Kyiv March 22, 11:32 p.m.
Moscow March 23, 12:32 a.m.
Washington March 22, 5:32 p.m.
Ukraine Live Updates: Russia Continues Bombardment, but Its Forces Have Shrunk, Pentagon Says
President Biden heads to Europe this week and will press allies for even more aggressive economic sanctions on Russia. Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian dissident, was sentenced to nine years in prison. Ukrainians said they had recaptured the strategic town of Makariv, west of Kyiv.
As Russian forces struggled to make progress across Ukraine, losing control of a contested town west of the capital, Moscow advanced on a different front on Tuesday, expanding the toughest crackdown on dissent during President Vladimir V. Putin’s 22 years in power.
In what appeared to be a signal move in that expansion, a Russian court sentenced the already imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny to nine years in prison on fraud charges. The verdict was widely seen as a way to keep him behind bars as the Kremlin tries to tightly control the war’s narrative at home amid glimmers of defiance. Mr. Navalny has been urging Russians to protest the invasion via letters from jail that his lawyers post on social media.
The move came as Russia amended an already draconian censorship law to make “discrediting” the activities abroad of all government bodies — not just the military — a potentially criminal offense. The law punishes anyone spreading “false information” about the invasion with up to 15 years in prison. Russia has taken other moves to quell information, including blocking access to Facebook.
On the ground, Ukrainians continued to mount a spirited defense of the capital, Kyiv, and said they had raised the blue and gold Ukrainian flag over Makariv, a town about 40 miles to the west, where control has gone back and forth between Russian forces and Ukrainians. Tuesday’s announcement reflected Ukrainian efforts to keep Russian forces from encircling Kyiv. After 26 days of fighting, a senior U.S. defense department official said that the Russians had not been able to advance beyond nine miles northwest of Kyiv or 18 miles from the city’s east — essentially where they were last week.
In other major developments:
The Pentagon has assessed that Russia’s “combat power” in Ukraine has dipped below 90 percent of its original force for the first time, reflecting the losses Russian troops have suffered at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.
President Biden is preparing to travel to a NATO summit this week in Brussels, where Western allies are expected to discuss how they will respond if Russia employs chemical, biological, cyber- or nuclear weapons.
Tens of thousands of people remain trapped in Mariupol, many now confined to basements and running low on food and water. Mr. Zelensky said that the city was being “reduced to ashes,” and the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, called the Russian assault “a massive war crime.”
The Ukrainian military is mounting an aggressive counteroffensive to reclaim territory captured by Russia in southern Ukraine, hoping to capitalize on public defiance. The efforts are most evident in captured towns and cities like Kherson, where Russian soldiers opened fire on protesters on Monday. Russia has withdrawn most of its helicopters from the airport in Kherson, according to satellite images analyzed by The Times, in what analysts said could be a telltale sign of Russian military setbacks in the south of the country.
Wildfires have broken out in the radioactive forest that surrounds the Chernobyl nuclear plant, an area now controlled by the Russian Army, Ukrainian news media reported on Tuesday. The report raised worries that radiation could spread widely in the smoke if the fires burned unchecked.
Edward Wong and
WASHINGTON — When the Cold War ended, governments and companies believed that stronger global economic ties would lead to greater stability. But the Ukraine war and the pandemic are pushing the world in the opposite direction and upending those ideas.
Important parts of the integrated economy are unwinding. American and European officials are now using sanctions to sever major parts of the Russian economy — the 11th largest in the world — from global commerce, and hundreds of Western companies have halted operations in Russia on their own. Amid the pandemic, companies are reorganizing how they obtain their goods because of soaring costs and unpredictable delays in global supply chains.
Western officials and executives are also rethinking how they do business with China, the world’s second-largest economy, as geopolitical tensions and the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses and use of advanced technology to reinforce autocratic control make corporate dealings more fraught.
The moves reverse core tenets of post-Cold War economic and foreign policies forged by the United States and its allies that were even adopted by rivals like Russia and China.
“What we’re headed toward is a more divided world economically that will mirror what is clearly a more divided world politically,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I don’t think economic integration survives a period of political disintegration.”
“Does globalization and economic interdependence reduce conflict?” he added. “I think the answer is yes, until it doesn’t.”
Opposition to globalization gained momentum with the Trump administration’s trade policies and “America First” drive, and as the progressive left became more powerful. But the pandemic and President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have brought into sharp relief the uncertainty of the existing economic order.
President Biden warned President Xi Jinping of China on Friday that there would “consequences” if Beijing gave material aid to Russia for the war in Ukraine, an implicit threat of sanctions. China has criticized sanctions on Russia, and Le Yucheng, the vice foreign minister, said in a speech on Saturday that “globalization should not be weaponized.” Yet China increasingly has imposed economic punishments — Lithuania, Norway, Australia, Japan and South Korea have been among the targets.
The result of all the disruptions may well be a fracturing of the world into economic blocs, as countries and companies gravitate to ideological corners with distinct markets and pools of labor, as they did in much of the 20th century.
Mr. Biden already frames his foreign policy in ideological terms, as a mission of unifying democracies against autocracies. Mr. Biden also says he is enacting a foreign policy for middle-class Americans, and central to that is getting companies to move critical supply chains and manufacturing out of China and to friendlier countries.
The goal is given urgency by the hobbling of those global links over two years of the pandemic, which has brought about a realization among the world’s most powerful companies that they need to focus on not just efficiency and cost, but also resiliency. This month, lockdowns China imposed to contain Covid-19 outbreaks have once again threatened to stall global supply chains.
The economic impact of such a change is highly uncertain. The emergence of new economic blocs could accelerate a massive reorganization in financial flows and supply chains, potentially slowing growth, leading to some shortages and raising prices for consumers in the short term. But the longer-term effects on global growth, worker wages and supplies of goods are harder to predict.
The war has set in motion “deglobalization forces that could have profound and unpredictable effects,” said Laurence Boone, the chief economist of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
For decades, executives have pushed for globalization to expand their markets and to exploit cheap labor and lax environmental standards. China especially has benefited from this, while Russia profits from its exports of minerals and energy. They tap into enormous economies: The Group of 7 industrialized nations make up more than 50 percent of the global economy, while China and Russia together account for about 20 percent.
Trade and business ties between the United States and China are still robust, despite steadily worsening relations. But with the new Western sanctions on Russia, many nations that are not staunch partners of America are now more aware of the perils of being economically tied to the United States and its allies.
If Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin organize their own economic coalition, they could bring in other nations seeking to shield themselves from Western sanctions — a tool that all recent U.S. presidents have used.
“Your interdependence can be weaponized against you,” said Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at Harvard Kennedy School. “That’s a lesson that I imagine many countries are beginning to internalize.”
The Ukraine war, he added, has “probably put a nail in the coffin of hyperglobalization.”
China and, increasingly, Russia have taken steps to wall off their societies, including erecting strict censorship mechanisms on their internet networks, which have cut off their citizens from foreign perspectives and some commerce. China is on a drive to make critical industries self-sufficient, including for technologies like semiconductors.
And China has been in talks with Saudi Arabia to pay for some oil purchases in China’s currency, the renminbi, The Wall Street Journal reported; Russia was in similar discussions with India. The efforts show a desire by those governments to move away from dollar-based transactions, a foundation of American global economic power.
For decades, prominent U.S. officials and strategists asserted that a globalized economy was a pillar of what they call the rules-based international order, and that trade and financial ties would prevent major powers from going to war. The United States helped usher China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 in a bid to bring its economic behavior — and, some officials hoped, its political system — more in line with the West. Russia joined the organization in 2012.
But Mr. Putin’s war and China’s recent aggressive actions in Asia have challenged those notions.
“The whole idea of the liberal international order was that economic interdependence would prevent conflict of this kind,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis, a research group in Washington. “If you tie yourselves to each other, which was the European model after the Second World War, the disincentives would be so painful if you went to war that no one in their right mind would do it. Well, we’ve seen now that has proven to be false.”
“Putin’s actions have shown us that might have been the world we’ve been living in, but that’s not the world he or China have been living in,” she said.
The United States and its partners have blocked Russia from much of the international financial system by banning transactions with the Russian central bank. They have also cut Russia off from the global bank messaging system called SWIFT, frozen the assets of Russian leaders and oligarchs, and banned the export from the United States and other nations of advanced technology to Russia. Russia has answered with its own export bans on food, cars and timber.
The penalties can lead to odd decouplings: British and European sanctions on Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who owns the Chelsea soccer team in Britain, prevent the club from selling tickets or merchandise.
About 400 companies have chosen to suspend or withdraw operations from Russia, including iconic brands of global consumerism such as Apple, Ikea and Rolex.
While many countries remain dependent on Russian energy exports, governments are strategizing how to wean themselves. Washington and London have announced plans to end imports of Russian oil.
The outstanding question is whether any of the U.S.-led penalties would one day be extended to China, which is a far bigger and more integral part of the global economy than Russia.
Even outside the Ukraine war, Mr. Biden has continued many Trump administration policies aimed at delinking parts of the American economy from that of China and punishing Beijing for its commercial practices.
Officials have kept the tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump, which covered about two-thirds of Chinese imports. The Treasury Department has continued to impose investment bans on Chinese companies with ties to the country’s military. And in June, a law will go into effect in the United States barring many goods made in whole or in part in the region of Xinjiang.
Despite all that, demand for Chinese-made goods has surged through the pandemic, as Americans splurge on online purchases. The overall U.S. trade deficit soared to record levels last year, pushed up by a widening deficit with China, and foreign investments into China actually accelerated last year.
Some economists have called for more global integration, not less. Speaking at a virtual conference on Monday, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the World Trade Organization, urged a move toward “re-globalization,” saying, “Deeper, more diversified international markets remain our best bet for supply resilience.
But those economic ties will be further strained if U.S.-China relations worsen, and especially if China gives substantial aid to Russia.
Besides recent warnings to China from Mr. Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, the Commerce Department has said it would ban the sale of critical American technology to Chinese companies if China tried to supply forbidden technology to Russia.
In the meantime, the uncertainty has left the U.S.-China relationship in flux. While many major Chinese banks and private companies have suspended their interactions with Russia to comply with sanctions, foreign asset managers appear to have also begun moving their money out of China in recent weeks, possibly in anticipation of sanctions.
Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said she did not expect China to “throw all in” with Russia, but that the war could still strain economic ties by worsening U.S.-China relations.
“Right now, there is great uncertainty as to how the U.S. and China will respond to the challenges posed by Russia’s increasingly urgent need for assistance,” she said. “That policy uncertainty is another push to multinationals who were already rethinking supply chains.”
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Continue reading the main storyChristoph Koettl and
Russia has withdrawn most of its helicopters from a strategic airport in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, according to satellite images analyzed by The Times, in what experts said could be a telltale sign of Russian military setbacks in the south of the country.
The removal of the equipment from the airport, evidenced by images captured by the space imaging company Planet Labs over six days, comes as the Ukrainian Army is pressing to retake lost territory in the Kherson region.
Kherson, a shipbuilding center east of Odessa on the Black Sea, was the first major city to be overwhelmed by Russian forces in the early days of the war. But Russia has failed to overtake the region as a whole.
Control over Kherson is essential to any effort to dominate the south broadly. The region, which lies just north of the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula, stretches from the Black Sea coastline to the mouth of the Dnieper River.
Last week, Ukrainian forces attacked the Kherson airport, inflicting considerable damage to Russian equipment, which was clearly visible in satellite images and video of the aftermath. An image taken on Monday shows that previously visible aircraft had been removed, though Russian ground troops appear to still control the airport.
“The Ukrainian attack itself shows the vulnerability of the position, and the Russians may have decided that it’s unwise to keep expensive aircraft parked there,” Frederick W. Kagan, the director of the Critical Threats project at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an email. He said Russian forces appeared to have given up, at least for the moment, on taking Mykolaiv, a strategic city located on an inlet of the Black Sea, as well as other critical areas in southern Ukraine, like Odessa, a major economic and cultural center.
“Kherson airfield is most useful for those operations,” he added.
A video posted to Twitter on March 18, and verified by The Times, shows Russian vehicles towing helicopters away from the airport through a town about 25 miles to the southeast.
Mason Clark, a senior analyst and Russia team leader at the Institute for the Study of War, wrote in an email that the Russians on the whole were pulling back manned aircraft as a result of losses sustained against Ukrainian forces. Mr. Clark said the Russian air operations may also have been impacted by casualties of crew and mechanical support staff and exhaustion.
TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas company, said on Tuesday that it would stop buying Russian oil by the end of the year and halt further investment in projects in the country.
At the same time, the company warned of the risks and potential negative consequences — for itself and Europe — of a headlong flight from Russia in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Paris-based company said it had “initiated the gradual suspension of its activities in Russia, while assuring its teams’ safety.” TotalEnergies had said on March 1 that it would halt new Russian investment.
Tuesday’s announcement expanded on that initial statement, describing how the company would no longer enter into or renew contracts to purchase Russian oil and petroleum products, and saying that would it would halt all such purchases by the end of this year. TotalEnergies also said it would stop providing capital for new projects in Russia, including a large planned liquefied natural gas installation called Arctic LNG 2.
The energy company’s actions since the invasion illustrate the challenges for European businesses and policymakers. Europe is dependent on energy from Russia, which is one of the world’s largest suppliers of oil and gas.
TotalEnergies itself is in a difficult position. The company said in its statement on Tuesday that it had been accused of “complicity in war crimes” for continuing to work in Russia. At the same time, its Russian business, especially liquefied natural gas investments, has been an important part of the company’s future strategy and something it has been reluctant to completely renounce.
TotalEnergies “is far more entrenched” in Russia than rivals like BP and Shell, which have made commitments to completely extricate themselves, said Biraj Borkhataria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, an investment bank.
Buying energy from Russia is also an established practice that will be difficult to abandon. TotalEnergies appears to have been one of the larger buyers of shiploads of Russian crude in 2021, averaging 186,000 barrels a day, according to data from Kpler, a research firm.
TotalEnergies has contracts to import Russian oil that comes by pipeline to its Leuna refinery in eastern Germany. The company said that it would terminate these deals by the end of 2022 and substitute supplies brought through Poland.
But the company warned that such moves could have an impact on the availability of an ingredient for diesel fuel that is already in short supply globally.
The company said it was continuing to supply liquefied natural gas to Europe through a facility that it owns in part called Yamal LNG, as long as governments “consider that Russian gas is necessary.”
The company noted a dilemma that complicated efforts to liquidate its holdings. Russian law, it said, barred it from selling its various minority interests to non-Russian buyers.
“Abandoning these interests without consideration would enrich Russian investors, in contradiction with the sanctions’ purpose,” TotalEnergies said.
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WASHINGTON — President Biden will press allies for even more aggressive economic sanctions against Russia during a series of global summits in Europe this week, White House officials said Tuesday, seeking to maintain unity of purpose as Russian forces continue to rain destruction on cities in Ukraine.
In Brussels on Thursday, Mr. Biden and other leaders are expected to announce a “next phase” of military assistance to Ukraine, new plans to expand and enforce economic sanctions, and an effort to further bolster NATO defenses along the border with Russia, said Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser.
“The president is traveling to Europe to ensure we stay united, to cement our collective resolve, to send a powerful message that we are prepared and committed to this for as long as it takes,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters.
Mr. Biden faces a steep challenge as he works to confront the aggression of President Vladimir V. Putin. The alliance has already pushed the limits of economic sanctions imposed by European countries, which are dependent on Russian energy. And the NATO alliance has largely exhausted its military options — short of a direct confrontation with Russia that Mr. Biden has said could result in World War III.
That leaves the president and his counterparts with a relatively short list of announcements to deliver on Thursday following three back-to-back meetings. Mr. Sullivan said there will be “new designations, new targets” for sanctions inside of Russia. And he said the United States will make new announcements about efforts to help European nations wean themselves of their dependence on Russian energy.
But the chief goal of the summits — which have been hastily developed in just a week’s time by diplomats in dozens of countries — may be as a further demonstration that Mr. Putin’s invasion will not lead the allies to devolve into sniping and disagreement.
Mr. Sullivan said that despite Russia’s intention to “divide and weaken the West,” the allies have remained “more united, more determined, and more purposeful than at any point in recent memory.”
The president is scheduled to depart Washington early Wednesday morning ahead of summits on Thursday with NATO, the Group of 7 nations, and the European Council. On Friday, Mr. Biden will head to Poland to discuss the flood of Ukrainian refugees who have arrived since the start of the war. He will also visit with American troops stationed in Poland as part of NATO forces.
Mr. Biden is expected to meet with President Andrzej Duda of Poland on Saturday before returning to the White House later that day.
The Pentagon has assessed that Russia’s “combat power” in Ukraine — comprising more than 150,000 troops massed in Belarus and western Russian prior to the invasion — has dipped below 90 percent of its original force for the first time, reflecting the losses Russian troops have suffered at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.
A senior defense official, who was not authorized to discuss details of Russia’s actions in Ukraine publicly, said Tuesday morning that Russian forces were “struggling on many fronts,” including routine supply lines and logistics, and that the Pentagon had seen indications that some Russian troops had been evacuated because of frostbite.
The official declined to address estimates of Russian casualty numbers, saying, “Even our best estimates are exactly that.” But last week, American intelligence offered a conservative estimate that 7,000 Russian troops had been killed in the conflict.
Pentagon officials have said that losing 10 percent of a military force, including both those killed and injured, renders a single unit unable to carry out combat-related tasks. Such losses also affect the morale and cohesion of a military unit.
The defense official also said that the Pentagon had seen no indication that Russian forces are moving toward the use of chemical or biological weapons.
On Monday, President Biden stressed the possibility that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia might turn to such weapons, which are banned by international treaty. “His back is against the wall,” Mr. Biden said at a meeting of U.S. business leaders.
The senior defense official said Russian forces continued to rely on long-range artillery and rockets attacks on cities because Russian soldiers had not been able to make progress on the ground in taking population centers like Kyiv.
In the past 24 hours, Russian warships in the Sea of Azov have been shelling Mariupol for the first time, the official said, noting that indiscriminate fire at civilian areas is a war crime.
“We have seen clear evidence that certainly over the last week or so the Russians have deliberately and intentionally targeted” civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and places of shelter, the official said in a briefing to reporters. “And we also have indications of behavior on the ground by Russian forces that would likewise constitute war crimes.”
“The administration is going to be helping provide evidence to the multiple investigations that are going on,” the official said, “but we see clear evidence that they’re committing war crimes through these indiscriminate and intentional attacks on civilian targets and the people of Ukraine.”
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Reporting from Washington
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, has tested positive for the coronavirus today and will not travel with President Biden to Europe this week, she said in a statement. She said that she “had two socially-distanced meetings with the President yesterday,” and is “sharing the news of my positive test today out of an abundance of transparency.” President Biden tested negative for the coronavirus today.
Zhanna Agalakova, a journalist who resigned earlier this month from Channel One, Russia’s state control broadcaster, said on Tuesday that she had done so to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “I’m doing this for Russians,” she said in a series of Tweets via Reporters Without Borders. “Our news doesn’t show the reality.”
KRAKOW, Poland — At least five prisons have been attacked by Russian troops since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, raising concerns about the often overlooked impact of conflict on people who are detained.
Damage, mostly as a result of shelling, has been recorded at prisons in the war-ravaged coastal city of Mariupol; Berdiansk, to its west; Chernihiv, northeast of Kyiv; and Kharkiv, near Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, the ministry said on Monday. The ministry shared photos on Facebook of what it said were damaged prison facilities in the Chernihiv and Kharkiv regions.
The Ukrainian government has said that the prisons closest to the fighting are in crisis, as it has been difficult to get drinking water, heat and electricity, and telephone lines and internet connections are broken. Officials say they have had problems delivering food and medicines to facilities across the country, and in some areas it has been difficult to get supplies for heating.
According to the Ministry of Justice, there are 33 prisons located in active conflict zones in the country. Exactly how many people were being held in them was not immediately clear, but there are some 48,000 people in prisons nationwide.
Donations of humanitarian supplies have come in from the Polish prison service, according to the Ukrainian Penitentiary Service, which shared images of the deliveries on Sunday.
Shortly before Russia’s invasion began last month, Vadym Pyvovarov, the executive director of the Association of Ukrainian Human Rights Monitors on Law Enforcement, wrote of his concerns about the need for an evacuation plan that protected the human rights of prisoners.
At the time, he said that he and colleagues had raised the issue with local prison authorities, but said that based on his early observations, there were not enough protections in place.
“Most of the staff do not know what to do should emergency evacuations be needed,” Mr. Pyvovarov wrote. “The provision of transport for prisoners remains the responsibility of local authorities, who — as is understandable — would be primarily concerned with the protection and evacuation of state employees and their families, followed by the rest of the civilian population.”
At the time, he called on Ukrainian authorities to take urgent measures to ensure the prisoners were protected.
“Like any other citizen,” he wrote, “they are entitled to the protection of the state in times of peace like in times of a military emergency.”
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said that the war in Ukraine was unwinnable and that Ukrainians were “enduring a living hell – and the reverberations are being felt worldwide with skyrocketing food, energy and fertilizer prices threatening to spiral into a global hunger crisis.” He said 10 million Ukrainians had been displaced from their homes. Guterres repeated his plea for Russia to stop the war, saying there was enough on the table to seriously negotiate.
Reporting from Krakow
The northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv is in an increasingly dire humanitarian situation, according to Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmila Denisova. With damaged infrastructure, the city is struggling to maintain its water supply, its lights are out because of electrical troubles and the gas supply is sporadic, she said. “It is impossible to fix this due to constant shelling,” she said.
In a speech by video link greeted by two standing ovations, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned Italy’s Parliament on Tuesday that the invasion of his country could become a stepping stone for Russian forces seeking to enter Europe, and that famine would strike in parts of the world if Ukrainian farmers were unable to continue their work.
“Ukraine is the gate for the Russian army — they want to enter Europe,” he said. “But barbarity should not enter.”
Mr. Zelensky warned that “famine was approaching for several countries” that depended on Ukrainian corn, oil and wheat, including Italy’s “neighbors across the sea,” referring to some North African nations.
“How can we sow under the strikes of Russian artillery? How can we cultivate when our enemy destroys our fields and our fuel?” he said.
In response, Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy said that the country wanted Ukraine to join the European Union, and praised the “heroic” resistance of the Ukrainians against the “ferociousness” of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
“The arrogance of the Russian government has collided with the dignity of the Ukrainian people,” Mr. Draghi said, “who have managed to curb Moscow’s expansionist aims and impose a huge cost on the invading army.”
Mr. Draghi underscored the humanitarian aid that Italy sent to Ukraine since the outbreak of the war, the hospitality offered to 60,000 refugees, mostly women and children, and his compassion for the over 236,000 Ukrainians who have been living and working in Italy for years.
He also said Italy would respond with military aid.
“We are ready to do more,” Mr. Draghi said. “In front of inhumanity, Italy has no intention of looking away.”
Mr. Draghi said that Italy has frozen more than 800 million euros worth of assets from Russian oligarchs and was working to overcome its dependency on Russian energy supplies as fast as possible.
For his part, Mr. Zelensky did not mention Mr. Putin by name, even as he portrayed him as the power and planner behind the war. “We need to stop only one person so that millions can survive,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky thanked Italy for taking in children and women fleeing the war, in private homes and hospitals.
“In Italy, the first Ukrainian baby was born from a mother who fled the war,” he said, adding that he has visited Italy often and knows the sense of family in Italy.
Mr. Zelensky said that 117 children have been killed in the war so far.
“And this is not the final number,” he said, describing the devastation caused by the weekslong war.
He urged Italy to freeze Russian assets, from villas to yachts, mentioning the Scheherazade, a mysterious, gigantic luxury yacht located in the Tuscan coastal town of Marina di Carrara that The New York Times reported to be potentially linked to Mr. Putin.
Mr. Zelensky also told Italian lawmakers that he had a morning conversation with Pope Francis, and that the pontiff understood the Ukrainians’ desire for peace and need to defend themselves.
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NEW DELHI — A top American diplomat and Russia expert met with India’s foreign secretary on Monday, affirming the countries’ security ties as India’s dependence on Russian arms has come into sharp relief amid the invasion of Ukraine.
Victoria Nuland, the under secretary of state for political affairs, met India’s foreign secretary, Harsh Shringla, as part of a U.S. delegation visit to India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, three countries that abstained from a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ms. Nuland was scheduled to meet with India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, on Tuesday.
Russia is India’s main arms supplier, and the two countries have deep cultural and historic ties. Indian officials have said the country is considering striking a deal to boost its minuscule fuel imports from Russia with discounted supplies.
Ms. Nuland made it clear in an interview with the Indian channel NDTV that U.S. officials were hoping India would revise its stance as a member of the Quad, a four-country alliance that also includes Japan and Australia.
“We understand India’s historic ties with Russia, but times have changed now,” she said. “The U.S. is a defense and security partner of India.”
A raft of high-level political meetings are taking place in New Delhi as Russia intensifies its attacks across Ukraine. Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a summit with Japan’s prime minister, Fumio Kishida, on Saturday and a virtual summit with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia on Monday, both of whom have condemned Russia for its actions in Ukraine.
Mr. Modi is expected to host Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, this weekend.
A Russian court sentenced Aleksei A. Navalny to nine years in a high-security prison on Tuesday, imposing a new punishment on the imprisoned opposition leader at a time when the war in Ukraine has made him even more of a liability for President Vladimir V. Putin.
Prosecutors had claimed that Mr. Navalny, a relentless critic and frequent target of Mr. Putin, and Mr. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation — which the Russian authorities banned as extremist last year — had embezzled donations from supporters.
“Navalny committed fraud, that is, the theft of other people’s property through deceit and breach of trust,” the judge, Margarita Kotova, said in reading her verdict, according to the news agency Interfax.
Mr. Navalny has been the subject of a long-running campaign of harassment and intimidation by the Russian authorities, and the fraud case was widely seen as a move by the Kremlin to keep him behind bars beyond the expiration in 2023 of his current two-and-a-half-year prison term, ostensibly for violating the terms of his parole.
It was also a way to increase Mr. Navalny’s personal hardship and isolation, with the new sentence clearing the way for him to be moved to a more remote, higher-security prison, making it more difficult for his lawyers and family to visit him.
The latest trial was held in a makeshift courtroom at the prison outside Moscow where Mr. Navalny has been held for more than a year. Following the sentencing, two of his lawyers were detained by the police and driven away in a police truck after they went outside to speak to journalists, according to news reports, before being released later.
A member of Mr. Navalny’s legal team who was not at the sentencing said that his aides expected the prosecutor’s office, which had originally requested a term of 13 years, to appeal the ruling. It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Navalny would be allowed to serve his existing term and the new one concurrently.
Mr. Navalny, who was also ordered to pay 1.2 million rubles, about $11,500, expressed defiance after the sentence was announced and said that the Anti-Corruption Foundation that he created in 2011 would be expanding its operations beyond Russia. He encouraged others to continue to fight.
“The best support for me and other political prisoners is not sympathy and kind words, but actions,” said a comment attributed to Mr. Navalny on his Twitter account. “Any activity against the deceitful and thievish Putin’s regime. Any opposition to these war criminals.”
He also referenced a popular phrase about serving time in prison from the TV show “The Wire”: “‘You only do two days. That’s the day you go in and the day you come out’ I even had a T-shirt with this slogan, but the prison authorities confiscated it, considering the print extremist.”
Mr. Navalny’s original prison term has not quieted him, and the war in Ukraine has only made him more of a headache for the Russian government. He has been urging Russians, via letters from jail that his lawyers post to social media, to protest the invasion.
“It is every person’s duty to fight against this war,” Mr. Navalny said in a courtroom speech last week. The war, he said, was started by a “group of crazy old men who don’t understand anything and don’t want to understand anything.”
Even with Mr. Navalny in prison, his aides outside Russia have been calling for protests against the war and continuing to publish their trademark corruption investigations on YouTube. On Monday, the group released a video that offered evidence that Mr. Putin was hiding a $700 million yacht at a dock in Italy.
Another video from the group said that during Mr. Navalny’s trial last week, Judge Kotova had received multiple phone calls from a number that researchers traced to the head of public relations for the presidential administration.
“The case was entirely fabricated by specific people,” Ivan Zhdanov, a supporter and former head of Mr. Navalny’s foundation, says in the video. “This verdict is being written by Putin’s officials.”
Judge Kotova has not commented on the allegations, but she was promoted to a more senior judicial position last week, the state news agency RIA Novosti reported.
Mr. Navalny’s backers sometimes say that the exact length of his prison term matters little, because they expect Mr. Putin’s system to collapse in the coming years. Leonid Volkov, Mr. Navalny’s professed chief of staff, said on Twitter that the government’s expectation that Mr. Navalny would serve a full nine years was “the same overestimation of their strength as the one that led them to war and economic disaster.”
But for the moment, Mr. Putin has the upper hand. The Kremlin has forced Mr. Navalny’s network of supporters into exile and, in recent weeks, blocked access to Instagram and Facebook, and cracked down further on the independent media — making it ever harder for Mr. Navalny to communicate with the Russian public.
There is substantial evidence that the Russian government was responsible for the poisoning that nearly killed Mr. Navalny in August 2020, and with the world’s attention on Ukraine, Mr. Navalny’s supporters fear that his life is in danger again.
“Without public protection, Aleksei will be face to face with those who have already tried to kill him,” his spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, posted on Twitter on Monday. “And nothing will stop them from trying again. Therefore, we are now talking not only about Aleksei’s freedom, but also about his life.”
Mr. Navalny’s sentencing came amid further crackdowns on freedom of speech in Russia on Tuesday. The country’s Supreme Court turned down an appeal to stop the liquidation of Memorial, a major human rights organization that chronicled political repression in the Soviet Union, after it was designated a “foreign agent” in December.
And the Russian Parliament amended an existing “anti-fakes” law to make it more sweeping. The new language prohibits the spreading of false information or the discrediting of activities that the Russian government performs abroad. The original version of the law referred only to military bodies.
On Tuesday evening, Alexander Nevzorov, a journalist and a former member of Russia’s Parliament, became the most prominent person to be targeted by the law.
A criminal investigation was launched against him for publishing information on Instagram and YouTube about a Russian bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Mr. Nevzorov has 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube and 690,000 followers on Instagram, which was banned in Russia on Monday.
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The Ukrainian military is mounting an aggressive counteroffensive to reclaim territory captured by Russia in southern Ukraine, hoping to use public defiance to bolster military efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials.
Those efforts are most evident in towns and cities that were overwhelmed by Russian forces in the early days of the war, such as Kherson, where Russian soldiers opened fire on protesters on Monday, according to videos and photographs verified by The Times.
Ukrainian protesters gathered in a central square, looked in the eyes of the Russian soldiers, and shouted: “Go home! Go home!”
Then the Russian soldiers started shooting.
At the same time as Russian soldiers are struggling to quell public unrest — and resorting to ever more violent means to do so — the Ukrainian Army is pressing to retake lost territory in the Kherson region.
It is hard to tell how successful the effort has been to date, but Ukrainian officials say they want to take back both the airport and the city. A senior U.S. defense official confirmed that there was an effort to take Kherson back but did not characterize the fighting beyond saying, “It’s a very dynamic, active battlefront.”
Ukrainian officials are hoping that public resistance will act as a force multiplier. With each report of soldiers looting a store, kidnapping a government official or engaging in other criminal activity, public anger swells.
While it is impossible to independently verify every claim made by Ukrainian officials, President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly seized on many of the more disturbing episodes to rally people in Russian-held areas.
“Resistance for Ukrainians is a feature of the soul,” he said on Monday. “And I really want you, all our Ukrainians in the south, to never think even for a moment that Ukraine does not remember you. Whenever you are in pain, when you resist in spite of everything, please know that our hearts are broken at this time, because we are not with you.”
Russian control over Kherson is essential to any effort to dominate the south broadly. The region, which borders the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula, stretches from the Black Sea coastline to the mouth of the Dnieper River. It has been under Russian occupation since March 3 and remains one of the few cities to have fallen.
It is strategically important because it gives the Russians a beachhead inside southern Ukraine and allows their forces to move heavy armor and artillery from Crimea by rail into the combat theater. But residents have grown increasingly brazen in their defiance despite the growing risks, marching through the streets in large numbers, waving Ukrainian flags, and openly confronting Russian troops.
The Ukrainians also continued to mount a spirited defense of the capital, Kyiv, pushing the Russians back in their approach from the northwest.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported on March 21 that “the Ukrainian flag was raised over the town of Makariv” and Russian forces have been pushed back. Makariv is about 40 miles west of Kyiv. As in many of the towns and cities around the capital, fierce fighting has led to vast destruction and control has gone back and forth over the course of the war.
Tuesday’s announcement reflected Ukrainian efforts to keep Russian forces from encircling Kyiv. After 26 days of fighting, a senior U.S. defense department official said that the Russians had not been able to advance beyond nine miles northwest of Kyiv or 18 miles from the city’s east.
After 26 days of fighting, a senior U.S. defense department official said that the Russians had not been able to advance within nine miles northwest of Kyiv — essentially where they were since last week — and to within 18 miles from the city’s east, which is where they were a week ago.
Reporting from Istanbul
Russia’s talks with Ukraine are moving “much more slowly and less substantively than we would like,” the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said in his daily call with reporters. He added that making details of the talks public “would only harm the negotiation process.”
Reporting from Istanbul
Dmitri A. Muratov, the Russian newspaper editor who shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, said he would seek to auction his Nobel medal to benefit Ukrainian refugees. In a statement published by his independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, he said it was important to share with the millions of refugees “what is dear to you and has a price to others.”
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel is prepared to visit Kyiv for mediation between Ukraine and Russia, his office said. After an invitation from the Ukrainian government, his office said he would be ready to travel if negotiations reached a sufficient level of seriousness. The Ukrainian ambassador to Israel, Yevgen Korniychuk, said no visit had been confirmed.
Reporting from Seoul
The Russian grandmaster Sergey Karjakin has been suspended from chess for six months over his backing for President Vladimir V. Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, the International Chess Federation announced. “No matter what happens,” Karjakin had previously said on Twitter, “I will support my country in any situation without thinking for a second!”
Reporting from Krakow
Four Ukrainian journalists who were taken from their homes in Melitopol, a city in southeastern Ukraine, were released late on Monday after their situation was publicized, the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine said in a statement.
Maria Varenikova and
LVIV, Ukraine — Each night, Ukrainian pilots like Andriy loiter in an undisclosed aircraft hangar, waiting, waiting, until the tension is broken with a shouted, one-word command: “Air!”
Andriy hustles into his Su-27 supersonic jet and hastily taxis toward the runway, getting airborne as quickly as possible. He takes off so fast that he doesn’t yet know his mission for the night, though the big picture is always the same — to bring the fight to a Russian Air Force that is vastly superior in numbers but has so far failed to win control of the skies above Ukraine.
“I don’t do any checks,” said Andriy, a Ukrainian Air Force pilot who as a condition of granting an interview was not permitted to give his surname or rank. “I just take off.”
Nearly a month into the fighting, one of the biggest surprises of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s failure to defeat the Ukrainian Air Force. Military analysts had expected Russian forces to quickly destroy or paralyze Ukraine’s air defenses and military aircraft, yet neither have happened. Instead, Top Gun-style aerial dogfights, rare in modern warfare, are now raging above the country.
“Every time when I fly, it’s for a real fight,” said Andriy, who is 25 and has flown 10 missions in the war. “In every fight with Russian jets, there is no equality. They always have five times more” planes in the air.
The success of Ukrainian pilots has helped protect Ukrainian soldiers on the ground and prevented wider bombing in cities, since pilots have intercepted some Russian cruise missiles. Ukrainian officials also say the country’s military has shot down 97 fixed-wing Russian aircraft. That number could not be verified but the crumpled remnants of Russian fighter jets have crashed into rivers, fields and houses.
The Ukrainian Air Force is operating in near total secrecy. Its fighter jets can fly from air strips in western Ukraine, airports that have been bombed yet retain enough runway for takeoffs or landings — or even from highways, analysts say. They are vastly outnumbered: Russia is believed to fly some 200 sorties per day while Ukraine flies five to 10.
Ukrainian pilots do have one advantage. In most of the country, Russian planes fly over territory controlled by the Ukrainian military, which can move anti-aircraft missiles to harass — and shoot down — planes.
“Ukraine has been effective in the sky because we operate on our own land,” Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force said. “The enemy flying into our airspace is flying into the zone of our air defense systems.” He described the strategy as luring Russian planes into air defense traps.
Dave Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and the principal attack planner for the Desert Storm air campaign in Iraq, said the impressive performance of the Ukrainian pilots had helped counter their disadvantages in numbers. He said Ukraine now has roughly 55 operational fighter jets, a number that is dwindling from shoot-downs and mechanical failures, as Ukrainian pilots are “stressing them to max performance.”
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has appealed repeatedly to Western governments to replenish the Ukrainian Air Force and has asked NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over the country, a step Western leaders have so far refused to take. Slovakia and Poland have considered sending MiG-29 fighter jets, which Ukrainian pilots could fly with minimal additional training, but as yet no transfers have been made.
“Russian troops have already fired nearly 1,000 missiles at Ukraine, countless bombs,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video address to Congress on March 16, appealing for more planes. “And you know that they exist, and you have them, but they are on earth, not in Ukraine — in the Ukrainian sky.”
Mr. Deptula said transferring these jets into Ukraine is critical. “Without resupply,” he said, “they will run out of airplanes before they run out of pilots.”
Pilotless drones are also a tool in the Ukrainian military’s arsenal, but not in the battle for control of the airspace. Ukraine flies a Turkish-made armed drone, the Bayraktar TB-2, a plodding, propeller aircraft that is lethally effective in destroying tanks or artillery pieces on the ground but cannot hit targets in the air. If Ukraine’s air defenses fail, Russian jets could easily pick them off.
As in other aspects of Ukraine’s war effort, volunteers play a role in the air battles. A volunteer network watches and listens for Russian jets, calling in coordinates and estimated speed and altitude. Other private Ukrainian pilots have removed up-to-date civilian navigation equipment from their planes and handed it over to the air force, in case it can be helpful.
Air-to-air combat has been rare in modern war, with only isolated examples in recent decades. U.S. pilots, for example, have not flown extensive aerial dogfights since the first Iraq War in 1991. Since then, U.S. fighter jets have engaged in air-to-air combat on just a few occasions, shooting down 10 planes in the Balkan wars and one plane in Syria, according to Mr. Deptula.
In the night sky, Andriy said he relies on instruments to discern the positions of enemy planes, which he says are always present. He has shot down Russian jets but was not permitted to say how many, or of which type. He said his targeting system can fire at planes a few dozen miles away.
“I mostly have tasks of hitting airborne targets, of intercepting enemy jets,” he said. “I wait for the missile to lock on my target. After that I press fire.”
When he shoots down a Russian jet, he said, “I am happy that this plane will no longer bomb my peaceful towns. And as we see in practice, that is exactly what Russian jets do.”
Most of the aerial combat in Ukraine has been nocturnal, as Russian aircraft attack in the dark when they are less vulnerable to air defenses. In the dogfights over Ukraine, Andriy said, the Russians have been flying an array of modern Sukhoi jets, such as the Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35.
“I had situations when I was approaching a Russian plane to a close enough distance to target and fire,” he said. “I could already detect it but was waiting for my missile to lock on while at the same time from the ground they tell me that a missile was fired at me already.”
He said he maneuvered his jet through a series of extreme banks, dives and climbs in order to exhaust the fuel supplies of the missiles coming after him. “The time I have to save myself depends on how far away the missile was fired at me and what kind of missile,” he said.
Still, he said in an interview on a clear, sunny day, “I can still feel a huge rush of adrenaline in my body because every flight is a fight.”
Andriy graduated from the Kharkiv Air Force School after deciding to become a pilot as a teenager. “Neither me nor my friends ever thought we would have to face a real war,” he said. “But that’s not how it turned out.”
Andriy has moved his wife to a safer part of Ukraine, but she has not left the country, he said. She spends her days weaving homemade camouflage nets for the Ukrainian army. He never tells family members when he is going on duty, he said, calling only after returning from a night flight.
“I only have to use my skills to win,” said Andriy. “My skills are better than the Russians. But on the other hand, many of my friends, and even those more experienced than me, are already dead.”
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Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said that some 100,000 people remained in the besieged city of Mariupol, large portions of which have been destroyed and where food and water are scarce. Humanitarian corridors have allowed some residents to flee, but only sporadically. Before the war, more than 400,000 people lived in the city.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan strongly protested a decision by Russia to halt post-World War II peace treaty talks in response to Japanese sanctions on Moscow. The talks centered on the status of disputed islands annexed by Russia after the war, known in Russia as the Southern Kurils and in Japan as the Northern Territories.
KYIV, Ukraine — Wildfires have broken out in the radioactive forest that surrounds the Chernobyl nuclear plant, an area now controlled by the Russian Army, Ukrainian media reported on Tuesday, raising worries that radiation could spread widely in the smoke if the fires burned unchecked.
Forest fires are common in the spring and summer in the abandoned zone around the Chernobyl plant, where radiation levels are considerably lower than they were immediately after the 1986 accident but still pose risks.
Typically, Ukraine sends dozens of fire trucks and hundreds of firefighters into the area to extinguish blazes as quickly as possible. But as this year’s fire season begins, the Russian military is occupying the Chernobyl zone, having used the site to advance troops and tanks from Belarus toward the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
The fiercest combat now is about 50 miles south of the irradiated zone, in outlying towns around Kyiv. Any firefighting effort would have to come from Russia or Belarus unless Ukrainian firefighters are permitted to cross the frontline, an unlikely proposition.
Seven small fires are now burning in the forest, Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian news outlet, reported, citing a statement issued by Parliament. It said the source of the fires was most likely artillery shelling or arson. There was no way to independently confirm the report.
Usually, fires are started this time of year by lightning, by campfires or by farmers burning fields before the spring planting in areas near the zone. The statement said the fires had burned through an area estimated to be from 175 acres to 500 acres.
In past years, even with free access for firefighters to the Chernobyl zone, spring fires have quickly spread beyond control. A major fire in early April 2020 burned more than 8,600 acres before it was contained, despite more than 100 fire trucks being dispatched to the area.
Now, even rotating key Ukrainian personnel who manage the highly radioactive waste at the site has become entangled in the war. The crew at the site on the day of the invasion has been working under Russian military command for weeks. Over the weekend, 64 Ukrainian nuclear workers and other site personnel left the Chernobyl zone and were replaced by 46 Ukrainian nuclear sector employees who volunteered to cross the front to maintain the plant.
One reactor was destroyed in the 1986 accident, and the other three are decommissioned. But nuclear waste at the site requires continual management. Some used fuel is held in pools, for example, and cannot be allowed to overheat.
Radioactive smoke from wildfires in the area has been a persistent threat. Over the three decades since the accident, radiation has settled into the soil, posing little risk if left undisturbed. But the roots of moss, trees and other vegetation have absorbed some radiation, bringing it to the surface and spreading radioactive particles in smoke when it burns.
The main risk from the fires comes from inhaling, via the smoke, small radioactive particles thrown years ago from the open core of the destroyed Chernobyl reactor.
During the 2020 wildfires, increased levels of radioactive cesium were detected in some countries, including Belgium, Greece and the Netherlands. But an analysis found that in the Netherlands and Belgium, not all of the cesium came from the fires.
Russian armed forces on Monday took four Ukrainian media workers from their homes in Melitopol, a city in southeastern Ukraine, the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine said in a news release.
The journalists and some of their family members were driven from the city — which is under Russian military occupation — toward an unknown direction before they were released a few hours later.
The journalists were all associated with the Melitopolskie Vedomosti, a local newspaper. They included the paper’s retired publisher, Mykhailo Kumko; its editor in chief, Yevhenia Boryan; and two reporters, Yulia Olkhovska and Lyubov Chaika.
Anna Medvid, the director general of the company that owns the newspaper, told the union that Russian soldiers have conducted “preventive talks” with journalists, in an attempt to persuade them to collaborate.
“A week ago, I was also summoned for an interview. They want us to be loyal and supportive. I did not agree, and we parted,” she said in the release.
The soldiers confiscated mobile phones and home servers from the media workers, according to Ms. Medvid.
“The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine condemns attempts at intimidation and pressure on journalists by the occupiers in Melitopol, Berdyansk and Kherson,” the union said in another news release on Monday, adding that searches and abductions have become tools of intimidation of journalists and activists on the occupied territories.
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In a video address shared online early Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine condemned Russian attacks on protesters in the city of Kherson in the south and strikes in the Zaporizhzhia region in the southeast, where four children were hospitalized.
Mr. Zelensky said the Ukrainian army had largely stalled Russian advances on Monday.
“The enemy is slowly trying to move to go on the offensive somewhere, to capture our road somewhere, to cross the river somewhere,” Mr. Zelensky said in a translation of his remarks shared by his office.
In Kherson, which has been held by Russian forces since March 2, Mr. Zelensky said Russian troops shot at people “who peacefully took to the streets without weapons at a rally for their freedom — for our freedom.”
“The Russian soldiers do not even know what it is like to be free,” Mr. Zelensky said, condemning the attack. “They were driven here, to be honest, as if sentenced — sentenced to death, sentenced to disgrace.”
The shooting scattered the crowd of protesters. It was not immediately clear if there were any injuries or fatalities in that attack.
In a separate assault, a group of civilians came under attack in the Zaporizhzhia region in the southeast, hospitalizing four children, of which two were in grave condition, Mr. Zelensky said.
Through humanitarian corridors on Monday in several cities across the country — including Kyiv, the capital, and Mariupol, a key coastal city in the south — Mr. Zelensky said 8,057 people were rescued. The number of evacuees could not be independently verified. “Thank you to everyone who did it, who worked for the people,” he said.
Some previous attempts to evacuate people, and deliver food and supplies through humanitarian corridors had failed after they were caught under fire from Russian troops.
“It was a day of difficult events,” Mr. Zelensky said, likely referencing Russian strikes that left pockets of death and destruction around the country. “But it was another day that brought us all closer to our victory.”
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