grabbed territory there after Ukrainian protesters deposed a pro-Russian president in 2014. The accords are notoriously ambiguous, and Russia and Ukraine interpret them very differently.
“Now we need to go back to the initial solution of the Minsk agreement, because that agreement was reached by all parties related this issue,” Mr. Wang said, speaking through an English-language translator.
“Why can’t all parties sit down together to have in-depth discussions and to come up with the road map and timetable for the implementation of this agreement?” he said. “I believe that this is what all parties need to focus on, instead of hyping up tensions, stoking panic.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France has also suggested that the accords could offer the basis for a solution to the standoff over Ukraine.
Earlier this month, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, hosted President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and the two declared that their countries’ friendship had “no limits.” Mr. Xi also backed Russia over one of its security demands: that NATO stop expanding east, closer to Russia’s borders.
In his latest remarks, Mr. Wang also questioned any expansion of NATO, calling the security bloc a relic of the Cold War. “The reasonable concerns of Russia should also be respected and heeded,” he said.
But Mr. Wang denied that when it came to Ukraine, China had abandoned its longstanding commitment to the importance of national sovereignty.
“The sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of any country should be respected and safeguarded,” he said. “Ukraine is no exception.”
The United States now believes that Russia has as many as 190,000 troops in or near Ukraine, nearly twice as many as there were in January, according to an assessment made public on Friday by Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
That was a significantly higher number than the 150,000 troops President Biden referred to earlier this week, and the 100,000 in January.
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But American officials said the new number includes some forces that were not previously counted — most notably Russian forces in Crimea, as well as separatist forces led by Russian military officers in the Donbas region, a portion of eastern Ukraine they have controlled since 2014. The officials did not provide a breakdown of these forces.
The new number also includes some additional forces that have moved into Belarus, according to American officials briefed on the intelligence. And the combat forces have increased, according to a defense official. There are now between 120 and 125 battalion tactical groups, up from 83 earlier in February.
Counting Russian forces is an imprecise science. The size of Russian battalions can vary, depending on their role. And while Russia has taken fewer pains to hide the movement of troops in recent weeks, moving units during the day rather than at night, the United States has not detected all of Russia’s combat preparations, officials said.
Russia has also, according to outside analysts, blocked some means of monitoring Russian rail traffic, which had been used to count forces flowing to and from the Ukrainian border.
A U.S. defense official said that as many as 75,000 of the Russian forces outside of Ukraine were in combat formations, ready to mount a full-scale invasion in days.
U.S. and allied officials have been divided on whether Russia intends an invasion aimed at occupying a wide swathe of the country, or if it wants simply to solidify its control in the Donbas region. But the defense official said that within the Russian forces outside Ukraine’s borders are reservist units, the kinds of forces that would be tasked not with taking new territory but with conducting occupation operations. And even as Russia has made a show of pulling back some forces, it has pushed other forces closer to the border.
Thomas Bullock, a senior open-source intelligence analyst with Jane’s, said Russia had moved air defense systems, long-range artillery and army units to sites about 18 miles from Ukraine’s borders in recent days, particularly in the area where the borders of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia converge.
“It’s very difficult to hide at this stage because the world is watching and they are moving a lot of equipment in,” Mr. Bullock said.
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Continue reading the main storyAVILO-USPENKA, Russia — Inna Shalpa, a resident of the separatist-held town of Ilovaisk in eastern Ukraine, had no idea where the Russian bus she stepped into with her three children would take her on Saturday. But she was ready to accept the uncertainty, convinced that a wider war at home was imminent.
“We were mostly worried about the children,” Ms. Shalpa, 35, said in the middle of a frantic effort to distribute people among buses parked in front of the first Russian railway station on the other side of the border from Ukraine.
Mr. Shalpa was one of several thousand people who have crossed into Russia after Kremlin-backed leaders of the two separatist republics in Ukraine declared an evacuation of women and children, claiming that the Ukrainian government is about to launch an attack.
Kyiv has denounced the separatist claims as baseless provocation, and many of their moves are seen as a deliberate effort to create panic — potentially as a pretense for Russian military action. But for many residents, the fear of violence is real.
Fighting between the separatists and Ukrainian forces has intensified severely over the past few days, with the heavy use of artillery heard from afar. Some people said they fled because separatist leaders had urged them to.
On Friday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the government to pay $130 to every refugee, and the Russian government sent $64 million to regional authorities for the effort. The government of the Russian region of Rostov, which has several crossing points with the separatist areas, has declared a state of emergency.
The Ukrainian government has tried to persuade people that Ukraine is not their enemy. But after eight years of grinding war in Ukraine’s east that has left thousands dead, many people arriving through the Matveev Kurgan border crossing on Saturday were not convinced. Most get their news from Russian state television channels, and years of shelling have taught them to be skeptical of Ukraine’s motives, they said.
Ukrainian soldiers “are standing just six miles away from us and we can hear them very well,” said Lyudmila N. Zueva, 63, referring to sounds of gunfire.
Like many people fleeing, Ms. Zueva, a retired teacher, was traveling to stay with relatives in Russia.
For those like Ms. Shalpa, who couldn’t go stay with relatives and friends, the Russian government has built a tent camp on the border.
Though feelings of animosity toward Ukraine were common among those arriving in Russia on Saturday, some people said they didn’t care who was in charge as long as there was peace.
Yekaterina Novikova was waiting for a commuter train with her daughter and grandson to go to the Russian city of Taganrog. She had to leave her son and his family and she couldn’t hold back her tears.
“We were thinking that it would be better for us to return to Ukraine,” she said. “Now we don’t care, we just want peace.”
At the White House this week, President Biden said the United States had “reason to believe” that Russia was “engaged in a false flag operation” to use as an excuse to invade Ukraine.
A new report by the European Expert Association, a research group that focuses on security in Ukraine, and the technology watchdog group Reset Tech said that since October, misinformation researchers had observed rumors circulating widely online and in Russian news media that could be groundwork for such an operation, or to help justify a military buildup.
Many of the rumors first started circulating on anonymous Telegram channels, and were then repeated in televised statements by Russian officials, the report said. Others started with statements from Russian officials and were repeated on Telegram channels until they became talking points among ordinary citizens.
“The rhetoric of the pro-Kremlin sources lately has become much more aggressive,” Maria Avdeeva, research director at the European Expert Association, said.
At the request of The New York Times, the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit research group, independently evaluated the report and said the research appeared reliable.
Here are some of the unsupported claims the European Expert Association researchers found.
Unsubstantiated Claim 1: Ukraine is planning to attack some separatist-held territories using chemical weapons.
On Dec. 21, the Russian defense minister, Sergey Shoigu, alleged that the Ukrainian army was preparing to attack two separatist-held territories in Ukraine. The next day, the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti published a report that claimed, without proof, that a stash of chemical weapons had been given to Ukraine by the United States, according to the researchers.
Throughout January and February, the researchers said, Russian-backed media spread the rumor, which was amplified on social media. “Chemical weapons are already present on the territory of Ukraine,” said a message in one anonymous Telegram channel with 24,500 followers. The post was viewed by 7,000 people.
Unsubstantiated Claim 2: The Ukrainian Army is preparing to attack Donbas.
Russian state media has been spreading rumors that the Armed Forces of Ukraine are planning an attack on Donbas, the separatist region in eastern Ukraine, with the help of American, British and Polish mercenaries, according to the researchers.
The rumor then spread on Facebook and YouTube. “The Ukrainian people are waiting for Mother Russia to free their younger sister from the Nazis and the State Department,” said one Facebook post that collected nearly 100 likes. On YouTube, a video spreading the same unproven claim collected more than 31,600 views.
Unsubstantiated Claim 3: Nuclear power plants are at the center of a U.S. plot.
In this narrative, the Russians accuse the Ukrainians and Americans of planting a false flag.
Since Jan. 30, all 15 of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants have been generating electricity, marking the longest stretch of full utilization of nuclear energy in the country. That comes as Ukraine’s authorities decided to disconnect from the power grid with Belarus and the Russian Federation and implemented the plan to do so.
Russian state media began to spread the idea that Ukraine was overestimating its ability to keep up with its energy needs, and that the country’s nuclear facilities were in dire need of repair. The Russian media implied that Western countries could be organizing to attack the nuclear facilities and place the blame on Russia.
On Feb. 12, a Telegram channel with over 15,000 followers posted that the British Special Air Service was preparing an attack on one of Ukraine’s power plants.
And on Feb. 15, the Telegram channel of a Russian war correspondent, Aleksander Kots, alleged that Ukraine had asked for special equipment from the United States to help mitigate a possible natural disaster, including to help with radiation and chemical fallout, according to the researchers. Mr. Kots added the unfounded accusation that the Ukrainians were devising a false-flag event — accusing Russia of preparing a terrorist attack against a nuclear power plant. His comments were seen by 83,900 people on Telegram, the researchers reported.
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Continue reading the main storyIn recent days, researchers have seen the Russians put their surface-to-air missiles on alert.
Normally the missile canisters are horizontal — an indication that they are not at the ready. But when they are ready to launch, they appear to point straight up into the air.
This is how the canisters at Dzhankoi airfield in Crimea appeared by Feb. 10. In an image taken by Capella Space’s Synthetic Aperture Radar on Thursday, the S-400s could be seen with their canisters in a firing position, ready to launch.
“Although the Russian government continues to state they are removing troops from the region, I do not believe Russia has relaxed its military posture,” said Steven De La Fuente, a researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “These images show Russia’s military forces are still on alert and ready to attack.”
Imagery from commercial satellite companies has been one important source of information as tensions rise over Russia’s military buildup surrounding Ukraine. Unlike traditional overhead imagery, the Capella SAR satellites can monitor sites even when there is cloud cover, as has often been the case in recent weeks over Ukraine.
Other outside experts have also raised questions about Russia’s claims of a drawdown. An analysis written for Janes, the defense intelligence company, concluded that “there are no indicators that a large-scale drawdown has begun.”
Janes analyzed satellite imagery, social media posts and Russian government videos purporting to show tanks leaving the border areas. The videos were inconclusive, and appeared designed to confuse, said Thomas Bullock, a senior open-source intelligence analyst with Janes.
Janes said it has monitored the deployment of air defense systems, long-range artillery and army units moving to sites about 18 miles from Ukraine’s borders, and the deployment of transport and attack helicopters to a site 25 miles from the Ukraine border.
BARANOVICHI, Belarus — Russian and Belarusian military forces staged a mock battle on Saturday, with warplanes, tanks and rocket launchers pounding a muddy, wind-swept military training ground around 70 miles north of the Ukrainian border.
The two countries displayed their firepower just hours after President Biden said in Washington that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had made a final decision to reject diplomatic overtures and invade Ukraine.
The military maneuvers, planned long in advance, came on the penultimate day of a 10-day joint exercise involving the biggest deployment of Russian troops on the territory of Belarus, a neighbor and close ally, since the end of the Cold War.
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NATO officials have warned that the maneuvers could provide cover for an attack on Ukraine. But there was no sign there on Saturday of any preparations for real rather than pretend war, with soldiers milling around as military attachés from Ukraine and several NATO countries, including the United States, Poland and Turkey, watched a deafening barrage of rockets and bombs beat back an attack by mock enemy forces.
The military exercises, known as Allied Resolve 2022, revolve around a fictitious conflict between an aggressive coalition of hostile states serving as a stand-in for NATO, and two made-up nations representing Belarus and the Russian Federation.
Following the Kremlin’s script that Russia is a victim rather than an aggressor, Saturday’s drills southwest of the Belarusian capital, Minsk, re-enacted a counterattack to liberate territory seized by the enemy. Signaling the power that Moscow has on hand in the event of a real war, a Russian Tupolev strategic bomber flew over the pretend battlefield escorted by fighter jets.
“If you want peace, you prepare for war,” said Aleksandr Volfovich, the state secretary of the Belarus security council. He declared the exercises a success that demonstrated the “determination and readiness” of Belarusian and Russian forces to successfully repel any attack.
Asked whether Belarus would assist Russia in any invasion of Ukraine, he said: “Belarus is not helping Russia seize Ukraine. Russia does not need to seize Ukraine. Belarus is a country of goodness and peace. We very much hope to live with everyone in peace.”
Western officials have expressed concern that Russian troops may stay behind in Belarus rather than return to their often distant home bases in Russia. Mr. Volfovich declined to comment on that possibility, but said that forces taking part in the exercises would carry out “checks” for several days after the official end of the maneuvers on Sunday.
“After that, a decision will be made,” he said.
Dmitri Mezentsev, a Russian politician and official who serves as state secretary of the Union State, a merger of Russia and Belarus that began in the 1990s and is only now taking on a serious concrete form, dismissed Western warnings of imminent aggression. Claims that the current military exercises pose a threat, he said, are “wrong and baseless.”
Asked about the possibility of Russia and Belarus invading Ukraine, a young soldier who gave only his first name, Kiril, laughed and said: “I have other plans. I’m going to see my grandmother tomorrow in Vitebsk,” a Belarusian town on the opposite side of the country near Russia and far from Ukraine.
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MUNICH — Vice President Kamala Harris told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday that the Western alliance faced a “defining moment” in the Ukraine crisis and warned Russia’s leaders that if they invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies would target not only financial institutions and technology exports to Russia, but also “those who are complicit and those who aid and direct this unprovoked invasion.”
The speech was the first time Ms. Harris has stepped into the hurricane of the diplomacy and signaling surrounding a high-stakes international crisis, so every word — and how she delivered it — was watched with care.
Her text hewed closely to the message that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken delivered on Thursday at the United Nations. “This playbook is all too familiar to us all,” she said of the events unfolding near Ukraine’s borders. “Russia will plead ignorance and innocence. It will create false pretexts for invasion, and it will amass troop and firepower in plain sight.”
“Russia continues to claim it is ready for talks, while at the same time it narrows the avenues for diplomacy,” Ms. Harris said. “Their actions simply do not match their words,” a phrase that French officials have also used in denouncing threatening posture by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
The vice president met on Saturday afternoon with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who flew to Munich for a few hours at the moment his country faces the most acute threat of full invasion in its history. Several Biden administration officials expressed concern about his travels to Germany, saying that they expected Russia to claim he had fled the country. A few worried about whether Moscow would try to block his return.
But in meeting Ms. Harris and speaking at the conference, where he last appeared two years ago to talk about cracking down on corruption and bolstering the Ukrainian economy, Mr. Zelensky hoped to bask for a brief moment in the embrace of partners who have promised to aid him but have said they will not send troops to face the Russian military.
Ms. Harris argued in her speech that the crisis had driven NATO allies together. “As President Biden has said, our forces will not be deployed to fight inside Ukraine,” she said, touching on — but not exploring — the decision to leave the fighting to Ukraine’s own military. “But they will defend every inch of NATO territory.”
Later, the vice president added, “our strength must not be underestimated.”
KYIV, Ukraine — Every February seems to be difficult for Julia Po. It is the month she had to leave her home in Crimea in 2014 after Russian troops annexed it and pro-Moscow separatists took control of parts of eastern Ukraine.
But this February has been particularly painful, with Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders and the United States and its allies warning that an invasion looks imminent. On Friday, President Biden, while still pressing for a diplomatic solution, said he believed that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had made a final decision to invade within a week and target Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
American officials said that as many as 190,000 Russian troops and members of aligned militias were arrayed near the borders and in the eastern regions held by the separatists. In the east, separatist leaders called for mass evacuations, claiming that Ukraine’s military was planning a large-scale attack — an assertion that Mr. Biden dismissed as a lie intended to give Russia a pretext to invade.
The crisis has taken a toll on many Ukrainians, including Ms. Po, an artist. She had been planning an exhibition in western Ukraine, but she forgot about it until the last moment, overwhelmed by stress over the Russian troop buildup.
She decided to go — but then began to worry that if worst-case scenarios about the invasion come true, she would be stuck in the western city of Lviv for a long time.
“I read the news and think to myself, ‘How I can go if I have a cat here?’” said Ms. Po, 36. “And I cancel everything. The next day it gets calmer and I book again.”
Ms. Po said her background made it hard to be an optimist. “When you are from the Crimea and have already lost your home, you understand that everything is possible,” she said.
In Kyiv, there has been an air of unreality about the situation, and stoic resolve. Despite the smoldering eight-year conflict with the separatists in the east, many Ukrainians have tried to keep moving forward.
But the recent warnings from the White House have had a powerful effect, though Ukraine’s government has sought to discourage people from panicking.
Anna Kovalyova, a writer with three small children, moved with her family from Kyiv to Lviv on Sunday. She did so after the U.S. Embassy said it would move its operations there.
“We moved temporarily, because we really felt growing panic in Kyiv,” Ms. Kovalyova, 29, said in an interview.
“The atmosphere in Lviv is completely different,” she said. “You don’t feel so anxious here. And there are a lot of people like us here from Kyiv, mostly with children, who came for a week or two to spend uncertain times.”
At least one school in Ukraine was striving to offer reassurances to parents, sending messages to say that if phone service went out, they should rest assured that their children were in school.
The messages also noted that the school had a basement, presumably to be used as a shelter for the children in the event of an attack. Some elementary schools were conducting drills to prepare students for the possibility of bombardment.
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Continue reading the main storyMUNICH — Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany warned Russia on Saturday that an invasion of Ukraine would be a “grave mistake” that would prompt immediate and heavy “political, economic and strategic” consequences.
“To put it bluntly: Nothing justifies the deployment of well over 100,000 Russian soldiers around Ukraine,” Mr. Scholz told an audience of heads of state and security chiefs at the Munich Security Conference. In one of his strongest statements yet against Moscow’s efforts to extend its sphere of influence, he added, “No country should be another’s backyard.”
In his first speech on security policy since becoming chancellor in December, Mr. Scholz outlined a Germany that would be less squeamish when it comes to military deterrence and equally committed to European and trans-Atlantic unity. He urged a “repositioning of Europe in the world” and a strengthening of NATO’s military capabilities.
He also vowed that Germany would do its part and suggested that its military spending — long a bugbear of allies — would rise.
“The developments of the past few months show us how necessary it is to concentrate on the issue of alliance defense in the North Atlantic area,” Mr. Scholz said. “We have to muster the skills that are required for this. And yes, that also applies to Germany.”
He then proceeded to outline what this would mean: “airplanes that fly, ships that can set sail, soldiers that are optimally equipped for their dangerous tasks.”
Other NATO members have long criticized Berlin for not living up to a commitment to increase military spending to 2 percent of economic output, made in the wake of the last Russian invasion of Ukraine. German military spending has increased in recent years but remains at 1.5 percent of the country’s economic output.
“A country of our size, which bears a very special responsibility in Europe, must be able to afford” a functioning military, Mr. Scholz said, adding, “We also owe it to our allies in NATO.”
Since taking over from Angela Merkel, his respected and long-serving predecessor, Mr. Scholz has faced sharp criticism at home and abroad for his lack of leadership in one of the most serious security crises in Europe since the Cold War. But in recent weeks he has noticeably changed the pace, meeting almost daily with fellow Western leaders and this week traveling to Moscow for a four-hour meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
On Saturday in Munich, Mr. Scholz said that possible Ukrainian NATO membership, which Mr. Putin vehemently opposes, was not currently “on the agenda” but stressed that “in principle” NATO’s door remained open.
Mr. Scholz was not the only European leader striking a tough note at the security gathering. France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, warned Moscow of “massive sanctions” in the event of any further violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
MARIUPOL, UKRAINE — Paramilitary groups are actively preparing for a Russian invasion near Ukraine’s front line with Russia-backed separatists.
The Ukrainian government insists that independent armed groups have no part in its war in the east, and that these fighters don’t exist there. But New York Times journalists recently contacted three paramilitary groups that claim to operate near the front line of the conflict. One allowed us to film them this month.
We followed Ruslan Postovoit and Yuriy Ulshin, who first took up arms in 2014 as part of the nationalist volunteer movement that was formed during the protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square.
Now, they are preparing for a possible larger war with Russia and commanding a unit of about a dozen paramilitary fighters.
“If a full-scale war breaks out tomorrow in Ukraine, there will be tens if not hundreds of thousands of volunteers, just like me,” said Mr. Postovoit, who goes by the call name “Pauk” or “Spider.”
By 2015, the government said it had mostly disarmed all volunteer battalions and integrated the fighters into the official armed forces.
“There are no volunteers outside of structured battalions right now in Ukraine,” said Serhiy Sobko, chief of staff of the Territorial Defense Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “I don’t have personal evidence of the existence of these unofficial groups,” he added.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry declined to comment further about Mr. Postovoit and Mr. Ulshin’s group.
On the ground hundreds of miles from Kyiv, the presence of paramilitary units is an open secret. Local commanders say they see them as an asset to help regular soldiers. And Ukraine’s chief commander of the armed forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnny, shared a photo on Facebook posing with Mr. Ulshin and other volunteer fighters.
Mr. Ulshin and Mr. Postovoit said they grew frustrated with the military chain of command and orders not to fight. Today, they say, they fight on their own terms, but that they collaborate and coordinate with local military commanders on missions like drone reconnaissance.
Mr. Ulshin and Mr. Postovoit led The Times to a local military command post near the front line town of Vodiane, and it was evident that the two groups had a rapport.
Paramilitary units can receive weapons and supplies through crowdsourcing and a network of volunteers, including Ukrainians abroad.
“You have the official armed forces, and you have the volunteer world, operating parallel to what the government does,” said Jonas Ohman, a Lithuania-based financier who supplies drones and anti-drone jammers to fighters like Mr. Ulshin and Mr. Postovoit.
“We told them, if you want to kill the enemy, tell us what you need and we will get it for you,” Mr. Ohman said, referring to the moment he began financing Ukraine’s volunteer fighters, in 2014.
Military experts and paramilitary members and suppliers say there are dozens, if not hundreds, of fighters like Mr. Ulshin and Mr. Postovoit operating near front lines in the Donbas region.
The role paramilitary fighters will play in any conflict with Russia is uncertain. Politically, the groups present a liability. But Mr. Ulshin and Mr. Postovoit say their fighters want to continue defending their country.
“It’s simple,” Mr. Postovoit said. “This is our land. Do you understand? We don’t have anywhere to go but onward.”
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