Kyiv March 30, 10:53 p.m.
Moscow March 30, 10:53 p.m.
Washington March 30, 3:53 p.m.
Live Updates: Putin’s Military Advisers Misinformed Him on Ukraine, U.S. Intelligence Says
One American official said there was “now persistent tension” between the Russian president and his Defense Ministry. Strikes were reported around the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv, and Russian officials offered contradictory assessments of the progress in peace talks.
Dan Bilefsky and
A day after inconclusive peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, pessimism about Russia’s willingness to tame its punishing attacks in Ukraine was growing on Wednesday amid mixed signals emanating from Kremlin officials and declassified U.S. intelligence that President Vladimir V. Putin was being misinformed about the invasion from aides fearful about his reaction.
According to the U.S. intelligence, the misinformation has created mistrust and stoked tensions between Mr. Putin and his Ministry of Defense, including with the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.
American officials said that Mr. Putin’s strict isolation during the pandemic and willingness to publicly castigate advisers had contributed to him getting incomplete or overly optimistic reports about the progress of Russian forces, apparently leaving him genuinely unaware that the Russian military had been using conscripts in Ukraine or that drafted soldiers were among those killed in action.
Continued fighting in parts of Ukraine also underscored doubts about Russia’s intentions. Local officials reported new attacks on the outskirts of Kyiv, the capital, and the northern city of Chernihiv, two areas where Russia had said this week that it would sharply reduce combat operations. And there was also a contradiction between the positive language used by Russia’s chief negotiator about the peace talks in Istanbul and comments from officials and war supporters in Moscow.
Here are other developments:
Russian troops have been moving away from the area around Kyiv, the capital, and Chernihiv, a provincial town to the north, according to the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, Oleksiy Danilov. Some of the Russian units were not withdrawing, but rather relocating to eastern Ukraine, Mr. Danilov said.
The humanitarian situation on the ground in Ukraine is worsening. More than four million people have fled the country since the Russian invasion began, including two million children, according to the latest figures from the United Nations refugee agency and UNICEF.
In Mariupol, the besieged strategic port city in the south and one of the worst-hit places of the war, new satellite imagery released Tuesday showed hundreds of people lining up outside a supermarket amid food shortages. Concerns are growing that Russia is trying to starve the population to break its will.
Germany began preparing for eventual shortages of natural gas, as officials pointed to growing concerns that Russia could cut off deliveries unless payments were made in rubles.
The Russian currency, the ruble, made an enormous rebound to nearly its prewar value, bolstered by the talks in Istanbul and by the Russian central bank’s measures to support it.
A NASA astronaut and two Russian counterparts landed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday after departing from the International Space Station in a Russian spacecraft. The space station is one of the few places where day-to-day cooperation between the United States and Russia continues.
Some Russian troops outside Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, have been “repositioned” to the north of the city, the Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, told reporters. But he said that less than 20 percent of the troops were being repositioned and that the Pentagon believes some of them will head to Belarus to resupply.
Reporting from Warsaw
President Biden told President Volodymr Zelensky of Ukraine that the United States intends to give his government $500 million in direct budgetary aid, according to a White House statement detailing a call between the two leaders. The White House said the aid could be used to pay salaries and maintain basic government services. Officials said Zelensky also updated Biden on the status of negotiations with Russia.
Julian E. Barnes and
WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s struggles in Ukraine, according to declassified U.S. intelligence.
The intelligence, according to multiple U.S. officials, shows what appears to be growing tension between Mr. Putin and the Ministry of Defense, including with the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.
Speaking in Algiers, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken acknowledged Mr. Putin had been given less than truthful information from his advisers.
“With regard to President Putin, look, what I can tell you is this, and I said this before, one of the Achilles' heel of autocracies is that you don’t have people in those systems who speak truth to power or who have the ability to speak truth to power,” Mr. Blinken said. “And I think that is something that we’re seeing in Russia.”
Other American officials have said that Mr. Putin’s rigid isolation during the pandemic and willingness to publicly rebuke advisers who do not share his views have created a degree of wariness, or even fear, in senior ranks of the Russian military. Officials believe that Mr. Putin has been getting incomplete or overly optimistic reports about the progress of Russian forces, creating mistrust with his military advisers.
Mr. Putin seemed genuinely unaware that the Russian military had been using conscripts in Ukraine, and that drafted soldiers were among those killed in action, according to the U.S. officials. Mr. Putin’s ignorance showed “a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president,” according to a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the declassified, but still sensitive, material. There “is now persistent tension” between Mr. Putin and the Defense Ministry, the official said.
The American intelligence assessment also said that Mr. Putin had an incomplete understanding about how damaging Western sanctions had been on the Russian economy, officials said.
The war continues to go poorly for Russian forces. Ukraine’s military has not only held its own but also begun counterattacking. Some U.S. officials believe that senior Russian officials are wary of delivering truthful assessments — potentially afraid that the messengers of bad news will be held responsible for the battlefield failures.
The Russian military’s stumbles have eroded trust between Mr. Putin and his Ministry of Defense. While Mr. Shoigu had been considered one of the few advisers Mr. Putin confided in, the prosecution of the war in Ukraine has damaged the relationship.
Mr. Putin has put two top intelligence officials under house arrest for providing poor intelligence ahead of the invasion, something that may have further contributed to the climate of fear.
With evidence of Mr. Putin’s frustration growing, the United States has in recent weeks been building up an intelligence case that he had not been getting accurate assessments from the Ministry of Defense and other senior officials. The U.S. officials believe that Mr. Putin is continuing to be misled and that senior advisers are unwilling to tell the truth.
What American intelligence sources there might be in the Kremlin is a tightly held secret. But since Russia began its troop buildup along Ukraine’s borders last year, U.S. intelligence officials have accurately predicted Mr. Putin’s moves.
The declassified information was reported earlier on Wednesday by The Associated Press.
Russian forces announced a shift in their posture around Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Tuesday, though American officials voiced skepticism that Russia was stopping its attacks as a peace gesture. Rather, some believe the moves are a further sign that Russia is adjusting its failing strategy. It is also possible that the shifting strategy is a sign of dysfunction and miscommunication in the upper ranks of the Russian Defense Ministry.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Dozens of medical workers and patients have been killed in more than 80 attacks since Russia invaded Ukraine, the World Health Organization said at a news conference on Wednesday.
“Since the beginning of the Russian Federation’s invasion, there have been 82 attacks,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization’s director general, confirmed at the briefing. The W.H.O. said the attacks had resulted in at least 72 deaths and 43 injuries, which included health care professionals and patients.
Dr. Ghebreyesus added that the W.H.O. was working with local and international partners to deliver medical supplies to the hardest hit areas across Ukraine, and that it had so far delivered around 160 metric tonnes of supplies.
“We continue to urge for guarantees of safe passage to deliver supplies to Mariupol and other besieged cities,” he said.
In cities around Ukraine’s north, east and south, Russian forces have battered civilian centers, hitting apartments, supermarkets and other buildings. In Mariupol, a city in Ukraine’s south that has been bombarded and cut off for weeks, videos showed a Russian strike had damaged and destroyed buildings at a hospital complex, including a maternity ward. Near the capital, Kyiv, medical centers have been close to combat zones, and struggled to take in the wounded.
The United Nations rights office has said that at least 1,035 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia invaded, with one official saying the actual number “is likely much higher in locations that have seen intense fighting, in particular Mariupol and Volnovakha.”
"WHO continues to work with local and international partners to deliver medical supplies to the hardest hit areas across #Ukraine. WHO has now delivered about 160 metric tonnes of supplies"-@DrTedros https://t.co/UAxPPrFehx
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 30, 2022
HULIAIPOLE, Ukraine — The shelling begins in earnest a little before midnight, well after the sky has turned oily black, the cell towers have powered down and the stray dogs bark into the night.
There is no electricity or running water in Huliaipole. There is just darkness and long minutes of silence when the ticking of battery-powered wall clocks or the grating of open gates in the cold wind are anxiously scrutinized until the next explosion thuds somewhere nearby, rattling windows. And bones.
And then it happens again. And again. A high-pitched screech and then a boom. Sometimes the shells get closer. Or farther away. Maybe, for a few hours, they stop altogether. But it’s been the same routine for almost a month in this town along the front lines in eastern Ukraine, with each night bringing the same question: Where will the next one land?
“It’s like living in a horror movie,” said Ludmila Ivchenko, 64, between tears, bundled in her winter parka on Monday. She rocked back and forth, sitting beside the flame of an oil candle deep in the basement of the town’s hospital where she and her neighbors now live.
As Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol are being torn apart by intense bombardments, cruise missile strikes and infantry advances, Huliaipole, a town once home to about 13,000 people, is dying a much slower death.
The town, about 90 miles northwest of Mariupol and on the edge of the Donbas region, would likely be in the path of any future Russian offensives in the east, where the Russian defense ministry said Wednesday it would focus its operations.
Strategically situated at the intersection of important roads bisecting the country, Huliaipole is surrounded by a half-moon of Russian and separatist forces that are perfectly content with shelling the town instead of taking it, likely because they don’t have the resources yet to do so, military analysts say.
The residents of the shrinking enclave — now down to about 2,000 people — are caught in the middle of dueling artillery battles between Ukrainian and Russian forces as homes, apartments, markets, restaurants and health clinics are slowly destroyed, and people are forced to flee, live underground or die.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyPresident Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy discussed the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine during their first phone call since the war in Ukraine began, according to the office of the Italian government. Putin also described a system to pay for gas in rubles, a condition that the Italian leader recently rejected, while Draghi “underlined the importance of establishing a ceasefire as soon as possible,” the statement said.
Reporting from Algiers
At a news conference in Algiers, the U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, was asked about reports that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had been misled by his generals on the progress of the war in Ukraine. “One of the Achilles heels of autocracies,” he answered, “is that you don’t have people in those systems who speak truth to power or who have the ability to speak truth to power. And I think that is something that we’re seeing in Russia.”
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
With the war in Ukraine five weeks old, civilians are trying to protect the country’s memorials and monuments. On Wednesday, volunteers worked to protect a statue of Princess Olga of Kyiv, a regent of Kievan Rus, a medieval empire founded by Vikings in the ninth century located in modern-day Belarus, Ukraine, and part of Russia. Olga converted to Christianity and was canonized by the Orthodox Church in 1547.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Twitter that he and President Biden spoke for an hour about “the situation on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.” Zelensky, who has been in regular contact with Western leaders, said they also “talked about specific defensive support, a new package of enhanced sanctions, macro-financial and humanitarian aid.”
Just finished an hour-long conversation with @POTUS. Shared assessment of the situation on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. Talked about specific defensive support, a new package of enhanced sanctions, macro-financial and humanitarian aid.
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) March 30, 2022
ISTANBUL — Russia’s lead negotiator said on Wednesday that peace talks with Ukraine appeared to be on the verge of a breakthrough, even as other officials voiced skepticism and pro-Kremlin commentators heaped scorn on the talks — mixed messages that underscored the lack of clarity over President Vladimir V. Putin’s goals in the invasion and the uncertainty over whether progress in the talks was real.
The Kremlin’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, read a statement broadcast on state television that described Ukraine’s proposal on Tuesday to declare neutrality as a core concession to Russia, just hours after the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that the talks in Istanbul had produced nothing “very promising.”
In the broadcast, Mr. Medinsky said, “Yesterday, the Ukrainian side for the first time outlined its readiness, in writing, to fulfill a number of important conditions for building normal and, I hope, good neighborly relations with Russia.”
He listed a series of concessions, like refusing to host foreign troops, that he said Ukraine was prepared to make. “If these conditions are fulfilled, then the threat of a NATO bridgehead being created on Ukrainian territory will be liquidated,” Mr. Medinsky said.
He said Russia was determined to keep negotiating, and Mykhailo Podolyak, a member of Ukraine’s delegation in Istanbul, said the talks had yielded “proof of the viability of Ukrainian statehood.”
“The revision of global security principles & the role of institutions begins,” Mr. Podolyak said on Twitter.
The positive language from the negotiators clashed markedly with hard-line rhetoric coming out of Moscow, where supporters of the war decried Mr. Medinsky’s diplomacy as bordering on traitorous.
“Any talks with Nazis before your boot is on their throat are perceived as weakness,” Vladimir Solovyov, a popular state television host, said on his YouTube show, reprising the Kremlin’s false characterization of the Ukrainian government as “Nazis.” “You cannot meet with them or talk to them.”
And Mr. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, was far more cautious than Mr. Medinsky in his comments earlier Wednesday. He said that Ukraine’s willingness to put some proposals in writing was a “positive factor,” but that there was little progress to report otherwise.
“We do not see anything very promising or any breakthroughs,” Mr. Peskov told reporters. “Very, very long work is ahead.”
Some Russian analysts and Western officials see the diplomacy as little more than a way to buy time while Russian troops regroup. Russia’s promise to wind down military operations around Kyiv, which the Russian Defense Ministry cast as a good-faith gesture of de-escalation, in reality appeared to be a way to explain away a battlefield defeat.
Russia forces around Kyiv were “regrouping,” the Defense Ministry said on Wednesday, although that assertion could not be independently confirmed. The aim of gathering forces near Kyiv was all along not to take the city, but to tie up and weaken Ukrainian troops in the area, the ministry claimed in a statement.
“All these goals were achieved,” the ministry said, adding it would now focus on “the final stage of the operation to liberate” the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Putin himself has not commented on what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine since March 18. Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the France-based political analysis firm R. Politik, noted that much of what Ukraine proposed on Tuesday would be a nonstarter for Mr. Putin, such as the idea that there would be a 15-year negotiating process about the status of Crimea — something that Mr. Putin, who annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014, says is nonnegotiable.
She described the negotiations as, most likely, a feint rather than a signal that Russia was ready to wind down the war. But she noted that — as was the case in the run-up to the invasion — senior Russian officials were unlikely to know what Mr. Putin was really planning, leading to this week’s mixed messages.
“The problem with the Russian regime is that, once again, no one understands what Putin wants,” Ms. Stanovaya said. “As a result, we get this informational chaos.”
BELGRADE, Serbia — Mindful of the angry and still-unhealed wounds left by NATO’s bombing of Serbia more than 20 years ago, Ukraine’s ambassador appeared on Serbian television after Russia invaded and bombed his country in the hope of rousing sympathy.
Instead of getting time to explain Ukraine’s misery, however, the ambassador, Oleksandr Aleksandrovych, had to sit through rants by pro-Russian Serbian commentators, and long videos of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, denouncing Ukraine as a nest of Nazis. The show, broadcast by the pro-government Happy TV, lasted three hours, more than half of which featured Mr. Putin.
Angry at the on-air ambush, the ambassador complained to the producer about the pro-Kremlin propaganda exercise, but was told not to take it personally and that Mr. Putin “is good for our ratings.”
That Russia’s leader, viewed by many in the West, including President Biden, as a war criminal, serves in Serbia as a lure for viewers is a reminder that the Kremlin still has admirers in Europe.
While Germany, Poland and several other E.U. countries display solidarity with Ukraine by flying its flag outside their Belgrade embassies, a nearby street pays tribute to Mr. Putin. A mural painted on the wall features an image of the Russian leader alongside the Serbian word for “brother.”
Part of Mr. Putin’s allure lies in his image as a strongman, an appealing model for President Aleksandr Vucic, the increasingly authoritarian leader of Serbia, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the belligerently illiberal leader of Hungary. Facing elections on Sunday, the Serbian and Hungarian leaders also look to Russia as a reliable source of energy to keep their voters happy. Opinion polls suggest both will win.
Then there is history, or at least a mythologized version of the past, that, in the case of Serbia, presents Russia, a fellow Slavic and Orthodox Christian nation, as an unwavering friend and protector down the centuries.
But perhaps most important is Mr. Putin’s role as a lodestar for nations that, no matter what their past crimes, see themselves as sufferers, not aggressors, and whose politics and psyche revolve around cults of victimhood nurtured by resentment and grievance against the West.
Arijan Djan, a Belgrade-based psychotherapist, said she had been shocked by the lack of empathy among many Serbs for the suffering of Ukrainians but realized that many still bore the scars of past trauma that obliterated all feeling for the pain of others.
“Individuals who suffer traumas that they have never dealt with cannot feel empathy,” she said. Societies, like trauma-scarred individuals, she added, “just repeat the same stories of their own suffering over and over again,” a broken record that “deletes all responsibility” for what they have done to others.
A sense of victimhood runs deep in Serbia, viewing crimes committed by ethnic kin during the Balkan wars of the 1990s as a defensive response to suffering visited on Serbs, just as Mr. Putin presents his bloody invasion of Ukraine as a righteous effort to protect persecuted ethnic Russians who belong in “Russky mir,” or the “Russian world.”
“Putin’s ‘Russian world’ is an exact copy of and what our nationalists call Greater Serbia,” said Bosko Jaksic, a pro-Western newspaper columnist. Both, he added, feed on partially remembered histories of past injustice and erased memories of their own sins.
The victim narrative is so strong among some in Serbia that Informer, a raucous tabloid newspaper that often reflects the thinking of Mr. Vucic, the president, last month reported Russia’s preparations for its invasion of Ukraine with a front-page headline recasting Moscow as a blameless innocent: “Ukraine attacks Russia!” it screamed.
The Serbian government, wary of burning bridges with the West but sensitive to widespread public sympathy for Russia as a fellow wronged victim, has since pushed news outlets to take a more neutral stand, said Zoran Gavrilovic, the executive director of Birodi, an independent media monitoring group in Serbia. Russia is almost never criticized, he said, but abuse of Ukraine has subsided.
Mr. Aleksandrovych, the Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia, said he welcomed the change of tone but that he still struggled to get Serbians to look beyond their own suffering at NATO’s hands in 1999. “Because of the trauma of what happened 23 years ago, whatever bad happens in the world is seen as America’s fault,” he said.
Hungary, allied with the losing side in two world wars, also nurses an oversize victim complex, rooted in the loss of large chunks of its territory. Mr. Orban has stoked those resentments eagerly for years, often siding with Russia over Ukraine, which controls a slice of former Hungarian land and has featured prominently in his efforts to present himself as a defender of ethnic Hungarians living beyond the country’s border.
In neighboring Serbia, Mr. Vucic, anxious to avoid alienating pro-Russia voters ahead of Sunday’s election, has balked at imposing sanctions on Russia and at suspending flights between Belgrade and Moscow. But Serbia did vote in favor of a United Nations resolution on March 2 condemning Russia’s invasion.
That was enough to win praise for Mr. Vucic from Victoria Nuland, an American under secretary of state, who thanked Serbia “for its support for Ukraine.” But it did not stop Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, from on Monday suggesting Belgrade as a good place to hold peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv.
Serbs who want their country to join the European Union and stop dancing between East and West accuse Mr. Vucic of playing a double game. “There are tectonic changes taking place and we are trying to sleep through them,” said Vladimir Medjak, vice president of European Movement Serbia, a lobbying group pushing for E.U. membership.
Serbia, he said, is “not so much pro-Russian as NATO-hating.”
Instead of moving toward Europe, he added: “We are still talking about what happened in the 1990s. It is an endless loop. We are stuck talking about the same things over and over.”
More than two decades after the fighting ended in the Balkans, many Serbs still dismiss war crimes in Srebrenica, where Serb soldiers massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in 1995, and in Kosovo, where brutal Serb persecution of ethnic Albanians prompted NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign, as the flip side of suffering inflicted on ethnic Serbs.
Asked whether she approved of the war unleashed by Mr. Putin as she walked by the Belgrade mural in his honor, Milica Zuric, a 25-year-old bank worker, responded by asking why Western media focused on Ukraine’s agonies when “you had no interest in Serbian pain” caused by NATO warplanes in 1999. “Nobody cried over what happened to us,” she said.
With much of the world’s media focused last week on Russia’s destruction of Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city, Serbia commemorated the start of NATO’s bombing campaign. Front pages were plastered with photos of buildings and railway lines destroyed by NATO. “We cannot forget. We know what it is to live under bombardment,” read the headline of Kurir, a pro-government tabloid.
A small group of protesters gathered outside the United States Embassy and then joined a much bigger pro-Russia demonstration, with protesters waving Russian flags and banners adorned with the letter Z, which has become an emblem of support for Russia’s invasion.
Damnjan Knezevic, the leader of People’s Patrol, a far-right group that organized the gathering, said he felt solidarity with Russia because it had been portrayed as an aggressor in the West, just as Serbia was in the 1990s, when, he believes, “Serbia was in reality the biggest victim.” Russia had a duty to protect ethnic kin in Ukraine just as Serbia did in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Mr. Knezevic said.
Bosko Obradovic, the leader of Dveri, a conservative party, said he lamented civilian casualties in Ukraine but insisted that “NATO has a huge responsibility” for their fate.
Mr. Obradovic on Sunday gathered cheering supporters for a pre-election rally in a Belgrade movie house. A stall outside the entrance sold Serbian paratrooper berets, military caps and big Russian flags.
Predrag Markovic, director for the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, said that history served as the bedrock of nationhood but, distorted by political agendas, “always offers the wrong lessons.” The only case of a country in Europe fully acknowledging its past crimes, he added, was Germany after World War II.
“Everyone else has a story of victimization.” Mr. Markovic said.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyReporting from Istanbul
The Russian Defense Ministry says it is “regrouping” its forces around Kyiv. In a statement, the ministry claimed those forces’ aim had been to tie up and weaken Ukrainian troops in that region, preventing them from joining the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “All these goals were achieved,” the ministry said, adding it would now focus on “the final stage of the operation to liberate” the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine.
Reporting from Warsaw
President Biden is speaking this morning by phone with Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in what White House officials said was the latest in ongoing discussions between the two leaders about how the United States can support Ukraine in the fight against Russia's invasion.
BERLIN — Ukrainians fleeing war in their homeland remain vulnerable when arriving in Germany, the authorities in Berlin have warned, saying that thieves have been targeting the refugees — mostly women and children — at Berlin’s main train station and bus depot.
The police have hung fliers printed in both Ukrainian and Russian and have posted on social media that the refugees should avoid dubious offers of aid and warned of the potential for criminal activity, including human trafficking and sex offenses.
“My colleagues regularly find gangs of thieves who try to exploit the defenselessness and exhaustion of women traveling alone with children, in particular, in order to steal their last valuables,” Carsten Milius, an official from the Bund Deutscher Kriminalbeamter, a police union, told Der Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily newspaper.
The police in Berlin have also been keeping track of registered sex offenders in the city, said Iris Spranger, a Berlin lawmaker responsible for city security. She added that besides uniformed officers, plainclothes officers had also been stationed at arrival sites.
“From very early on, we focused on the safety of the refugees because they are mostly women and children,” Ms. Spranger told the regional public broadcaster RBB.
Of the more than four million refugees who have fled Ukraine since the war began in February, half are children, according to newly released figures from UNICEF. More than a quarter-million refugees have made it to Germany, according to the federal police. Roughly 3,000 arrived in Berlin via train or bus on Tuesday alone, according to the authorities in Berlin.
Michael Spiess, a spokesman for the federal police in Berlin, said that extra units had been deployed to the train station and were coordinating closely with aid workers.
In the days after Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of people greeted refugees arriving in Berlin with offers of places to stay, food or money, but that has given way to an organized team of registered volunteers, who wear matching vests identifying them as aid workers.
Special buses run continuously from Berlin Central Station, the main train station, and from the city’s bus depot to a recently decommissioned airport, where aid organizations have set up 2,600 beds for people to rest before moving to more permanent lodging.
How the Ruble’s Value Has Changed
Propped up by positive expectations that were bolstered by peace talks in Istanbul and by the Russian central bank’s quick and robust measures to support it, the Russian ruble made a staggering rebound approaching its prewar value on Wednesday.
The Russian currency was trading at 83 per dollar, only two rubles away from the levels it hit on Feb. 23, one day before President Vladimir V. Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine.
The rebound ran contrary to expectations. On Sunday, President Biden said on Twitter that as a result of sanctions, “the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.”
The ruble’s stronger showing is most likely driven by artificial factors and might not be a good marker that the Russian economy is improving, said Yevgeny Nadorshin, the chief economist at the PF Capital consulting company in Moscow.
“In view of sanctions and countersanctions, which limit Russia’s transborder trade and thus reduce the demand for foreign currency, we cannot say that exchange rates reflect economic realities in the country,” Mr. Nadorshin said.
Ever since Western countries imposed sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine, Russia’s central bank has made a number of strategic moves that have further limited international trade, but prevented a catastrophic bank run and capital flight.
For instance, it ordered Russian companies to convert 80 percent of foreign currency revenues they receive under export contracts into rubles. That allowed the central bank to accumulate some hard currency as the West froze more than $300 billion worth of Russian reserves, Mr. Nadorshin said.
The country’s main financial regulator also limited the amount of foreign currency that Russians can withdraw from their bank accounts to $10,000 over the next six months; anything over that would be paid in rubles. The key interest rate was raised to 20 percent, making ruble-denominated deposits more attractive, but also making lending, including mortgages, prohibitively expensive.
Russia can live under such restrictions for a long time, Mr. Nadorshin said, but the price of that would be further isolation and long-term development.
“The Soviet Union lasted a long time,” he said, “but we know what it all ended up with.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Know your customer.
It’s a basic rule of banking in the United States. Without it, the American financial system is at risk of being an unwitting participant in crimes ranging from money laundering to the funding of terrorism.
But the imposition of economic sanctions on Russian oligarchs over the invasion of Ukraine has exposed a loophole that prevents regulators from tracking the flow of offshore money into the United States: Hedge funds, private equity firms, family offices and venture capital firms don’t always know whose money they’re taking.
Now, some lawmakers on Capitol Hill are joining the calls for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department to require firms in the $11 trillion private funds market to do the same kind of checks performed by financial institutions including banks, brokerages, mutual funds and even casinos.
In a joint letter on Tuesday to Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, and Gary Gensler, the S.E.C. chairman, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse said closing the loophole would “help the U.S. government track down the hidden wealth of sanctioned Russian elites and better combat money laundering, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other criminal activity throughout our financial system.”
The two Democrats cited a report by The New York Times last week about the deeply complex financial holdings of one oligarch, Roman Abramovich, who has invested billions of dollars through private funds. (Mr. Abramovich has been the subject of sanctions by British authorities but not those in the United States.)
“The status quo is plainly untenable,” the senators wrote.
A spokesman for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the lawmakers’ letter. The S.E.C. did not immediately comment.
The calls to tighten the monitoring of foreign money into hedge funds and private equity firms goes back about two decades, when the private fund industry was much smaller than it is today. But some contend the rationale for exempting those industries no longer holds given the impact of hedge funds and private equity on markets.
“Right now, broker-dealers, mutual funds and banks are legally required to understand who their clients are and evaluate the source of their clients’ funds before investing them,” said Elise Bean, former staff director and chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who has specialized in money laundering investigations. “But hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital funds don’t — which doesn’t make any sense.”
Ms. Bean is advising a coalition of more than 100 organizations that filed a comment letter with the S.E.C. last week, saying that regulators should require private funds to provide regulators with a list of all the “beneficial owners” of the money they accept from investors and to identify the countries in which those investors reside.
The groups, calling themselves the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, said private funds needed to be required to make those disclosures to help regulators track the potential “presence of illicit financial flows in private markets.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they said, demonstrated the challenges of keeping tabs on money from political insiders who made investments shrouded in secrecy at a time when they were not subject to government sanctions.
An S.E.C. spokeswoman said the commission “benefits from robust engagement from the public” but generally does not respond publicly to comment letters.”
There are a number of competing ideas to bring private funds and unregulated investment advisers up to the same know-your-customer standards as banks.
Ms. Warren and Mr. Whitehouse suggested in their letter that the Treasury could interpret additional powers given to financial regulators in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks as covering private funds.
Some supporters of increased oversight say the Investment Advisers Act gives the S.E.C. the authority to require private funds to conduct know-your-customer checks.
Another possibility is to expand the 50-year-old Bank Secrecy Act, which requires banks and other regulated financial institutions to carefully vet their customers and stop potential money laundering.
The Enablers Act, introduced in the House of Representatives last fall, would extend those rules to investment advisers at private funds and others.
“It is not a bad thing to understand who you are taking money from,” said Daniel Tannebaum, an expert on financial crimes at the consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
But the fate of the Enablers Act is uncertain. A comparable bill has yet to be introduced in the Senate and no committee has agreed to consider it in the House. The scope of the legislation could also pose a problem: Lawyers, public relations firms and art dealers would also be required to make the same checks, and the inclusion of so many professions increases the likelihood of opposition.
The holdings of rich and powerful Russians have come under intense scrutiny after the United States and other Western nations targeted their ability to conduct business after the invasion of Ukraine. Private funds in the United States are required to inform the Treasury if they hold assets belonging to Russians on the sanctions list, but they are not required to provide that information to other investors.
And oligarchs’ finances are deeply complex, which can obscure their role as the source of the money: The Times reported that Mr. Abramovich has invested several billion dollars in U.S. hedge funds and private equity funds through a variety of shell companies. In some cases, participants weren’t even aware of whose money they were helping to manage.
Much of Mr. Abramovich’s investing activity was facilitated by a small firm, Concord Management, based in suburban Tarrytown, N.Y. Concord Management previously said it recommended investments but did not directly manage any money. Representatives for Mr. Abramovich in London did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
In another example, Fort Ross Ventures, a California venture capital firm, has taken in investment dollars from Sberbank, a Russian state-owned bank. The U.S. and British governments have both imposed sanctions on Sberbank.
Ross Ventures said in a statement that it was “analyzing all international sanctions announced against Russia and Sberbank and will act in compliance with the applicable law.”
The proposals from Ms. Warren and Mr. Whitehouse as well as the FACT coalition involve revisions to a private fund disclosure requirement called Form PF — enacted in the wake of the financial crisis of more than a decade ago — that the S.E.C. is already considering revising.
The S.E.C. has proposed requiring hedge funds, private equity firms and other investment advisers that must file a Form PF to provide regulators with updates on “extraordinary investment losses” or large exposures to other investors that could have an impact on markets.
The FACT coalition has said the existence of money from questionable sources in private funds is also potentially destabilizing to the financial system, which is why regulators need to have access to real-time information about those investors.
Representatives for the professional associations that represent the hedge fund and private equity industry said placing further reporting and know-your-customer demands on private funds was largely unnecessary because neither industry historically has been a magnet for money laundering.
The associations note that even if a private fund manager in the United States is not doing its own background checks, many funds employ independent firms to administer their offshore investment vehicles to perform know-your-customer and anti-money laundering checks on foreign investors.
Bryan Corbett, chief executive officer for the Managed Funds Association, which represents more than 140 hedge funds and other investment funds, said private funds already “work with banks and specialized administrators and conduct standardized, rigorous due diligence on those investing in funds.”
In the case of offshore funds, many outside administrators are based in the Cayman Islands, which heed sanction orders by both the United States and Britain. When the British government imposed sanctions on Mr. Abramovich, many administrators moved to freeze funds in entities that could be tied to him.
Shortly before the sanctions orders were imposed, representatives for Mr. Abramovich had sought to restructure some of the entities that invested in those funds, according to three people briefed on the matter. But those maneuvers did not succeed in avoiding the sanctions orders, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter.
But critics have said the checks are not foolproof because many wealthy offshore investors like Mr. Abramovich have relied on shell companies to mask their ownership, and private fund managers are often not aware of who the beneficial owner of a shell company is.
“It is clear that substantial Russian money has infiltrated U.S. private investment markets, but we don’t know exactly how much, where it is invested, or who might be impacted by sanctions due to a lack of transparency,” Ms. Bean said.
A previous version of this article misspelled the surname of Oliver Wyman’s expert on financial crimes. He is Daniel Tannebaum, not Tannenbaum.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
At least two million children have now fled the war in Ukraine, with another 2.5 million displaced within country, according to newly released numbers from UNICEF. “The situation inside Ukraine is spiraling,” said the agency’s executive director, Catherine Russell. Earlier, the U.N.’s refugee agency released figures showing that more than four million people had fled the country since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24.
Reporting from Istanbul
Russia’s chief negotiator with Ukraine reaffirmed Russia’s interest in a peace deal along the lines of the one proposed at Tuesday’s talks in Istanbul. “Yesterday the Kyiv authorities, for the first time in all these past years, declared their readiness to reach an agreement with Russia,” the negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said in a televised statement. The Kremlin has sent mixed messages, with a spokesman saying earlier Wednesday that the Istanbul talks did not produce anything “very promising.”
A Ukrainian government delegation is visiting Israel for low-level meetings with Israeli diplomats, an Israeli official said. The meetings will not involve Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel, who is focused on leading the response to a recent wave of terrorist attacks, the official said.
China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, told his visiting Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that “Chinese-Russian relations have withstood the new test of constant international changes,” the Chinese foreign ministry said. Wang also said that China was willing to advance relations to “an even higher level.” His published comments did not mention the war.
Reporting from Brussels
Pop stars like Madonna, Miley Cyrus and Elton John will support a global fund-raising event that the E.U. and Canada are organizing for Ukraine on April 9 in Warsaw. The event’s goal will be to raise money for Ukrainian refugees and people displaced within Ukraine by the Russian invasion.
A NASA astronaut returned to Earth on Wednesday with two Russian counterparts, emerging in a world where cooperation between Russia and the United States to preserve the safety of astronauts and the International Space Station can no longer be taken for granted.
Mark Vande Hei, the NASA astronaut, who spent 355 days in space, and his Russian crewmates, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, flew home together in a Russian spacecraft, guided by Russian flight controllers. At the landing site in Kazakhstan, Mr. Vande Hei was met by a contingent of NASA and Russian personnel, a close collaboration between the two space agencies that has continued despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the tensions it has caused between Moscow and the West.
The space station was meant to be a marvel of post-Cold War amity between Moscow and Washington, but Russia has faced withering sanctions and mounting isolation from Western nations over its war in Ukraine. And the conflict is likely to test NASA’s ability to cooperate with its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos.
The two agencies appear to have worked together on Wednesday to bring the crew back from orbit, but their cooperation was preceded in recent weeks by tense outbursts. Dmitry Rogozin, who leads the Russian space program, has made bellicose statements on social media, and he shared a video that suggested that the Russians might leave Mr. Vande Hei behind.
Yet NASA officials have sidestepped what Mr. Rogozin has said and have insisted that nothing has changed.
“For the safety of our astronauts, the working relationship between NASA and our international partners continues,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said in his State of NASA speech on Monday. “And that includes the professional relationship between the cosmonauts and our astronauts.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
BERLIN — Germany began preparing for eventual shortages of natural gas on Wednesday, as the country’s economy minister pointed to growing concerns that Russia could cut off deliveries unless payments on existing contracts were made in rubles.
The government activated the first step of a national gas emergency plan that could, eventually, lead to the rationing of natural gas. Wednesday’s action — the first step, or “early warning stage” — involves setting up a crisis team of representatives from the federal and state governments, regulators and private industry, said Robert Habeck, the economy minister and vice chancellor.
The move illustrates the risk facing European countries that rely on Russian oil and gas as the war in Ukraine drags on. On Monday, energy ministers from the Group of 7 nations rejected a demand by Russia that the country be paid for its supplies in rubles. Several European energy companies have said payment in rubles would require a renegotiation of long-term contracts.
“We will not accept any breach of the private contracts,” Mr. Habeck said.
The dispute over natural gas comes as prices of energy, food and other staples rise across the continent as the war rages, snarling supply chains that were already under strain from the pandemic. On Wednesday, both Germany — the largest economy in Europe — and Spain reported inflation levels in March that touched on 40-year highs.
The German Council of Economic Experts, which advises the government in Berlin, warned in a report that its “outlook for the economy in Germany and the euro area has worsened sharply” because of the war in Ukraine.
The ongoing standoff of natural gas pricing is part of attempts from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to push back against a wide-ranging raft of economic sanctions aimed at punishing the Kremlin for invading neighboring Ukraine.
“We must increase precautionary measures to be prepared for an escalation on the part of Russia,” Mr. Habeck told reporters. “With the declaration of the early warning level, a crisis team has convened.”
The team will meet daily to monitor the situation and establish measures that could be taken if supplies start running low, which Mr. Habeck stressed is not yet the case. Only if the situation were critical enough would the government intervene to begin rationing natural gas supplies. In that case, according to a planning document, households and critical public services, including hospitals and emergency services, would be prioritized over industry.
Roughly half of Germany’s homes rely on natural gas for their heating, and 55 percent of the country’s gas comes from Russia. It arrives via overland pipelines through Ukraine and Poland and through the original Nord Stream pipeline under the Baltic Sea. A sister pipeline that was awaiting German approval, Nord Stream 2, was effectively frozen by the government two days before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine.
“Security of supply continues to be guaranteed,” Mr. Habeck said. “There are currently no supply bottlenecks. Nevertheless, we must increase precautionary measures to be prepared for an escalation on the part of Russia.”
Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy company, said on Wednesday it had continued to supply gas to Europe via Ukraine in line with requests from European consumers and that flows remained high. Gas was also flowing westward through a pipeline that crosses Poland from Russia for the first time since March 15, it said.
Poland has been lobbying its European Union partners to end their dependence on Russian energy as quickly as possible. The government in Warsaw has a pipeline linking the country to Norway that is expected to open by the end of the year, and capacities for liquefied natural gas would be increased. The country also announced it would stop importing Russian oil by the end of the year.
In Athens, the Greek energy ministry called an emergency meeting of all players in the country’s gas market to discuss alternative options for procuring natural gas in the event of an interruption in Russian gas supplies, the ministry said.
Moscow has not said when the demands for ruble payments will begin, but it is expected to present its plans later this week. But at a news conference on Wednesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, indicated that things might not move as quickly as some in Europe have feared.
“Payments and deliveries take some time,” Mr. Peskov said. “It doesn’t mean that everything that gets delivered tomorrow must be paid for by the evening. It is a process that is stretched in time.”
Russia’s top lawmaker warned on Wednesday that oil, grain, metals, fertilizer, coal and timber exports could also soon be priced the same way.
Mr. Habeck also urged German consumers and companies to begin making efforts to cut their energy use wherever possible. “Every kilowatt-hour counts,” he said.
Ivan Nechepurenko and Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.
Haley Willis and
New satellite imagery released by U.S.-based space technology company Maxar Technologies shows hundreds of people lining up outside a supermarket in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Tuesday.
The city has been under siege for weeks and is suffering from severe food and water shortages. Experts on siege warfare told the Times that starving a population is a tactic that can break the will of a besieged city.
The supermarket seen in the satellite image sits on the western edge of the city. Recent videos published by Russian state media, and verified by The New York Times, show that Russian forces have already pushed their way into the city center, to the area around Mariupol’s Drama Theater, which was destroyed on March 16.
Since surrounding Mariupol last month, Russian forces have destroyed the city’s power plants, cutting off electricity for residents as temperatures froze, and then the water and gas, essential for cooking and heating, according to the mayor, Vadym Boichenko.
The new satellite images further reveal the extent of the destruction in residential areas around the city. In Mariupol’s Zhovtnevyi district, near the drama theater, a comparison of imagery from before the war to the situation on Tuesday shows buildings and homes have been almost entirely razed.
While much of its prewar population of more than 500,000 have escaped, unconfirmed reports say that more than 2,000 people have died, and Mr. Boichenko said that about 160,000 are believed still to be trapped in the city. They are increasingly isolated. On Monday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was ceasing relief operations in Mariupol out of concern for the safety of its aid workers.
Mr. Boichenko said over the weekend that Ukrainian forces still control the center of Mariupol. But Russian forces continue to gain ground. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said on Tuesday that despite pockets of Ukrainian resistance, Mariupol “will likely fall to the Russians in days.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyMark Vande Hei, a NASA astronaut, has landed in Kazakhstan in a Soyuz capsule, returning to Earth from the International Space Station with two Russian astronauts.
Reporting from Geneva
The United Nations set up a commission of inquiry to investigate international crimes, including possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in the context of Russia’s “aggression against Ukraine.” The three-person panel, based in Vienna, will complement an investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The Morning Newsletter on Wednesday focused on the battle for Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Here is an excerpt.
The Donbas region, on the border with Russia, makes up about 9 percent of Ukraine’s landmass. Many of its residents have long felt at least as much of a connection to Russia as to the rest of Ukraine.
After Russia invaded a nearby region — Crimea — in 2014 and annexed it, Moscow-backed separatists in Donbas started their own war against Ukraine’s government. The separatists proclaimed the formation of two breakaway republics, and fighting has continued sporadically over the past eight years. Last month, President Vladimir Putin of Russia recognized both republics.
In recent weeks, Russia has made progress in taking over territory there. And it can hold that territory without the long, exposed supply lines that Ukraine has successfully attacked elsewhere. A battle over Donbas also gives Russia an opportunity to encircle and destroy a large chunk of Ukraine’s military.
Russia appears to be on the verge of being able to create such a pincer around these Ukrainian troops, coming from the east and the south. Experts refer to this Russian progress as a “land bridge” from Crimea to the Donbas.
The city of Mariupol, in southern Donbas, is a part of this story. Putin and his military planners have attacked Mariupol so brutally because it is the largest city in the potential land bridge that they do not yet control. It also has a major port.
Some analysts believe that Russia would struggle to maintain the land bridge for an extended period. Its military would face many of the same challenges — a dedicated opposition, dispersed over a large territory — that have bedeviled it elsewhere in Ukraine.
Others think a sustained land bridge is more likely.
“With its long history of starting wars disastrously but then winning them by piling in more men and matériel to overwhelm the defender through sheer brute force,” said Keir Giles of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Britain, “Russia has time on its side.”
Reporting from Istanbul
The Kremlin said the Russia-Ukraine talks in Turkey had not produced anything that was “very promising” or that constituted “any breakthroughs.” Its spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told reporters that although Ukraine’s proposals were “a positive factor,” reaching a deal would still take a lot of work.
Intense strikes continued overnight Wednesday on the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, the region’s governor said, hours after Russia vowed to sharply reduce its combat in that area and around the capital, Kyiv.
“Yesterday, the Russians publicly stated that they were reducing their offensive actions and activity in the Chernihiv and Kyiv areas,” the governor, Vyacheslav Chaus, said in a statement posted to the Telegram social media app. “Do we believe that? Of course not.”
The Chernihiv region, which is northeast of Kyiv and extends to the Belarusian border, has been the site of fierce fighting since the Russian invasion began last month. The area has been a target as Russian forces tried to advance toward Kyiv, surrounding Chernihiv and bombarding it with airstrikes and artillery fire.
On Wednesday, that remained unchanged despite the new promises, Mr. Chaus said.
“Civil infrastructure has been destroyed again. Libraries, shopping malls and other facilities have been destroyed, and many houses have been destroyed,” he said in the statement. “Because, in fact, the enemy roamed Chernihiv all night.”
Military analysis from the Institute for the Study of War in Washington suggested on Tuesday night that Russian forces might be preparing to take up defensive positions along the Snov River, east of the Chernihiv region. A report from the Ukrainian General Staff this week indicated that Russian forces had destroyed bridges in several towns along that river.
The humanitarian situation in the region has grown dire, with shortages of food, water and electricity. Russian attacks have also hit civilians, including a strike on a bread line in Chernihiv that left at least 10 people dead. Thousands of people in the city have been displaced from their homes, fleeing to Kyiv and elsewhere.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyReporting from Krakow, Poland
More than four million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began last month, according to the latest figures from the United Nations refugee agency.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
An industrial facility in the western region of Khmelnytsky was hit by three Russian strikes overnight, causing fires, the governor of the area said. Even as Russia has focused its attacks on the east and north of Ukraine, sporadic strikes on key infrastructure have continued across the country.
Reporting from Seoul
Germany declared an “early warning” of potential gas shortages, after Russia’s threat to cut off delivery unless payments are made in rubles. Germany’s economy minister said that supplies were currently stable but that the warning was a precaution, and urged people to conserve energy.
NEW DELHI — As international outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine boiled over, foreign ministers and envoys filed in to New Delhi, hoping to pull India off the fence and into clearer condemnation of Russia, its longtime ally.
The United States offered a mix of carrots and sticks: signaling a willingness to expand defense cooperation with India, long dependent on Moscow for a majority of its weapons, but also calling India a “shaky” member of an important alliance of democracies known as the Quad. Prime ministers of Japan and Australia, both part of that alliance, held urgent meetings with India’s leaders. Israel announced that its prime minister would arrive soon.
But when the United Nations again voted last week on a resolution critical of the Russian aggression, India stuck to abstaining. Then India further emphasized its relative neutrality: It also abstained from supporting a resolution that favored Russia. Instead, India called for an end to hostilities and respect for the territorial integrity of states — an expression of displeasure with Russia’s war without calling it out as an aggressor.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and its backlash offer the latest manifestations of India’s effort to chart its own path through rapid changes in the world order in recent years. At the center of it is an increasing clarity among India’s foreign policy strategists that the country cannot afford to take sides in what is increasingly a multipolar world, officials and analysts say.
India’s vulnerabilities — including a slowing economy that is struggling to meet the demands of a growing population and an ill-equipped military stretched on two fronts by territorial disputes with China and Pakistan — are such that it needs allies far and wide, even if it means New Delhi has to work with the harsh reality of those allies’ bitterly opposing each other.
After decades spent trying to delicately navigate the Cold War legacy of a bipolar world, it is facing even more complications, including the rise of an expansionist China on its doorstep.
“Our position is not that this is not our problem — our position is that we are for peace,” Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s foreign minister, told the country’s Parliament on the day India again chose to abstain from voting against Russia at the United Nations. “Indian foreign policy decisions are made in Indian national interest, and we are guided by our thinking, our views, our interests.”
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, is in China and meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi. China is hosting talks on Afghanistan with Russia, Pakistan and the United States, though Lavrov will likely discuss the war in Ukraine in his meeting with Wang.
Reporting from Seoul
U.S. citizens in Russia may be singled out for detention by Russian authorities, the State Department warned. The U.S. had previously issued a “Do Not Travel” advisory for Russia and urged citizens to leave immediately.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Russian forces will likely lean into heavy artillery and missile strikes after heavy losses and logistical issues, according to the latest British defense intelligence assessment. Some units are returning to Belarus and Russia to reorganize and resupply. Russian forces seem unable to fight on more than one front.
The authorities of Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland and the Czech Republic announced on Tuesday that they were expelling a total of 43 Russian envoys, in what the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs said was a coordinated security effort to counter Russian espionage.
Belgium expelled 21 members of staff at the Russian embassy in Brussels and at the consulate in Antwerp. Speaking to the parliament on Tuesday, Sophie Wilmès, the Belgian foreign minister, said that the diplomats were given two weeks to leave the country, in a decision she described as “related to our national security.”
Across the border, the government of the Netherlands announced on Tuesday that it was expelling 17 Russian officials who were accredited as diplomats, but were in fact “secretly active as intelligence officers.” The decision was based on intelligence from Belgian security services.
“The cabinet has decided to do this because of the threat to national security posed by this group,” the Dutch government said in a news release.
Ireland’s prime minister, Micheal Martin, told the Irish parliament on Tuesday that four senior Russian officials have been asked to leave Ireland, after his government had also received security advice from its intelligence officials. Simon Coveney, Ireland’s minister of foreign affairs, said in a statement on Tuesday that the envoys breached “international standards of diplomatic behavior,” namely the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Mr. Martin said that while Ireland was collaborating with other countries, all 27 E.U. members have yet to form a consensus on how to deal with Russian espionage.
Czech authorities said one staff member at the Russian Embassy in Prague had been declared persona non grata and was asked to leave the country within 72 hours.
The four countries have followed the United States and other E.U. nations, including Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Slovakia, which have also expelled Russian diplomats in recent weeks.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Russian ambassadors in several countries have issued statements describing the decisions as “arbitrary,” “provocative” and “groundless.” Over the past weeks, Russia had also expelled diplomats from some of these countries in an act of retaliation.
“Experience shows that Russia does not leave such measures unanswered. We cannot speculate on that, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is prepared for various scenarios that may occur in the near future,” Wopke Hoekstra, the Dutch foreign affairs minister, said.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment