Kyiv March 17, 2:49 a.m.
Moscow March 17, 3:49 a.m.
Washington March 16, 8:49 p.m.
Live Updates: Ukraine Counterattacks as Russia Pounds Civilian Targets
The fate of hundreds was uncertain after an attack destroyed a theater in Mariupol where they had sheltered. After Ukraine’s president pleaded with Congress for arms, President Biden approved $800 million in new military aid. He also called Vladimir V. Putin “a war criminal.”
A theater in the coastal Ukrainian city of Mariupol where hundreds of people had been sheltering was destroyed on Wednesday, according to local officials and documented by videos. The day of intensifying brutality began with Russian shelling in the northern city of Chernihiv, which killed at least 10 people as they waited in line for bread.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made an impassioned appeal in a virtual address to the U.S. Congress, casting the defense of his nation as a battle for the cause of democracy. As he spoke, his country’s forces staged counterattacks near the capital, Kyiv, and the Russian-occupied city of Kherson as battle-depleted Russian troops continued their attempt to encircle major cities.
President Biden, responding to Mr. Zelensky’s appeal, announced that the United States would send an additional $800 million in security aid to help Ukraine. The United States has provided at least 600 Stinger antiaircraft missiles and about 2,600 Javelin antitank missiles, in addition to small arms, according to a senior White House official.
And Mr. Biden sharpened his rhetoric regarding Russia’s president, telling a reporter that he believed Vladimir V. Putin was “a war criminal.” A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, called the president’s comments “unacceptable and unforgivable,” according to state-run media.
But Mr. Biden stopped well short of agreeing to a more direct military intervention that Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly requested, including for the United States and NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Here are some of the day’s major developments:
In Mariupol, an assistant to the mayor, said that about 1,000 people had been inside the Drama Theater when it was hit by a Russian attack, and it was not immediately clear how many had survived. Russia’s Defense Ministry denied carrying out the attack. A satellite image taken days earlier showed that the Russian word for “children” had been written in large white letters in front of and behind the theater.
Mr. Biden detailed the additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, saying Russia’s invasion had caused “appalling devastation.” The announcement came after Mr. Zelensky, invoking the attacks of Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11, addressed lawmakers on a large screen in a movie theater-style auditorium at the Capitol, and showed them graphic images of the war.
Among the major cities Russian forces continued to shell was Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s east. The city’s emergency services agency said at least 500 civilians had been killed in the shelling.
Russian officials said that their negotiations with Ukrainian delegates over a cease-fire had shown “progress on a number of positions” and that there was “hope that a certain compromise can be reached.” In Moscow, Mr. Putin delivered a far more hard-line message, denigrating pro-Western Russians as “scum and traitors,” and claiming that Western nations were trying to “cancel Russia.”
The mayor of Melitopol, who was dragged from his office with bag over his head last week by Russian troops, has been freed and is safe, according to a Ukrainian official, after days without word of his condition. The government in Kyiv had decried his detention as a kidnapping.
NATO defense ministers directed military commanders to draw up detailed plans to reinforce deterrence in the alliance’s eastern flank. The alliance’s secretary general said, “our new posture should include substantially more forces in the eastern part of the alliance, at higher readiness.”
The rhetorical clash between the United States and Russia escalated on Wednesday when President Biden said that he believed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a “war criminal,” and a top Russian official said the comment was “unacceptable and unforgivable.”
Mr. Biden was responding to a reporter’s question as he was leaving an event at the White House. Later, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters that Mr. Biden was “speaking from his heart and speaking from what he’s seen on television.”
In the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, there have been attacks on refugee escape routes, heavily populated civilian neighborhoods, schools, hospitals and, on Wednesday, a theater that was being used as a bomb shelter.
On Wednesday, an International Criminal Court prosecutor, Karim Khan, held a virtual meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky while in Ukraine. Late last month, Mr. Khan said he was seeking authorization to open an investigation into the war, and that his office had already found “a reasonable basis” to believe war crimes had been committed. He said it “had identified potential cases that would be admissible.”
The Kremlin responded to Mr. Biden’s comment on Wednesday with a longstanding critique that it was Western countries, rather than Russia, who were threatening world peace.
Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, told the state-run news outlet Tass that Mr. Biden’s remarks were “unacceptable and unforgivable on the part of the head of a state, whose bombs have killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world.”
Last month, Mr. Putin spoke to reporters in his country about “the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently rudely and unceremoniously from year to year.”
Mr. Biden’s unscripted remarks on Wednesday echo messages U.S. officials have been making recently.
Vice President Kamala Harris was in Warsaw on March 10, a day after an apparent Russian strike destroyed a maternity ward in Mariupol. Would the United States support an investigation into accusations Russia committed war crimes, a reporter asked Ms. Harris.
“Absolutely,” Ms. Harris said, though she did not directly accuse Russia of committing war crimes.
Later that same day, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the BBC NewsHour that Russia’s attacks on civilians “constitute war crimes; there are attacks on civilians that cannot be justified by any — in any way whatsoever.”
Mr. Biden has long criticized Mr. Putin, including in a television interview with ABC News that was broadcast last year. In the interview, when Mr. Biden was asked whether he thought Mr. Putin was a “killer,” he responded, “Mmm hmm, I do.”
The Kremlin recalled its ambassador to Washington after those remarks aired, and Mr. Putin quoted a Russian schoolyard rhyme in response, saying, “When I was a child, when we argued in the courtyard, we said the following: ‘If you call someone names, that’s really your name.’”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on Thursday afternoon, according to a Security Council diplomat. The meeting was called by the U.S. and the five other European members of the council (Britain, France, Albania, Ireland and Norway). The U.N.’s agencies for refugees, health and political affairs will brief the council on the worsening humanitarian situation in Ukraine and the status of the more than three million refugees, the diplomat said. Russia and China, like the U.S., Britain and France, are permanent members of the council.
Raphael Minder and
MADRID — Spain, which has pledged to seize the suspected superyachts of Russian oligarchs targeted for sanctions imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on Wednesday impounded the third such vessel, one of the world’s biggest superyachts, in Spanish territorial waters this week.
The ship was impounded in the Spanish port of Tarragona, pending an inspection to establish its exact ownership, Spain’s transport ministry said in a statement. The ship, called the Crescent, was registered in the Cayman Islands.
The Spanish authorities have taken similar measures against two other yachts, the Valerie, which was in a maintenance yard in Barcelona, and Lady Anastasia, a yacht that was moored in Port Adriano, on the Spanish island of Majorca.
Spain’s hunt for Russian-owned superyachts comes after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the seizure of the Valerie on Monday and warned that “there will be more.”
The transport ministry said on Wednesday that if the inspections confirmed that the yachts belonged to people on the sanctions list drawn up by the European Union, they would remain fully immobilized.
The Valerie is suspected of being indirectly owned by Sergei Chemezov, the head of Rostec, a Russian industrial conglomerate that also makes military technology and equipment. The vessel was one of four Russian-owned superyachts that had recently been undergoing work at MB92, a shipyard that has helped establish Barcelona as one of the main hubs for the extravagant yachts owned by the super wealthy.
The Crescent, valued by the SuperYachtFan website at $600 million, appears to be the sister ship of the slightly larger, slightly more expensive Scheherazade, a 459-foot superyacht that U.S. officials said could be associated with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Both were built at the same German shipyard, Lurssen, where the Crescent was given the project name “Thunder,” while the Scheherazade, put into service about two years later, was called “Lightning.” Both share the same interior and exterior designers and have been managed by a Monaco company, Imperial Yachts, which caters to Russian oligarchs.
The two yachts also share another, unusual characteristic: Photos of the Crescent taken on March 13 by a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, Alex Finley, in the Spanish port where it was impounded appear to show that the Crescent conceals its nameplate while in port, just like the Scheherazade.
Track information on the Crescent from MarineTraffic, a maritime data provider, shows that Crescent spends most of its time in the Mediterranean, cruising between Spain, Italy, France and Montenegro, a popular destination for the yachts of Russian oligarchs. The 445-foot long Crescent, one of the 20 largest superyachts, has been at the Tarragona marina since early November.
Last week Italian police said they were investigating the ownership of the Scheherazade, which is in dry dock at a port on the Tuscany coast.
The Lady Anastasia, which was impounded on the island of Mallorca, is believed to be owned by Alexander Mikheev, a Russian arms dealer. In late February, the police on Majorca detained a Ukrainian member of the yacht’s crew because he had been planning to sink the vessel, in retaliation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was released on bail, pending an investigation.
In early March, the French authorities seized a yacht in a yard in La Ciotat, which they said was linked to Igor Sechin, the chief executive of the state oil company Rosneft and a former deputy prime minister of Russia. The French yard is owned by MB92, the Spanish company that owns the yard in Barcelona.
MB92 said at the time that it was cooperating with the French authorities and would respond in due course to any possible further sanctions against Russians. “We are continuously monitoring the decisions taken by the Spanish authorities, the European Union and the U.S. as they come into effect,” the company said.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
The city council in Mariupol said about 11,000 people were able to leave the besieged city on Wednesday. Russian forces have encircled the city, which has been without heat, food or clean water for two weeks. Repeated attempts at mass evacuation had failed as they came under attack by Russian forces.
Reporting from Warsaw, Poland
Warszawa Centralna, the Polish capital’s main railway station, has become a hub for Ukrainian refugees in the city. Whether they are passing through or planning to stay in the city, refugees can find food and water at the station, as well as a cadre of over 3,000 volunteers working to assist them.
The United Nations’ highest court on Wednesday ordered Russia to immediately cease military actions in Ukraine, a largely symbolic ruling that was nevertheless welcomed by the Ukrainian government.
Ukraine had filed a case with the International Court of Justice, asking its judges to issue an injunction demanding that Russia end its violent incursion in the country.
In Wednesday’s 13-2 vote, the judges ordered Russia to “immediately suspend” military operations. The two opposing votes were cast by judges from Russia and China.
The ruling, while legally binding, is not expected to have an impact on the war. Moscow is not expected to comply and boycotted the court’s first hearing in the case.
Still, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, hailed the ruling.
“Ukraine gained a complete victory in its case against Russia at the International Court of Justice,” he wrote on Twitter.
The ruling comes as an isolated Russia has been increasingly shunning western institutions.
Russia gave formal notice on Tuesday that it would withdraw from the Council of Europe, which was established in 1949 as Europe’s main institution governing human rights.
Russia was suspended from the Council on Feb. 25, the day after it invaded Ukraine. Marija Pejcinovic Buric, the organization’s secretary general, said earlier this month that the war “goes against everything we stand for and is a violation of our statute and of the European Convention on Human Rights.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against the coronavirus will have to wait longer for a decision on emergency use authorization by the World Health Organization.
A W.H.O. official said on Wednesday that the organization was forced to delay the assessment process for the vaccine because of difficulties created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We were supposed to go do inspections in Russia on the 7th of March, and these inspections were postponed for a later date,” said Dr. Mariângela Simão, an assistant director general of the W.H.O., at a news conference in Geneva. “The assessment, along with inspections, have been affected because of the situation.”
Dr. Simão said that obstacles to booking flights into Russia and using credit cards while there were among the many issues confronting the agency’s inspectors. After Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, most Western countries closed their airspace to Russian aircraft, and Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in Russia.
Dr. Simão said a new timetable would be drawn up as soon as possible.
The two-dose Sputnik V was developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute, part of Russia’s Ministry of Health. Russia began distributing the vaccine in the fall of 2020, and regulators in more than 70 countries have approved it for use, according to the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which backed the vaccine’s development.
But Sputnik V has not yet been approved by the European Union’s main drug regulator or the World Health Organization. Russians and other travelers who have received the vaccine have had a difficult time entering the European Union or the United States.
Though President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has called Sputnik a medical breakthrough, the country repeatedly failed to follow international procedure and provide all the data foreign regulators need to assess safety of a vaccine that was rushed through large-scale clinical trials to speed its release in the fall of 2020. An E.U. health official accused Russia’s government last fall of repeatedly delaying inspections of Russian facilities. But Russian officials insist that the delays in the approval process have been political.
Russia cleared a hurdle in February 2021 with the publication in the British medical journal The Lancet of late-stage trial results showing that Sputnik V vaccine was safe and highly effective. Even then, many countries, including Brazil and South Africa, have rejected using it. Ukraine also does not recognize Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.
The United Nations-backed Covax program that distributes vaccines globally to low- and moderate-income nations cannot use vaccines that are not approved by the W.H.O.
About half of Russian adults have been fully vaccinated, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford.
ODESSA, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces carried out counter-offensives against Russian positions on Wednesday, seeking to inflict what one official called “maximum losses,” even as the invading Russian military stepped up its lethal attacks on cities.
In Mariupol, an airstrike destroyed a theater where about 1,000 people had taken shelter, according to city and regional administrators, and photos and videos posted online showed the burning wreckage of the building.
Officials in Mariupol, the besieged southern city that has suffered the most intense bombardment, said they could not yet estimate the number of casualties among civilians, who might have been in a bomb shelter beneath the theater. The strike came as 11,000 residents evacuated the city on Wednesday, according to its city council.
After falling back under a relentless pounding over the war’s first weeks, Ukrainian troops tried to gain some momentum with counterattacks on Russian positions outside of Kyiv and in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, in Ukraine’s south, a senior Ukrainian military official said.
Rather than seek to regain lost territory, Ukrainian forces tried to cause as much destruction and death as possible, attacking Russian troops and equipment with tanks, fighter jets and artillery, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.
“In the task of inflicting maximum losses, we’ve done excellently,” the official said.
American intelligence officials said their conservative estimate of Russian troop deaths was at least 7,000, a staggering number that carries implications for both combat effectiveness and morale. Western defense and intelligence agencies estimate that Ukraine also has suffered thousands of combatants killed.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed Congress via video link on Wednesday, asking for more aid, and President Biden promised more weaponry. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia falsely accused Ukraine of seeking weapons of mass destruction and asserted that what he called an “economic blitzkrieg” by the West, aimed at destroying Russia, had failed.
Mr. Putin also sneered at Russians who oppose the war, saying the Russian people could distinguish “true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just to spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.”
In a televised videoconference with top officials, he once again falsely described the government in Kyiv, led by a Jewish president and prime minister, as being “pro-Nazi” and on its way to acquiring nuclear weapons. “Their aim, of course, would have been Russia,” he said.
And then he went deeper into unreality, accusing the government in Kyiv of disregard for the suffering of the Ukrainian people that his own forces were bombing every day.
“The fact that people are dying, that hundreds of thousands, millions have become refugees, that there is a real humanitarian catastrophe in cities held by neo-Nazis and armed criminals,” he said. “They’re indifferent.”
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held a third consecutive day of talks on a possible settlement to the conflict, and in typical fashion, the Kremlin left a muddy picture of its intentions. Mr. Putin’s bellicose, often false statements, larded with World War II references, clashed with more conciliatory comments from his underlings.
But little appeared to have changed on the battlefield. The war in Ukraine, about to enter its fourth week, has become a grinding daily slog with little evidence of significant gains for either side.
Details of the Ukrainian offensive could not be fully established independently, though several top Ukrainian officials, including key aides to Mr. Zelensky, confirmed that the counterattacks were underway.
In Kyiv, missile strikes and heavy artillery sounded overnight and in the early morning on Wednesday in exchanges in the outlying suburbs that were notably heavier and louder than in previous days. Two people were wounded and a residential building was damaged in a strike that landed near the city zoo, the second time in two days that shells have landed close to the city center.
Satellite pictures from Tuesday showed heavy black smoke above the Kherson airport, where the senior military official said Ukrainian forces had targeted parked Russian military aircraft.
Kherson was the first (and so far, only) major city to be fully taken over by Russian forces, which have turned it into a forward military base from which they have launched attacks on surrounding cities and villages, according to Ukrainian officials. On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had taken control of the entire Kherson region, giving Russian forces a significant foothold in southern Ukraine that Ukraine’s military will have difficulty dislodging.
Even so, neither side can be said to have made much progress militarily. The Institute for the Study of War, which has been tracking developments closely, noted in a Tuesday evening assessment that, for nearly two weeks, Russian forces have not been conducting extensive simultaneous attacks that would allow them to seize control of multiple areas at once in Ukraine. And they are unlikely to do so in the next week, it said.
In the absence of significant military gains, Russian forces on Wednesday continued a campaign of terror against Ukrainian civilians.
At least 10 people were killed when a Russian strike hit a bread line in Chernihiv, a city north of Kyiv that has been subject to intense shelling by Russian troops seeking to move on the capital. Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said in a statement that the attack occurred at about 10 a.m. as people were lined up at a grocery store. Photos released by the prosecutor’s office showed several bodies scattered around a dirt yard.
Using heavy artillery, cruise missiles and fighter jets, Russian forces have systematically targeted civilian areas with no military presence, striking apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in cities and villages all over a broad front in the north, east and south of Ukraine. The attacks may have killed thousands of civilians, though reaching a precise count of the dead has been impossible.
Saying it was “profoundly concerned” by Russia’s use of force, the International Court of Justice ordered Russia on Wednesday to suspend its military operations immediately, pending its full review of a case submitted by Ukraine last month. However, the order was not expected to lead to any immediate cessation in the onslaught.
According to the United Nations, at least 726 civilians have been killed, including 64 children, since the invasion began on Feb. 24, though its figures do not include areas where fighting has been heaviest, like Kharkiv and Mariupol. In Mariupol alone, which has been turned into a hellscape of burning and decimated buildings, local authorities say at least 2,400 have been killed, and probably far more.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, the municipal emergency services agency first reported on Wednesday that 500 civilians had been killed since the war began, but then revised that number to 100 later in the day. In any case, the agency said in statement on Facebook, the true number of deaths could be much higher, noting that emergency workers were continuing to scour the rubble of residential neighborhoods for more bodies, often under fire.
Mr. Zelensky’s appeal to Congress on Wednesday was in part a desperate effort to obtain the weaponry and defenses capable of fending off such attacks. Central to this appeal was a call for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Ukraine, aimed at preventing Russian fighter jets, which cause some of the most severe death and destruction, from operating over Ukrainian territory. “Close the sky” has become a rallying cry for Ukrainian officials and regular citizens.
“Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people,” Mr. Zelensky said.
Knowing that the request had little chance of being approved, given that it would thrust American pilots into direct confrontation with the Russians, Mr. Zelensky quickly pivoted to something to which Republicans and Democrats have been far more receptive: asking for more weapons to enable his people to keep up the fight themselves.
Mr. Biden announced $800 million in new military aid to Ukraine, including antiaircraft and antitank missiles, body armor, vehicles, drones and small arms, bringing to $2 billion the amount delivered or pledged since early last year. But as expected, he did not offer to deliver warplanes or enforce a no-fly zone.
The United States and its allies have relied primarily on financial sanctions that are already devastating the Russian economy.
Russian officials close to the talks said Wednesday there had been signs of progress, though even there, the picture was unclear. They said the idea of a neutral Ukraine, with a status like that of Sweden or Austria, was on the table, which their Ukrainian counterparts disputed.
Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, told a Russian television network that the status of the Russian language and Russian news outlets in Ukraine were under discussion, and that “there are concrete formulas that are close to being agreed on.”
Michael Schwirtz reported from Odessa, Ukraine; Valerie Hopkins from Lviv, Ukraine; and Carlotta Gall from Kyiv. Reporting was contributed by Anton Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Oil tankers from around the world — including several chartered by U.S.-based companies — are continuing to transport millions of barrels of oil out of Russian ports, a top adviser to Ukraine’s president said, as he made a plea to the White House to restrict all trade in Russian oil by American companies.
In an interview from Kyiv overnight on Tuesday, Oleg Ustenko, an economic adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, also urged the chief executives of Western oil and gas companies to pledge to not handle oil from Russia, and to hire independent accounting firms to verify that no Russian oil is being loaded onto their ships.
“We’re talking about supplying Russia with bloody money that they’re using to feed a military machine that is killing my people,” Mr. Ustenko said. “We need a full embargo, a full boycott. All Russian ports must be closed.”
Mr. Ustenko said American companies were abetting that trade. He cited as an example a tanker chartered by Chevron, the U.S. oil giant, which left a Russian port on Friday en route to the Netherlands.
In a statement, Chevron said the oil aboard the ship originated in Kazakhstan.
Agnia Grigas, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on energy and geopolitics in Eastern Europe, pointed out, “If that oil was bought from Russian traders, the implications are the same,” because the net effect would be that Russian traders would be making a profit from the transactions.
Reporting from Washington
Asked if President Biden’s comment that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is a "war criminal" marked a change in the U.S. assessment of events in Ukraine, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Mr. Biden was “responding to what he has seen on television. We have all seen barbaric acts, horrific acts, by a foreign dictator in a country that is threatening and taking the lives of civilians.”
Videos posted to social media on Wednesday show that the Drama Theater of Mariupol, where civilians were seen sheltering in recent days, had been largely destroyed. Walls on two sides of the building, and large parts of the roof, had collapsed.
About 1,000 people had been inside but it was not immediately clear how many had survived, said Pyotr Andryuschenko, an assistant to the mayor.
“We cannot estimate how many died,” he said, because shelling had continued without stopping. “No one can get there physically to order assistance to people or determine how many survived,” he said. “We hope at least some people survived.”
Mr. Andryuschenko said that people were sheltering in all parts of the theater, including the basement and the ground floor. “This is an inhuman crime,” he said.
The city administration said on Telegram that hundreds of people were hiding at the site, and that it was “impossible to estimate the scale” of the strike. “Information about the victims is being clarified,” it said.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the top Ukrainian official in the Donetsk region, blamed a Russian airstrike for the destruction. Russia’s Defense Ministry denied carrying out the attack.
Russian forces have besieged Mariupol, a strategic port city on the Sea of Azov, for over a week, cutting off civilians from food, water, electricity and heat. Bombs, missiles and artillery have hit apartment blocks, stores and a hospital complex, including a maternity ward, and local officials have struggled to count the dead.
The Azov Battalion, a far-right military unit that has become a subset of the Ukrainian National Guard, posted a video from the theater last Thursday. The New York Times reviewed the video, which shows the theater packed with families and young children. At one point a baby can be heard crying. The video also shows an armed man in military uniform several times.
The Times reviewed satellite images showing that the word “children” had been written in Russian in large white letters in front of and behind the theater. The words were written around Saturday.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
President Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday referred to pro-Western Russians as “scum and traitors” who needed to be removed from society, describing the war in Ukraine as part of an existential clash with the United States and setting the stage for an ever fiercer crackdown at home and even more aggression abroad.
Comparing the West to Nazi Germany, the Russian leader laced his speech with derision for the “political beau monde” in Europe and the United States, and for the “slave-like” Russians who supported it. It was a far more hard-line message than one delivered earlier in the day by Mr. Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, who said that Russia saw “a certain hope that a compromise can be reached” with Ukraine to end the war.
The clash in tone indicated that even as Mr. Putin was directing his officials to explore a negotiated end to a war in which Russia faced far heavier resistance than the Kremlin had anticipated, he was prepared to keep raising the stakes in his conflict with the West.
And in reserving his toughest language for fellow Russians who disagreed with him, Mr. Putin opened the door to a new wave of repression that, analysts fear, could hit a much broader swath of society than the activists and journalists the Kremlin has targeted in recent months.
“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths,” Mr. Putin said. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
The beginnings of a new crackdown quickly emerged. The authorities announced a criminal case against a popular lifestyle blogger, Veronika Belotserkovskaya, for antiwar Instagram posts that “discredited the state authorities and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.” The government blocked access to the website of BBC News and promised that this was “only the beginning of the response to the information war unleashed by the West against Russia.”
“The struggle we are waging is a struggle for our sovereignty, for the future of our country and our children,” Mr. Putin said.
Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of a political analysis firm, R. Politik, said Mr. Putin was signaling to law enforcement authorities across the country that they should target “all spheres of society that show any sympathy to the Western way of life.”
“This speech was, in part, an informal and indirect sanctioning of mass repression,” Ms. Stanovaya said. “His speech was scary — very scary.”
Mr. Putin insisted in his speech, which he delivered at the beginning of a televised videoconference with senior officials, that Russia’s military tactics in Ukraine had “fully justified themselves.” But even pro-Kremlin analysts said that Russia was becoming bogged down in a bloodier conflict than anticipated — because Mr. Putin had apparently believed that many Ukrainian soldiers would lay down their arms rather than fight.
“The military operation is, no question, tougher going than had been expected,” said Sergey Markov, a pro-Kremlin commentator who appears frequently on state television. “It was expected that 30 to 50 percent of the Ukrainian Armed Forces would switch over to Russia’s side. No one is switching over.”
As a result, Mr. Putin appears to be probing for an exit that would fall short of his original aim to topple the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — even as his military continues to pound Ukrainian cities. Russian and Ukrainian officials spoke by video link for a third straight day on Wednesday, and Mr. Putin’s lead negotiator said there had been “a certain progress on a number of positions, but not all of them.”
But Mr. Putin has made it clear that he sees Ukraine as only one battlefield in his wider conflict with the West — a fight, he reiterated on Wednesday, that he sees as existential.
Ms. Stanovaya said that Mr. Putin appeared to be leaving the unpleasant work of negotiating a compromise end to the war to his officials, while himself setting the stage for a bigger showdown ahead with the West and with pro-Western Russians. It was also possible, she said, that the negotiations were a bluff to buy the Kremlin time to prepare for an assault on Kyiv.
“It’s dirty work to negotiate with Nazis,” she said, sarcastically channeling Mr. Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine’s leaders. “He’s got little to be happy about in this situation.”
The West, Mr. Putin said in his speech Wednesday, was waging “total, undisguised” war against Russia with an “economic blitzkrieg” as well as “political and informational means.” In a blunt acknowledgment of the pain caused by Western sanctions, he said Russia had to prepare for a “temporary rise in inflation and unemployment” as it embarked on “deep, structural changes of our economy.”
Mr. Putin claimed that the West was echoing the Nazis’ antisemitic pogroms in trying to “cancel” Russia by banning “Russian music, culture and literature.”
“There is only one goal,” Mr. Putin said. “The destruction of Russia.”
Mr. Putin said he would fight back — including by cracking down on the West’s supporters inside Russia. He has spoken in years past about a “fifth column” of treacherous Russians whose allegiances are with the West. But on Wednesday, he reprised that theme with a new intensity, suggesting that any Russian with ties to the West could be considered a traitor.
“They will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on national traitors, on those who earn money here, with us, but live there,” Mr. Putin said. “And ‘live’ not even in the geographical sense of the word, but in their thoughts, in their slave-like consciousness.”
Shortly after the speech, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced it had launched criminal cases against several Russians under the law Mr. Putin signed this month potentially criminalizing any deviation from the official narrative of what the Kremlin calls a “special military operation,” not a war. By naming Ms. Belotserkovskaya, the lifestyle blogger, as a suspect, the authorities made it clear that anyone could be a target in this wave of repression.
The government also blocked access to BBC News, making the British broadcaster the most prominent Western media outlet to be hit by the Kremlin’s campaign to prevent ordinary Russians from seeing independent news reporting about the war.
“An unprecedented information campaign has been unleashed, which involves global social networks and all Western media, the objectivity and independence of which turned out to be just a myth,” Mr. Putin said.
Reporting from Washington
President Biden told reporters that he believed President Vladimir V. Putin was responsible for war crimes. Responding to a question as he departed an event in the East Room for an event on the prevention of violence against women, he said, “I think he is a war criminal.” It is the first time the administration has specifically accused the Russian president of war crimes during the invasion of Ukraine.
BRUSSELS — NATO defense ministers on Wednesday directed military commanders to draw up detailed plans to reinforce deterrence in the alliance’s eastern flank in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Final decisions will be taken at a summit meeting in late June, according to the NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg.
“On land, our new posture should include substantially more forces in the eastern part of the alliance, at higher readiness, with more prepositioned equipment and supplies,” he told a news conference after the meeting. Mr. Stoltenberg said there also must be enhanced air support, air defenses and naval presence to “reset deterrence.”
He said the “total new security reality” effectively rendered irrelevant a 1997 agreement with Russia, known as the NATO-Russia Founding Act, not to put substantial NATO forces in countries once part of the Soviet bloc.
“We will do what is necessary, and the NATO-Russia Founding Act is not something that will create problems or a hindrance for NATO to make the necessary decisions,” he said.
The alliance already has reinforced its presence in member states near Russia and Ukraine with an extra 50,000 troops in addition to national armies, NATO officials said. That makes a total of nearly 180,000 troops on the eastern flank. There are about 100,000 American troops in Europe alone, Mr. Stoltenberg said. There has also been enhanced air policing and more ships at sea.
Leaders are widely expected to make these deployments permanent at the June meeting despite the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which the alliance likely will not abandon but simply ignore.
New deployments will require considerably more investment in military spending by member states, Mr. Stoltenberg noted, as well as more money for NATO’s own budget.
While some member states, like Poland and the Baltic nations, want to do more to help Ukraine defend itself, Mr. Stoltenberg insisted that the alliance was united in refusing to risk putting any NATO-country troops in Ukraine or trying to create a no-fly zone, which the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been demanding.
But the defense ministers agreed to continue to support Ukraine with more military equipment, money and humanitarian aid, Mr. Stoltenberg said.
As for suggestions that Mr. Zelensky might be willing to abandon Ukraine’s desire to join NATO, Mr. Stoltenberg said that any such decision would be up to the democratically elected leaders of Ukraine.
Asked if Russia could win the war, Mr. Stoltenberg cautioned against speculation. He praised “the courage and capabilities” of the Ukrainian army and people, but said: “At the same time Russia remains a world military power. They have many different types of weapons, and therefore I think it’s too early to speculate about the outcome.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The satirical series “Servant of the People,” which starred Volodymyr Zelensky as the president of Ukraine before he was elected to office in real life, has returned to Netflix, the streaming service said Wednesday.
In the show, which debuted in 2015, Mr. Zelensky plays a teacher who wins Ukraine’s presidency in a surprise election after he is caught on camera ranting about the country’s corruption. It was last available on Netflix in February 2021.
“More satirical than ‘The West Wing,’ less caustic than ‘Veep,’ with higher stakes than in ‘Parks and Recreation,’ ‘Servant of the People’ is a what-if fable about an ordinary citizen vaulted into power,” James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for The New York Times, wrote in a review of the sitcom.
Much like his fictional character, when Mr. Zelensky ran for president in 2019, he had no prior experience in politics. He deployed a charmingly populist campaign that utilized social media and evoked his sitcom role so strongly that he named his political party “Servant of the People,” after the show. He won the (real) election in a landslide. But upon taking office, many European officials did not take Mr. Zelensky seriously.
Following Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky has emerged as a national hero, due in part to his rhetorical talent and use of video to deliver key messages directly to his people and to the world.
Mr. Zelensky made a direct appeal to the United States Congress on Wednesday, invoking U.S. history as he implored American leaders to come to his country’s aid as it seeks to hold off the Russian invasion.
Reporting from Odessa, Ukraine
Ukrainian forces readied defensive positions in Odessa, digging trenches and installing Czech hedgehogs as they continued to prepare for a Russian attack on the strategic port city.
The mayor of the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, who was dragged from his office with a bag over his head last week by Russian troops, has been freed, according to Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian presidential administration.
Mayor Ivan Fyodorov, 33, had not been heard from for days after his detention, which Ukrainian officials decried as a kidnapping.
In a message Wednesday on Telegram, Mr. Yermak said that Mr. Fyodorov was safe and had spoken to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Mr. Yermak provided no details about Mr. Fyodorov’s whereabouts, his ordeal or how he was freed.
The Russian news agency Tass reported on Saturday that the prosecutor’s office in Luhansk, one of the breakaway areas recognized by Moscow, was preparing terrorism charges against Mr. Fyodorov, accusing him of raising money for the far-right group Right Sector.
That day, hundreds of his townspeople had poured out into the streets of Melitopol in an expression of outrage and defiance, despite the presence of Russian troops.
“Return the mayor!” they shouted, witnesses said and videos showed. “Free the mayor!”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Olga Smirnova, who has for over a decade been a star of the Bolshoi, the Russian company whose name is synonymous with ballet, has left.
In a move likely to shake up the ballet world, Ms. Smirnova, 30, on Wednesday announced that she had joined the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, becoming one of the most significant Russian cultural figures to leave the country because of its invasion of Ukraine.
Ms. Smirnova, who since 2016 has been a principal soloist at the Bolshoi, said in a news release that she had been thinking about leaving for some time. “It’s just that the current circumstances accelerated this process.”
The ballerina has been vocal in her opposition to the war, a position that made it untenable for her to keep working in the country, the release said. The Kremlin has clamped down fiercely on free speech, and earlier this month, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, passed a law making it illegal to spread “false information” about the war, punishable with up to 15 years in prison.
Ms. Smirnova published a lengthy post this month to Telegram, the messaging app popular in Russia, in which she said she opposed the war “with all the fibers of my soul.” One of her grandfathers was Ukrainian, she said, but insisted that was not the sole reason for her opposition. “I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia,” she said, adding, “We may not be at the epicenter of the military conflict, but we cannot remain indifferent to this global catastrophe.”
A spokeswoman for the Bolshoi, which still lists Ms. Smirnova among its dancers on its website, said it had no comment on her departure, except to confirm that it was a personal decision.
Ms. Smirnova is one of a number of dancers who have left, at least temporarily, the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky Ballet, Russia’s other major company, since the invasion of Ukraine began. But most of those other dancers, including the Italian Jacopo Tissi, the Brazilian David Motta Soares and the British dancer Xander Parish, have not been Russian.
In an interview from Tallinn, Estonia, last week, Mr. Parish, who dances for the Mariinsky, told The Sunday Times, a British newspaper, that he intended to focus on international guest appearances for the next few months. “It’s hard to imagine not being able to go back, but I just need to keep positive and look for opportunities,” he said.
On Wednesday, the Dutch National Ballet said that Victor Caixeta, a Brazilian soloist at the Mariinsky Ballet, had also joined the company. “The current circumstances have meant I’ve had to make the hard decision of leaving Russia — the place I’ve called home for almost five years,” Mr. Caixeta said in a statement.
Leila Guchmazova, a Russian dance critic, said in a Telegram message that Ms. Smirnova’s decision to leave was like “a bomb” in the Russian ballet world. Since the Soviet Union ended, she said, “dancers left the Bolshoi to find new abilities and better positions” but Ms. Smirnova, who had it all, departed because she “prefers to express her opinion.”
Ms. Smirnova’s fans in Russia, including in the sponsors’ circles, will be impressed by the decision, Ms. Guchmazova said, but added that it was “very important” to realize that the mood at the Bolshoi toward the “special operation in Ukraine,” as it is known in Russia, is far from the government’s position. Vladimir Urin, the Bolshoi’s general director, signed a petition against the operation soon after it began, she said.
There have been other upheavals at the Bolshoi because of the war. Alexei Ratmansky, the Bolshoi’s former artistic director and now artist in residence at American Ballet Theater, was preparing a new ballet for the company in Moscow when the invasion began and he immediately left. The project is officially on hold, but Mr. Ratmansky told The New York Times that he doubted he would return to Russia to work “if Putin is still president.”
Ms. Smirnova has been a star at the Bolshoi almost since she joined the company in 2011, making her departure all the more notable. In an article in 2013 in The New York Times, Ms. Smirnova was described as “a rarity, a ballerina whose every movement feels luminously right and true.”
Global ballet audiences will be able to see her again soon. The Dutch National Ballet said Ms. Smirnova would make her debut in April, performing the title role in Marius Petipa’s romantic “Raymonda,” a classic of Russian ballet.
More than 10 people died in a shelling attack in the northern city of Chernihiv on Wednesday, the regional governor said. The people had been in line for bread, according to a Ukrainian media organization, Suspilne News, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.
A video shared by Suspilne News appeared to show around 10 bodies on a sunny street outside a supermarket. The bodies had been blurred in an effect applied after the video was shot. The location and time of the video have been verified by The New York Times.
The supermarket sits across from a dentist’s office and pharmacy and is surrounded by apartment complexes.
“A shell flew in and more than 10 people are dead,” Viacheslav Chaus, the governor of Chernihiv oblast, told Rada TV, another Ukrainian media outlet.
“Such horrific attacks must stop. We are considering all available options to ensure accountability for any atrocity crimes in Ukraine,” the embassy said in a tweet. The embassy’s tweet said the people had been “shot and killed,” and it was not immediately clear why the description differed from the Ukrainian accounts.
Russian forces encircled Chernihiv and were laying siege to it, the mayor said last week, adding that repeated bombardment was causing critical infrastructure to fail. The ancient city of 300,000 lies directly along the Russian invasion route from Belarus to Kyiv.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyReporting from Istanbul
President Andrzej Duda of Poland met with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Ankara. Mr. Duda said the two men discussed the two million refugees who have come to his country from Ukraine, calling it a “crisis” and appealing for international support.
“Servant of the People,” the 2015 television satire that Volodymyr Zelensky starred in before he became president of Ukraine, has returned to Netflix, the streaming service said. In the series, Zelensky plays a teacher who becomes president of Ukraine because of a viral video.
You asked and it’s back!
— Netflix (@netflix) March 16, 2022
Servant of the People is once again available on Netflix in The US. The 2015 satirical comedy series stars Volodymyr Zelenskyy playing a teacher who unexpectedly becomes President after a video of him complaining about corruption suddenly goes viral. pic.twitter.com/Pp9f48jutF
WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Wednesday that the United States would send $800 million in additional military assistance to Ukraine, shortly after the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, delivered an impassioned virtual address to Congress in which he appealed for more help in staving off Russia’s invasion.
“This new package on its own is going to provide unprecedented assistance to Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said, adding that the Russian invasion was producing “appalling devastation and horror” in that country.
“The American people are answering President Zelensky’s call for more help, more weapons for Ukraine,” he said.
But Mr. Biden stopped well short of responding to the more direct military intervention that Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly requested, including for the United States and NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
In his dramatic address to American lawmakers hours earlier, Mr. Zelensky showed a gruesome video of the Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and pleaded for additional military aid, a no-fly zone and more severe sanctions on Russia. He described the threat his nation faced as an attack on the democratic values championed by the United States.
Speaking from the White House, Mr. Biden condemned what he called a “God-awful” invasion that is an “outrage to the world.” And he hailed Mr. Zelensky’s courage.
“He was convincing,” Mr. Biden said of the Ukrainian president’s address to Congress, calling it a “significant speech.”
“He speaks for a people who have shown remarkable courage and strength in the face of brutal aggression,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. Biden has pledged to enhance Ukraine’s ability to fight and to defend its capital, Kyiv, and other besieged cities while also trying to avoid steps that could lead to a direct military confrontation with Russia and a broader war in Europe.
White House officials said the $800 million that Mr. Biden announced was part of the spending package he signed on Tuesday that included $14 billion in aid for Ukraine.
The United States last week announced $200 million in security aid for Ukraine. In February, it approved a $350 million arms package.
The weapons provided to Ukraine from the United States have included at least 600 Stinger antiaircraft missiles and about 2,600 Javelin antitank missiles, according to a senior White House official. But Ukraine says it needs sophisticated antimissile systems.
The United States has also provided five Mi-17 helicopters, three patrol boats and 70 other vehicles of various kinds, plus small arms, tactical gear and military medical equipment, the White House official said. The weapons come from existing U.S. military stockpiles in Europe, the official said, and are flown into neighboring countries like Poland and Romania, where they are shipped overland into western Ukraine.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, David E. Sanger and Katie Rogers contributed reporting.
President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned his Russian counterpart on Wednesday against “any possible Russian decision to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine,” the White House said in a statement.
The explicit warning to Nikolai P. Patrushev, President Vladimir V. Putin’s main national security adviser, reflected escalating concerns in Washington that the Russians, stymied in their hopes of a quick takeover of the country, could resort to weapons of mass destruction.
Officials said there was no direct mention of the use of battlefield nuclear weapons, although two officials said the administration sent a separate warning on that issue through other channels in the opening days of the war, when Mr. Putin announced he was placing Russian nuclear forces on alert.
The White House would not say who initiated Wednesday’s call, though Russia indicated it came at the request of the United States. Mr. Patrushev, who has been in his job for 14 years, was among the Russians targeted by U.S. sanctions immediately after the invasion.
Russia’s Security Council, Mr. Putin’s main advisory body on national security matters, said on its website that Mr. Patrushev had called on the United States to stop “supporting neo-Nazis and terrorists in Ukraine” and to stop facilitating the inflow of “mercenaries” and weapons to the country.
It said Mr. Patrushev had also brought up what Russia has claimed are U.S.-controlled biological weapons facilities on Ukrainian territory, and warned the U.S. against planning provocations involving weapons of mass destruction.
The White House, Pentagon and State Department have all unequivocally denied claims promoted by Russian state media about biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.
Russia’s Security Council also said Mr. Patrushev had called on the United States to exert influence on the government in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to resolve the crisis through diplomacy.
In the White House account, Mr. Sullivan “clearly laid out the United States’ commitment to continue imposing costs on Russia, to support the defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” and to bolster defenses along NATO’s eastern borders.
“Mr. Sullivan told General Patrushev that if Russia is serious about diplomacy, then Moscow should stop attacking Ukrainian cities and towns,” the statement said.
American officials have not revealed details of why they think Russia could use chemical and biological weapons in Ukraine, which would mark a major escalation of the conflict. Nor has Mr. Biden addressed the question of whether and how their use might affect the nature of the United States’ and NATO’s military support for Ukraine. So far, Mr. Biden has insisted that the United States will stay out of any direct combat with Russia as long as Moscow does not attack NATO territory.
But use of chemical or biological weapons would present Mr. Biden with a problem similar to the one that confronted President Barack Obama in 2012 and 2013, after Mr. Obama declared during the conflict in Syria that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” Mr. Obama said that would “change the calculus,” but then pulled back from a plan to take military action after President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used chemical weapons in April 2013.
In this case, the calculus is different: Unlike Syria, Russia is a nuclear-armed state, and the concerns about escalation of a conflict permeate the White House and the Pentagon.
Mr. Sullivan’s conversation came hours after Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken described, for the first time in public, the standard that the Biden administration would use for deciding when to begin lifting economic sanctions on Russia.
Mr. Blinken, speaking to NPR, said the sanctions would be lifted only when Russia withdraws fully from Ukraine, in a retreat that must be “in effect, irreversible” so that an invasion “can’t happen again” in a few years.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment