Kyiv March 13, 3:22 p.m.
Moscow March 13, 4:22 p.m.
Washington March 13, 8:22 a.m.
Live Updates: Russia Strikes Base Near Polish Border, Leaving at Least 35 Dead
More than 100 were injured after missiles hit a base used to ferry weapons and train foreign fighters. Russia had warned that arms shipments were “legitimate targets.”
NOVOYAVORIVSK, Ukraine — Russia took direct aim on Sunday morning at a hub for Western arms shipments and fighters in Ukraine, launching a barrage of airstrikes at a military base near the Polish border that killed at least 35 people and brought the war perilously closer to NATO’s doorstep.
A day after warning that weapons flowing into Ukraine from Western allies were “legitimate targets,” Russia carried out the aerial assault against the base less than a dozen miles from the frontier with Poland, where American troops are deployed to bolster NATO’s defenses.
Besides being a transit point for arms for Ukraine, up to 1,000 foreign fighters were training at the base, known as the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, as part of the new International Legion that Ukraine has formed to help fight Russia, a Ukrainian military official said.
The strike, which also wounded at least 134 people, was part of a significant escalation in the Russian military offensive over the weekend. Here are the latest developments:
Ukrainian officials called Russia’s strike against the military base, where American troops and other foreign military personnel have long helped train Ukrainian forces, a “terrorist attack,” and they renewed calls for NATO to establish a no-fly zone.
A Russian airstrike killed nine civilians in the heavily contested southern port city of Mykolaiv, the regional governor said, making it one of the deadliest attacks on a residential area in the city since the war began more than two weeks ago.
Attacks in two cities in western Ukraine pierced the sense of security in the region, which has been a safe haven for refugees, businessmen, journalists and diplomats.
Hundreds of people protested in the streets of Melitopol in southern Ukraine on Saturday over the detention of the city’s mayor, who had refused to cooperate with occupying Russian forces.
How we verify our reporting on the invasion of Ukraine: To cut through the fog of propaganda and misinformation on both sides, The New York Times has deployed dozens of reporters, photographers, videographers, audio journalists, writers and others to Ukraine and the countries bordering it to deliver real-time, independent, in-depth coverage of the conflict and its reverberations across the region.
Reporting from Rome
Pope Francis on Sunday reiterated his pleas for an end to the “harrowing war that is ravaging Ukraine,” telling the thousands of faithful who gathered for his weekly Angelus prayer and blessing that it must stop “before it reduces cities to cemeteries.”
At least 85 children have died and nearly 100 have been wounded in the fighting in Ukraine, the office of Ukraine’s attorney general said in a statement on Sunday, citing data from the country’s juvenile prosecutors.
The figure is higher than that provided by the United Nations human rights body, which reported on Saturday that 42 children had died. The United Nations has acknowledged that its tallies are probably an undercount.
Ukraine’s attorney general’s office said that among those killed was a young football player who was in a car attempting to evacuate with other civilians on Friday when Russian artillery struck the vehicle.
The statement adds to other accounts of children who were killed as they tried to flee the violence, including a 9-year-old and an 18-year-old who died last week as they ran across a damaged bridge in the town of Irpin, trying to evacuate to Kyiv.
The report also provides new evidence for what humanitarian organizations have called a crisis facing children in Ukraine, with more than a million having fled the country since Russian forces invaded on Feb. 24.
Among the incidents cited in the attorney general’s report was a child who was killed in a car at a checkpoint on Friday in the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine, where some of the heaviest fighting has occurred.
The report said that most of the child victims were in the regions of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Sumy, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zhytomyr. It added that 369 educational institutions had been damaged by bombing and shelling, and 57 completely destroyed.
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As Russia’s aggression in Ukraine takes a horrific human toll, Americans are channeling their outrage into boycotts aimed at products they assume are produced by Russians in Russia, with ties, somehow, to President Vladimir V. Putin.
The problem is that Americans consume hardly any products that are truly Russian. Russian oil, for example, makes up 3 percent of the oil that Americans consume on a daily basis.
Much the same is true of vodka. Some states that recently placed bans on Russian spirits discovered they were setting a policy that affected only two brands with a small footprint domestically — Russian Standard and Ustianochka.
In fact, less than 1 percent of the vodka consumed here comes from Russia, according to the IWSR, a beverage industry trade group. (Another group, the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, said Russian vodka made up only 1.3 percent of the market in the country, down about 79 percent since 2011.)
The vodka most commonly but incorrectly associated with Russia, Stolichnaya, has been produced in Latvia since 2002, and the headquarters of its parent company, the Stoli Group, are in Luxembourg.
Last week, the company formally rebranded its signature spirit as just Stoli after bar owners from Vermont to Michigan to Iowa declared they would no longer serve it and shared video of themselves dumping bottles of it down the drain.
Azi Paybarah contributed reporting.
Protests against the war in Ukraine were taking place in at least 20 Russian cities on Sunday, as small numbers of people continue to defy a crackdown on dissent. By midday, police had detained more than 250 demonstrators, according to the rights group OVD-Info, raising the total to more than 14,000 since the start of the war.
ODESSA, Ukraine — A Russian airstrike killed nine civilians on Sunday in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, the region’s governor, Vitaliy Kim, said in a video statement, making it one of the deadliest attacks on a residential area in the city since the war began more than two weeks ago.
Details about the strike were not immediately available. Mr. Kim said the attack on a residential area in the north of the city appeared to have been carried out by Russian fighter jets.
“These scum are bombing our city to seed panic,” he said of the Russian forces.
For nearly two weeks, the Russians have been trying to seize Mykolaiv, a strategic city of roughly 500,000 residents that lies directly in the path of a Russian advance west along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast toward Odessa, the home of Ukraine’s Navy and its largest port.
Although Russian troops have occasionally pushed into the Mykolaiv city limits, a small band of Ukrainian soldiers has kept them largely at bay, forcing them to seek alternative routes.
Mykolaiv has been pounded by Russian air and artillery strikes almost daily, though those attacks have been far less intense than the pulverizing bombardment faced by other cities, including Kharkiv and Mariupol. Even so, whole neighborhoods have been flattened and civilian infrastructure — like hospitals, power stations and shopping malls — has been damaged.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Ukraine
A Russian airstrike killed nine civilians in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv on Sunday, the region’s governor, Vitaliy Kim, said in a video statement, making it one of the deadliest attacks on a residential area in the city since the war began more than two weeks ago.
Reporting from London
President Andrzej Duda of Poland said in an interview with the BBC that the use of weapons of mass destruction by Russia against Ukraine would be a “game-changer” that could compel NATO to rethink its decision to refrain from military intervention in the conflict.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Doctors are treating the wounded at the Novoyavorivsk hospital, near the base in western Ukraine hit by Russian rockets on Sunday. Some patients were put into ambulances that were sent across the region.
The base outside Lviv that was attacked by Russian forces early on Sunday was a key link between Ukraine’s armed forces and Western militaries before the war — and has become an important logistics hub and training center for foreign fighters since Russia’s invasion began.
A Ukrainian military official said that up to 1,000 foreign fighters were training at the base — the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, which is also known as the Yavoriv military complex — as part of the new International Legion that Ukraine has formed to help fight Russia.
Before the war, troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, Latvia and other Western allies trained Ukrainian forces there, starting in the 1990s. One of the buildings that was hit in the attack was in an area where American, Canadian and other foreign military instructors had stayed before the invasion, according to a broadcast journalist for the U.S. Army who covered multinational training at the base.
Dozens of soldiers from the Florida Army National Guard had been training Ukrainian troops at the base as part of a NATO mission until Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered them to leave the country last month, days before the Russian invasion.
The base has also trained troops for peacekeeping operations that Ukraine has participated in, often as part of United Nations missions elsewhere in Europe and in Africa. Since the war began, Ukraine has recalled those peacekeepers, including a helicopter unit that had been deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Marc Santora and Yousur Al-Hlou contributed reporting.
A bus carrying Ukrainians in northern Italy overturned Sunday morning, killing one person, firefighters said.
Remo Tassinari, a shift supervisor for firefighters in the province of Forlì-Cesena, where the accident took place, said that the victim was a woman who remained stuck under the bus, which had a Ukrainian license plate.
The bus had about 20 passengers, according to Mr. Tassinari. The national fire service had initially said through its Twitter account that the bus carried about 50.
The bus was headed to Pescara, on Italy’s eastern coast, when it overturned near the city of Cesena, Mr. Tassinari said.
Mr. Tassinari said the cause of the accident and the number of people involved remained unclear, but that one person had been taken to a hospital with light wounds.
The Italian Interior Ministry said that some passengers were taken to the offices of Forlì’s highway patrol police for assistance while they waited to resume their trip.
Firefighters were at work on the crash site on the A14 highway in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna, using two crane trucks to lift the bus.
Overall, Italy has welcomed 34,851 Ukrainians fleeing the conflict, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Hong Kong
Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, warned companies “to think very carefully about any investments” that would support the Russian government. He added that Britain supported efforts by companies to reduce Russian holdings to inflict “maximum economic pain.”
I am urging firms to think very carefully about their investments in Russia and how they may aid the Putin regime.
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) March 13, 2022
I also want to make it clear that there is no case for new investment in Russia. https://t.co/jcFL95aLqfpic.twitter.com/6mLd7C2kDM
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
With the western city of Lviv on edge after missiles struck a military base only 30 miles from the historic city center, air raid alarms blared again at 11:20 a.m., sending people looking for cover.
Valerie Hopkins and
NOVOYAVORIVSK, Ukraine — Russian warplanes fired about 30 cruise missiles at a Ukrainian military base near the Polish border, local officials said on Sunday, launching a furious and sustained air assault against a target that brought the war even closer to NATO’s doorstep.
Five hours after the attack, the fires at the base were still raging. Dozens of people injured in the attack were raced to area hospitals. A Ukrainian soldier on the base who was not authorized to speak publicly said that there was a shortage there of tourniquets and other essential medical equipment.
The head of the Lviv regional military administration, Maksym Kozytskyi, said that at least 35 people were killed and 134 were wounded. They included military personnel and civilians. The Ukrainian emergency services said they were doing search-and-rescue operations.
Ukrainian air defense systems intercepted 22 of the missiles, according to officials, but others struck the base.
“The air defense system worked, a number of them were shot down,” Mr. Kozytskyi said at a news conference. But he repeated calls for NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, a step that Western leaders have refused to take out of concern that it could draw them into a direct military confrontation with Russia.
Ukrainian officials said the missiles were fired from Russian fighter jets flying from Saratov, in southwestern Russia. Their target was the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, less than a dozen miles from the Polish border.
Until February, American forces were at the base as part of a NATO mission focused on training the Ukrainian army. They withdrew days before the Russian invasion.
At the same time, however, the Pentagon dispatched 5,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division to Poland to provide reassurance to a pivotal NATO ally. The number of American troops in Poland has grown since then.
Throughout the war, the Pentagon reiterated that the troops would not enter Ukraine but were there to help the Polish government deal with refugees fleeing over the border.
Well into the third week of the war, Ukraine’s air defenses have bedeviled Russian warplanes, shooting down missiles and some Russian aircraft. With NATO so far unwilling to impose a no-fly zone, the Ukrainian military said in a statement last week that “we will close the sky ourselves.”
Poland has been the main transit point for Ukrainian refugees fleeing to the West, and for arms shipments and foreign fighters traveling in the other direction, into Ukraine. The attack on Sunday followed a Russian threat to directly attack the weapons shipments from Ukraine’s Western allies, labeling them “legitimate targets.”
On Sunday, Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, appealed directly to allies in a Facebook post, calling on them to “close the skies of Europe.”
“Joe Biden, Jens Stoltenberg, do you understand that war is closer than you imagine?” he wrote. “Russia is already on your border.”
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Russian fighter jets fired more than 30 cruise missiles at a military base near the Polish border, according to an official from Lviv. The jets took off from Saratov, Russia, and also from the Black Sea.
Reporting from London
On Sunday morning, a bus carrying 50 Ukrainians overturned in Italy’s northern region of Emilia-Romagna, killing at least one person and injuring others, Italy’s firefighters said.
🔴 #A14 Forli-Cesena, incidente bus cittadini nazionalità #ucraina: accertata al momento una vittima, feriti altri passeggeri, operazioni #vigilidelfuoco in corso [#13marzo 7:50] pic.twitter.com/dtLL72gS72
— Vigili del Fuoco (@emergenzavvf) March 13, 2022
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
The military administration leader of the Lviv region reports that at least nine people have been killed and 57 injured in the attack on the military base in western Ukraine.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Fighters injured in this morning’s attack on the Yavoriv military complex in western Ukraine have been arriving at an emergency hospital in Lviv. One ambulance worker estimated there are about 300 injured.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, called the Russian missile strikes at on a military base in western Ukraine a “terrorist attack” and repeated his government’s calls for NATO to establish a no-fly zone over the country.
russia has attacked the International Center for Peacekeeping&Security near Lviv.Foreign instructors work here.Information about the victims is being clarified.This is new terrorist attack on peace&security near the EU-NATO border.Action must be taken to stop this.Close the sky!
— Oleksii Reznikov (@oleksiireznikov) March 13, 2022
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
A train full of refugees came under fire in eastern Ukraine, killing a conductor, Ukraine’s national railroad said in a statement. The company is trying to send another train to evacuate the crew and passengers, including about 100 children.
Marc Santora and
A pre-dawn missile attack on a military training base in northwest Ukraine on Sunday morning killed at least nine people, officials said, bringing the war perilously close to NATO forces positioned only a dozen miles away on the Polish border and widening the war as Russia seeks to stem the flow of weapons into Ukraine.
Eight missiles were shot at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, according to the Ukrainian military and local officials. Air defense systems intercepted some but several stuck the base, a key logistics hub and training center for foreign fighters. Colonel Anton Myronovych, a spokesman for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said that at least nine people were killed and 57 injured, but information was still coming in. An ambulance worker at an emergency hospital in Lviv, about 35 miles away, said that about 300 people wounded in the attack had arrived for treatment.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, called the strikes “a terrorist attack on peace and security near the E.U.-NATO border” and repeated his government’s calls for allies to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
The base, also known as the Yavoriv military complex, is a vital link in the pipeline to get weapons from NATO allies into Ukraine. Russia warned on Saturday that arms sent to Ukraine would be considered “legitimate targets” for Russian forces. Only hours later, the United States defied Moscow by promising an additional $200 million in arms and equipment for Ukraine.
Before the war, the base was used by NATO in their efforts to train the Ukrainian military.
Soldiers from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, Latvia and many other allies have worked at the base, where foreign fighters who have volunteered to fight are now being organized and trained. The Ukrainian government estimates that some 20,000 people from around the world have signed up to join the nascent International Legion. That includes several thousand Americans, according to officials familiar with the legion but not authorized to speak publicly.
It was unclear how many Americans were at the base during the attack. One American who has volunteered to fight, reached by phone after the strikes, said the facility was being bombed and he could not talk.
One of the buildings damaged was located in a section where American, Canadian and other foreign military instructors had slept before the war, according to Staff Sergeant Jonathan Norris, who served as a broadcast journalist for the U.S. Army covering multinational training at the base.
Colonel Myronovych, the Ukrainian military spokesman, said in an interview with The New York Times on March 11 that “up to a thousand foreigners” were being trained at the base.
The most skillful, well-prepared foreigners have already been deployed to the front line and they are attached to the units of the armed forces of Ukraine,” he said.
Austin Ramzy, Benjamin Foley, Valerie Hopkins and Andriana Zmysla contributed reporting.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Lviv, Ukraine
For the second time in three days, Russian missiles struck the airport in Ivano-Frankivsk in the southwest of Ukraine, according to the mayor.
Reporting from Hong Kong
Russian forces launched as many as eight missiles early Sunday at a base in western Ukraine, the Lviv regional governor wrote on Facebook. The region had been relatively untouched, but the attack on Sunday indicates Russia’s scope of targets is spreading across the country.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
After the sound of air raids pierced the air in Lviv, there were reports of explosions on the outskirts of the city, which is a stronghold of the resistance and a place many have escaped to flee fighting farther east.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Air raid sirens blared throughout almost every major city in Ukraine, including the capital of Kyiv, as Russian forces ramped up their attacks following President Putin’s dismissal of calls for a cease-fire.
Around Ukraine on Saturday, residents sought shelter from fighting, looked out onto the aftermath of battles or fled in search of safer ground. Smoke rose over the capital, Kyiv, after a night of heavy Russian bombardment. Some of the last remaining civilians in two nearby towns, Irpin and Bucha, fled toward the city.
In the west, men mourned their fellow soldiers during a funeral in the town of Lutsk. In Odessa, in Ukraine’s south, a statue of the city’s first governor, the Duke of Richelieu, was sheathed in sandbags in anticipation of further Russian attacks.
As Ukrainian forces waged intense battles for Kyiv, Kharkiv and other major cities, people waited to see what might come of an escalating war, faltering diplomatic efforts and Western sanctions against Russia.
Photographers with The New York Times and other news organizations are throughout Ukraine, following the fighting and the flow of refugees across Europe as Ukrainians cope with the uncertainty and fear of Russia’s military invasion.
Marc Santora and
LVIV, Ukraine — Ivan Fyodorov, the mayor of Melitopol, is an ethnic Russian in a southern Ukrainian city where Russian is commonly spoken and where cultural and familial ties to the motherland run deep.
That would seem to make him just the kind of person to welcome conquering Russian soldiers with open arms and flowers.
Instead, he labeled them “occupiers.”
On Friday evening, those Russian soldiers threw a bag over Mr. Fyodorov’s head and dragged him from his government office, Ukrainian officials said. He has not been seen since.
Security camera footage from Melitopol’s Victory Square appears to show someone being escorted out of a government building by soldiers, but The New York Times could not verify the identity of the people in the video.
Since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, the mayor — 33 years old, lanky, fit and photogenic — had posted brief live broadcasts almost daily on social media to update Melitopol residents on the situation in the city, which lies just north of Crimea, the peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
He told residents where to buy milk and medicine, published updated lists of what pharmacies or A.T.M.s were operating and warned repeatedly that looters would be identified and punished.
Born in Melitopol, a city of just over 150,000 people, Mr. Fyodorov holds degrees in economics and management. He served on the city council for five years, from 2010 to 2015, and held various posts including deputy mayor, before being elected mayor in December 2020.
In the United Nations Security Council, Ukraine’s ambassador also asked the Russians to release him. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky said he had raised the fate of the mayor in calls with the leaders of Germany and France.
“They have switched to a new stage of terror, when they are trying to physically eliminate representatives of the legitimate local Ukrainian authorities,” he said.
Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting.
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