Kyiv May 18, 9:14 p.m.
Moscow May 18, 9:14 p.m.
Washington May 18, 2:14 p.m.
Live Updates: With Soldier’s Trial and Mariupol Surrender, Ukraine and Russia Fight Information War
The Russian Defense Ministry said that nearly 1,000 fighters had surrendered to Kremlin custody at the Azovstal steel plant. In Kyiv, a Russian soldier pleaded guilty to killing a civilian and violating a Ukrainian law on the rules of war.
Russia and Ukraine intensified their information war on Wednesday, presenting starkly dueling narratives of the conflict that began with the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
Struggling to score battlefield wins, Russia on state media sought to portray the surrender of Ukrainian soldiers at the steel plant in Mariupol as a victory despite the protracted fighting for that city.
But the Ukrainians saluted the soldiers as heroes, while trying to focus the world’s attention on the trial of a young Russian soldier broadcast on YouTube. The soldier is accused of killing a civilian, and the trial has taken on added symbolic resonance as an effort to hold the Russians accountable on accusations of war crimes before the world.
Amid the intensifying battle to shape public opinion at home and abroad, there was particular jubilation in Russia that the captured soldiers included members of the Azov Battalion, whose origins as a far-right group have allowed President Vladimir V. Putin to falsely portray his invasion as a battle to rid Ukraine of Nazis. As of Wednesday, nearly 1,000 soldiers had surrendered.
The Russian Supreme Court has said it would hold a hearing next week on whether to declare the group a “terrorist organization,” which could give Moscow a pretext to deprive the prisoners of rights, and possibly prevent a prisoner swap the Ukrainians had been hoping for.
In other developments,
Finland and Sweden on Wednesday formally asked to join NATO, potentially adding to the Western military alliance’s presence on Russia’s doorstep. But later in the day, Turkey, a NATO member, blocked an initial effort by the military alliance to move ahead quickly with their applications, according to a senior diplomat. Turkey’s hold on the applications may be an attempt to squeeze political concessions from the west.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said it would not be legal for the United States to seize Russian assets and use them to pay for rebuilding Ukraine. The comment, made in a news conference in Bonn, Germany, came as some European leaders have expressed support for the idea.
Finding ways to avoid a global slowdown while continuing to exert pressure on Russia for its war in Ukraine will be the primary focus of finance ministers from the Group of 7 nations who are convening in Bonn, Germany, this week.
Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said that Russia would provide the injured Ukrainians who surrendered at the Mariupol steel plant with medical aid, in accordance with international humanitarian regulations.
“It does not matter who the person is, if he is a civilian or a fighter, and needs to receive medical attention,” she said.
Like other Russian government agencies who have addressed the issue of those who had held out in the steel plant, Ms. Zakharova accused troops from the Azov Battalion of committing war crimes. Some of those who surrendered were believed to belong to the battalion, which is part of Ukraine’s National Guard. But Russian authorities have sought to use the battalion’s origins in the far right to buttress Moscow’s false claims that its army is fighting Nazis in Ukraine.
Ms. Zakharova also accused the battalion of using civilians as human shields and facilities like kindergartens and medical centers to store ammunition. The repeated accusations, echoed by one Russian government agency after another, suggested the kind of charges that the Russian courts, not known for their independence, are likely to level against at least some of those who surrendered.
Ukrainian officials, human rights analysts and the U.S. government have accused Russian forces of war crimes. They have drawn on the accounts of scores of survivors and evidence uncovered from towns like Bucha showing that Russian forces carried out execution-style atrocities against civilians. The Kremlin has denied wrongdoing.
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners in small groups since the war began. Asked about a possible exchange with the Mariupol fighters, Ms. Zakharova said she had no information aside from the fact that medical attention would be available. She said the question of an exchange was an issue for the Ministry of Defense.
The foreign ministry spokeswoman noted that Russia had encouraged the men to leave the plant for days, faulting the government of Ukraine for waiting so long to say that they could surrender. “At the moment, the most important thing is that everybody exits,” she said.
American officials said that Russian lawmakers, who are considering a law to bar prisoner exchanges, had complicated a possibility that the Ukrainian soldiers in Mariupol who surrendered could be swapped for Russian prisoners. American intelligence agencies have assessed that the possibility of meaningful peace talks between Russia and Ukraine at this point are low, saying that also applied to more narrow talks on exchanging prisoners of war.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
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The European Union on Wednesday outlined an ambitious plan to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels before 2027, as it struggles to preserve a united front against Moscow while reducing its dependence on Russian fuel and protecting Europe from skyrocketing energy prices.
The proposal focuses on reducing energy consumption, boosting renewable sources and diversifying energy imports. It is an attempt by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, to coordinate national energy policies and to carve out joint contingency plans in case Russia abruptly cuts off oil and gas supplies. The plan envisions investing 210 billion euros over five years, with a big chunk coming from repurposing of the bloc’s coronavirus stimulus funds.
“Putin’s war poses fundamental challenges to our Union,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, told reporters on Wednesday. “It shows how dependent we are on imported fossil fuels. And how vulnerable we are to rely on Russia for importing our fossil fuels.”
Wednesday’s proposal comes after weeks of unsuccessful negotiations over a E.U. embargo on Russian oil. The measure was blocked by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, who maintains a close relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, highlighting the fractures in the bloc’s unity when it comes to energy.
Energy prices across the bloc had been rising rapidly since October, and the invasion of Ukraine has only underscored Europe’s dependence on Russia, which provides about 40 percent of the European Union’s natural gas and 25 percent of its crude oil. Still, the energy mixes vary from country to country, and their national interests sometimes diverge.
The bloc’s ultimate goal is to become independent from Russia by ramping up production from renewable sources like wind and solar power. Wednesday’s proposal included the possibility of diverting money earmarked for agriculture to renewable energy projects, speeding up permits for renewable energy companies, and requiring public and private buildings to install solar panels on their roofs.
But pivoting to green energy will take time. Frans Timmermans, the commission’s vice president responsible for green energy, said on Wednesday that in the short run Europe was “in a predicament.”
“Just imagine the societal disruption, if we would not be able to find alternatives in the short run,” Mr. Timmermans told reporters. “Then people would really be left in the cold next winter.”
The measures in the plan intended to alleviate energy shortages immediately include investments in hydrogen as a fuel and finding new gas suppliers, mainly for liquefied natural gas, such as the United States and Qatar. E.U. nations could also purchase gas collectively, increasing their bargaining power to influence prices and secure supplies.
Ultimately, however, the cheapest and the fastest way to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russia is simply using less energy, and while the commission will mount a public awareness campaign, it will largely be up to national governments to take on the politically fraught task of convincing Europeans to consume less.
“The ultimate impact of the plan will not be determined in Brussels, but in national capitals,” said Simone Tagliapietra of Breugel, an economic research group in Brussels. He added: “Will the member states cooperate or go alone? These are all national choices.”
Russia will shut down the Moscow office of the CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, and cancel visas for the outlet’s journalists, according to Russia’s Foreign Ministry. It said the move came in response to Canada’s ban in March of the news outlet Russia Today.
The Russian state news media is celebrating Ukraine’s decision to halt fighting at the Azovstal steel works in the city of Mariupol with a mixture of triumphalism and outright glee, with pro-war commentators gloating about the surrender of some of Ukraine’s most hardened fighters, including members of a group that began as far-right paramilitary brigade.
The surrender of the Ukrainians, including members of the Azov battalion, was being portrayed in Russia as its biggest military victory in years — despite requiring Moscow’s forces to engage in a nearly three-month siege that laid waste to the southeastern city. And the tone of the statements added to questions over whether Russia would seek to try the captured soldiers instead of releasing them in a prisoner exchange, as Ukraine has indicated.
Pro-war Russian commentators said the fall of Mariupol signaled an end to the myth of Kyiv’s resilience against Moscow and potentially a watershed moment in the war that could shatter Ukrainian morale and push President Volodymyr Zelensky off balance.
“This is the moment of truth for those who boasted that they would defend Mariupol entrusted to them to the last drop of blood,” said Vyacheslav Nikonov, a member of Parliament who hosts one of the most popular political talk shows on Russian television.
For years, the Russian state-run media and conservative commentators have portrayed the Azov regiment as proof of a false claim that the Ukrainian state has been infected with Nazism. President Vladimir V. Putin has argued that the Kremlin, which builds its own legitimacy on the legacy of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, could not tolerate that and therefore was compelled to invade.
Yuri Knutov, a military historian and director of the Museum of the Air Defense Forces, called the fight for the steel plant a “small Stalingrad,” comparing the fight to the famous Battle of Stalingrad in World War II.
For many conservative commentators, the Azov regiment has also been a symbol of broad anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine. Andrei Medvedev, a television host and deputy of the Moscow city legislature, called Azov “the most motivated and the most ideologically pumped-up unit” of Ukrainian forces.
“Now looks like these ‘knights’ are a little broken,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “They broke down spiritually.”
Amid a spreading sense of frustration over the slow progress of Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine, the surrender at Azovstal emboldened some commentators. Maksim Fomin, a pro-war blogger, said the surrender was proof that the Ukrainians “aren’t ready to die for their ideals.”
Aleksandr Kazakov, a pro-Russian analyst, called the surrender “a grave political defeat” for the Ukrainian government which had “turned Azovstal into a symbol of its struggle, into a myth.”
“Now this myth has been destroyed,” he said in a post. “The symbol of confrontation has turned into a symbol of defeat.”
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.
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Continue reading the main storySteven Erlanger and
Turkey has blocked an initial effort by NATO to move ahead quickly with the applications of Finland and Sweden, which were handed over Wednesday morning, according to a senior diplomat.
Turkey presented NATO ambassadors with a list of grievances mostly concerning allegations about Kurdish terrorists and prevented an early procedural vote to proceed with the applications.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has complained about the issue and has said it makes him doubtful about Sweden and Finland as members. Turkey’s hold on the applications is not thought to be final, but rather an effort to get its concerns addressed seriously by member states.
Analysts said Mr. Erdogan seemed to be raising his demands, calculating that his cooperation was at a premium at a moment of global crisis.
Soner Cagaptay, the director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute, said Mr. Erdogan was probably angling for concessions in the month before the NATO summit in June, and looking for movement by Sweden on its stance regarding Kurdish groups that Turkey regards as linked to the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or P.K.K., as well as an unblocking of military sales of American F-16s to Turkey.
“He definitely wants concrete steps on the P.K.K.,” Mr. Cagaptay said, adding that the Turkish leader could cast a public statement from Sweden on the issue as a win to his domestic audience at home.
In an address to his lawmakers in Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Erdogan criticized at length Western support for Kurdish groups that Ankara sees as a terrorist threat.
“It wouldn’t be wrong to say that we are bittersweet watching the solidarity and cooperation in the region, the sources used, the arms opened, the tolerance shown,” he said. “Because we, as a NATO ally who struggled with terror for years, whose borders were harassed, big conflicts occurred just next door, have never seen such a picture.”
Turkey’s formal objection to the application of Sweden and Finland to join NATO came hours before Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was set to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken in New York.
BONN, Germany — Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Wednesday that elevated food and energy prices are depressing both spending and economic output, creating what she called “stagflationary effects” all around the world.
Her comments, which came ahead of a Group of 7 finance ministers meeting this week, offered a downbeat assessment of the global economy at a moment when nations are facing significant headwinds.
Ms. Yellen suggested that the United States was well placed to withstand the turbulence, pointing to America’s strong labor market and healthy household finances. But she warned that Europe could be more vulnerable to a recession because of its dependence on Russian energy, as well other factors that are weighing on global growth, including severe lockdowns in China to contain coronavirus outbreaks that are compounding supply chain problems.
“This is an environment that is filled with risks, both with respect to inflation, and also potential slowdowns,” Ms. Yellen said.
Ms. Yellen, who is expected to press her G7 counterparts to continue punishing Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, said that “spillover effects” were expected from the forceful sanctions that have been implemented so far. She said the United States and its allies are working to minimize the collateral economic damage while maintaining pressure on Russia.
Ms. Yellen also signaled that the pressure on Russia’s economy would soon intensify. She said that the United States was likely to allow the expiration of a sanctions exemption that has let Russia continue making payments to American bondholders. The exemption is scheduled to expire on May 25, making it likely that Russia could soon default on its foreign debt for the first time in a century.
“If Russia is unable to find a legal way to make these payments, and they technically default on their debt, I don’t think that really represents a significant change in Russia’s situation,” Ms. Yellen said. “They’re already cut off from global capital markets.”
The Treasury secretary did cast doubt on an idea that has been gaining momentum in Europe as countries look to help Ukraine rebuild its economy. While some nations have floated the idea of seizing Russian assets and using them to fund Ukraine’s rebuilding, Ms. Yellen said on Wednesday it would not be legal for the United States to do.
“It’s not something that is legally permissible in the United States,” Ms. Yellen said, noting that other countries also have legal obstacles.
Ms. Yellen also made the case for removing some of the tariffs on Chinese goods that have been in place since former President Donald J. Trump imposed levies in 2018. President Biden has suggested the administration is considering relaxing those tariffs as a way to help deal with rising prices, a position Ms. Yellen reiterated.
“Some relief could come from cutting some of them,” Ms. Yellen said, explaining that the tariffs were not strategic and that they are harming consumers and businesses. “There are a variety of impacts, there are a variety of opinions, and we really haven’t sorted out yet or come to agreement on where to be on tariffs.”
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Pressures on global supply chains worsened in April as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and pandemic lockdowns in China made it more difficult for companies to source parts and products globally, a supply chain index published on Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed.
The index — which tracks global transportation costs, delivery times and other factors across seven major economies — showed that those pressures had been easing between December 2021 and March, though they remained very high historically.
But the trend reversed in April as delivery times lengthened for products in China and the euro area and air freight costs rose.
For two months, a group of Ukrainian fighters was holed up in the Azovstal steel plant in the city of Mariupol, mounting a last stand against Russian forces in a critical part of eastern Ukraine. On Monday, Ukraine surrendered the plant. After the end of the resistance at Azovstal, a new episode of “The Daily” podcast hears from Leonid Kuznetsov, a 25-year-old soldier who was stationed inside.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Battle for Azovstal: A Soldier’s Story
The surrender of a steel plant in Mariupol gave Russia a rare victory but has already become a rallying cry for further resistance in Ukraine.Advertisement
Continue reading the main storyTreasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said it would not be legal for the United States to seize Russian assets and use them to pay for rebuilding Ukraine. The comment, made in a news conference in Bonn, Germany, before a summit of G7 finance ministers, came as some European leaders have expressed support for the idea.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, was scheduled to meet on Wednesday with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in New York, on the sidelines of forums at the United Nations on migration and global food security.
Long scheduled as part of an effort to improve strained United States-Turkey relations and tackle longstanding bilateral disputes, the meeting was also likely to focus on the war in Ukraine, as well as on Finland’s and Sweden’s applications to join NATO.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has raised objections to the two Nordic nations joining the Western military alliance, but analysts said his posturing was aimed less at blocking their accession than at gaining more in talks with the United States. Turkey is one of 30 NATO members, all of whom have to agree on admitting new members.
“Erdogan is not addressing Helsinki or Stockholm here,” said Ahmet Kasim Han, a professor of international relations at Aydin University in Istanbul. “He is trying to give a message: ‘You cannot discipline me and my country. You have to make a broad bargain with me about Turkey’s problems with the West.’”
But the concessions that Turkey is seeking are not firmly defined, said Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s something — and everything,” she said.
She added that the conversation would inevitably flow to the issue of American support for Kurdish forces in Syria, which Turkey sees as a security threat.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
A Russian soldier pleaded guilty in a Kyiv court on Wednesday to having fatally shot a civilian, in the first trial Ukraine has conducted for an act that could be considered a war crime since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
The soldier, Sgt. Vadim Shyshimarin, pleaded guilty to shooting a 62-year-old man on a bicycle in the village of Chupakhivka in the Sumy region, about 200 miles east of Kyiv, four days after Russia’s full-scale invasion began on Feb. 24. He faces 10 years to life in prison.
Asked by the presiding judge whether he accepted his guilt, Sergeant Shyshimarin, 21, said, “Yes.”
“Fully?” the judge asked. “Yes,” the sergeant replied.
The sergeant had admitted to Ukrainian investigators that he had pulled trigger of the Kalashnikov rifle that killed the man, Oleksandar Shelipov, prosecutors said. He told investigators in a videotaped statement that he and four other servicemen had stolen a car at gunpoint and were fleeing from Ukrainian forces when they spotted Mr. Shelipov on a bicycle, talking on a phone. He said he was ordered to kill the man so he would not report them.
“I was ordered to shoot, I fired an automatic burst at him, he fell. We drove on,” Sergeant Shyshimarin told the Ukrainian Intelligence Services.
The sergeant had been charged under a Ukrainian statute with violating “the laws and customs of war, combined with premeditated murder,” Ukrainian prosecutors said. He had not been charged with a war crime under international law.
The trial had drawn widespread interest, and even though Sergeant Shyshimarin entered a guilty plea, prosecutors plan to present all the evidence against him on Thursday.
On Wednesday, the courtroom and an overflow room were crowded with members of the local and international news media, and the proceedings were being broadcast on YouTube. Kateryna Shelipova, the widow of the man who was fatally shot, was also in court on Wednesday.
The prosecutor, Andriy Sinyuk, described the hearing as an “unprecedented procedure” in which “a serviceman of a different country is accused of murdering a civilian of Ukraine.”
In Moscow, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, dismissed the proceedings on Wednesday, telling reporters that the accusations leveled against Russian soldiers by Ukraine were “simply fake or staged.”
“We still have no information,” Mr. Peskov said. “And the ability to provide assistance due to the lack of our diplomatic mission there is also very limited.”
Sergeant Shyshimarin’s lawyer said that no one from the Russian government had contacted him about his client, though he said he had been in touch with the defendant’s mother.
The trial was part of Ukraine’s extensive effort to document atrocities and identify their perpetrators. A number of international initiatives hold both sides accountable for war crimes are going forward.
Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the Hague-based International Criminal Court, said on Tuesday that he was sending the court’s “largest ever” team of experts to Ukraine to investigate allegations of war crimes. And the United Nations Humans Rights Council voted last week to deepen its investigation into rights abuses in the region around Kyiv and other areas.
Sergeant Shyshimarin’s guilty plea took place as Ukraine sought to free its soldiers who were have surrendered the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol in recent days. The Russian Defense Ministry said it had almost 1,000 fighters, more than 50 of whom were “seriously injured,” in custody.
Ukraine hopes to trade the soldiers for Russian prisoners of war. Neither Moscow nor Kyiv has released details about a potential prisoner exchange, but any prisoner transfer could complicate the efforts of Ukrainian prosecutors to hold Russians suspected of war crimes accountable.
Complicating matters further, the Russian authorities have said in recent days they would interrogate some of the Ukrainian prisoners from the Azovstal plant about alleged war crimes, raising the possibility Moscow may also put soldiers on trial.
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A dearth of medicine. A power grid ablaze. Water flooding through mass graves that has raised the fear of diseases like cholera.
As hundreds of Ukrainian fighters are being taken out of Mariupol after their surrender of its besieged steel plant, the city’s mayor made a plea to the world on Wednesday to help the 100,000 civilians who remain inside the Russian-controlled southern port city under rapidly deteriorating sanitation and health conditions.
Although several humanitarian corridors have been negotiated to help civilians flee, the mayor, Vadym Boichenko, called for new international efforts to create opportunities for safe passage for the thousands who still want to flee.
“We have thousands of residents — most of them have been calling the hotline of the municipality and they were begging to be sent, begging to have evacuation,” he said, speaking via online video conference to journalists.
Mr. Boichenko cited concerns over the potential spread of cholera, dysentery and other epidemiological crises because of rapidly worsening public health conditions. Russian forces occupying the city, while trying to repair the public water system, had accidentally caused flooding in the streets, he said. That water now risks flowing through the mass graves dug for the more than 20,000 people he said had been killed there.
“In the summer,” he said, “this will be a very big problem.”
World Health Organization officials cited similar concerns on Tuesday.
Mr. Boichenko also said that summer rains raised the risk of disease spreading at a time when doctors have little means to tackle them.
“The city today has no conditions for providing health care,” he said. “There’s no medicine.”
Power is still not working in the city because of another accident that he blamed on Russian forces. “Essentially,” he said, parts of the power system “were burned down, because they didn’t test the power grid, and they caused a fire.”
The mayor said he could not share any new information on the process of evacuating the Azovstal steel plant, where an undisclosed number of fighters remain. The factory was the Ukrainians’ last bastion in the city, and Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that hundreds more of the fighters had surrendered to Moscow’s forces.
The ministry did not specify where the latest batch of fighters had been taken, but Ukraine’s General Staff said earlier that its soldiers had been transported to two Ukrainian towns that are under Russian control.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Russia used auxiliary forces from Chechnya in its long battle for Mariupol, Britain’s defense ministry said on Wednesday. The deployment demonstrates Russia’s “significant resourcing problems” in Ukraine and is “likely contributing to a disunited command,” the ministry said.
The war in Ukraine is casting a long shadow over this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On Tuesday, Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, addressed the event’s opening ceremony, with stirring rhetoric and Charlie Chaplin quotes.
But the conflict had already had an impact on the festival long before Zelensky’s appearance. Within days of Russia’s invasion, in February, some of Ukraine’s leading movie directors and producers called on film festivals worldwide to boycott Russians, as a sign of support. Cannes said in a statement in March that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” but added that it would not ban Russian directors.
There is one major Russian director at this year’s event: Kirill Serebrennikov, who is competing for the Palme d’Or with “Tchaikovsky’s Wife.” The Cannes press office told The Hollywood Reporter it had approved “only a few” Russian media outlets to cover the event, and that all of those outlets opposed the war. It was unclear, however, if any state news outlets had requested accreditation, and the festival did not respond to emailed questions.
Two movies by Ukrainian directors are on the festival’s program: Maksim Nakonechnyi’s “Butterfly Vision” and Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction.” But even those choices might stir controversy. In March, the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled Loznitsa, because he did not support its call to boycott Russian movies.
“When I hear calls to ban Russian films, I think of my Russian friends — decent and honorable people,” Loznitsa told The New York Times in March. “We cannot judge people by their passports,” he added: “They are victims of this war, just like we are.”
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Reporting from Paris
Russia has expelled 34 diplomats and staff working at the French embassy in Moscow, a move that the French Foreign Ministry said “has no legitimate basis.” Russia presented the expulsions as a response to France’s decision to bar several dozen Russian diplomats last month for undermining France’s security interests. The ministry said the people expelled on Wednesday were doing legitimate diplomatic work.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
It is a battered, ramshackle husk of a building. But for artists fleeing war, it is a haven.
Here on the outskirts of Lviv, a city on Ukraine’s westernmost edge whose region has absorbed some two million people escaping fighting, displaced artists who have shunned formal, government-run shelters have made a home inside an abandoned factory, where they can live and create by their own rules.
“It’s like we’ve made our very own castle,” said Ilya Todurkin, 21, from Mariupol.
Like many others, he has found a healing place here after the trauma of the first days of Russia’s invasion, when he discovered the body of his best friend shortly after he had killed himself.
“When the war started, there was a big wave of suicide for people with mental issues and depression,” he said. “I thought about suicide, too.”
Mr. Todurkin clawed out of his depression with the help of his new community of fellow displaced artists. Launched by Kepsko, an initiative that set up creative spaces in the factory a year ago, it offered the place up as a shelter in March.
Most of the internally displaced people in Lviv are in shelters set up by municipal authorities and charities. This week, the city called on residents to open their homes as well.
The mostly empty plant outside Lviv, which once made cardiological equipment, has a special draw for artists. Its sprawling junkyards and empty factory floors had long attracted graffiti artists, pop-up restaurants and techno parties.
Last weekend, the artists opened the space for an art exhibition and rave, with proceeds going to the Ukrainian army.
Shouting over thudding techno beats, Natasha Kushnir, 23, pointed to sculptures she made with plastic, glass and gasoline: “These are materials to make a Molotov cocktail. But we’ll need to use these things after the war to create new life in a peaceful way.”
Oleksander Sokolov, 33, a circus producer, said many artists arrive suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. “There is a lot of anger, a lot of sadness to get out,” he said. “We have to help each other heal.”
They share the skills they have: Some offer massages, yoga lessons, or music instruction. A particular favorite among the artists living there is “Soul Voice,” a therapeutic method using singing and vocal exercises, led by a musician from Kyiv.
Arrivals must commit to abstain from alcohol or “nonnatural” substances, and to join in on what Mr. Sokolov calls “dobrotvorena,” which translates to “making kindness.” They agree to make decisions communally, without criticizing one another.
Mr. Sokolov is working with other artists to give back by developing a recycling project for Lviv. His next circus act, he says, will use only recycled materials.
For many, like Artem Suslikov, a wood sculptor, the community offers a feeling of a fresh start. He lost all his artwork when he fled shelling in Berdiansk, his hometown in eastern Ukraine.
In the three weeks since he arrived, he has made an array of small pieces, using wood from the factory yard. Holding up a chunk he had shaped to look like a Soviet-era apartment block, he pointed to the wood’s flaws.
“It’s got a crack there, and here it was burned by fire,” he said. “It’s a symbol of our lives: We’re all a little bit broken, but we are still standing.”
Reporting from London
Google said that its subsidiary in Russia would file for bankruptcy protection and that the company would no longer have employees in the country. The Russian authorities had seized the company’s assets in the country, including its bank account, making it impossible for the company to continue operation, Google said in a statement. It said services like search, YouTube, email, maps and the Play app store would continue to work inside Russia.
A Kyiv court on Wednesday will hear the indictment of a Russian soldier accused of shooting a civilian, the first soldier being prosecuted in Ukraine over a possible war crime since Russia’s invasion began in February.
The soldier, Sgt. Vadim Shysimarin, is accused of shooting a 62-year-old man on a bicycle in the village of Chupakhivka in the Sumy region, about 200 miles east of Kyiv, four days after the war began.
The man’s widow is expected to appear in court.
The trial takes place as Ukraine seeks the transfer of its own soldiers who were taken into Russian custody from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol in recent days. Hundreds of the fighters, more than 50 of whom were reported to be seriously injured, have been evacuated to Russian-controlled territory.
Ukraine hopes to trade the soldiers for Russian prisoners of war. Neither Moscow nor Kyiv has released details about a potential prisoner exchange, but any prisoner transfer could complicate the efforts of Ukrainian prosecutors to hold accountable Russian fighters accused of atrocities.
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Continue reading the main storyRussia said on Wednesday that nearly 1,000 Ukrainian fighters from the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol had surrendered to Russian forces, though their fate remained uncertain, with Ukraine promising their eventual swap in a prisoner exchange amid calls in Moscow to have them tried in court.
The surrender of some of Ukraine’s most die-hard fighters — who held out beneath the sprawling steel factory for weeks under heavy bombardment — in effect ended the longest and most devastating battle of the war so far. It also offered Russia an opportunity to present a victory at a time when some pro-Russian commentators have begun to voice frustration over the army’s miscalculations and slow progress in the war.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that 694 members of the Ukrainian Army and the Azov battalion, which belongs to the country’s National Guard, had surrendered over the past 24 hours, bringing the overall number of surrendered fighters to 959. There was no immediate comment from the Ukrainian government.
A video published on Wednesday by Zvezda, a Russian defense ministry television channel, appeared to show Russian soldiers on a road littered with debris checking bags of Ukrainian fighters, some of them visibly wounded.
The ministry did not specify where the latest batch of fighters had been taken. Ukraine’s General Staff said earlier that its soldiers had been transported to two Ukrainian towns that are under Russian control.
The Russian statement also offered no clarity over what will happen next. In particular, the fate of members of the Azov battalion, the Ukrainian group whose far-right links have offered a veneer of credibility to Russia’s false claims that its army was fighting Nazis in Ukraine, carries an outsized symbolic weight for both sides in the war. In his February speech announcing the start of the invasion, President Vladimir V. Putin said that Russia would “seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians.”
Amnesty International on Wednesday demanded that the Red Cross be given immediate access to the Ukrainian fighters from Mariupol who are now in Russian hands. The agency said it had “serious concerns about their fate as prisoners of war,” in part because they had been dehumanized in the Russian news media.
On Tuesday, Russian officials paved the way for what some fear will turn into a show trial.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower chamber of Russia’s Parliament, said the legislative body would discuss the ban of “exchanges of Nazi criminals.” The Russian prosecutor general asked the country’s Supreme Court to declare the Azov brigade a “terrorist organization,” and the court scheduled a hearing on the issue for May 26, the Russian Justice Ministry said in a statement.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s equivalent to the F.B.I., said on Tuesday that investigators would interrogate the captured fighters to “check their involvement in crimes committed against civilians.”
The swift Russian moves have raised questions about the parameters and durability of the surrender terms negotiated between Moscow and Kyiv, and about whether all of the fighters remaining in the steel factory’s sprawling nuclear shelters will abide by it.
On Tuesday, Hanna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, said that moves by Russian lawmakers to ban a prisoner exchange were “a political statement aimed at the internal propaganda and internal political processes in Russia.”
She said the negotiations and an operation to rescue the soldiers, who are widely seen as heroes in Ukraine, were continuing. She also praised their role in pinning down and damaging Russian forces long enough in Mariupol to ensure that they could not swiftly redeploy to join battles elsewhere in Ukraine.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Amnesty International on Wednesday demanded that the Red Cross be given immediate access to Ukrainian forces from Mariupol who are now in Russian hands. The agency said it had “serious concerns about their fate as prisoners of war,” in part because they had been dehumanized in the Russian news media.
Alan Rappeport and
BRUSSELS — The world economy is heading into a potentially grim period as rising costs, shortages of food and other commodities and Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine threaten to slow economic growth and bring about a painful global slump.
Two years after the coronavirus pandemic emerged and left much of the globe in a state of paralysis, policymakers are grappling with ongoing challenges, including clogged supply chains, lockdowns in China and the prospect of an energy crisis as nations wean themselves off Russian oil and gas. Those colliding forces have some economists starting to worry about a global recession as different corners of the world find their economies battered by events.
Finding ways to avoid a slowdown while continuing to exert pressure on Russia for its war in Ukraine will be the primary focus of finance ministers from the Group of 7 nations who are convening in Bonn, Germany, this week.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said that elevated food and energy prices were depressing both spending and economic output, creating what she called “stagflationary effects” all around the world.
“This is an environment that is filled with risks, both with respect to inflation, and also potential slowdowns,” Ms. Yellen said.
The economic challenges that governments around the globe are facing could begin to chip away at the united front that Western nations have maintained in confronting Russia’s aggression, including sweeping sanctions aimed at crippling its economy and efforts to reduce reliance on Russian energy.
Policymakers are balancing delicate trade-offs as they consider how to isolate Russia, support Ukraine and keep their own economies afloat at a moment when prices are rising rapidly and growth is slowing.
Central banks around the world are beginning to raise interest rates to help tame rapid inflation, moves that will temper economic growth by raising borrowing costs and could lead to higher unemployment. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, last week signaled a possible increase in interest rates in July, which would be the ECB’s first such move in more than a decade.
Global growth is expected to slow to 3.6 percent this year, the International Monetary Fund projected in April, down from the 4.4 percent it forecast before both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s zero-Covid lockdowns.
On Monday, the European Commission released its own revised economic forecast, showing a slowdown in growth to 2.7 percent this year from the 4 percent estimated in its winter report. At the same time, inflation is hitting record levels and is expected to average 6.8 percent for the year. Britain’s annual inflation rate jumped to 9 percent last month, the highest in 40 years, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. And some Eastern European countries face even steeper price increases, with Poland, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania all facing inflation rates in excess of 11 percent.
Pressures on global supply chains also worsened in April as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and pandemic lockdowns in China made it more difficult for companies to source parts and products globally, a supply chain index published Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed. That could further exacerbate shortages and price increases.
Eswar Prasad, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division, summed up the challenges facing the G7 nations, saying that its “policymakers are caught in the bind that any tightening of screws on Russia by limiting energy purchases worsens inflation and hurts growth in their economies.”
“Such sanctions, for all the moral justification underpinning them, are exacting an increasingly heavy economic toll that in turn could have domestic political consequences for G7 leaders,” he added.
Still, the United States is expected to press its allies to continue isolating Russia and to deliver more economic aid to Ukraine despite their own economic troubles. Officials are also expected to discuss the merits of imposing tariffs on Russian energy exports ahead of a proposed European oil embargo that the United States fears could send prices skyrocketing by limiting supplies. Policymakers will also discuss whether to press countries such as India to roll back export restrictions on crucial food products that are worsening already high prices.
Against this backdrop is the growing urgency to help sustain Ukraine’s economy, which the International Monetary Fund has said needs an estimated $5 billion a month in aid to keep government operations running. The U.S. Congress is close to passing a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine that will cover some of these costs, but Ms. Yellen has called on her European counterparts to provide more financial help.
Finance ministers are expected to consider other measures for providing Ukraine with relief.
There is increasing interest in the idea of seizing some of the approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves that the United States and its allies have immobilized and using that money to help fund Ukraine’s reconstruction. Treasury Department officials are considering the idea, but they have trepidations about the feasibility of such a move and the possibility that it would raise doubts about the United States as a safe place to store assets.
On Wednesday, Ms. Yellen dismissed the likelihood of such a move when she said liquidating Russian assets is “not something that is legally permissible in the United States.”
Ahead of the G7 meeting this week, American officials saw the economic challenges facing Europe firsthand. During a stop to meet with top officials in Warsaw on Monday, Ms. Yellen acknowledged the toll that the conflict in Ukraine is having on the economy of Poland, where officials have raised interest rates sharply to combat inflation. Poland has absorbed more than three million Ukrainian refugees and has faced a cutoff in gas exports from Russia.
“They have to deal with a tighter monetary policy just as countries around the world and the United States are,” Ms. Yellen told reporters. “At a time when Poland is committed to large expenditures to shore up its security, it is a difficult balancing act.”
A downturn may be unavoidable in some countries, and economists are weighing multiple factors as they gauge the likelihood of a recession, including a severe slowdown in China related to continuing Covid lockdowns.
The European Commission, in its economic report, said the E.U. “is first in line among advanced economies to take a hit,” because of its proximity to Ukraine and its dependence on Russian energy. At the same time, it has absorbed more than five million refugees in less than three months.
Deutsche Bank analysts said this week that they thought a recession in Europe was unlikely. By contrast, Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, warned in a note on Monday that with consumer demand and output falling, “Germany’s economy is headed for recession.” Analysts at Capital Economics predicted that Germany, Italy and Britain are likely to face recessions, meaning there is a “reasonable chance” that the broader eurozone will also face one, defined as two consecutive quarters of falling output.
Vicky Redwood, senior economic adviser at Capital Economics, warned that more aggressive interest rate increases by central banks could lead to a global contraction.
“If inflation expectations and inflation prove more stubborn than we expect, and interest rates need to rise further as a result, then a recession most probably will be on the cards,” Ms. Redwood wrote in a note to clients this week.
The major culprit is energy prices. In Germany, which has been most dependent on Russian fuel among the major economies in Europe, the squeeze is being acutely felt by its industrial-heavy business sector as well as consumers.
Russian gas shipments “underpin the competitiveness of our industry,” Martin Brudermüller, the chief executive of the chemical giant BASF, said at the company’s annual general meeting last month.
While calling to decrease its dependence, Mr. Brudermüller nevertheless warned that “if the natural gas supply from Russia were to suddenly stop, it would cause irreversible economic damage” and possibly force a stop in production.
The fallout from a gas embargo has been the subject of spirited debate among German economists and policymakers, with analyses ranging from manageable to catastrophic. The flow of energy is just one of several supply concerns in the industrial sector.
Rising food prices are another matter causing anxiety among finance ministers. The Treasury Department released a report on Wednesday laying out plans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions to combat food shortages.
The interruption of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, which together account for 28 percent of global exports, along with supply chain disruptions, a severe drought in India that has caused it to ban shipments of grain and Covid-related lockdowns in China, are also causing food prices to spiral and increasing global hunger, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
The question for both American and European policymakers is how to corral leaping prices without sending their economies into recession. The Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates to tame inflation in the United States, and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, has acknowledged that bringing prices down without seriously hurting the overall economy will be a challenge. Ms. Yellen suggested on Wednesday that the United States was well placed to withstand the turbulence, pointing to America’s strong labor market and healthy household finances. She predicted that the United States would not fall into a recession but that Europe could be a different matter.
“I think Europe is perhaps a bit more a bit more vulnerable, and of course, more exposed on the energy front than the United States,” she said.
That conundrum accounts for the reluctance of the European Central Bank to raise rates. In the plus column, the European Commission noted that unemployment in the eurozone was down, as were government deficits, even though war-related costs were rising.
While food prices are increasing around the world, the level of inflation varies widely. Food inflation was 2.5 percent in France and Ireland during the first three months of 2022 and 10 percent in Eastern European countries, while in Turkey and Argentina, it was 60 to 70 percent in March alone, according to an analysis last week from ING.
In a speech to the Brussels Economic Forum on Tuesday, Ms. Yellen made the case that Russia’s actions are a reminder that nations should not trade national security for cheap energy. She argued that it is crucial to reduce reliance on Russia and China and to accelerate investments in renewable resources.
“No country controls the wind and the sun,” Ms. Yellen said. “Let’s make sure that this is the last time that the global economy is held hostage to the hostile actions of those who produce fossil fuels.”
Alan Rappeport reported from Brussels and Bonn, Germany, and Patricia Cohen from London.
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