Kyiv Feb. 26, 12:47 a.m.
Moscow Feb. 26, 1:47 a.m.
Washington Feb. 25, 5:47 p.m.
Live Updates: Kyiv Rocked by Explosions for Second Night
The U.S. plans to impose sanctions on President Vladimir Putin as more governments and financial institutions seek to isolate Russia. NATO leaders said more troops would be deployed.
Shashank Bengali and
Ukrainians on Friday battled for their capital, Kyiv, as officials warned residents to stay indoors and “prepare Molotov cocktails” to defend against Russian forces who had entered a northern district of the city. Kyiv could fall quickly, the Biden administration warned Congress on Thursday.
As missile strikes hammered Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Ukrainians to defend the country, and President Vladimir V. Putin faced intensifying pressure from the international community.
The European Union placed sanctions on Mr. Putin, and the United States said it would follow suit. At a rare summit meeting, NATO leaders said more troops would be sent to eastern members and pledged to continue supplying weapons to Ukraine, including air-defense systems.
Russian officials signaled an openness to talks, but President Vladimir V. Putin derided the Ukrainian government and it was unclear under what conditions the Kremlin would consider negotiations.
Here is what else is happening:
Mr. Putin urged Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms and described Mr. Zelensky’s government as “a band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.” The brutal language suggested he was not seriously planning to engage Mr. Zelensky in peace talks.
But earlier Friday, a Kremlin spokesman said Mr. Putin was prepared to send representatives to Belarus for talks with a Ukrainian delegation. The offer came after Mr. Putin spoke with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. The spokesman said that the Russian offer came on the heels of a comment by Mr. Zelensky that he was ready to discuss “neutral status” for Ukraine.
The European Union froze the assets of Mr. Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. The United States said it was planning to sanction President Vladimir Putin as soon as Friday. Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged other NATO leaders to exclude Russia from Swift, a vital payment system used by banks worldwide.
Mr. Zelensky said that 137 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians had been killed in the Russian invasion that began on Thursday. The United Nations reported a lower tally of casualties but said that any figures were probably an undercount.
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, tells the Security Council: "This is a simple vote today. Vote yes if you believe in upholding the U.N. charter. Vote yes if you respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Vote yes if Russia should be held to account to its action. Vote no or abstain if you do not believe in the U.N. charter. Vote no and align yourself with the unprovoked actions of Russia. Just as Russia had a choice, so do you."
The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, says 50,000 people have fled Ukraine in the past 48 hours, according to the U.N.H.C.R. “Russia’s most latest attack is so bold, so brazen, that it threatens our international system as we know it. We have a solemn obligation to not look away.”
For weeks, a Russian invasion had been expected by some Ukrainians and merely sequestered in the mind’s recesses by others. But once the sweeping attacks began on Thursday, hitting seemingly every corner of the country, the war became unavoidably tangible for Ukrainians — a hovering cloud of darkness that once seemed unimaginable in the post-Cold War era. These images are a visual documentation of a populace coping with the initial stages of a national military invasion, struggling with newfound uncertainty and fear.
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Ukraine has asked for emergency financing from the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, the fund's managing director, said on Friday. The fund will coordinate with the World Bank to support Ukraine, Ms. Georgieva said, warning that the war could have a “serious economic impact” worldwide.
The United Nations Security Council meeting is about to start. It will vote on a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Evan Hill and
Videos and photos from Ukraine on Friday indicate the continued use of widely banned cluster munitions on populated civilian areas, most likely by Russia.
One video, first geolocated by Bellingcat and analyzed by amateur researchers online, showed what appeared to be remains of a Russian-made 9M27K cluster warhead rocket embedded in the ground outside an apartment building in Okhtyrka, a town in northeastern Ukraine. The New York Times independently verified the video evidence. It was not clear if the strike caused any casualties.
The rocket landed about 750 feet from the Sun Kindergarten, where a video showed people bleeding on the ground after a strike outside the front door. It was not clear whether the casualties outside the kindergarten were caused by the same cluster munition.
An attack on Thursday in eastern Ukraine that killed four and wounded 10 appeared to involve the use of a Tochka short-range ballistic missile with a similar cluster warhead.
Cluster munitions are a class of weapon that includes rockets, missiles, bombs, artillery and mortar projectiles that break open in mid-air and dispense a number of smaller submunitions over a wide area. They have been the subject of an international treaty banning their use that went into effect in 2010, but Russia — like the United States and China — has not signed onto the accord.
According to Human Rights Watch, Russia has used cluster munitions in Georgia, Chechnya, and Syria as well as in Ukraine during Russia’s 2014 invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk.
“Cluster munitions, for the Russians, are a tool that they reach for quite often,” said Mark Hiznay, the group’s associate arms director, in an interview.
“Because of their wide-area effect they cannot be contained to a military objective,” Mr. Hiznay said. “So if you have a school near a military objective, you end up hitting the school too.”
Mr. Hiznay said these types of weapons are notoriously unreliable and that a certain percentage fail to explode on impact, leaving behind hazardous duds that can still detonate if handled.
“So what you’re doing, essentially, is scattering landmines and someone is going to have to clear them,” he added.
A Russian official said relations with the U.S. and Britain are nearing a “point of no return,” the Interfax news agency reported. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, spoke as the U.S. and Britain said they plan to impose sanctions on President Putin.
Several bursts of small arms fire could be heard in central Kyiv on Friday shortly before midnight. Earlier in the evening, there were explosions in the distance. Ukraine’s military said Russian soldiers entered a northern district of Kyiv on Friday and that “sabotage groups” are operating in the city.
The United States has put arms control negotiations with Russia on hold as a result of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the State Department’s spokesman said. Talks between Russia and the United States on limiting the nations' nuclear arsenals, the world's largest, had restarted last year.
Reporting from Washington
It’s worth noting that the White House also said travel restrictions will also be imposed on President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The United Nations' top humanitarian coordinator said on Friday that the agency was scaling up efforts, allocating $20 million from an emergency fund, to help the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine.The conflict in just two days has already sparked a refugee crisis with “hundreds of thousands of people” on the move in Ukraine and outside of Ukraine crossing borders into Eastern European countries.
Reporting from Washington
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, says President Biden has always wanted actions against Russia to be made “in alignment with allies.” Biden waited for the Germans to act first before sanctioning Nord Stream 2. European allies similarly gave him the green light on these sanctions against Putin.
Reporting from Washington
During her daily press briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirms the United States will be moving forward to impose sanctions against President Vladimir V. Putin.
Reporting from Moscow
Russia claims that Ukraine has rejected immediate peace talks — a characterization that Ukraine has not confirmed. Earlier Friday, the Kremlin said it was ready to send a delegation to Belarus to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky. But now, the Russian foreign ministry, according to the Interfax news agency, says Ukraine proposed putting “the question to tomorrow.”
Alan Rappeport and
The Biden administration intends to impose sanctions on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, taking the rare step of freezing the personal assets of a world leader, White House officials said on Friday.
The decision aligns the United States with its European allies, whose governments made similar moves earlier in the day. Leaders of the European Union and Britain took action to freeze the assets of Mr. Putin and Sergey V. Lavrov, his foreign minister.
The sanctions are a provocative step but are also largely symbolic given that it’s unclear where Mr. Putin’s wealth resides. The status of Mr. Putin’s financial holdings has been cloaked in mystery and his money is not believed to be held in the United States.
While the U.S. has sanctioned and frozen the assets of some Russian oligarchs, targeting Mr. Putin directly is an unusual move. It puts him in similar company with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, both of whom have been subjected to personal sanctions by the U.S. government.
Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, said on Friday that imposing sanctions on Mr. Putin “sends a clear message about the strength of the opposition to the actions by President Putin and the direction in his leadership of the Russian military.”
Ms. Psaki said the sanctions will also apply to Mr. Lavrov and Russian national security officials. The decision was made in the last 24 hours after consultation with European leaders, Ms. Psaki said. Yet unlike Europe and Britain, which did not impose a travel ban on the officials, the Biden administration is expected to prevent Mr. Putin from traveling to the U.S.
Ms. Psaki would not comment on what impact she believed the sanctions would have on Mr. Putin’s wealth, but underscored that it was a demonstration of unity in opposition to his actions.
Adam M. Smith, a former Treasury Department official who is now a partner at the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said that the sanctions on Mr. Putin are a significant messaging tool because the United States has never taken such an action against the leader of such a powerful country. However, he said that the sanctions were unlikely to affect Mr. Putin’s wealth or change his calculus in Ukraine.
“I don’t think Putin is really going to lose much sleep on being sanctioned,” Mr. Smith said.
The sanctions add to the growing list of restrictions that the Biden administration, in coordination with Europe, has been rolling out. The United States placed sanctions on major Russian financial institutions and the nation’s sovereign debt and took steps to prevent Russia from gaining access to American technology critical for its military, aerospace and other overall economy.
Officials in the United States and Europe have also been debating additional measures to squeeze the Russian economy if the invasion of Ukraine escalates. One measure could be cutting Russia off from SWIFT, the vital international financial messaging service used by banks worldwide.
The sanctions announced on Friday will likely receive mixed reviews on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have struggled for weeks to coalesce around any kind of bipartisan legislative response to a Russian invasion.
Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said on Thursday said that Washington should consider sanctioning Mr. Putin personally but his Republican counterpart on the panel, Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, argued the sanctions would be largely symbolic.
“The guy’s a mad man,” Mr. Risch said of the Russian president. “I don’t think you can reason with him. And so as a result of that, what needs to happen is, his country is going to have to pay the price and decide whether they want to continue with him.” Sanctioning Mr. Putin directly, he continued, “isn’t something that’s going to move the needle here.”
Catie Edmondsoncontributed reporting.
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Volunteer fighters are now patrolling central Kyiv after President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for Ukrainians to defend their country.
Reporting from Washington
The United States is planning to sanction President Vladimir Putin as soon as Friday, a U.S. official confirms. CNN reported the plans earlier.
Russian police officers continue to arrest anti-war protestors in Moscow on Friday.
On the drive from Kyiv, the signs of war are everywhere. I just saw two big military convoys. Lots of smaller military vehicles traveling up and down the roads. An air raid siren is blaring right now. People in small towns and villages are building checkpoints, digging trenches and blocking bridges. There are tanks and traffic jams. And the roar of jets overhead. This war has turned Ukraine into a nightmare.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Only 72 hours ago, Kyiv was a modern European metropolis, with bustling cafes and clubs so popular that people from Berlin came. Today, the streets are barren and everything is closed. Civilians have been told to buy or collect weapons and radio stations are airing instructions about how to make Molotov cocktails.
Patrick Kingsley and
TEL AVIV — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has asked the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to mediate negotiations in Jerusalem between Ukraine and Russia.
The request was made during a phone call between the two leaders on Friday, according to the Ukrainian ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Korniychuk. An Israeli official who spoke anonymously in order to speak more freely confirmed that the request, first reported by Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster, had been made.
“We do believe that Israel is the only democratic state in the world that has great relations with both Ukraine and Russia,” Mr. Korniychuk said. Mr. Bennett’s office confirmed that a phone call took place, but declined to comment on its contents.
Mr. Korniychuk said Israel did not immediately assent to the request. “They didn’t say no,” he said. “They are trying to figure out where they are in this chess play.”
Ukraine would feel more comfortable negotiating in Israel than in Belarus, a close Kremlin ally and the location of previous peace talks, because it perceives Israel to be a more neutral party, Mr. Korniychuk said.
Israel has attempted to mediate between Ukraine and Russia several times in recent years, most recently in January, but also under Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Bennett’s predecessor as prime minister.
Israel is eager to maintain good cultural and trade ties with both countries; both Russia and Ukraine have significant Jewish populations, while Israel has many citizens of Russian and Ukrainian origin.
While Israel has expressed support for Ukraine in recent days, its senior officials have mostly avoided direct criticism of Russia. Though Yair Lapid, the Israeli foreign minister, condemned Russia’s invasion on Thursday, Mr. Bennett avoided any mention of Russia in a subsequent statement.
Israeli officials say their country needs to avoid antagonizing Russia because of the latter’s important role in the Middle East, where the Russian military has a significant presence in Syria, Israel’s northeastern neighbor.
Russia and Iran provided critical military support to the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad during his country’s civil war, while both Syria and Iran are bitter enemies of Israel. To avoid friction, Israel notifies Russia when striking Syrian and Iranian military targets on Syrian soil, and works to maintain good relations with Russia in order to continue to strike in Syria with ease.
In a sign of the sensitivity with which Israel is treating the situation, the Israeli government has placed the management of Ukrainian affairs under its National Security Council, which reports directly to the prime minister instead of the foreign ministry, the Israeli official said.
A day after he was dropped from concerts at Carnegie Hall, the star Russian maestro Valery Gergiev on Friday faced rising anger over his record of support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, with several leading European institutions — including the Munich Philharmonic, of which Mr. Gergiev is chief conductor — threatening to sever ties with him unless he denounced Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The fallout, encompassing Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, was a rare rebuke of a titan of the classical music industry, and it reflected growing global outrage over Mr. Putin’s ongoing military offensive in Ukraine.
Mr. Gergiev, 68, one of Russia’s most prominent cultural ambassadors, is now being shunned because of his ties to Mr. Putin, his longtime friend and benefactor. He seems in peril of losing several key posts, including the podium in Munich and his position as honorary conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.
Munich’s mayor, Dieter Reiter, issued an ultimatum on Friday, saying Mr. Gergiev must denounce the “brutal war of aggression that Putin is waging against Ukraine” before Monday or be fired by the orchestra, three years before his contract is set to expire.
The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra offered a similar warning, threatening to cancel its “Gergiev Festival,” planned for September. The Teatro alla Scala in Milan said Mr. Gergiev would be dropped from upcoming performances of Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” and other engagements if he did not immediately call for peace.
And after Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic announced on Thursday that Mr. Gergiev would no longer lead the orchestra in three high-profile concerts starting Friday evening, Carnegie on Friday canceled two concerts by the Mariinsky Orchestra in May that were to have been led by Mr. Gergiev.
Mr. Gergiev did not respond to requests for comment from The New York Times.
The uproar was a significant blow to a conductor who has built a busy international career while maintaining deep ties to the Russian state, including in his role as general and artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
Mr. Putin has been critical to Mr. Gergiev’s success, providing funding to his theater and showering him with awards. Mr. Gergiev has emerged as a prominent supporter of Mr. Putin, endorsing his re-election and appearing at concerts in Russia and abroad to promote his policies. The two have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure as the leader of the Mariinsky, then called the Kirov.
Western cultural institutions have largely looked beyond Mr. Gergiev’s ties to Mr. Putin, even as the conductor became the target of repeated protests over the past decade, at Carnegie, the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere.
Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine this week put new pressure on arts leaders to reconsider their ties to Mr. Gergiev. After a hastily arranged meeting on Thursday morning, Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic made the announcement that the orchestra would go on without him. The Russian pianist Denis Matsuev, who had been scheduled to perform with Mr. Gergiev and the Philharmonic on Friday, and who has expressed support for Mr. Putin’s policies in the past, was also taken off the program.
Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, who in the past said that Mr. Gergiev should not be punished for political views, said in an interview on Friday that he and the Philharmonic had come to the conclusion that it was “untenable” for Mr. Gergiev and Mr. Matsuev to perform because of their ties to Mr. Putin.
“All of us felt this situation just changes the world, unfortunately,” he said, referring to the invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Gergiev and Mr. Matsuev were also dropped from concerts next week in Naples, Fla., with the Philharmonic, whose chairman said as recently as Sunday that Mr. Gergiev was a gifted artist and would take the podium for the Carnegie dates.
“He’s going as a performer, not a politician,” Daniel Froschauer, the orchestra’s chairman, said in an interview then with The Times.
The Philharmonic issued a statement on Friday saying it stands against “every form of aggression and war.” It did not reference Mr. Gergiev or Mr. Matsuev.
The attack on Ukraine prompted Anna Netrebko, the Russian soprano who is one of the biggest stars in opera, to cancel a performance she had been set to give Friday night in Denmark with her husband, the tenor Yusif Eyvazov.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, continued to be bombed late Friday, as Russia's invasion passed into its second night. Five explosions could be heard within an interval of approximately five minutes, and Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said on social media that they appeared to come from Kyiv Thermal Power Plant № 6, to the city’s north-east.
Doctors Without Borders, the medical charity that is often among the last humanitarian groups to remain in combat zones, said it was suspending work in Ukraine because of the rapid escalation of fighting and upheaval. The fast-changing situation, it said, had forced it to halt work including "HIV care in Severodonetsk, tuberculosis care in Zhytomyr, and improving health care access in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine."
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The war in Ukraine has cast a stark light on how dependent Europe is on Russia for its energy needs and raises the question of where else European countries can buy the oil and gas needed to heat their homes, generate electricity and power their cars.
The simple answer does not appear to be the Middle East.
The energy minister of Qatar, a major gas producer, said this month that Qatari gas could not replace Russian gas in Europe because it had already been promised elsewhere.
And Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, has said its agreements with other oil-producing states prevent it from increasing output to bring down global oil prices, which are the highest since 2014.
To punish the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for invading Ukraine, the United States on Thursday imposed harsh sanctions aimed at cutting off Russia’s largest banks and some of its oligarchs from the global financial system.
But sanctions so far imposed by the United States and the European Union have avoided targeting Russia’s energy industry because European countries are so dependent on it. Europe gets nearly 40 percent of its gas and more than a quarter of its oil from Russia, a major source of income for the country.
As fears mounted in recent weeks that Mr. Putin would proceed with the invasion, U.S. officials said they were in talks with energy-producing countries about their abilities to provide Europe with gas should the supplies from Russia be disrupted, although they did not name specific countries.
Last month, President Biden welcomed the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, to the White House and declared Qatar a “major non-NATO ally,” signifying close ties.
And last month, two senior White House officials, including Amos Hochstein, Mr. Biden’s special envoy for energy security, visited Saudi Arabia for talks on “a collaborative approach to managing potential market pressures stemming from a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine,” according to a White House statement.
It was not clear whether any agreements were reached.
Volkswagen will suspend production at two factories in eastern Germany that make electric vehicles because fighting has interrupted deliveries of critical parts from western Ukraine, the company said Friday.
The temporary shutdowns illustrate how war in Ukraine could have unpredictable effects on the global economy, adding to supply chain turmoil that has fueled inflation. Volkswagen and other automakers have been plagued for the last two years by shortages of semiconductors and other components caused by the pandemic and its economic side effects.
One of the factories, in Zwickau, is Volkswagen’s largest production site for electric vehicles, including the ID.4 sport utility vehicle exported to the United States.
Volkswagen has already had trouble meeting demand for its electric vehicles. The company sold 17,000 ID.4s in the United States last year, but could have sold four times that many, executives said. Volkswagen plans to begin producing the car in Chattanooga, Tenn., this year.
Volkswagen said it would shut down assembly lines in Zwickau, which has a capacity of more than 300,000 vehicles a year, from Tuesday through Friday. The Dresden plant, a showcase factory in the city’s downtown, will stop production Wednesday through Friday.
A Volkswagen spokesman declined to say what parts had been affected by the conflict.
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Continue reading the main storyPresident Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine posted a video on social media showing him standing alongside other government officials, and saying that country’s leaders had not fled Kyiv as Russian forces entered the city.
Satellite images collected on Friday show more than 90 helicopters lined up across five miles of road in a rural area of Belarus, 90 miles from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. The aircraft include both attack and transport helicopters, the same types seen Thursday in Russia’s assault on an airport outside Kyiv.
The decision to position the aircraft along a road close to Ukraine instead of a base appears designed to facilitate rapid deployments.
“It’s sort of the perfect range really,” said Tom Bullock, an analyst at Janes, about the location. “It gives these pilots much more ability to go into some of Russia’s main front lines, such as Kyiv.” Bullock says the aircraft include Ka-52 attack and Mi-8 transport helicopters.
Over the last few days there have been numerous reports of heavy fighting on the outskirts of Kyiv. The satellite images from today also show increased military activity in this same area of Belarus, including Russian ground forces lined up.
BRUSSELS — NATO leaders conducted a rare emergency summit on Friday and agreed to make “significant additional defensive deployments of forces” to the eastern members of the alliance, they said in a statement.
That includes activation of elements of the Rapid Response Force, which in principle can call on 40,000 troops, and the “very high readiness joint task force,” which is essentially a land brigade numbering around 5,000 troops, NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, said in a news conference after the summit meeting.
Those deployments, to enhance deterrence and reassure allies on the borders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, would involve thousands of troops, some of them from the United States, and more than 100 jets put on high alert in 30 locations, he said. The response force is being used for the first time “in the collective defense context,” Mr. Stoltenberg said.
He said Ukrainian troops were fighting bravely but the situation was fluid. He also said that NATO member states would continue to supply weapons to Ukraine, including air-defense systems, presumably ground-to-air missiles like the Stinger.
“There must be no space for miscalculation or misunderstanding,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “We will do what it takes to defend every inch of NATO territory.”
Rather than reducing its presence in Central Europe, as Russia has demanded, NATO will continue to support democratic nonmember countries like Georgia, Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina, he said.
He called Russia the aggressor and Belarus the enabler, and said that Russia had made “a terrible strategic mistake for which Russia would pay a severe price for years to come.”
NATO and the West, he said, “are in this for the long haul.”
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Russian shelling in eastern Ukraine poses a threat to natural gas pipelines that are critical to the country’s energy supplies, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner warns. In a Facebook post, the commissioner, Lyudmyla Denisova, says the pipelines in Okhtyrka, in the Sumy region northwest of Kharkiv, are critical civilian infrastructure, protected under international law.
Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban takeover of their country last year have found themselves in the middle of another bloody conflict in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.
“I would rather be in Kabul than getting stuck in this war,” said Somaia Shahamat, 19, who has lived in Kyiv with her family since August. “We don’t know anyone here, and there is no one to help us to get to the Polish border.”
Ms. Shahamat said she and five family members received visas Thursday to join her father in Switzerland. But they haven’t been able to find a vehicle to leave Kyiv.
“We all get scared when we hear explosions,” she said, “I constantly remind my younger siblings to stay away from the windows.”
The exact number of Afghans who were allowed to enter Ukraine on humanitarian grounds after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is unclear. But Afghans there say the number could be in the hundreds.
Many are in Ukraine temporarily, waiting for their immigration cases in the United States, Canada and other European countries to be resolved. But some applied for asylum in Ukraine to settle there permanently.
Elyas Attai, a former Afghan government employee who has lived in Odessa for the past seven months, said he applied for asylum, but now feels compelled to immigrate to another European country.
“I woke up to the sound of loud explosions” on Thursday morning, he said. “Rockets were landing in different parts of Odessa all day.”
Mr. Attai said once he survived a deadly suicide attack in Kabul, but the sounds of the Russian missiles were much louder and scarier.
“I had never experienced anything like that,” he said.
He said that he and dozens of other Afghans had left Odessa for Lviv in a convoy of eight vehicles.
Some Afghan refugees said that they had run out of food and water, because groceries and markets were closed when they woke up on Thursday morning.
Thousands of Afghans immigrated to Ukraine over the years before the Taliban’s return to power, community members said. Some are citizens, and others live in the country as refugees, mostly in Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s two largest cities, which have borne the brunt of Russian attacks.
Searching for diplomatic solutions, President Zelensky of Ukraine asked the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, to mediate negotiations in Jerusalem between Ukraine and Russia. Mr. Bennett’s office declined to comment.
President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with President Biden, saying on Twitter that the leaders discussed “strengthening sanctions, concrete defense assistance, and an anti-war coalition.”
Reporting from Paris
The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development took steps Friday to freeze Russia out of the international economic body. Russia had a long-standing request for membership.
United Nations Food Program says that 50 percent of its wheat for all programs around the world come from Ukraine. And that is in jeopardy. “The fall out of Ukraine in terms of wheat is something that is spewing out before us and we have yet to see where it will lead,” said Martin Griffiths Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Emergency Relief Coordinator. He said that hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and on the move in and around Ukraine. The UN has allocated $20 million from UN’s emergency fund to scale up effort for humanitarian aid in Ukraine.
Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, called on the E.U. to cut Russia off from SWIFT, a payment system; close European airspace to Russian aircraft; and to impose personal sanctions against Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, as well as oligarchs cooperating with Putin. “The European Union cannot look away,” he wrote.
People continue to gather in the main train station in Kyiv in an effort to get out of town as Russian troops enter the outskirts of the capital.
Reporting from London
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain says he will introduce sanctions against President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. At a NATO meeting he also urged other leaders to exclude Russia from the SWIFT payment system.
The Bank of Russia said that to satisfy “a growing demand” for cash, it had “increased the distribution of hard cash to banks, and the replenishment of ATMs will continue this weekend.” Since Russia invaded Ukraine and Western nations announced measures meant to handicap Russian banks, uneasy Russians have lined up to withdraw funds from banks.
Reporting from Brussels
Sir Jim Hockenhull, the U.K. chief of defense intelligence, said Russian forces were conducting strikes across Ukraine and advancing on two axes toward Kyiv. “Their objective is to encircle the capital, to secure control of the population and change the regime," he said. "Ukrainian Armed Forces continue to offer strong resistance."
Amanda Holpuch and
The Eurovision Song Contest, a cultural phenomenon that was the springboard for Abba and Celine Dion and is watched annually by 200 million people, has decided that no Russian act will be allowed to participate in this year’s contest.
In making the announcement on Friday, the organizers alluded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, citing fears that Russia’s inclusion in the contest would damage the reputation of the world’s largest music competition, a showcase meant to promote European unity and cultural exchange.
The exclusion from the famously over-the-top celebration of kitsch may seem like a trivial matter, but if Russia becomes a cultural pariah on the global stage, it could intensify tensions within the country.
President Vladimir V. Putin is credited with restoring Russia’s stability after the political and economic chaos of the 1990s. Russia began competing in the wildly popular song contest in 1994, has competed more than 20 times, and its participation has been a cultural touchstone of sorts for the country’s rebound and engagement with the world.
In 2008, when Dima Bilan, a Russian pop star, won Eurovision with the song “Believe,” Mr. Putin weighed in promptly with congratulations, thanking him for further burnishing Russia’s image.
The decision by the European Broadcasting Union, the coalition of public media organizations that oversees the contest, to block Russians from the contest followed the cancellation of two major European sporting events in Russia on Friday. European soccer’s governing body voted to move the Champions League final, the continent’s biggest soccer competition this year, from St. Petersburg to Paris.
And the governing body of Formula 1, the international car racing organization, canceled the Russia Grand Prix, which was scheduled for September, citing “impossible” circumstances.
The European Broadcasting Union said it had decided to block Russian performers after consulting with its membership, which includes broadcasters from 56 countries, including Ukraine and Russia.
Just a day earlier, it had said Russia could compete. But Ukraine and public broadcasters in Finland, the Netherlands, and Iceland had called for Russia to be excluded, and Finland on Friday said it would not compete in the final if Russia participated.
The contest features performers from 39 different countries singing and dancing to a diverse range of songs. Maneskin, a tattooed, four-person Italian rock band, won last year’s competition and Barbara Pravi, a French solo artist, came in second after singing a plaintive song of longing backed by a piano and cello.
Russia, which finished ninth in last year’s competition, was originally given a spot in this year’s semifinal, which is scheduled for May in Turin, Italy. The contest organizers did not say how removing the Russian act would affect the structure of the competition.
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In Canada, a country with one of the world’s largest Ukrainian diasporas, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been met with particularly visceral emotion, including from the deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, the daughter of a Ukrainian-Canadian mother.
Speaking after Russia invaded Ukraine this week, Ms. Freeland, who lived for a time in Ukraine as a student in the late 1980s, said that President Vladimir V. Putin had cemented his place “in the ranks of the reviled European dictators who caused such carnage in the 20th century.”
“The horrific human costs of this cruel invasion are the direct and personal responsibility of Vladimir Putin,” she said in a speech peppered with Russian and Ukrainian, adding: “To my own Ukrainian-Canadian community, let me say this: Now is the time for us to be strong as we support our friends and family in Ukraine.”
Russia’s barbaric attack cannot — and will not — be allowed to succeed.
— Chrystia Freeland (@cafreeland) February 24, 2022
See my full comments from today: pic.twitter.com/rJ4rbI7Uzc
Canada has a large population with Ukrainian heritage, including about 1.4 million Ukrainian-Canadians, according to the Canadian government.
Brought up in Alberta amid Canada’s close-knit Ukrainian community, Ms. Freeland, a former Moscow bureau chief for The Financial Times and author of a book about Russia, has a strong connection to Ukraine.
While a student at Harvard University in the late 1980s, she did a university exchange program in Kyiv. During the heady days of glasnost, in the run-up to the Soviet Union’s disintegration, she was involved in 1988 and 1989 in the Ukrainian independence movement, and was tailed by the KGB. She was even given a code name: Frida.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ms. Freeland, Canada has taken a strong stance against Russian aggression. This week it unveiled financial sanctions against 62 Russian individuals and entities, including members of the Russian elite, and halted all export permits.
Amid concerns of a new European refugee crisis as Ukrainians flee the country, the Canadian government said Canadian Armed Forces in Poland were also prepared to help with humanitarian efforts, while Mr. Trudeau said Thursday that Canada would prioritize immigration applications for Ukrainians.
Last year, Simon Miles, an assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, wrote in the Globe and Mail, a leading Canadian newspaper, that while Ms. Freeland was pursued by the KGB in the late 1980s, she earned the spy agency’s admiration by outfoxing them. Among other things, he wrote, she evaded interception by sending material out of Ukraine via a diplomatic pouch at the Canadian embassy in Moscow.
Citing material from the KGB archives, Mr. Miles wrote that the KGB had tried to stymie Ms. Freeland, including by having her teacher at a university in Kyiv increase her academic workload. But again, she foiled the secret police because her fluent Ukrainian allowed her to ace her course work, without attending class.
Last year, Ms. Freeland recalled her days as a student in Ukraine. “I am aware that my work with pro-democracy and environmental activists invoked the ire of the Soviet KGB. I remember being the target of smear campaigns in the Soviet press,” she told the Globe and Mail.
“Though I was eventually forced to leave the country, I have no regrets about my time in Ukraine during the Soviet period. Out of this experience, what struck me, very powerfully, was how quickly a rotten political system could collapse, and how important the work of brave dissidents could be.”
The Russian attack on Ukraine has prompted a flurry of activity among far-right European militia leaders, who have taken to the internet to raise funds, recruit fighters and plan travel to the front lines to confront the country’s invaders, according to a research group.
In recent days, militia leaders in France, Finland and Ukraine have posted declarations urging their supporters to join in the fight to defend Ukraine against a Russian invasion. The posts have been located and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group, a private organization that specializes in tracking extremist groups.
Rita Katz, the director of SITE, said that numerous far-right white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups throughout Europe and North America had expressed an outpouring of support for Ukraine, including by seeking to join paramilitary units in battling Russia.
The motivation to travel to Ukraine, she said, was to gain combat training. It was also ideologically-driven, she added, since these far right groups viewed the fight against Russia as a fight against communism, clinging to World War II historical narratives, and associating modern-day Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin, with the former Soviet Union.
The apparent mobilization of far-right groups could be problematic for the Ukrainian government, playing into Mr. Putin’s depiction of Ukraine as a fascist country, and his false claim to be waging war against Nazis who control the government in Kyiv. In reality, Ukraine has a democratically elected government and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish.
Some of the activity appears to be centered on the Azov Battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard that has drawn far-right fighters from around the world, SITE said. That group came together following the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and saw action against pro-Russian militias.
In one declaration, posted this week on the messaging app Telegram, shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a leader of the Azov Battalion’s political wing called for a “total mobilization” of the group, and pointed volunteers toward recruitment resources online.
Earlier this week, Carpathian Sich, a Ukrainian group, posted donation information to its Telegram channel, seeking money from its followers via PayPal, as well as with the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tron cryptocurrencies.
The same information was shared on several Finnish and French far-right sites, among them “OC,” a white nationalist site. This week, the group posted a pro-Ukraine statement on its Telegram channel, encouraging its subscribers to make donations to Carpathian Sich. A subsequent post said, “Just like the U.S.S.R., Putin will be defeated,” by aligning “French nationalists” with the Ukrainian people.”
Neo-Nazi and white supremacist Telegram users from Finland also encouraged fellow Finns to join the fight alongside Ukrainians, SITE reported. One post said, “the age-old duty of the Finns has been to wage war against the Russians.”
“Russia has always been persecuting us, and that snake will not drop until it knocks its head off,” said the post, according to SITE. “The best solution would be to make a collective surprise blow and knock out Moscow to the Stone Age.”
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CAIRO — It was on the way to the bakery that Mona Mohammed realized Russia’s war on Ukraine might have something to do with her.
Ms. Mohammed, 43, rarely pays attention to the news, but as she walked through her working-class Cairo neighborhood on Friday morning, she overheard a few people fretting about the fact that Egypt imports most of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine.
War meant less wheat; war meant more expensive wheat. War meant that Egyptians whose budgets were already crimped from months of rising prices might have to pay more for the round loaves of aish baladi, or country bread, that contribute more calories and protein to the Egyptian diet than anything else.
“How much more expensive can things get?” Ms. Mohammed said as she waited in line to collect her government-subsidized loaves from her local bakery.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this week threatened to further strain economies across the Middle East already burdened by the coronavirus pandemic, drought and conflict. As usual, the poorest have had it the worst, reckoning with inflated food costs and scarcer jobs — a state of affairs that recalled the lead-up to 2011, when soaring bread prices helped propel anti-government protesters into the streets in what came to be known as the Arab Spring.
In a region where bread keeps hundreds of millions of people from hunger, anxiety at the bakeries spells trouble.
In Egypt, the world’s top importer of wheat, the government — which had previously said that it would increase the price of subsidized bread — was moving in the wake of the invasion to find other grain suppliers.
In Morocco, where the worst drought in three decades was pushing up food prices, the Ukraine crisis was set to exacerbate the inflation that had already caused protests to break out across the country over the weekend.
And in Tunisia, which was already struggling to pay for grain shipments, the war seemed likely to complicate the cash-strapped government’s efforts to avert a looming economic collapse.
Global wheat prices were already up 37 percent from the previous year, and North Africa and the Middle East, the largest buyers of Russian and Ukrainian wheat, were experiencing their worst droughts in over 20 years, said Sara Menker, the chief executive of Gro Intelligence, an artificial intelligence platform that analyzes global climate and crops.
Volkswagen will pause production at two factories in Germany that produce electric vehicles because deliveries of parts made in Ukraine have been interrupted by fighting. The shutdowns illustrate how war could have unpredictable effects on the global economy, adding to supply chain turmoil that has fueled inflation.
President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a video on social media on Friday night, standing alongside several government officials and saying that Ukraine’s leaders had not fled the capital, Kyiv. "We're in Kiev," the post said. "We're defending Ukraine."
MOSCOW — The Russian government said it was partially limiting access to Facebook for restricting some pro-Kremlin news media accounts, a move that could make it harder for Russians to share their anger over their country’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, said Facebook was “involved in the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms” because it had limited access to four Russian media accounts, including that of the state-run news agency RIA Novosti and of the Defense Ministry’s television channel, Zvezda. Starting Friday, Roskomnadzor’s statement went on, “measures are being taken to partially limit access.”
Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the move came in response to the social network’s warning labels on misleading content.
“Russian authorities ordered us to stop the independent fact-checking and labeling of content posted on Facebook by four Russian state-owned media organizations,” he said in a statement. “We refused. As a result, they have announced they will be restricting the use of our services.”
It was not clear what the partial limitation to access would entail, but it could be similar to the government’s move last year to slow down access to Twitter.
Roskomnadzor did not indicate that the partial limitation would also apply to Instagram or WhatsApp, which are also owned by Meta. Major American online platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter remain accessible in Russia, allowing a space for dissent that does not exist on television.
“Ordinary Russians are using our apps to express themselves and organize for action,” Mr. Clegg said.
Since President Vladimir V. Putin launched his attack on Ukraine on Thursday, many Russians have taken to social media to post expressions of shame and anger. Rights activists in Russia have voiced concern that the Kremlin would mount a new crackdown on freedoms in the wake of the invasion.
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