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Ukraine Live Updates: Blinken and Austin Visit Kyiv to Meet With Zelensky
The U.S. secretaries of state and defense were the highest-level American officials to go to Ukraine. A Ukrainian commander told The Times that the steel plant in Mariupol hasn’t fallen, but that he and others would give up if they could leave the factory safely.
Andrew E. Kramer and
KYIV, Ukraine — Two top American officials, in a trip shrouded in secrecy, made a wartime journey to Kyiv on Sunday, where President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine planned to urge them to provide more aid in his nation’s battle against Russian invaders, a top Ukrainian official said.
The U.S. government had been at extraordinary pains to to keep everything about the trip by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III under wraps until the men were safely out of Ukraine, declining even to confirm that it was taking place.
But it was an open secret.
A day earlier, Mr. Zelensky disclosed plans for the highest-level U.S. delegation to visit Ukraine since Russia invaded two months ago. In an interview broadcast on Sunday, as the U.S. government remained silent, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovych, said on Ukrainian television that the men were there.
“They’re right now in Kyiv, talking to the president,” Mr. Arestovich said. “Maybe something will be decided regarding how they can help.”
Less secret was the agenda of the meeting: Ukraine’s plea for more military aid from Western allies as it tries to fend off an attack that has crushed cities and left thousands dead. One Ukrainian lawmaker said it sent “a powerful signal to Russia that Ukraine will not be left alone with this war.”
Already, Congress has approved $13.6 billion in emergency spending related to the invasion, including for weapons, military supplies and one of the largest infusions of U.S. foreign aid to any country in the last decade. The funds also cover the deployment of U.S. troops to Europe. Days before the Americans’ visit, President Biden announced an additional $800 million in military aid, including equipment designed to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s offensive in the east.
But top-level U.S. officials had not visited the country since it was invaded, even as European leaders went to witness firsthand evidence of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in the suburbs of Kyiv.
As Ukrainians celebrated Orthodox Easter, the head of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox church, Metropolitan Epiphaniy, met in Kyiv on Sunday with two visiting U.S. Congress members, Tim Walberg of Michigan and Victoria Spartz of Indiana, both Republicans.
“Now, we are celebrating Easter, which is about Christ rising,” the metropolitan said. “We are sure that with his victory, we will have victory too.
But denouncing the Russians, he also endorsed the righteous use of force in self-defense.
“In this difficult fight,” he said, “spirit is not enough. You also need weapons.”
On Sunday, that fight was raging in Mariupol, the eastern port city were Russia redoubled its assault after withdrawing its forces from the capital region, where they had encountered fierce resistance. A steel plant there where Ukrainian forces have been holding out has come under ferocious attack, but it remains under Ukrainian control — at least, for now.
“We are prepared to leave the city because there is nothing left to defend,” Capt. Svyatoslav Palamar, a Ukrainian commander, said by phone from inside the plant Sunday. “We consider that we’ve fulfilled our mission.”
Given Russia’s new focus on seizing eastern Ukraine, a region filled with wide-open expanses of flatland, Ukrainian forces need more long-range weapons and the ability to quickly move troops on the ground and in the air, military analysts say.
With long-range artillery cannons, helicopters, armored vehicles, tanks, radar defense systems and deadly drones now flowing into the country, Ukrainian leaders have said they have the opportunity not only to defend their land but also to drive the Russians out.
Mr. Blinken was the last high-ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine when he stopped there in mid-January. The United States closed its embassy in Kyiv on Feb. 14 and its diplomats soon left the country.
Russia’s invasion began 10 days later, and as it tried to seize the capital in an initial offensive, parts of Kyiv were struck by shelling and Ukrainian and Russian forces fought in the streets of Kyiv’s suburbs. But Russia’s retreat from the area around Kyiv appears to have made the city far less dangerous than it was a few weeks ago, and Western leaders have been taking the opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with Mr. Zelensky.
It remained unclear on Sunday exactly how Mr. Austin and Mr. Blinken got to Kyiv, where Mr. Zelensky has remained since Russia invaded the country.
The distance makes air travel the obvious choice, but the Ukrainian government closed its airspace to civilian flights when the invasion began.
Other leaders who visited, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, went by rail. But given the security concerns, his trip, too, was shrouded in secrecy. Rumors about an impending trip by Mr. Johnson had circulated for days, but no news of the journey itself became public until he was seen in Kyiv.
In March, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Poland, where she expressed American support for Ukraine and U.S. allies in NATO and the European Union. Mr. Blinken previously went as far as Poland’s border with Ukraine, meeting with Ukrainian diplomats at a crossing used by hundreds of refugees over the course of an hour.
Mr. Biden also visited a town near the border on a state visit to Poland on March 25, but did not cross into Ukraine. He met with refugees and gave a speech in Warsaw the next day.
Previous visits by senior American officials to other war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, were typically not announced until after the official had arrived in the country — and sometimes not even until after they had left.
The White House has ruled out sending Mr. Biden to Ukraine, citing not only the risk but Mr. Biden’s enormous security requirements. Senior cabinet officials such as Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin travel with smaller entourages.
On Sunday, as Ukrainians gathered for muted celebrations of Easter, Russia’s offensive claimed more lives.
Before dawn, two young girls, aged 5 and 14, were killed when their home in the Donetsk region, near the eastern border with Russia, was destroyed, according to the Donetsk Regional Military Administration.
Nearly 100 miles to the west, three Russian missiles slammed into the city of Pavlograd. The strikes damaged railway infrastructure and eight buildings and also killed a 48-year-old man, according to local authorities.
In the eastern region of Luhansk, at least eight people were killed when seven houses and a police station were struck by Russian artillery fire, according to Ukrainian authorities.
The statements from state and local officials offered only a partial accounting of the growing toll as fighting along the 300-mile front line in eastern and southern Ukraine intensifies. The heavy fighting has so far resulted in only small gains for Russian forces, but the situation for civilians caught in the crossfire grows more dire by the day.
The fighting once again hindered evacuation efforts.
Igor Zhovkva, an adviser to President Zelensky, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that, despite claims from Russia that it had taken control of the port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian forces and civilians remained in the city. Many soldiers were wounded, he said.
“Today, we turn to Russian authorities to open the humanitarian corridors for civilians,” he said.
With the city in ruins, an estimated 120,000 people are surviving in what witnesses have described as barbaric conditions. Ukrainian officials said Sunday that Russian forces were continuing to bombard the sprawling steel factory where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are trapped.
Ukrainian forces are willing to leave the factory and evacuate the city if given guarantees of safe passage for themselves and hundreds of civilians, said Captain Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Battalion, whose fighters have been holed up at the plant since March 1.
“We will continue to defend it until there is an order to retreat from our military leadership,” he said. “And if we are going to leave, we are going to leave with our weapons.”
Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kyiv, and Natalie Kitroeff from Mexico City. Reporting was contributed by Marc Santora and Jane Arraf from Lviv, Ukraine; Michael Schwirtz from Mariupol; Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London; and Eduardo Medina from New York.
Eduardo Medina and
The United States’ top diplomat and top defense official arrived in Kyiv on Sunday, a Ukrainian official said, following other world leaders who have visited the embattled capital over two months of war to signal their support for Ukraine.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III met with President Volodymyr Zelensky, becoming the first senior U.S. officials known to have visited Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24. The visit was confirmed by Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, in an interview with a Russian lawyer and activist on YouTube.
“They’re right now in Kyiv, talking to the president,” Mr. Arestovich said. “Maybe something will be decided regarding how they can help.”
The Biden administration has backed Ukraine with aid and weaponry, and has helped lead an international campaign of sanctions against Russia. But it had been under growing pressure to send a high-level official to Kyiv after recent visits there by several European officials, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who walked the streets with Mr. Zelensky, and the prime ministers of Spain and Denmark.
U.S. officials did not announce the visit, but Mr. Zelensky revealed it in a speech on Saturday, saying he would use the meeting to discuss “the military assistance we need.” The Pentagon and State Department did not immediately comment.
Mr. Blinken was the last high-ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine when he stopped there in mid-January. The United States closed its embassy in Kyiv on Feb. 14 and its diplomats soon left the country.
Russia’s invasion began 10 days later, and as it tried to seize the capital in an initial offensive, parts of Kyiv were struck by shelling and Ukrainian and Russian forces fought in the streets of Kyiv’s suburbs. But Russia’s retreat from the area around Kyiv appears to have made the city far less dangerous than it was a few weeks ago, and Western leaders have been taking the opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with Mr. Zelensky.
In March, only a few weeks after Russia’s invasion, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv on a mission that was kept tightly under wraps. Over the following weeks, they were followed by leaders of Britain, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Estonia, Spain and Denmark. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, visited both Kyiv and Bucha, where in the wake of Russia’s retreat journalists and investigators have found evidence of atrocities.
In March, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Poland, where she expressed American support for Ukraine and U.S. allies in NATO and the European Union. Mr. Blinken went as far as Poland’s border with Ukraine, meeting with Ukrainian diplomats at a crossing used by hundreds of refugees over the course of an hour.
President Biden also visited a town near the border on a state visit to Poland on March 25, but did not cross into Ukraine. He met with refugees and gave a speech in Warsaw the next day.
Previous visits by senior American officials to other war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, were typically not announced until after the official had arrived in the country — and sometimes not even until after they had left.
Security concerns and contested airspace have still required leaders to make long journeys to reach Kyiv. The British government said that Mr. Johnson, whose visit in early April was unannounced, used several modes of transportation, including a train from eastern Poland.
The White House had ruled out sending Mr. Biden, citing not only the risk but Mr. Biden’s enormous security requirements. Senior cabinet officials such as Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin travel with smaller entourages.
The U.S. visit follows Mr. Biden’s announcement on Thursday of an additional $800 million in military aid, including equipment designed to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s offensive in the east.
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Continue reading the main storyAnushka Patil and
Orthodox Christians in Kyiv this weekend observed a poignant Easter Sunday — the holiest day of their year — as Russian forces continued to attack Ukraine despite calls for a humanitarian cease-fire during the holiday.
Orthodox Easter Sunday this year falls exactly two months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In areas of the country now liberated from Russian forces, many services were held in churches ruined by bombing.
At Saint Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kyiv, which appears to stand relatively unscathed, worshipers like Valentyna Atamaniuk expressed the “pain and joy” of observing the holiday while the war grinds on.
The bittersweet sentiment echoed President Volodymyr Zelensky’s nightly address on Holy Saturday, when he used the story of Easter to hearten his people. “There will be a resurrection,” he said. “Life will defeat death.”
For Western leaders traveling to Kyiv to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, the question of how to get there is far from straightforward.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III were expected on Sunday, but details of their trip haven’t been released.
The distance — Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, after Russia — makes air travel the obvious answer, but that option was eliminated when the government closed its airspace to civilian flights after the invasion.
That leaves rail, road, or a combination of the two. It is about 340 miles by train from the Polish border to the Ukrainian capital, where Mr. Zelensky has remained since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.
The first European leaders to visit Kyiv after the invasion were the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia who crossed from the Polish border by train on March 15. The trip, to signal European solidarity, took place at a time of particular peril. Russian forces were bombarding the city in an attempt to take it.
In the aftermath of Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain’s visit to Kyiv on April 9, video emerged on social media of him swaying slightly as he stood in what appeared to be the carriage of a moving train.
“I am traveling on a fantastic Ukrainian railways train to Kyiv from Poland,” he said.
Rumors about an impending trip by Mr. Johnson had circulated for days but no news of the journey itself became public until he was seen in Kyiv, likely a reflection of what his security officials viewed as a need for secrecy.
Other Western politicians have made the trip to Kyiv recently to stress their support for Ukraine, but even after the trips are concluded, they have not disclosed their precise itineraries. A timetable showed the trip takes at least eight hours.
Visitors have included Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, who went April 8 to the town of Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv, where retreating Russian soldiers are accused of killing dozens of civilians.
The Austrian chancellor, Karl Nehammer, visited this month, as did the prime minister of Slovakia.
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For many in Ukraine, war has overshadowed Easter, celebrated on Sunday in the Orthodox church two months after Russia invaded the country. Ukrainian Orthodox Christians observe Easter Mass at the Intercession of the Theotokos Orthodox Cathedral in the western city of Lviv. Troops with the 128th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade attend a small Orthodox Easter service at a remote base along the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia region, in South East Ukraine.
Elsewhere, a woman wipes away tears as she attends an Orthodox Easter Sunday service at the Church of St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints in Bucha, Ukraine.
Ukrainian worshipers wait with Easter baskets to be blessed as they attend an Easter service outside Voznesenska Church in the village of Bobryk, northeast of Kyiv, the capital. Easter services were held there despite damage to the main part of the church, which was struck by a Russian rocket on March 5 before Russian troops occupied the village three days later.
In the basement of a battered school in Kharkiv, a dozen residents have taken shelter. In a neighborhood not far away, life has returned to some sense of normalcy. But they choose to stay.
KHARKIV, Ukraine — The shelling had gone on so long and had been so frequent that even moments of quiet brought their own kind of terror.
The artillery barrages and rocket strikes started when the Russians first invaded in February, 59 days ago, and have not stopped. For those still hiding in the school, every day now brings the same routine: Rise at first light, start the fires, boil water, make tea, cook soup and return to the basement.
They cower in the unbearably cold underground, packed together and listening as shells slam Kharkiv, an eastern Ukrainian city of 1.4 million before the war started, which Russian firepower has tried to pound into submission. There were roughly 300 people sheltering in the school in the early days of the war, yet nearly all have fled. Now there are only 12.
“Here the people left have nowhere to go and nowhere to come back to,” said Larisa Kuznetsova, 55, one of the school’s inhabitants until recently. “And where shall we move? Who needs us elsewhere?”
Trapped in the dangerous ground between Russian and Ukrainian forces, the 12 people still inside the slanted and dusty basement of Kharkiv Municipal Gymnasium No. 172, as the school is officially called, embody what the war has become for those who do not flee: a test of endurance. Even amid the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, there are people who can’t imagine leaving their home, no matter the cost.
They could escape to a safer section of Kharkiv, only a few miles away, yet they stay. One woman refuses to leave her disabled husband and son. The school secretary stays to protect against looting. The humanitarian workers who bring food to the 12 have taken to calling them “the dwarfs.”
Even with the risk of a direct strike looming over them, they remain, trying to create a semblance of normalcy. They gathered around a table in the school’s underground on Sunday, the Orthodox Easter, for a traditional meal and Easter cakes.
“We served this table so that we could celebrate the holiday, like at home,” said Natalia Afanasenko, 44, the group’s de facto cook.
No. 172’s conversion into a bomb shelter began almost as soon as the war started on Feb. 24. Kharkiv, only 30 miles from the Russian border and Ukraine’s second largest city, was attacked immediately. Ms. Kuznetsova, a short, quick-talking neighborhood shopkeeper, and her son, Dmitry, 23, stayed in their apartment for the first five days.
“There was shelling then, but unobtrusively,” she said. “The shops were open. We would wait in line for two hours and buy a lot of canned food.”
Then one day, as the mother and son ate lunch, the power went out. Ms. Kuznetsova decided to take a quick half-hour nap. She awoke to three shells slamming into her building, known in the neighborhood as Building 40, shaking its foundation, shattering windows and sending her small family crawling to their bathroom, then to the basement.
A few days later, another strike lit Building 40 on fire.
“Everybody came out wearing whatever they were in, and the neighbor was coming my way, saying, ‘What the hell are you doing here? Hurry up to the school,’” recounted Ms. Kuznetsova.
No. 172 is in the neighborhood of Saltivka, a populated residential area in Kharkiv’s northeastern reaches. It has been shelled incessantly by seemingly every type of artillery in the Russian inventory.
The Soviet-style apartment blocks and small shops were built in the late 1960s and ‘70s as Kharkiv expanded after the city’s destruction during World War II. Now Ukrainian howitzers and mortars are positioned nearby, with the apartment towers acting as a shield from incoming Russian fire, locking residents in the middle of an unending duel.
The school, constructed in 1995, is what counts as a safe haven for the neighborhood, partly because its basement is below ground, unlike some in the surrounding apartment buildings.
Ms. Kuznetsova and Dmitry arrived there on March 3, when the original hundreds had dwindled to about 70 people. The basement was damp and putrid. The basics, like food and hygiene material, were scavenged from vacated apartments until humanitarian workers started arriving.
In charge of this bedraggled colony is Natalia Skvortsova, 48, the school secretary. She and her son, Yevgeny Kryvoruchko, 18, are staying for two reasons. She wants to protect against looting and prevent school records and graduation certificates from being destroyed. Quietly, she’s afraid that Yevgeny, now a university student who spends long hours in the half darkness mastering Rubik’s cubes (his fastest time is nine seconds), might get drafted.
“This is how it is,” she said, matter-of-factly.
Before the Russian invasion started, No. 172 was a pleasant white-walled educational center with 1,000 students. It had new projectors, a 25-meter pool and lovely large windows.
But after at least four rounds of artillery hit the campus, killing one man, most windows are shattered, some classroom doors are torn in half, plaster has sheared off walls and the pool’s water is a murky gray. A school museum exhibit honoring Soviet soldiers who fought in World War II has been picked apart so a German helmet from the conflict could be used for protection in the basement.
“It’s terrifying living here,” Yevgeny said. “Yes, I want to leave. But my family is here, how could I?”
As February turned to March, and March to April, the exodus from No. 172 slowly gathered pace.
“Whoever could leave, left,” said Valeriy Gretskykh, 67, one of the final 12.
Today, Kharkiv is still under relentless bombardment, yet only a few miles away from Saltivka life has returned, somewhat. Some shops are open, traffic lights are on and city workers take out the trash at regular intervals. Saltivka remains the hardest hit neighborhood, and with some modicum of normalcy so close, the resistance to evacuate can easily be seen as baffling.
The school residents haven’t showered in months, resorting to baby wipes and bottled water. Plumbing is nonexistent. Power comes from a small generator that runs a few hours every couple days and beds are constructed from school desks and gym mats. For entertainment, they watch old VHS tapes, including school graduations and the documentary “Joseph Stalin: The Last Years, the Last Days.”
“We don’t watch heavy films about war,” said Olga Altukhova, 66, a retired saleswoman whose birthday on April 17 was marked by a bouquet of tulips.
Ms. Altukhova has refused to evacuate because her disabled husband and mentally disabled son are still inside nearby Building 40 and physically can’t leave. Most every hour, she leaves the basement and talks to her husband as he leans out the window from the sixth floor.
The fear of leaving is also fueled by the unknown. The 12 have heard worrying stories about those who have fled.
“I was speaking to a friend who moved to another part of Kharkiv on the phone yesterday,” said Ms. Kuznetsova. “She says, ‘We are eating plain noodles now, nothing is left and the volunteers won’t bring anything after we call them.’”
Indeed, No. 172’s location — practically on the front line — has meant frequent visits from humanitarian aid organizations and nonprofits.
“We are fed amazingly,” Ms. Kuznetsova added. “A lot of people who stay here are eating things now that they weren’t able to eat during the peaceful life.”
No. 172 has so much donated bread that much of it goes bad. So every day one resident breaks a loaf and feeds a gang of pigeons, who take off briefly when artillery comes close, before returning to their meal.
The residents also help take care of people in the neighborhood, acting as a distribution point for those who won’t leave their apartments. People take food, toiletries and secondhand clothes from the school, which Ms. Altukhova lists in a log book and then signs out to whoever comes by during the pauses in shelling.
For the past week, leading up to Orthodox Easter on Sunday, the challenge was gathering the necessary ingredients for a proper lunch, a job that fell to Ms. Afanasenko, 44, the designated cook.
By Sunday she had what she needed after racing to her apartment: mushrooms and canned olives that she had kept since last fall, mayonnaise stored months in advance and onions she had watered outside the basement. Volunteers brought eggs, cakes and, two days before the holiday, holy water.
In the half-dark of the basement, with sunflower-printed napkins and a table arrangement of tulips picked from the neighborhood, the residents of No. 172 raised paper cups of wine and hugged one another.
“When it all ends, we’ll just visit our homes,” Ms. Altukhova joked. “And we’ll be living here!”
Dimitry Yatsenko contributed reporting.
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LVIV, Ukraine — The smoked sausage and the pungent horseradish mixed with beets was the same and the sweetbread with icing blessed by a priest was just as blessed, but, for Ukrainians displaced from their homes, the joy of Easter Sunday was overshadowed by uncertainty and anguish.
In this country where a large majority of people are practicing Christians, Easter is the most important religious and cultural event of the Christian calendar. Most of them are Orthodox or Eastern Rite Catholics who commemorated Easter on Sunday according to the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar in which Christ’s resurrection was celebrated a week ago.
At a transit shelter for displaced families in a football stadium on the outskirts of this western Ukrainian city on Sunday morning, about a dozen families sat in the cafeteria, the children opening Easter boxes with slices of sausage, a plastic container of purple horseradish, sweetbread, chocolates and a painted egg.
A priest had come earlier to bless the brown cardboard boxes — a version of the blessings bestowed on wicker baskets with traditionally embroidered cloths covering the same foods brought into churches before Easter breakfast.
Near the cafeteria tables, a woman and a young girl lit candles and said prayers in front of a glass painting of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.
Outside, smoking a cigarette, Olena, who asked to be identified only by her first name, said she had arrived on Tuesday from her village of Sadove in the Kharkiv region, not far from the Russian-occupied city of Izium.
“In these times, we don’t feel like celebrating Easter,” she said.
Olena, 31, said she was torn between staying in western Ukraine with her 8-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter or returning to Kharkiv to join the sisters she also left behind.
Nearby, Anna Ivashchenko, 33, a mail carrier from the Donetsk region, said before this year, she had cherished Easter celebrations.
“Last year was during Covid, but Easter was very nice,” she said. “We had a barbecue by the river.”
She said here at the shelter she was trying to keep her children, ages 9, 10 and 17, distracted with a concert and games planned for the afternoon.
She decided to leave her city of Dobropillya with her children because of the shelling and explosions after her husband was injured fighting in Mariupol.
Inside Lviv, at the Ukrainian Catholic University, groups of children sat around tables to decorate eggs using wax and traditional geometric designs. Volunteers placed lit tea candles next to the children to be able to melt wax used to create the intricate designs on the delicate eggs, which had been emptied through a pin prick.
Lesyia Onyshko watched her daughter Sophia Melania, 8, dressed for Easter in a dark pink cardigan with a red-and-white bow in her hair, intently draw lines of wax on her egg.
She and her family were displaced from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
“Having a young child, it’s very difficult to leave and support her all the time because sometimes she’s crying,” said Ms. Onyshko, who works at a museum in Kyiv. She said the designs on the eggs were symbols of spring renewal and new life.
In the background, a group of teenagers dressed in shirts with traditional Ukrainian embroidery danced through the room singing a folk song.
Sofia Antymys, 17, a freshman university student who was volunteering at the event, said the children would also make boxes for the soldiers, filling them with letters and sweetbread.
“For us, we are religious people, and Easter has a lot of meaning,” she said. “Christ dies and then He is reborn, as Ukraine will be reborn after this war.”
LVIV, Ukraine — Yevhen Tishchenko stood on the train platform trying to wrestle bulging, woven plastic duffel bags onto an old luggage cart while his wife lifted their disabled youngest child onto a plastic tricycle.
Mr. Tishchenko, a furniture salesman, and his wife, Tetiana Komisarova, arrived at this train station in western Ukraine after walking for five days with their children to reach safety. They did not know where they were going. But they knew it was better than where they had come from — Mariupol in eastern Ukraine, which has been bombarded by Russian forces for weeks.
The family’s home was far from the steelworks mill where soldiers are sheltering underground, holding off Russian troops trying to take the city’s last vestige of territory held by Ukraine.
But Mariupol has been devastated by fighting, with shortages of medicine, food and electricity.
The couple did not own a car. When conditions became unbearable last Sunday, they packed the fraying bags with clothes and food and started walking with their four children. Their oldest child is 12, and their youngest, at 6, suffers from microcephaly, a rare condition that requires regular neurological monitoring and psychiatric consultations.
They left behind Mr. Tishchenko’s elderly mother, who could not walk, and their gray-and-white cat, named Mosia by Uliana, the 6-year-old.
Their journey out of the city was macabre: decomposing bodies, shelling in the distance, Russian military convoys and checkpoints.
“The city was turned into one big cemetery,” said Ms. Komisarova, 42. “We lived near Shevchenko Boulevard. There was a strip of land between two roads, and corpses were lying there for a long time. I’ve never seen so many dead bodies in my life.”
At each Russian checkpoint, they would say Ms. Komisarova had a sister in the next town. And at each checkpoint, perhaps moved by a large family struggling with children, the soldiers let them through. Some showed them photos of their own children.
“At one of them, a Russian soldier started asking us where we were going,” she said. “I said ‘Orikhove’. And then he said: ‘No, don’t go there. It’s being shelled. Go somewhere west.’”
She said they would stop in villages where people would let them stay.
In a village near Rozivka, she found out that the friend she had hoped to stay with had escaped. So they spent the night in a deserted house with other displaced people.
“We made a fire in a clay oven to keep warm, and then the neighbors came. They boiled potatoes with fried eggs for us. They fed us well,” she said.
On the fifth day, they were picked up by a man with a load of radishes and taken to the train station in Zaporizhzhia.
Arriving in Lviv, Ms. Komisarova and the children waited outside the station by the pile of luggage as Mr. Tishchenko went off to ask where they could find shelter. Looking around at the vehicles coming and going, the former high school teacher said she had forgotten what traffic looked like.
Her eldest daughter, Anna, 10, carried a Hello Kitty backpack and a green stuffed toy identical to the one her sister had been given along the way. A volunteer gave the children Easter chocolates they put in their pockets but did not eat.
Mr. Tishchenko, 37, has not been able to reach his mother but the children said their father had boarded up the shattered windows before they left, and they believed their grandmother would be all right.
They again hoisted the bags onto a street tram to take them to a resettlement office where they would be given a place to stay in a school that had been turned into a shelter for the displaced. At the office, one of the guards wiped tears from her eyes as she sat with the children while their parents were being interviewed.
Ms. Komisarova, a former Ukrainian language and literature teacher, said they intended to return when Mariupol was safe again.
“Honestly, we don’t have a specific plan where to go until then,” she said. “I remember the moment when we reached the first Ukrainian checkpoint and saw our flags and heard a soldier speaking our language. I was just sitting in the car and crying. We really want Mariupol to be Ukrainian again.”
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Reporting from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine
Ukrainian troops with the 128th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade attend Orthodox Easter services along the frontline in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine on Sunday. Hopes for a cease-fire over the holiday weekend were quickly dashed, as Russian artillery fire and missiles continued to strike Ukrainian infrastructure, government buildings and residential homes.
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces are still in full control of the Azovstal steel plant in the war-battered port city of Mariupol and have repelled continuous assaults by Russian infantry even while weathering steadily intensifying air and artillery attacks, a commander of one of the Ukrainian units defending the plant said in an interview on Sunday.
Ukrainian forces are willing to leave the factory and evacuate the city if given guarantees of safe passage for themselves and hundreds of civilians, said Capt. Svyatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Battalion, whose fighters have been holed up at the plant since March 1.
“We are prepared to leave the city because there is nothing left to defend,” Captain Palamar said by phone from inside the plant. “We consider that we’ve fulfilled our mission. But we will continue to defend it until there is an order to retreat from our military leadership. And if we are going to leave, we are going to leave with our weapons.”
On Thursday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia issued an order to halt the assault of the Azovstal factory. He called for a blockade instead, but the fighting continued, drawing crucial resources from Russian forces, even as preparations were underway for a significant offensive in eastern Ukraine.
“Despite the fact that today is an important Christian holiday, they bombed the factory all night,” Captain Palamar said.
The defense of the Azovstal factory in Mariupol is emblematic of the fierce, and to many unexpected, resistance of Ukrainian forces against their more powerful and more numerous adversaries. For nearly two months, a relatively small band of fighters has withstood a relentless barrage of attacks from land, sea and air, continuing to maintain a defensive perimeter that has prevented Russian troops from entering the territory of the plant, according to soldiers and officials.
But Captain Palamar and other soldiers interviewed by The Times said that they are short on time. Stocks of ammunition are dwindling and, perhaps more critically, rations of food and water are running dangerously low.
It is not clear how many people remain inside the plant — a sprawling complex consisting of a number of buildings with deep reinforced concrete bunkers that have been difficult for Russian forces to penetrate.
What is certain is that no one is coming for them. The rings of Russian defenses around the city are too heavily fortified for Ukrainian forces to mount an attack.
Ukrainian fighters at the plant say that they hope some neutral country might work to broker a deal that could allow them and the civilians sheltering in the plant to escape, perhaps by sea.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said he had discussed with his soldiers the impossibility of Ukraine’s military swiftly breaking through to their position by attacking from outside the Russian encirclement. There would be no immediate rescue.
“We are not preparing it at this moment,” he told the reporters gathered in the Maidan Nezalezhnosti subway station in Kyiv, the capital. “They clearly understand this. That is the reality.”
In the interview, Captain Palamar indicated that the Ukrainian fighters at the plant were not satisfied with efforts being made to extract them. He called on the military and political leadership of Ukraine “to save the lives of our fighters, who have done so much for this war, who have died heroically, been wounded and held practically the entire southeastern military group.”
“We can’t get out ourselves. Not without help,” he said.
Captain Palamar would not say how many fighters remain alive and in fighting condition, but admitted that more than 500 were wounded, some seriously.
The conditions, particularly for the wounded, are grim. There is a field hospital, but very little medical equipment or medicine remains. Video from inside the hospital that he sent via WhatsApp shows pale, largely motionless soldiers with an array of gruesome injuries sprawled on mats on a concrete floor. Anesthesia drugs are running low and some of the wounded require amputations, Captain Palamar said.
Every day brings new fighting and death, he and others at the plant said. The battle for Azovstal is being waged along a defensive ring on the outer rim of the factory complex, though heavy bombing has slowly reduced the areas from which Ukrainian soldiers can carry out the fight. As Russian forces have used increasingly large and powerful weapons, cave-ins have become a more common cause of death, he said, both to civilians and soldiers.
Fighting at the plant is being waged by a number of Ukrainian groups including national guard units, regular army, volunteer battalions and even some police officers. But the primary fighting force is the Azov Battalion, which is part of the National Guard of Ukraine. It is a force that does include nationalist soldiers, which the Kremlin has used to paint the unit as fascist. The unit has evolved into a regular combat force within the Ukrainian military.
Captain Palamar and others have ruled out surrender to Russian forces, saying they do not trust the Kremlin’s guarantees that it would abide by rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.
“No one wants to surrender and end up in the hands of the Nazis or the Gestapo,” he said. “There are many examples of soldiers ending up as prisoners and contact with them is lost. Their fates are unknown.”
Maria Varenikova and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv.
Two Ukrainian officials expressed doubts on Sunday about the United Nations secretary general’s planned trip to Moscow this week, saying that António Guterres should visit Ukraine first and focus on humanitarian aid, not peace talks in Moscow.
Mr. Guterres will meet and have lunch on Tuesday with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and then meet with President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a statement from the United Nations. He will then travel to Ukraine and meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday.
Mr. Guterres “hopes to talk about what can be done to bring peace to Ukraine urgently,” a U.N. spokeswoman said in a statement. But Igor Zhovkva, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, criticized Mr. Guterres for traveling to Moscow. Speaking on Sunday to NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the U.N. should focus more on providing humanitarian support to Ukraine.
“Any peace talks are good if they end with a result,” Mr. Zhovkva said. But he added that he doubted the talks arranged by Mr. Guterres “would end up with any result.”
The U.N., he said, “is lagging behind in Ukraine in terms of humanitarian support to my country, so it would be good to have” Mr. Guterres concentrate on aid.
The U.N. said that Mr. Guterres would also meet with U.N. staff members on the ground “to discuss the scaling up of humanitarian assistance to the people of Ukraine.”
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal of Ukraine told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Russia does not appear to be interested in this negotiation.
“They are interested in creation of food crises, energy crises,” Mr. Shmyhal said of Russia. “I’m not sure they’re capable to hold this negotiation in a proper way.”
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Continue reading the main storyBANGKOK — As the bonds of traditional alliances fray across the globe, the Royal Thai Army, the United States’ oldest treaty partner in Asia, has cast a wide net.
This year, with the world reeling from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Thai soldiers hosted American troops for Cobra Gold, annual military exercises that are one of the largest shows of force in the Asia Pacific. A few months before, they participated in Shared Destiny, peacekeeping drills run by the People’s Liberation Army of China. And in 2020, the Thais hedged their bets further, signing an agreement for their cadets to receive training at a defense academy in Moscow.
The geopolitical landscape following the Ukraine invasion has often been likened to that of a new Cold War. While the main antagonists may be the same — the United States, Russia and, increasingly, China — the roles played by much of the rest of the world have changed, reshaping a global order that held for more than three-quarters of a century.
Governments representing more than half of humanity have refused to take a side, avoiding the binary accounting of us-versus-them that characterized most of the post-World War II era. In a United Nations General Assembly vote this month to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council, dozens of countries abstained, including Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and Singapore. (The resolution succeeded anyway.)
Once proxy battlegrounds for superpowers, swaths of Africa, Asia and Latin America are staking their independence. The return of a bloc of nonaligned nations harks back to a period in which leaders of the post-colonial movement resisted having their destinies shaped by imperialism. It also points to the confidence of smaller countries, no longer dependent on a single ideological or economic patron, to go their own way.
“Without a doubt, the countries of Southeast Asia don’t want to be pulled into a new Cold War or be forced to take sides in any great power competition,” said Zachary Abuza, a security specialist at the National War College in Washington. “As they say in Southeast Asia, when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.”
Having to align themselves with one power or another, Mr. Abuza added, left many nations around the world “desperately poor and underdeveloped at the end of the Cold War.”
As a result, even the United States, the Cold War’s victor, cannot count on the support of some of its traditional partners in vocally condemning Russia for its attack on a sovereign, democratic nation. The NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 have only heightened mistrust of the West. Both military actions left countries in those regions struggling with the political fallout for years after.
“The crux of the matter is that African countries feel infantilized and neglected by Western countries, which are also accused of not living up to their soaring moral rhetoric on sovereignty and territorial sanctity,” said Ebenezer Obadare, senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Indonesia, a sprawling democracy once ruled by a dictator favored by the United States for his anti-communist stance, has said that it will welcome President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia when the country hosts the Group of 20 meetings this year. It, too, abstained in the U.N. vote to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council.
“Our government has adopted the questionable strategy of trying to ignore the biggest geopolitical earthquake in 70 years in our agenda as this year’s G-20 President, which kind of blows my mind,” said Tom Lembong, a former trade minister.
Other U.S. allies have characterized their decision to diversify as a function of American absenteeism. Last year, as China spread its vaccine diplomacy around the world, the United States was seen initially as hoarding its pandemic supplies.
Before that, during Donald J. Trump’s presidency, the United States pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an expansive trade pact that was meant to counter China’s way of doing business. Countries like Vietnam that had staked their reputations on joining felt betrayed, once again, by Washington.
Mexico, a longtime U.S. ally, has emphasized its neutrality, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has rejected sanctions on Russia.
“Mexico’s neutrality is not neutral,” said Tony Payan of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Mexico is poking Washington in the eye.”
About one-third of American ambassadorships in Latin America and the Caribbean remain unfilled. The vacancies include Brazil, the largest regional economy, and the Organization of American States.
“Many Latin Americans were realizing that the United States was abandoning them,” said Vladimir Rouvinski, a professor at Icesi University in Cali, Colombia.
Russia cannot count on automatic allegiance from its historical allies, either. Apart from a sense of autocratic camaraderie, ideology is no longer part of Moscow’s allure. Russia has neither the patronage cash nor the geopolitical clout of the Soviet Union.
Venezuela, Russia’s staunchest supporter in Latin America, received a high-level American delegation on the heels of the Ukraine invasion. Nicaragua, which became one of the first countries to back Russia’s recognition of separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, has since tempered its enthusiasm.
During a March U.N. vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Cuba abstained, rather than backing Moscow, although it and Nicaragua later rejected the effort to kick Russia off the Human Rights Council.
“They’re trying to walk a fine line between certainly not celebrating the invasion, but also not clearly condemning it, arguing in favor of peace,” said Renata Keller, a Cuba expert at the University of Nevada, Reno.
The most noticeable hedging has come from Africa, which accounted for nearly half the countries that abstained in the March U.N. vote.
“We don’t know why they are fighting,” President Samia Suluhu Hassan of Tanzania said in an interview, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
She added that she was “not sure” there was a clear aggressor in the conflict.
For Thailand, the decision to train with the American, Russian and Chinese militaries, as well as to buy weaponry from each country, is part of its long history of balancing between great powers. Deft diplomacy allowed Thailand to emerge as the only nation in the region not to be colonized.
The current drift away from the United States, which used Thailand as a staging ground for the Vietnam War, also stems from the political pedigree of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who came to power in a military coup eight years ago.
“Though Thailand may currently appear as a democracy, it is at heart an autocracy,” said Paul Chambers, a lecturer in international affairs at Naresuan University in Thailand. “A regime such as this will have autocratic bedfellows, including in Moscow.”
The same holds in Uganda, which receives almost a billion dollars in American aid and is a key Western ally in the fight against regional militancy. Yet the government of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda has been criticized by the United States and the European Union for a pattern of human rights violations.
Mr. Museveni has responded by assailing the West’s interference in Libya and Iraq. The president’s son, who also commands the country’s land forces, tweeted that a “majority of mankind (that are non-white) support Russia’s stand in Ukraine.”
Uganda, like dozens of other countries, can afford to speak up because of a new top trading partner: China. This economic reality, even if Beijing promises more than it delivers, has shielded nations once dependent on other superpowers from stark geopolitical choices.
Strategically located countries like Djibouti, host to Camp Lemonnier, the largest permanent U.S. base on the African continent, have diversified. A few years ago, after President Ismail Omar Guelleh’s invitation, Beijing established its first overseas military outpost in Djibouti. Mr. Guelleh also secured loans from the Chinese to help develop ports, free trade zones and a railway.
Growing Chinese engagement has provided African countries with “alternative investment, alternative markets and alternative ideas of development,” said Cobus van Staden, at the South African Institute of International Affairs.
But if the world feels more comfortably multipolar these days, the ripple effects of the fighting in Ukraine are a reminder that globalization quickly links far-flung nations.
Escalating global prices for fuel, food and fertilizer, all a result of war in Ukraine, have heightened hardship in Africa and Asia. Already contending with a devastating drought, East Africa now has at least 13 million people facing severe hunger.
And populations outside of Europe know too well that their refugees — such as Syrians, Venezuelans, Afghans, South Sudanese and the Rohingya of Myanmar — cannot expect the welcome given to displaced Ukrainians. In a race for finite reserves of care, aid groups have warned of the perils of donor fatigue for the world’s most vulnerable.
“The whole world,” President Hassan of Tanzania said, referring to Russia and Ukraine, “is affected when these countries are fighting.”
Hannah Beech reported from Bangkok, Abdi Latif Dahir from Nairobi, Kenya, and Oscar Lopez from Mexico City. Muktita Suhartono contributed reporting from Jakarta, Indonesia.
Rejecting calls from Ukrainians and humanitarian organizations for a cease-fire over the Orthodox Easter holiday, Russian forces continued to bombard towns and villages across Ukraine over the weekend.
Before dawn on Sunday, two young girls, aged 5 and 14, were killed when their home in the Donetsk region, near the eastern border with Russia, was destroyed, according to the Donetsk Regional Military Administration.
Nearly 100 miles to the west, three Russian missiles slammed into the city of Pavlograd. The strikes damaged railway infrastructure and eight buildings and also killed a 48-year-old man, according to local authorities.
In the eastern region of Luhansk, at least eight people were killed when seven houses and a police station were struck by Russian artillery fire, according to Ukrainian authorities.
The statements from state and local officials offered only a partial accounting of the growing toll as fighting along the 300-mile front line in eastern and southern Ukraine intensifies. The heavy fighting has so far resulted in only small gains for Russian forces, but the situation for civilians caught in the crossfire grows more dire by the day.
The fighting once again hindered evacuation efforts.
There were no humanitarian routes established out of the port city of Mariupol on Sunday, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said in a statement.
With the city in ruins, the estimated 120,000 people are surviving in what witnesses have described as barbaric conditions. At the same time, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that Russian forces continued to bombard the sprawling steel factory where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are trapped.
Ms. Vereshchuk said that the government would try to organize an evacuation again on Monday. She called for U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who is scheduled to travel to Moscow before visiting Kyiv next week, to demand a cease-fire and open up humanitarian corridors.
“This is what Guterres should talk about in Moscow, if he is preparing to talk about peace,” Vereshchuk said.
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Continue reading the main storyIgor Zhovkva, an adviser to President Zelensky, criticized António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, for planning to travel to Moscow this week. Speaking to NBC's "Meet the Press," he said the U.N. should focus more on providing humanitarian support to Ukraine.
When Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal of Ukraine was asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if the atrocities committed in Mariupol by Russian forces could diminish the possibility of a diplomatic end to the war, he replied: “Russia has done many atrocities and many war crimes in Ukraine. But we understand that this terrible war could be finished only on the table of negotiations.”
Igor Zhovkva, an adviser to President Zelensky, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” said that, despite claims from Russia that it had taken control of Mariupol, Ukrainian forces and civilians remained in the city. He added that many soldiers were wounded. “Today, we turn to Russian authorities to open the humanitarian corridors for civilians,” he said.
Ukrainian lawmaker Yevheniya Kravchuk told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that the expected visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would send “a powerful signal to Russia that Ukraine will not be left alone with this war.”
A few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, Valerie Glodan, wrote in a post on Instagram that she was living with “a new level of happiness” after she gave birth to her first child.
“Our girl is one month old now,” she wrote in the post, showing a photograph taken in late pregnancy. “It has been the best 40 weeks.”
But the chapter ended in tragedy on Saturday when Ms. Glodan, 27, was killed with her 3-month-old daughter, Kira, after a missile hit a residential area on the outskirts of the Black Sea port of Odesa, where they were staying. They had just moved in with Ms. Glodan’s mother, who was also killed in the attack.
The Instagram post and the violent death of a newborn broke through the daily reports of Russian attacks, whose randomness has caught many civilians — unable to flee or refusing to do so — in the middle.
“The war started when this baby was one month old. Can you imagine what is happening?” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said, in tears, at a news conference a few hours after the attack.
Five others were also killed when two cruise missiles hit the residential neighborhood in the Tairove district in the far western corner of the city and the number is set to rise given the extent of the damage, Ukrainian officials said. Photographs and video appeared to show extensive damage.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, reacted with anger on Twitter, saying the only objective of Russian missile strikes in Odesa is terror.
One of Ms. Glodan’s closest friends, Oleksandra Iliashenko, said she was “filled with emptiness.” Ms. Glodan was “a bright light, full of life,” she said and added: “She gave me hope for our future.”
A few weeks earlier, Ms. Glodan had called Ms. Iliashenko to tell her that she was starting to feel uneasy about the mounting violence. She said she had moved her family from their high-rise apartment, close to Odesa’s airport, to her mother’s home in the Tairove district, which is further from the city center.
The two friends talked and agreed that if the apartment the family abandoned was hit, it would be time to leave Odesa. Instead, the mother’s home was destroyed.
The two women met while studying journalism at the University of Odesa, and since then their lives ran in tandem. After college they started their first jobs at the same time and found husbands who became good friends. They bought neighboring apartments and were always rotating through each other’s front doors, planning parties, exchanging pets, looking after plants and later, children.
“We were planning on raising our families together. She was always telling me that we were in our prime, with such amazing opportunities — she believed we had great lives,” Ms. Iliashenko said, between sobs. She spoke in a phone interview from Warsaw, where she has been staying for the past few weeks.
She described her friend as strong-willed and industrious with a warm sense of humor. She loved her work in public relations, but had a talent for painting and an ear for poetry. “She built everything that she had. I admired her very much,” Ms. Iliashenko said.
In the weeks following the invasion, the two friends told each other they doubted the war would come to Odesa, and they believed the conflict would be over in three weeks, Ms. Iliashenko said. They tried to distract each other by cooking meals together and dreaming up vacations their families could take when the war ended.
Ms. Glodan’s husband, Uri, who survived the attack, was around the corner at a shop when the missile struck, Ms. Iliashenko said.
Mr. Glodan, a well-known Odesa baker, had spent the lead-up to the Orthodox Easter weekend making cakes for sale, decorated in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. On Sunday, he posted a series of photos to his Instagram account, commemorating his wife, daughter and mother-in-law. “My dear ones,” he wrote under the images. “You are in our hearts!”
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Ukrainian president. It is Volodymyr Zelensky, not Vladimir.
Reporting from Warsaw
Warsaw’s biggest pediatric hospital has put patients from Ukraine on its waiting list for liver transplants, sometimes ahead of Polish children. Schools in Poland’s capital have had to search for extra teachers to keep up with the influx of new pupils. Public transport has risked buckling under the strain of so many new residents.
Yet to just about everyone’s surprise, Warsaw has kept working, defying predictions of a breakdown and an angry public backlash. The city, which has welcomed hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees, has decked itself with Ukrainian flags and banners of support for Poland’s war-ravaged eastern neighbor.
But just as the tsunami of refugees, which increased the capital’s population by nearly 20 percent in just a few weeks, seemed to be receding, Warsaw’s mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, is now bracing for a possible new influx as Russia’s military pushes to achieve what President Vladimir V. Putin last week vowed would be the “full completion” of his war in Ukraine.
“Warsaw is at capacity,” Mr. Trzaskowski, a liberal opponent of Poland’s conservative governing party, Law and Justice, said in an interview. “We accepted more than 300,000 people but we cannot accept more. With the escalation by Russia in eastern Ukraine we could have a second wave.”
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BOBRYK, Ukraine — A few dozen faithful stood, tightly packed, in the one part of their church that remained whole: a tiny room meant for private worship, not a holiday crowd.
The main chapel of the Voznesenska Church, or Church of the Ascension, in this village northeast of Kyiv is now a ruin, after a Russian rocket tore through the roof, exploded inside and destroyed treasured religious objects.
Plaster peeled from the walls. A spray of shrapnel pierced the iconostasis, the traditional wall of icons in Orthodox churches. One shard had ripped through the head of an icon of Jesus Christ.
It was a scene that repeated itself across areas liberated from Russian forces in Ukraine, where Orthodox Easter services were held on Sunday in destroyed or damaged churches that offered a searing reminder of the terror that gripped communities as fighting raged.
“It was horrible here,” said Kateryna Skorobahatko, 69, a parishioner. “We had just finished the service and went home when the rocket hit the church.”
When the Russian Army entered the village a few days later, she said, soldiers were unapologetic. “What horrible things your people are doing here,” she said she told a Russian soldier. But when residents accused them of damaging a Ukrainian church, the Russians replied that it was impossible — because there is no such thing as Ukraine. Her village, she was told, was part of Russia.
On a sunny Sunday morning, dozens of parishioners arrived carrying traditional baskets of bread, eggs and other food to bless. Outside in the churchyard, apricot trees were in bloom. Roosters crowed in the village.
The priest, Henadiy Shevchenko, dedicated his sermon to a message of helping those who defend their country, saying they were doing God’s work.
After the service, people encircled the church, standing in the fresh green grass, and lit candles that were placed on the traditional Easter bread.
By custom, the bread is the first food a believer eats on Easter. Those who observe the tradition fast through the morning until they can bring their blessed Easter bread home to share with their families.
In Easters past, as worshipers gathered around the church, they formed multiple circles. The crowd on this holiday was smaller, with many families in Bobryk, and across the country, having fled their homes.
As the faithful encircled Voznesenska Church on Sunday, they could not complete a single circle.
Reporting from Hanover, Germany
On the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, 17 days after Gerhard Schröder left office as chancellor of Germany, he got a call on his cellphone. It was his friend President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Putin was pressing Mr. Schröder to accept an offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany.
“Are you afraid to work for us?” Mr. Putin had joked. Mr. Schröder might well have been, given the appearance of possible impropriety — the pipeline he was now being asked to head had been agreed to in the final weeks of his chancellorship, with his strong support.
He took the job anyway.
Seventeen years later, the former chancellor, who recounted the events himself in a pair of rare interviews, remains as defiant as ever.
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