Kyiv April 23, 10:38 p.m.
Moscow April 23, 10:38 p.m.
Washington April 23, 3:38 p.m.
Live Updates: Zelensky Says U.S. Secretary of State Will Visit Kyiv; Missiles Hit Odesa
The American secretaries of state and defense will make a trip to the embattled Ukrainian capital, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Russian missiles killed at least eight people in a residential area of Odesa.
Marc Santora and
Russian forces on Saturday launched deadly missile strikes on targets in Odesa, hitting a residential neighborhood and inflicting the kind of civilian carnage the Black Sea port city had so far avoided in two months of fighting, Ukrainian officials said.
At least eight people were killed and another 18 wounded when two cruise missiles struck the residential area in the city’s west, and officials warned the toll would likely climb given the extent of the damage. The missile attacks were the first to strike Odesa since early April and also destroyed two Ukrainian military targets, according to a statement by Ukraine’s southern air defense forces.
The attacks dashed hopes that there would be a letup in the fighting for Easter, as many Ukrainians who attend Orthodox or Eastern Rite churches were preparing to celebrate on Sunday.
The strikes also came a day after a Russian general outlined a new set of military objectives for Moscow that included the seizing of all Ukrainian lands along the Black Sea. Capturing Odesa would be a critical part of that strategy.
“They call the apartment building a military installation,” the mayor of Odesa, Gennady Trukhanov, said on Telegram, adding that a 3-month-old child had been killed in the strike.
In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters that the U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, would visit Ukraine’s capital on Easter Sunday. There was no immediate confirmation from the Pentagon and the State Department in Washington.
In earlier remarks, he warned Russia in that Ukraine would be better able to defend itself now that its international allies were finally supplying the heavy weaponry the Ukrainian president had been asking for since the war began in late February.
In other major developments:
While Russia has failed to make any significant territorial gains in the east, the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency warned that Russian forces are trying to identify the Ukrainian military’s most vulnerable points in order to launch a large-scale offensive.
The Russians continued to pound military and civilian targets along the 300-mile long front line even as the Ukrainian military claimed to have repulsed multiple Russian thrusts and staged counterattacks to reclaim Russian-occupied communities.
Western allies were speeding up efforts to deliver heavy arms to Ukraine. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said on Friday that his country was considering sending tanks to Poland so that Warsaw could then send its own tanks to Ukraine. Canada announced that it had sent heavy artillery, including M777 howitzers and additional anti-armor ammunition, to Ukraine in conjunction with the United States.
Russian authorities opened a criminal case against Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian pro-democracy activist and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, for spreading “false information” about the war in Ukraine, his lawyer said on Friday. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called for his release.
Hackers claimed to have broken into dozens of Russian institutions over the past two months, including the Kremlin’s internet censor and one of its primary intelligence services, leaking emails and internal documents to the public.
Russian forces have resumed attacks on the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, attempting to root out the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the decimated port city, Ukrainian and Western officials said on Saturday.
Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said that Russia had carried out airstrikes against the facility and Russian ground forces had attempted to storm it. But he said the Ukrainian fighters still inside had put up fierce resistance.
“Our defenders are holding on despite the very difficult situation, and have even launched counterattacks,” Mr. Arestovich said.
His description of events at the plant was backed up by a British Defense Ministry report published on Saturday that said heavy fighting continued to take place in Mariupol, frustrating Russia’s attempts to capture the entirety of the city.
Those assessments contradicted the Kremlin’s recent assertion that Mariupol had fallen fully under Russian control. Last week, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered his defense minister to put off a final assault on the Azovstal plant and blockade it instead.
Staff Sgt. Leonid Kuznetsov, a Ukrainian National Guard soldier fighting inside the factory, told The New York Times last week that, despite Mr. Putin’s order, Russian forces continued to shell the plant and had come to within 20 meters of the place where he and his comrades were positioned.
The Times has not been able to reach Sergeant Kuznetsov, or any other soldiers at the factory, for two days.
Ukrainian officials estimate that besides the soldiers still holding the plant, there are about 2,000 civilians, including women and children, who took shelter in bunkers there during the two-month long siege. Efforts to negotiate safe passage out for them have so far failed.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyThe mayor of Odesa, Gennady Trukhanov, said in a Telegram video that the death toll from a Russian missile strike on the city had risen to at least eight people, including a 3-month-old child.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told a news conference that the U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and the defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, would visit Ukraine's capital on Sunday to discuss "the military assistance we need." There was no immediate comment or confirmation from the U.S. State Department or the Pentagon, which has said Mr. Austin would be in Germany next week for meetings about Ukraine’s future needs.
Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that Britain would give Ukraine more military aid, including protected mobility vehicles, drones and anti-tank weapons, according to Mr. Johnson’s office. It added that the two leaders also condemned Russian attacks against civilian targets in Mariupol and Odesa.
Russia’s military “thwarted” the evacuation of civilians from the besieged port of Mariupol, according to Pyotr Andryushchenko, an aide to the city's mayor. He said on Telegram that Russian troops had dispersed some 200 civilians who’d assembled to await evacuation buses, telling them “there will be shelling now.” Previous evacuation efforts have repeatedly failed due to heavy fighting.
Jane Arraf, Marc Santora and
LVIV, Ukraine — On the eve of the most important Christian religious festival of the year, Ukrainians clung to centuries-old Easter traditions in the shadow of a war that has brought devastation and sorrow to much of the country.
At the Greek Catholic Church of the Transfiguration in Lviv’s historic city center, a line of churchgoers stood next to wicker baskets they had brought, covered with embroidered cloths and filled with sausages, smoked hams, Easter breads, butter and cheeses to be blessed by the priest.
It was a ritual celebrated throughout Ukraine, in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholic churches, which follow the Julian calender and will celebrate Easter this year on Sunday.
The food was destined to be eaten in elaborate Easter breakfasts after Mass on Sunday.
Other residents carried Easter baskets through the cobblestone streets on their way to churches of every denomination that line the central market district, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site.
As air raid sirens sounded, cafes closed their doors and a group of street musicians took a break from the folk music they were playing on traditional Ukrainian stringed instruments.
At a nearby intersection, some residents had laid bouquets of flowers at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary, next to piles of white sandbags intended to protect the statue from bombings. Since the start of the war, churches have shrouded religious statues in protective wrapping and have boarded up stained glass windows.
Russia, which is also predominantly Eastern Orthodox, rejected calls this week by Ukraine and the United Nations for an Easter cease-fire.
Though most Ukrainians and Russians are Orthodox Christians, long-simmering tensions between church leaders in the two nations have deepened in recent years. In 2019, the church in Ukraine, which had been subordinate to Moscow since 1686, was granted its independence.
This week Russian airstrikes killed at least seven people in Lviv, but the city has been spared most of the fighting raging in the east of the country for the past two months. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have sought refuge here or have passed through on the way to Poland and other countries.
At Lviv’s central train station, volunteers handed out Easter chocolates to displaced children arriving from other cities. One family who received the treats had walked for five days with their four children from the devastated southern port of Mariupol on their way to the relative safety of western Ukraine.
Many Ukrainians said they were sticking to their traditions in the face of a pervasive sadness and fear the war had brought.
“This year there’s not so much happiness in people’s faces and eyes,” said Myroslava Zakharkiv, a college English instructor. “Many people are grieving, many men are gone to the front.”
Ms. Zakharkiv, 48, said that she had done a traditional Easter cleaning of her home in a village near Lviv. She also had baked Easter bread and prepared foods to put in a basket to be blessed at the church.
“We hope there will be no bombs and no alarms but no one knows what will happen so we are a bit afraid,” she said.
For many of the displaced, the war has also meant separation from their families.
Anna Mukoida, 22, said this was the first Easter she would spend away from her family, who stayed in Bila Tserkva, a town 50 miles south of the capital, Kyiv, while she fled to the southwestern city of Chernivtsi.
Despite the danger and uncertainty, many Ukrainians were determined to hold on to tradition.
“Easter in the time of the war is like the sun on a rainy day,” said Ms. Mukoida. “It is very important now to have such days just to feel alive and remember that there was life before the war.”
Neonila Vodolska, 22, was also displaced. She was staying in the western city of Kalush, far from her family in Kyiv. To ease the pain of separation from her family, she said she bought a white shirt with traditional dark red embroidery to wear on Easter Day.
“Now I fully understand the importance of saving such traditions,” Ms. Vodolska said. “Doing something normal, celebrating something that reminds me of the good times, of my childhood, brings me hope.”
In most parts of the country, curfews remained in place over Saturday night, when many Christians traditionally hold vigils and celebrate a midnight Mass in memory of those who waited on Holy Saturday by Christ’s tomb. Instead many people planned to watch the Mass on television.
“We must understand that the gathering of civilians at a predetermined time of all-night service can be a target for missiles, aircraft and artillery,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a statement on Saturday morning.
In Lviv, the authorities initially announced the curfew would be lifted but then reimposed it after receiving intelligence that pro-Russia saboteurs could be planning attacks in the city.
Earlier in the week, the head of Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the Metropolitan Epifaniy, asked clergy to forgo nighttime Easter services in areas of the country affected by fighting, fearing Russian bombardments.
“It is not hard to believe this will really happen, because the enemy is trying to completely destroy us,” he said in a televised speech.
At least six people were killed when two cruise missiles struck a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the Black Sea port city of Odesa on Saturday, Ukrainian officials said. Given the extent of the damage, officials said the number of victims was certain to climb.
“There will be more,” Sergei Nazarov, an aide to Odesa’s mayor, said in a text message.
He said the missiles struck a residential neighborhood in the Tairove district in the far west of the city. Photographs and video from the scene, including those posted to the city government’s Telegram channel, appeared to show extensive damage to a large housing complex, which was partially obscured by plumes of thick, black smoke.
“All of this is while peaceful Odesa was preparing for Easter Sunday,” the mayor of Odesa, Gennady Trukhanov, said in a statement posted to the city’s Telegram channel. Orthodox Christians, who make up the majority in Ukraine, celebrate Easter this Sunday, and some in the Ukrainian military had expected, or hoped, that there might be some letup in the shelling.
At least 18 were wounded in the strike, according to Andriy Yermak, the head of the presidential administration. He said a three-month-old baby was among the dead.
The missile attack on Odesa comes a day after a Russian general outlined what appeared to be a broad new set of military objectives, including the seizure of all Ukrainian lands along the Black Sea, including Odesa.
While taking Odesa had appeared to be a major goal of the Russian military at the outset of the war, efforts by Russian forces to march westward along the coastline have been hindered by fierce Ukrainian resistance and logistical issues. The sinking this month of the Moskva, a warship in Russia’s Black Sea fleet, seemed to put an end to speculation that Moscow could mount an amphibious assault on the city.
In the past, Russian forces have launched rocket attacks against Odesa and the surrounding region by both air and sea, but those strikes have largely been aimed at military targets and strategic infrastructure. Until Saturday, Odesa had been largely spared the high-casualty attacks on civilians suffered by other Ukrainian cities.
Saturday’s attack was carried out by a Russian Tu-95 strategic bomber flying over the Caspian Sea, according to a statement by Ukraine’s southern air defense forces. It said the bomber fired six cruise missiles, two of which were taken out by Ukraine’s missile defense system.
“Unfortunately two missiles hit military targets and two hit residential homes,” the statement said, adding that Ukrainian forces also destroyed two Russian drones that were being used to help target the missiles.
Russia’s Defense Ministry later said that it had fired “high-precision long-range” missiles at a logistics terminal at a military airfield near Odesa, which it said was storing weapons provided by the United States and European countries.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, described the missile strikes as a terrorist attack.
“The only aim of Russian missile strikes on Odesa is terror,” Mr. Kuleba wrote on Twitter. “We need a wall between civilization and barbarians striking peaceful cities with missiles.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
At least two people were killed when Russian missiles struck residential and military buildings in Odesa, local officials said, and an aide to the president said the toll was at least five dead and 18 wounded. It was the first missile strike on the city since early April, and the assault came one day after a Russian general said that Moscow was intent on controlling all of southern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian military claimed on Saturday that it destroyed a Russian command post in the southern region of Kherson, which has been largely under Russian control since the early days of the war.
The intelligence agency of the Ukrainian defense ministry said in a statement that the Russian command center was located near a location of active clashes between the two forces and two high-ranking Russian officers were present at the time of the strike.
The claim could not be independently verified and there was no immediate comment from Russia’s military, which rarely acknowledges battlefield setbacks.
In a separate statement, Oleksiy Arestovych, a former Ukrainian military intelligence officer who is now an adviser to the Ukrainian president’s office, said that about 50 senior Russian officers were in the command center at the time of the attack.
“Their fate is unknown, but I think it must be miserable,” he said in an interview with a well-known Russian human rights activist. The Ukrainian military claimed later that two Russian generals were killed and another critically injured and had to be evacuated.
While fighting is raging in eastern Ukraine, Russia has been seeking to solidify its control in the south.
The Black Sea port city of Kherson was the first major urban center to fall to Russian forces after their invasion. Situated just north of the Russia-annexed Crimean Peninsula, Kherson has been critical in Moscow’s broader effort to control territory in the south. It is a vital link in Russia’s logistical chain stretching to Crimea, allowing for the movement of heavy artillery and equipment into southern Ukraine by rail.
In the first weeks of the war, Russia used Kherson as a springboard in its push toward Odesa. That offensive was ultimately halted by stiff Ukrainian resistance in the city of Mykolaiv.
After stopping the Russian advance, the Ukrainians staged several counterattacks and have reclaimed some villages in the region. But Russia has been fortifying its positions.
President Voldymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and other officials in his government have claimed that Russia is preparing to conduct a “referendum” to create a “Kherson People’s Republic.”
Moscow used a similar tactic with a disputed referendum in Crimea, which it invaded in 2015 and subsequently annexed.
“I want to say straight away: any ‘Kherson People’s Republics’ are not going to fly,” Mr. Zelensky said earlier this week.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
A missile strike has hit the southern city of Odesa and damaged infrastructure, the City Council said in a post on Telegram.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that “terror” was the “only aim” of a strike on Odesa. “We need a wall between civilization and barbarians striking peaceful cities with missiles,” he said on Twitter.
After Russia rejected Ukrainian calls for a pause in fighting for the Orthodox Christian Easter period, Ukraine’s military said that curfews would remain in place for traditional vigils held the night before the holy day on Sunday.
“We must understand that the gathering of civilians at a predetermined time of all-night service can be a target for missiles, aircraft and artillery,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a statement issued Saturday morning.
Earlier in the week, Metropolitan Epifaniy, the head of Ukraine’s Orthodox church, asked clergy to forgo night Easter services in areas of the country affected by fighting, fearing Russian bombardments.
“It is hard to believe this will really happen, because the enemy is trying to completely destroy us,” he said in a televised speech.
Both Ukrainians and Russians are predominantly Orthodox Christians. But long-simmering tensions between church leaders deepened in recent years. In 2019, the church in Ukraine, which had been subordinate to Moscow since 1686, was granted its independence. The war is now dividing the Orthodox faithful around the world.
The Orthodox Easter service starts late on Saturday and goes into Sunday morning, when a traditional feast begins. Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter a week later than most other churches.
“Already, many religious communities, with the blessing of their leaders, have decided to postpone Easter services,” the military said in its statement. “We urge priests and the faithful to follow such decisions and choose an alternative time of night for liturgies.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyBolstered by a growing arsenal of heavy weapons supplied by Western allies, Ukraine’s military has launched counteroffensives across their country’s northeast and claimed to have driven Russian forces out of several towns and villages.
The Ukrainian military intelligence agency, however, warned on Saturday that Russia was completing efforts to regroup in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region and was probing Ukrainian defenses for weak points before launching a major offensive. It also said that some of the elite Russian fighters who had been engaged in the battle for the southern city of Mariupol are now being dispatched to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Russian forces control a swath of territory in eastern Ukraine in the shape of a crescent moon — with Izium in the Kharkiv province to the north, the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk to the east, and large parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions to the south. Russian forces are looking to advance from multiple directions, encircling tens of thousands of entrenched Ukrainian forces.
Russia has so far failed to make any major territorial gains in eastern Ukraine since Moscow announced the start of its renewed offensive this past week, including in the last 24 hours, according to an assessment from Britain’s military’s intelligence agency.
Ukraine’s military said on Saturday that it had taken back settlements around the cities of Kharkiv and Izium, while repelling Russian thrusts in Donetsk.
Russian forces have also been unable to establish dominance in the air or on the sea, according to the British military intelligence agency’s assessment released on Saturday.
While Russia has claimed victory in the besieged city of Mariupol — a port key to its goal of securing a land corridor between eastern Ukraine and the Russia-annexed Crimean Peninsula — a band of Ukrainian fighters remain blockaded inside a sprawling steel factory. The British intelligence agency said that “heavy fighting continues to take place, frustrating Russian attempts to capture the city, thus further slowing their desired progress in the Donbas.”
The Donbas is the industrial territory that stretches across the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, bordering Russia. Since 2014, Russian proxies have controlled about a third of the territory, which is now serving as a springboard for part of the wider Russian offensive in the region.
Most of the fighting over the past week has been for control of towns and villages directly on the front line — many of which were already devastated by weeks of war. Many of the five million people who have fled Ukraine over the past two months have come from urban centers in eastern Ukraine.
Russia continued to pound civilian targets, Ukrainian officials said. Local leaders said several civilians were killed in overnight shelling in the Donetsk region.
Moscow has shifted its focus to the Donbas after a failed attempt to seize Kyiv, the capital, in the north, where its military was beset by problems of logistics, tactics and morale. Those issues are likely to persist in the battle for Donbas, independent analysts say.
Russia has suffered heavy losses in first two months of the war and military analysts have questioned if they have taken the time to properly regroup. The British intelligence agency said that any shift in Russian tactics would take time.
“Therefore, in the interim there is likely to be a continued reliance on bombardment as a means of trying to suppress Ukrainian opposition to Russian forces,” according to the assessment. “As a result, it is likely that Russian forces will continue to be frustrated by an inability to overcome Ukrainian defenses quickly.”
Ukrainian forces are also far better armed now than at the start of the war, with increasingly powerful weapons pouring into the country.
The United States recently approved an additional $800 million assistance package and other nations — from regional neighbors like Slovakia, Poland and the Baltics to Canada — have started delivering heavier and longer-range weapons. They include tanks, howitzers, anti-aircraft systems, anti-ship missiles, armed drones, armored trucks and personnel carriers.
“I am grateful to all our partners who finally heard us,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday. “We know for sure that with these weapons we will be able to save the lives of thousands of people.”
When a Russian commander said this week that gaining full control of southern Ukraine was one of the Kremlin’s military goals, he noted that doing so would give Russia “yet another point of access” to a little-known and internationally unrecognized breakaway republic known as Transnistria.
The 250-mile sliver of land that largely runs along the eastern bank of the Dniester River is controlled by Moscow-backed separatists who broke away from Moldova, Ukraine’s neighbor to the southwest, in 1992. Here is a closer look at the enclave.
Where is Transnistria?
The self-declared republic known as Transnistria, which formally calls itself the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, is the strip bordered mostly by the Dniester River on the west and Ukraine on the east. It is a small piece of Moldova, a former Soviet republic sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. It has its own flag, featuring a Soviet-style hammer and sickle, and its own currency.
The Russian-speaking area fought a bloody battle for its independence from Romanian-speaking Moldovans in 1992, and many of the people there are susceptible to Moscow’s disinformation around the war in Ukraine. Even though Russia doesn’t recognize Transnistria as a nation, it maintains 1,500 soldiers there, nominally to keep the peace and guard a large Soviet-era munitions cache.
How does Transnistria relate to the war in Ukraine?
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said early in the war that the situation in Transnistria was analogous to the fight over the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Russia has for years claimed that Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted as a pretense to back separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. On the eve of the full-scale invasion in February, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recognized the independence of two separatist republics in the Donbas. That set the stage for their leaders to request Russia’s assistance — and lay the pretext for Mr. Putin’s military incursion.
“They have already done such things in other countries,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address on March 11, referring to Russian forces. “They tore apart Moldova with Transnistria.”
Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekayev of Russia said on Friday that there was “evidence of oppression of the Russian-speaking population” in Transnistria, echoing false claims that Russia had made about eastern Ukraine before it invaded the country on Feb. 24. The Moldovan government responded by calling the claims “not only unacceptable but also unfounded.”
Will Russian troops in Ukraine move toward Transnistria?
The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said on Friday that General Minnekayev’s comments did not appear to signal an imminent Russian offensive toward Moldova, and that he seemed to say that control over southern Ukraine would give Russia future capability to reach Transnistria.
Russian forces, battered and weakened from their unsuccessful campaign for Kyiv and focused on the fight in the east, were “highly unlikely” to have the capability to make any significant push toward Moldova, the assessment said.
That hasn’t allayed fears in Moldova, where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted the country to file an emergency, long-shot application to join the European Union.
Moldova has condemned the invasion, but it is wary of provoking Moscow because it is almost entirely dependent on Russia for its energy supply. Russia has in the past intimated that it would lower energy prices if Moldova agreed to make concessions on Transnistria, an offer Moldova has refused.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyReporting from Krakow, Poland
More than one million Ukrainians who fled the war to escape fighting have returned to the country, according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
The Ukrainian government on Saturday said that it will try to evacuate civilians from the ruined city of Mariupol, where more than 100,000 people are struggling to survive under Russian occupation, according to Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk. Past efforts have failed because of heavy fighting and there was no indication the Russians would allow safe passage to the public or the hundreds of civilians blockaded in a sprawling steel factory where Ukrainian soldiers are trapped.
Monika Pronczuk and
CHISINAU, Moldova — Before war erupted next door, Moldovans had big plans for their country.
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine put Moldova, a former Soviet republic and one of Europe’s poorest nations, in an extremely vulnerable situation, threatening its economic development, straining its society with waves of refugees and evoking existential fears of yet another Russian occupation.
The war jitters are also adding another chapter to Moldova’s long and increasingly desperate effort to untangle itself from Moscow’s clutches. In pursuit of that, it recently applied to join the European Union, but the prospect of gaining admission anytime soon is remote.
“We are a fragile country in a fragile region,” said Maia Sandu, Moldova’s president, in an interview.
Moldovans’ fears swelled anew on Friday, when a Russian general said his country’s military now plans to seize the entire southern coast of Ukraine. That would establish a land bridge from Russia in the east to Transnistria, a heavily armed, breakaway region in Moldova’s east — bordering Ukraine — that is controlled by Russia.
Whether Russia has the wherewithal to swallow up such a large stretch of Ukrainian territory is debatable, especially in view of the enormous losses its military suffered in the battle for Kyiv. But whether real or just an effort to stir up trouble in the region, the Moldovans are taking the general’s threat seriously.
The Moldovan government has long been nervous about Transnistria, a thin sliver of territory that is controlled by at least 12,000 separatists and Russian troops. Since the war erupted, the Moldovan and Ukrainian militaries have faced the extra concern of whether the Transnistrians were going to jump into the battle and start attacking Ukraine from the west. So far, that has not happened.
Tucked between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova is tiny — with less than three million people — and for centuries has been torn between greater powers: first the Ottomans and Russia, and now Europe and Russia. The theme, clearly, is Russia, and Russia does not want to let it go.
Moscow exerts a stranglehold over nearly 100 percent of Moldova’s energy supply. And the Kremlin is constantly trying to stir up Moldova’s many Russian speakers who are susceptible to its propaganda, especially in Transnistria.
That is what seemed to have happened on Friday, when, according to the Russian news media, Maj. Gen. Rustam Minnekayev said, “Russian control over the south of Ukraine is another way out to Transnistria, where there are cases of Russian-speaking people being oppressed.”
The Moldovan government immediately summoned the Russian ambassador to complain about the general’s statement, saying it was “not only unacceptable but also unfounded” and led to “increased tension.”
For Ms. Sandu, 49, the country’s first female president, it was another hurdle along a dangerous pathway she has been trying to navigate since the crisis began.
Moldova has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and barred Moldovans from sticking pro-Russia symbols on their cars. At the same time, the country did not fully join the European Union’s sanctions on Russia, for fear of being cut off from Russian gas.
“No one said it was going to be easy,” Ms. Sandu, 49, said from her office on Stefan cel Mare, the grand boulevard in the capital, Chisinau, that cuts past a patchwork of hulking, Soviet-style office buildings. “But no one said it was going to be this hard.”
The war has been hard not only on her but on most everyone here. Before the hostilities started, Adrian Trofim, whose family owns a 19th-century countryside winery and resort, thought that he was finally catching a break after two years of struggling during the coronavirus pandemic. He was adding a wing to the hotel, setting up a spa focused on wine-based treatments and gearing up to produce a sparkling wine.
But now his operations have fallen into peril. Brandy worth a quarter of a million dollars that he needs to ship to Belarus has been blocked in his warehouses. His regular Ukrainian customers have no way of paying him, costing him several more hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he cannot ship his chardonnays to China, one of his new markets, because the port in Odesa, Ukraine, that he uses for exports shut down as soon as the first bombs fell in February.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Mr. Trofim, who may soon have to lay off almost half of his staff. “Everything is frozen until we understand how to live with this situation.”
It could be a while. When the war began in Ukraine, residents of Chisinau said they were awakened by the sounds of not-so-far-off explosions. Then Ukrainian refugees started streaming in — more than 400,000 have arrived, Moldovan officials have said — putting a severe strain on public services in a country where the average annual income is less than $6,000.
Prices for basic goods then shot up as supply chains were disrupted. And business owners had to persuade their employees, terrified that the war might cross into Moldova, not to flee the country, following the hundreds of thousands of Moldovans who moved abroad in the past decade.
“We were already considered a high risk,” said Carmina Vicol, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Moldova. “We had just started convincing investors to take a shot on us. Now everyone has backed out.”
It is not all bad news. Some Ukrainian companies are considering moving to Moldova, in search of a safer environment. And with all of the foreign dignitaries (and news crews) swooping in, its international profile has received a lift, leading the government last month to rebrand Moldova as “a small country with a big heart.”
Many Russians discovered that big heart long ago. During Soviet times, retired officers flocked to Moldova, drawn by the scenery, good food and sunshine. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the country was run by pro-Russian elites, who kept strong links with Moscow, especially regarding energy.
Moldova receives all its gas from companies controlled by Russia. And even though Moldovan leaders have talked a big game about weaning the country off Russian gas and getting energy from other countries like Azerbaijan, Turkey and Romania, none of those, at the moment, could come close to what Russia provides.
And so Russia continues to use its sway over gas prices to push Moldova around. Russia has intimated, for instance, that it would lower prices if Moldova agreed to make concessions on Transnistria, which Moldova has refused.
Moldova’s twin problems, of energy and Transnistria, are interconnected. In the Soviet era, Moldova’s biggest power plant, and its two biggest gas-pumping stations, were built in Transnistria.
“If you look at the map, it doesn’t make sense,” said Victor Parlicov, an energy analyst and a former government official. “It was built this way in case Moldova would try to pursue its own path.”
Transnistria has its own flag, complete with a Soviet-style hammer and sickle, and a separate identity from the rest of Moldova. Its roots go back to the 1920s, when the Soviet Union carved out a small republic in the same area, before incorporating parts of it into the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic during World War II.” Mr. Parlicov said that this fit a pattern of the Soviet authorities reshaping the borders of republics against historical realities, which created the potential for conflict.
Transnistria’s situation mirrors that of Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russia-backed separatists rebelled after the anti-Russian 2014 rebellion, setting off a chain of events that led to war. Transnistria also complicates Moldova’s aspirations to join the European Union.
“We’d be happy to be part of the E.U.,” said Serghei Diaconu, the deputy interior minister. But, he added, half-jokingly, Transnistria was “a big pain” that could discourage the E.U. from accepting Moldova.
Joining NATO would be an even taller order. Neutrality is enshrined in Moldova’s constitution, a holdover from the early 1990s, when it tried to stand on its own without antagonizing Russia. Now, Moldova’s leaders are questioning the wisdom of that approach.
“If you ask me whether neutrality is going to keep us safe, I don’t know,” said Ms. Sandu, the president. “It did not help over the last three decades to convince Russia to take its troops out of the country.”
The geopolitical tightrope the country is forced to walk, in the eyes of many Moldovans, means its future is intertwined with Russia’s. Mr. Trofim, the winemaker, for one, said that almost half of his business depended on Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
As he looked at the winery’s vast, neat gardens, empty but for a few visitors, he said that he was appalled by what Russia had done in Ukraine, but that he could not condemn anyone forever.
“I cannot say I will never do business with Russia,” Mr. Trofim said. “It is a matter of the well-being of my company.”
Reporting from Seoul
Britain said it would reopen its embassy in Kyiv next week for the first time since closing it in February, joining other nations that have been resuming diplomatic operations in the capital after Russian troops withdrew from northern Ukraine. President Zelensky said Britain was the 21st country to do so.
Canada has delivered heavy artillery, including M777 howitzers and anti-armor ammunition, to Ukrainian forces in conjunction with the United States, its Department of National Defense said. The country is also finalizing contracts for armored vehicles and for the maintenance and repair of specialized drone cameras it has already supplied to Ukraine, the department said.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal of Ukraine has wrapped up days of meetings in Washington, where he discussed support for Ukraine and its recovery with President Biden and other U.S. officials and international organizations. On his last day, Shmyhal met with Samantha Power, the administrator for U.S. Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., who announced an additional $131 million in development assistance for Ukraine.
Following reports that a Russian general had said Russia’s goal of taking control of southern Ukraine would create “yet another point of access” to a pro-Russian Moldovan enclave where he alleged Russian-speakers were oppressed, the Moldovan government summoned the Russian ambassador to complain, saying the comments were “not only unacceptable but also unfounded” and led to “increased tension.”
The U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, called for the immediate release of a Russian pro-democracy activist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was arrested earlier this month, and then charged with “spreading false information” under a new law that effectively criminalizes any public opposition to or independent news reporting about the war against Ukraine. Kara-Muzra faces 10 years in prison. Blinken called charges “preposterous” and “yet another cynical attempt to silence those who speak the truth.”
The wider ambitions a Russian general expressed on Friday — to take southern Ukraine all the way to Moldova, Ukraine’s southwest neighbor — reveal larger truths about Moscow’s agenda, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Friday.
“This only confirms what I have said many times,” Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address to the nation. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine was intended only as a beginning, then they want to capture other countries.”
His comments referred to remarks by Gen. Rustam Minnekayev of Russia, who in a defense industry meeting on Friday said that the Kremlin’s forces aimed to take “full control of the Donbas and southern Ukraine.” According to Russian news agencies, the general said that would cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, allowing Russia to gain “yet another point of access” to a pro-Russian Moldovan enclave, Transnistria.
General Minnekayev also claimed that there was “evidence of oppression of the Russian-speaking population” in Transnistria, echoing false allegations of a “genocide” against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, used to help justify the Feb. 24 invasion.
Since the onset of the invasion, Mr. Zelensky has stressed the country’s need for heavier weapons, including armored vehicles, tanks and missiles, at times expressing frustration that getting them has been so time-consuming. In his nightly address on Friday, Mr. Zelensky praised allies’ deliveries of military equipment, saying the matériel would help save thousands of lives. Equipping Ukrainian forces has been “the Number One task for our state,” he said. “I am grateful to our partners who finally heard us.”
He thanked Britain for deciding to reopen its embassy in Kyiv, saying that it was the 21st country to do so. Britain closed its doors in Kyiv in February, relocating its staff to the western city of Lviv.
Mr. Zelensky also highlighted the return to normalcy in parts of the country from which Russia has retreated, where access to gas, electricity, water, mobile and medical services has been restored in recent days.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyIn his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky noted the coming Eastern Orthodox Easter weekend, saying that Good Friday was “one of the most sorrowful days of the year” for Christians. (Zelensky is Jewish.) Good Friday, Zelensky said, is a “day when death seems to have won," but, he added, "We hope for a resurrection.”
Reporting from New York
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, will meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday in Ukraine, two days after meeting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow, to try to negotiate a peace deal. Guterres will also meet with the staffs of U.N. agencies working in Ukraine to discuss how to increase humanitarian aid to the country.
The problems that beset the Russian military in its failed attempt to seize Kyiv are likely to continue into the next phase of the war, according to independent analysts, giving the Ukrainian military a chance to drive back the invading force.
Big militaries fight with tight organization and strict hierarchy, with multiple levels of command ensuring that large forces can move in a coordinated way, but during the current invasion, analysts and U.S. officials have said, the Russian military has abandoned that structure. It has formed 800-person-strong battalion tactical groups, and to fill them out it has combined units that had not previously worked together, and gutted the middle layers of its battlefield command structure.
Those choices contributed to the logistics and communication problems that hampered the Russian military, leading to its defeat in the battle for Kyiv, and exposed deep weaknesses in its forces, outside analysts said.
Both allied governments and independent analysts had seen the Russian military perform well in large-scale military exercises that Moscow conducts each year. But those turned out to be scripted and rehearsed events, not actual drills meant to improve the military.
“The Russian military appears to have been a Potemkin army in the sense that it was really optimized to look good on training exercises rather than to fight well,” said Frederick W. Kagan, a military expert with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project.
Russia’s forces, in both the slow but largely successful fight for the southern city of Mariupol and the unsuccessful battle for Kyiv, have been battered and weakened. But rather than resting, reinforcing and re-equipping the forces, Moscow is pressing forward to try and make gains in the east.
Some Russian forces are beginning a drive to encircle Ukrainian Army forces that are in entrenched positions in the eastern area known as Donbas. The Russian military appears to be trying to secure battlefield gains — including capturing all of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, or oblasts — ahead of May 9, when Moscow holds its annual celebration of victory in World War II.
“They’re not taking the pause that would be necessary to re-cohere these forces, to take the week or two to stop, and prepare for a wider offensive,” said Mason Clark, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “They’ll likely be able to take some territory. We do not think they’re going to able to capture the entirety of the oblasts in the next three weeks.”
While the terrain in eastern Ukraine is more open, the soft muddy ground will likely force Russian tanks onto existing roads, much as occurred during the march toward Kyiv, making their movements more predictable and easier to thwart.
If Western supplies continue to flow to Ukraine, its military may be able to mount counterattacks against the Russians, Mr. Kagan said
“It is quite possible for the Ukrainian military, if properly resourced over time, to drive the Russian Army back a long way,” he said.
ZAPORIZKA REGION, Ukraine — The day after the war began, after their unit was nearly wiped out in a missile strike, Ukrainian Sgt. Oleksandr Gorvat presented his girlfriend and commanding officer, First Lt. Olena Petyak, a ring he had twisted together from wire and asked for her hand in marriage.
“Officially we’re not supposed to serve together, but we are not officially married,” he explained on Friday, amid the whoosh of Grad rockets being fired at nearby Russian positions. “That is for after the war. As soon as we win.”
Together with their unit, the 128th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade, the couple, both 25, were dug into a frontline position in the Zaporizka region of south-central Ukraine, east of the Dnipro River and only about two miles from where Russian forces were attempting to overrun more territory.
Fierce fighting was underway on Friday across a band of southeastern Ukraine, in and around major towns like Polohy, Orikhiv and Vasylivka, which is on the banks of the Dnipro. It fell to the troops of the 128th to prevent Russian forces from pushing farther north toward the important industrial city of Zaporizhzhia, just 20 miles north of Vasylivka on the river.
The Kremlin has achieved one of its strategic goals, seizing a strip of land along the Azov Sea, linking the Donbas region in the east, now the focus of the war, with Crimea, the peninsula President Vladimir V. Putin invaded and annexed in 2014. The only significant pocket of resistance remaining is a sprawling steel mill complex in the ruined port city of Mariupol, where Ukrainian fighters and civilians are in underground bunkers, under heavy bombardment.
But the Russians were attempting this week to expand that ribbon of territory, pushing north from the coast toward Zaporizhzhia. Other Russian forces were pushing west through Donbas, where on Friday some of the heaviest combat was being waged around the city of Sievierodonetsk and the town of Popasna. Moscow’s army was also advancing southward from the city of Izium. Altogether, the front line is about 300 miles long.
Moscow’s separatist proxies in Donbas, backed by Russian equipment and troops, have held part of the region since 2014, and Russia has said that it aims to expand its territory there. How far Mr. Putin will go is unclear, but the Kremlin appears intent on trapping much of the Ukrainian military in a pincer and destroying it.
Lieutenant Petyak, who is second in command of the brigade, said the goal in the Zaporizhzhia region — the southwestern part of that front line — was not just to hold the Russians at a standstill but to push them back.
“The enemy is constantly firing with artillery, tanks, Grads, and aviation in our direction,” she said. “They want to knock out this section, but they won’t be able to do it because we’re here. On the contrary they are going to have to give up their positions because I’m certain that sometime soon we will push forward and take the remainder of the land that they’ve been able to temporarily occupy.”
That may prove a challenge, even for the Ukrainian forces, which have surprised military analysts and professional soldiers with their fierce and effective defense since the start of the war.
After Mr. Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces based in the Crimean Peninsula, some of the country’s most skilled and well-equipped, lunged north, gobbling up territory in southern Ukraine both in the direction of Kherson, west of the Dnipro, and east toward Mariupol.
Early in the morning of Feb. 24, the soldiers of the 128th brigade learned the war had begun when a Russian cruise missile hit their base, just missing the barracks where they slept. The troops were able to escape into the nearby woods.
It was the next day, as they scrambled to regroup and join the combat against the invading Russians, that Sergeant Gorvat proposed.
At first the brigade was deployed in the vicinity of Melitopol, a southern city about midway between Crimea and Zaporizhzhia. But they have been pushed back nearly 70 miles to the north. They are now entrenched in a patch of woods wedged between wheat fields that are bright green with spring growth.
Ukrainians who live in the coastal territory that Russia has seized continue to surge north seeking refuge in Ukrainian-held lands. Convoys of cars and buses, laden with suitcases, arrive regularly at the parking lot of a home goods store in Zaporizhzhia. Many arrive with unsettling tales of the Russian occupation.
“It’s total lawlessness,” said Natalya Gorbova, who arrived in Zaporizhzhia on Thursday with her 17-year old son, Egor. They had fled Melitopol, whose mayor was kidnapped by Russian forces and dragged from his office with a bag over his head. He was only released after Ukraine agreed to a prisoner swap.
“If you stay home, it’s fine,” Ms. Gorbova said, “but there are these guys walking around with guns who do whatever they want.”
In Ukrainian territory, she said, “it’s easier to breathe.”
Ukraine’s front line positions buzz with surveillance drones that Russian forces use to target their artillery. At one point on Friday, Capt. Vitaliy Nevinsky, the commander of the 128th, dispersed a group of soldiers chatting close together around a campfire, lest a drone direct an artillery strike into the middle of their gathering.
The first weeks of the war were a baptism by fire for the 128th. At one point, Captain Nevinsky explained, his forces were surrounded and had to punch their way through the Russian lines. Captain Nevinsky, 25, said he was riding on a tank, covering the unit’s escape when it was hit by a shell. He suffered shrapnel wounds and a concussion, but returned to the front lines two weeks later.
His brigade is better equipped now, he said, with antitank missiles provided by the Americans and the British, as well as Stinger antiaircraft missiles and other advanced weapons systems. These have helped slow the Russian forces down, he said. This week, he said, the brigade has taken out two Russian T-72 tanks that strayed too close to their positions.
“We are on our own land,” he said. “We are defending ourselves and knocking out this horde, this invasion of our territory.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
The Russian defense ministry issued its first statement on casualties from the April 14 sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet. One serviceman died, 27 were missing and 396 crew members were evacuated, the statement said. Ukraine said the ship sank after it had been hit by its two missiles – an assertion corroborated by U.S. officials – while Russia claimed the catastrophe was caused by a fire that led to a munitions explosion. At least 10 families of the Moskva's crew members have voiced frustration over the uncertainy of their fate.
Reporting from New York
The United Nations said that satellite imagery collected by its Satellite Center confirmed massive destruction of civilian infrastructure around Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Around 77 percent of the Horenka, 71 percent of Irpin, and 58 percent of Hostomel, all city areas, were damaged or destroyed as of the end of March, according to Eri Kaneko, an associate U.N. spokesperson.
Russian authorities opened a criminal case against Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian pro-democracy activist and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, for spreading “false information” about the war in Ukraine, his lawyer said on Friday, making him one of the most prominent targets to date in the Kremlin’s crackdown on opposition to the war.
Mr. Kara-Murza, 40, who was arrested earlier this month, faces 10 years in prison, according to the official decree opening a case against him that was posted online by his lawyer, Vadim Prokhorov, on Friday. It says the activist is being investigated for remarks he made at the Arizona State Legislature on March 15.
Mr. Kara-Murza’s remarks, the decree says, concerned Russian bombardment of civilian targets in Ukraine and were made “with motives of political hatred.” The activist told a local news outlet in Phoenix that Russia was committing “war crimes” in Ukraine but that “Russia and the Putin regime are not one and the same.”
A Moscow judge on Friday ordered Mr. Kara-Murza to be placed in pretrial detention until June 12, citing “the nature of the suspicions” against him, according to Mr. Prokhorov.
Mr. Kara-Murza, seeking to avoid being detained before trial, said at a hearing on Friday that he had no plans to leave Russia. He has a residence in Northern Virginia where he lives with his family, according to the Post, but makes frequent trips to Russia and has an apartment in Moscow.
“I am a Russian politician and I have to stay in Russia,” he said, according to the Russian news outlet Mediazona.
Mr. Kara-Murza’s case shows how the Kremlin is moving aggressively to stamp out any opposition to the war among Russians — even comments made outside Russia and not in Russian.
Mr. Kara-Murza was a close associate of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader slain near the Kremlin in 2015. He himself was poisoned twice in recent years with undetermined toxins that put him in comas that lasted days and left him with neurological damage.
Many activists and journalists have fled Russia since the war in Ukraine began, fearing prosecution. But Mr. Kara-Murza remained. He said in recent interviews that it would be too demoralizing for all opposition figures to leave the country, that he belonged inside Russia and that leaving would be exactly what the Kremlin hoped he would do.
“The night, as you know, is darkest just before the light,” Mr. Kara-Murza wrote in a Post column from jail last week. “Russia will be free. I’ve never been so sure of it as I am today.”
Mr. Kara-Murza was initially arrested earlier this month on suspicion of disobeying the police and sentenced to 15 days in jail. But he is now being investigated under the law criminalizing “false information” about the war in Ukraine that President Vladimir V. Putin signed on March 4. The Kremlin said the law was “proportionately harsh” given the “information war that has been unleashed against our country” by the West.
“Americans should be infuriated by Putin’s escalating campaign to silence Kara-Murza,” Fred Ryan, the publisher of The Post, said in a statement on Friday. “And everyone who values press freedom and human rights should be enraged by this injustice and join in demanding Kara-Murza’s immediate release.”
OVD-Info, a rights group, says at least 35 criminal cases have been launched in Russia under the new law. Another 1,258 cases have been launched under the lesser charge of “discrediting” Russia’s armed forces, often resulting in fines, the group says.
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from Istanbul.
The “kamikaze” drones the Pentagon is sending to Ukraine will be particularly effective in the current phase of the fight against Russian forces, the chief executive of the company that makes the weapon said Friday.
Switchblade drones, made by California-based AeroVironment, were designed to attack either soldiers or tanks. But the technology is versatile: Larger versions can take out artillery tubes, crater runways and destroy radar installations. Smaller versions can target the drivers of vehicles, or individual officers if they are detected.
“It is almost a perfect type of conflict for Switchblade,” said Wahid Nawabi, the chief executive of AeroVironment.
Military officials call the weapons “kamikazes” because they can be flown directly at a target and are destroyed when they hit the target and explode.
Had Ukraine had Switchblades early in the war, Mr. Nawabi suggested, it could have used the weapon to easily — and safely — destroy the long convoy of trucks that at one point was slowly moving toward Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
There are questions about how quickly military aid, including the Switchblades, are reaching frontline troops. American officials in Washington have played down problems, but former American officials in Ukraine have said weapons are not moving fast enough from warehouses in Ukraine to troops in the field. Citing security concerns, Mr. Nawabi declined to comment on logistics issues.
Russia is now firing artillery at Ukrainian military positions from greater distances, presenting fewer targets for Ukrainian soldiers armed with anti-tank missiles. But, Mr. Nawabi said, “If you know that there are some Russian artillery or tanks 10, 20, 30, 40 kilometers away in one direction, you can launch Switchblade and go there and look for it.”
The company says the larger version can fly up to 31 miles, or 50 kilometers, and then has 40 minutes in which to locate a target, according to the company. And Switchblades are relatively cheap; while AeroVironment does not disclose the price, the smaller versions are under $10,000 each, according to people briefed on the cost.
The Switchblades that the Pentagon has sent forward came from existing stocks, including some that had previously been sent to Afghanistan. But the company will need to build more drones in order to continue supplying Ukraine’s army, Mr. Nawabi said.
He was in Washington last week speaking to members of Congress about how to ramp up production. While AeroVironment has a factory in California capable of quickly producing thousands of the drones, a microchip shortage and other supply chain problems are slowing output.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment