Kyiv May 8, 11:04 p.m.
Moscow May 8, 11:04 p.m.
Washington May 8, 4:04 p.m.
Live Updates: Jill Biden Visits Ukraine, in Latest Show of U.S. Support
The first lady met with the wife of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and G7 leaders moved to cut off the purchase of oil from Russia. Officials said a Russian airstrike had hit a school building being used as a shelter.
Marc Santora and
In a high-profile display of solidarity with Ukraine on the eve of a key Russian military holiday, Jill Biden, the first lady, made an unannounced visit to western Ukraine on Sunday, hours before President Biden and other Group of 7 leaders met virtually with President Volodymyr Zelensky. Canada’s leader, Justin Trudeau, also made an unannounced visit, traveling to view the devastation in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin.
The events served to demonstrate the depth of support for Ukraine by the United States and other nations in the face of Russia’s invasion, on a day when officials feared that dozens of people had been killed in a Russian airstrike that leveled a school in a village in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has intensified.
Moscow’s forces have renewed their assault in the east as they scramble to show progress before Monday, when Russia marks its annual May 9 holiday commemorating the Soviet victory against Nazi Germany in 1945. President Vladimir V. Putin has turned the day into a quasi-religious demonstration of military might, but an apparent Russian pullback from around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, was the latest sign of the struggles of Mr. Putin’s forces to gain ground.
Ukrainian forces have pressed a fierce counteroffensive in the east, bolstered by weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations that have pledged billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv.
Here are other developments:
Ukrainian fighters defending a sprawling steel plant in the ruined city of Mariupol said the plant was still under bombardment by Russian forces and vowed never to surrender. Ukraine is working to get wounded soldiers and medics out of the plant, following the evacuation of all civilians on Saturday.
Some U.S. diplomats, who were ordered to leave Ukraine in the days before Russia invaded, have returned to the embassy in Kyiv. At the Canadian Embassy, Prime Minister Trudeau raised the Maple Leaf to mark its reopening.
In congratulatory messages a day before the May 9 holiday, Mr. Putin praised the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics — two Russia-backed breakaway territories in Ukraine — for their role in what he described as a continued fight against Nazism.
The C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, warned that Mr. Putin was convinced that “he cannot afford to lose,” raising the specter that his forces will escalate their attacks in Ukraine.
The United Nations said that another 174 people evacuated from the Azovstal steel factory and other areas in Mariupol had arrived in Zaporizhzhia as part of a joint operation with the Red Cross, bringing the total number of people evacuated from the area to more than 600. “Our work, however, is not yet done,” the humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, Osnat Lubrani, said in a statement.
The White House on Sunday imposed visa restrictions on about 2,600 Russian military officials and Belarusian officials and issued sanctions against three Russian state television outlets as President Biden met virtually with leaders of the Group of 7 nations and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
The administration’s latest round of economic penalties comes just a day before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is expected to try to galvanize support for his invasion of Ukraine with a celebration of the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The sanctions were announced just as Mr. Biden’s one-hour, 13-minute call with Mr. Zelensky and the other world leaders was coming to a close.
The administration also said it would ban Americans from providing consulting or accounting services to members of the Russian Federation. “These services are key to Russian companies and elites building wealth, thereby generating revenue for Putin’s war machine, and to trying to hide that wealth and evade sanctions,” a White House statement said.
The administration also will restrict American companies from providing equipment, technology or advertising to Russia’s three most watched state-owned television stations — Channel One Russia, Russia-1 and NTV.
The United States on Monday is expected to issue a new rule restricting bulldozers and industrial equipment that American companies can export to Russia, a move the White House said would weaken Russia’s military industrial complex.
The 2,600 visa restrictions issued against Russian and Belarusian officials were “in response to their ongoing efforts to undermine the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine,” the White House said. The administration also restricted the visas of 35 executives from Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, and Gazprombank, a privately held arm of the Russian energy giant Gazprom.
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Continue reading the main storyEmma Bubola and
Leaders of the Group of 7 nations pledged during a virtual meeting on Sunday with President Volodymyr Zelensky to ban or phase out Russian oil, aiming to still further erode Russia’s economic standing as it pursues its invasion of Ukraine.
The group did not provide details but said in a statement that the plans would be enforced in a “timely and orderly fashion, and in ways that provide time for the world to secure alternative supplies.”
Oil bans are a two-edged sword. Oil is a top export for Russia, and Moscow would almost certainly sustain a big economic blow should it be banned, but parts of Europe are heavily dependent on its oil and thus are also vulnerable.
The United States, which imported a relatively small amount of energy resources from Russia, has already banned the import of Russian oil and gas.
The European Union, which gets about a quarter of its crude oil imports from Russia, has also announced plans for phasing out Russian oil, but is still in talks to formalize the decision. The bloc is too dependent on Russian gas to consider banning it in the short term, but has laid out plans to become progressively independent from it.
The G7 also said it would take steps to stop the provision of key services on which Russia depends and to toughen sanctions against the financial elites who support President Vladimir V. Putin, as well as their family members.
The White House also announced new sanctions on Sunday against three Russian state television outlets and said it would prohibit Americans from providing accounting or consulting services to anyone in Russia.
The Group of 7, which includes some of the world’s biggest economies, said that member nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States — would also continue to provide billions of dollars in military aid and intelligence to Ukraine, which has helped the country thwart Russian forces.
During the meeting Sunday, Mr. Zelensky pleaded Ukraine’s case with the world leaders, saying his ultimate goal was to force the full withdrawal of Russia’s army.
The G7, in its statement, said member nations had assured Mr. Zelensky of their “continued readiness to undertake further commitments to help Ukraine secure its free and democratic future.”
The call took place on the day the G7 leaders commemorate the end of the Second World War and as Russia prepared for its annual celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.
“We remain united in our resolve that President Putin must not win his war against Ukraine,” the G7 statement said. “We owe it to the memory of all those who fought for freedom in the Second World War.”
The actions of Mr. Putin, it said, “bring shame on Russia and the historic sacrifices of its people.”
Ahead of the call, the United Kingdom said it would offer an additional 1.3 billion pounds (about 1.6 billion dollars) in aid and military support to Ukraine. The new funding almost doubles the existing 1.5 billion pounds in support.
Reporting from Bucha, Ukraine
The U2 frontman Bono visited the grounds of a church in Bucha where a mass grave was found in March after Russian troops withdrew from the town just north of Ukraine's capital. Earlier Sunday, Bono and his bandmate the Edge performed in a Kyiv metro station.
A team of senior American diplomats returned to the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on Sunday for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine, a move that coincided with Victory in Europe Day and one day ahead of a planned Russian celebration of its military might.
“Just arrived in Kyiv! Delighted to be back on Victory in Europe Day,” the embassy posted on Twitter with a photo of the chargé d’affaires, Kristina Kvien.
The arrival of the diplomats on the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945 represented a first step toward a planned reopening of the American Embassy in the Ukrainian capital. All U.S. diplomats were ordered out of the country shortly before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion.
While the embassy was not yet officially reopened, the return of U.S. diplomats amounted to a symbolic reminder to President Vladimir V. Putin that his initial goal of capturing Kyiv failed, and put Moscow on notice that the West is supporting Ukraine’s government more than ever.
On Monday, Mr. Putin will oversee a major Victory Day military parade, and Western officials believe he may use the occasion to claim success in Ukraine despite major setbacks to his forces there. Some fear that Mr. Putin may also use the day to escalate the conflict.
President Biden last month nominated a veteran diplomat, Bridget A. Brink, to serve as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, a position that has been vacant for three years. For now, the American team in Kyiv will be led by the chargé d’affaires, Ms. Kvien, who has been working with her colleagues from Poland for the past several weeks.
After a visit to Ukraine last month, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the United States would begin to restore a diplomatic presence in the country. Last week, the diplomats began returning to the eastern city of Lviv for brief day trips.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Washington
The White House announced new sanctions against three Russian state television outlets as President Biden met virtually with leaders of the Group of 7 nations and President Volodymr Zelensky of Ukraine. In a statement, the Biden administration said it also will prohibit Americans from providing accounting or consulting services to anyone in Russia.
Marc Santora and
The last Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol vowed to never surrender, offering a defiant image to the world in a virtual news conference on Sunday from a bunker beneath the twisted remains of what was once one of Europe’s largest steel factories.
“Being captured means being dead,” Lieutenant Illya Samoilenko, an officer in the Azov regiment, said via Zoom, in an apparent reference to reports of killings by Russian forces in areas they seized. Occasionally, he turned off his sound to take urgent updates on the fighting. “We here are basically dead men. Most of us know this. This is why we fight.” The last evacuation of civilians, many of whom had been trapped for weeks beneath the sprawling complex, was completed on Saturday. Scores of the soldiers who remain are injured.
“We don’t have much time, we are under constant shelling,” Captain Svyatoslav Palamar, a deputy commander of the Azov regiment, told the news conference. He said attacks had continued throughout the night — from Russian tanks, artillery, airplanes, snipers and Russian forces who had breached the facility itself.
He said that while hundreds of civilians were evacuated in recent days, scores more were killed in attacks on the plant and some are likely still buried in the rubble. Thousands more have died in the city itself, with local politicians putting the death toll at over 20,000. Evacuation efforts coordinated by the United Nations and the Red Cross have not included soldiers or the wounded, and the Ukrainian fighters are desperate to tell their story and keep international attention focused on their plight.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged how difficult it is to save the soldiers. “But we do not lose hope,” he said in an overnight address. “We do not stop. Every day we are looking for a diplomatic option that can work out.”
The Ukrainian soldiers who spoke to the press on Sunday took questions for more than two hours. They declined to say how many fighters remain, what sort of weapons and supplies they have at their disposal, or to provide any other operational details.
Lt. Samoilenko, an intelligence officer who speaks fluent English, seemed intent on defining the legacy of the Azov Battalion.
“We know about our past,” he said. He acknowledged the Azov regiment’s “obscure” origins and its past association with far-right extremists — something he said the group had shed when it became part of the national military.
Independent military analysts and experts who study the far right support that assertion, saying that Azov’s incorporation into the regular combat forces of the Ukrainian military led to a purging of extremist elements.
Lt. Samoilenko said lingering public misperceptions about the battalion could explain why the group did not get as much support as it might have in the run up to the war.
The Kremlin continues to point to the Azov as justification for a military campaign that it claims, against all evidence, is aimed at ridding the country of Nazis.
At times, Lt. Samoilenko sounded bitter and angry toward his own government, saying “we received no support.”
“Politicians have their ratings, have their careers, have their national security concerns but we also have the truth, the truth is that we are unique because no one expected we would last so long and we are holding,” he said. “We could easily have withdrawn from Mariupol many months ago when the situation was critical and we decided to stay.”
Still, he said, they had no choice but to fight on.
“We are a symbol of the resistance,” he explained. “Surrender is not an option because Russia is not interested in our lives.”
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
“Canada will always stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter during a trip to Irpin, a devastated suburb of Kyiv. Thanking him for his visit, Mayor Oleksandr Markushyn said Trudeau "came to Irpin to see with his own eyes all the horror that Russian occupants did to our city."
Reporting from London
Britain will offer an extra 1.3 billion pounds (about $1.6 billion) in military support and aid to Ukraine, the treasury said in a statement ahead of a virtual meeting between the leaders of the Group of 7 countries and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. The new funding almost doubles the existing 1.5 billion pounds (more than $1.8 billion) of support to Ukraine, the statement said.
Reporting from Washington
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, defended American intelligence sharing that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill Russian generals and sink the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, while insisting that American officials did not direct Ukraine to carry out those attacks. “They make the decisions on what they will target and how they will target,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Ukrainian officials said that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has made an unannounced visit to Ukraine. Local officials posted photos of the premier touring devastation in the town of Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv. There was no immediate comment from Canada’s government.
A U.N. official condemned the Russian airstrike on a school in Bilohorivka, in eastern Ukraine, calling it “tragic & unacceptable.” Saviano Abreu, spokesperson for the U.N. humanitarian agency, tweeted: “Targeting civilians & civilian infrastructure, including schools, is a violation of international humanitarian law.”
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
All the power was cut to the Ukrainian controlled part of the Luhansk province in eastern Ukraine on Sunday after a Russian airstrike damaged a key part of the electrical grid, according to local authorities. Most civilians in the region have fled but an estimated 50,000 people are believed to still be trying to survive in towns and villages at the center of the fighting for control of the region.
Reporting from Uzhhorod, Ukraine
Jill Biden, the first lady, traveled to western Ukraine in an unannounced trip on Sunday, the latest show of support from the United States, which has significantly increased military aid for Ukraine in recent weeks.
Dr. Biden met Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, at a school in Uzhhorod, a town of 100,000 people a few miles from the border with Slovakia. The town’s population has doubled in recent weeks with the arrival of people fleeing fighting elsewhere in the country.
Ms. Zelenska, the wife of President Volodymyr Zelensky, has not been seen in public since Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24. She and Dr. Biden embraced outside the school, which has been converted to a temporary shelter for fleeing families, and Dr. Biden gave her a bouquet.
In a small room afterward, the two women briefly addressed reporters, with Ms. Zelenska thanking Dr. Biden for her “courageous” visit.
“We understand what it takes for the U.S. first lady to come here during a war, where the military actions are taking place every day, where the air sirens are happening every day, even today,” she said.
Dr. Biden made her trip on a day of public displays of support for Ukraine, and as rescuers searched for survivors from a Russian airstrike on a school in the east that officials feared had left dozens dead.
Mr. Zelensky was scheduled to meet virtually on Sunday with President Biden and the other leaders of the Group of 7, some of the world’s most powerful economies. Led by the United States, most members have increased their efforts to aid Ukraine, sending more money and military equipment.
Dr. Biden said that she wanted to make the visit on Mother’s Day. “I thought it was important to show the Ukrainian people that this war has to stop, and this war has been brutal, and that the people of the United States stand with the people of Ukraine,” she said.
The two first ladies had exchanged correspondence in recent weeks, according to U.S. officials. Dr. Biden was initially scheduled to tour a border crossing in Vysne Nemecke, Slovakia, near Ukraine’s western border, but State Department and National Security Council officials determined on Sunday that she could safely cross into the country.
The two women met privately for roughly an hour on Sunday before joining a group of children for a crafting project. In a sign of the delicate nature of the visit, a security agent passed a hand-held metal detector over a child who had entered the classroom just before the first ladies. Dr. Biden spent about two hours in Ukraine before crossing back into Slovakia.
The visit made Dr. Biden the latest high-profile person close to President Biden to travel to Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III visited Kyiv, the capital, last month, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Mr. Zelensky there last week. The details of both trips were shrouded in secrecy because of security concerns.
Mr. Biden traveled to Poland for three days at the end of March. While he visited troops near the border with Ukraine, he stopped short of entering the country because of security concerns.
Earlier on Sunday, Dr. Biden met with refugee families at an emergency aid center in Kosice, Slovakia. On Saturday, she visited the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, Romania, and met with humanitarian workers who briefed her on their efforts to assist Ukrainians.
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia used his congratulatory messages to mark the 77th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany to single out the leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics — two Russia-backed breakaway territories in Ukraine — for their role in what he described as a continued fight against Nazism.
Mr. Putin said that the forces seeking to control the two eastern regions were pursuing the same goal as their ancestors: “the liberation of their native land from Nazi filth.”
The Kremlin has maintained since it launched its invasion in February that its intention was to free Ukraine from Nazi rule. There has been no evidence of any Nazis running the country, and the war is generally seen as an attempt by Mr. Putin to grab territory and prolong his own more than 20 years in power.
An announcement on the Kremlin’s official website said that Mr. Putin had extended his congratulations to all the former states of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and Georgia, as well as to a couple of other rump states that Russia carved out of Georgia.
Despite invading Ukraine, causing the deaths of thousands of civilians and widespread destruction, Mr. Putin spoke about the need to preserve the “traditions of fraternal friendship.”
In recent years, Mr. Putin has largely used the Victory Day celebrations, one of the most important holidays in Russia, to associate his rule with the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany.
His messages came on the eve of the Victory Day parade in Moscow, an annual display on Red Square of Russia’s vast arsenal, with observers anticipating some hint from Mr. Putin this year about his view of the future course of the war.
In recent years, however, Mr. Putin has avoided linking the day to specific events, instead emphasizing traditions of patriotism and nationalism.
Another possibility is that Mr. Putin might use the occasion to formally annex Donetsk and Luhansk, even if Russia has failed in almost three months of fighting to fully control them.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
“We don’t have much time, we are under constant shelling, so we need to begin,” Captain Svyatoslav Palamar, a deputy commander of the Azov regiment defending the Mariupol steel plant, said as he opened a news conference. He said the plant was still under constant bombardment from Russian forces. While hundreds of civilians were evacuated from the plant, he said, scores have been killed and more are likely still trapped in bunkers and buried by rubble.
Russian forces’ attempts to advance in eastern Ukraine have been slow and bloody, and followed a grim pattern: weeks of bombardment, destruction of infrastructure that forces civilians to flee, and more shelling and artillery fire until there is little left for Ukrainians to defend.
That was the state of Popasna on Sunday when Ukrainian officials said Russian soldiers took control of what remained of the town.
“They are advancing from all sides, but there is no place left intact where they could establish a foothold,” the head of the Luhansk Regional Military Administration, Serhiy Haidai, said on Saturday. The next morning, Mr. Haidai said the Ukrainians had left their positions, leaving the ruins to the Russians.
For more than two months, Popasna and its surroundings have been so heavily bombarded that Mr. Haidai said last week that Russia was “removing it from the map of the Luhansk region.” A 22-minute video of drone footage released last week on Russian social media channels offered a glimpse of the destruction, with barely a building left standing.
Military analysts have described Popasna as a strategic prize because it sits on top of a hill that dominates the area — allowing Russian forces to direct artillery fire from a commanding position.
Russian forces are seeking to encircle the Ukrainians along the eastern front, with some of the fiercest fighting playing out in areas that have been on the front line of Ukraine’s eight-year-long war with Russia-backed separatists in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
But Russia’s progress in recent weeks has been slow and uneven. Ukrainian forces have often resisted until there are few civilians or pieces of intact infrastructure left to defend, and then staged tactical retreats to avoid capture.
The likely next step for the Russian forces after driving the Ukrainians out of Popasna, according to military analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research institute, would be an attempt to advance west, seeking territory deeper inside Ukraine.
But farther north, Ukrainians are on the offensive, continuing to take back territory around Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city. Russian forces destroyed several bridges while retreating from areas around Kharkiv, an indication that they would not attempt to cross the river in the other direction anytime soon, analysts said.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Krakow, Poland
The last Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol are holding a remarkable news conference from a bunker beneath the remains of the Azovstal steel plant. The fighters are the only people remaining there after an evacuation of the women, children and elderly people who were trapped with them was completed on Saturday.
Reporting from Berlin
The president of Germany’s Parliament, Bärbel Blas, arrived in Kyiv for a visit to commemorate the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945. It is the first official visit since a diplomatic spat erupted between Berlin and Kyiv over a decision by Ukrainian officials last month to uninvite the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, over his past connections to Russian officials. The dispute has since eased. Ms. Blas met Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal of Ukraine.
Dozens of people are feared dead after a Russian airstrike leveled a school in eastern Ukraine on Saturday, local officials said, as Russian forces kept up their unrelenting bombardment of towns and cities across the region.
The Ukrainian government said the basement of the school in the village of Bilohorivka, in the Luhansk region, was sheltering civilians, a claim that could not be independently verified. The village is only a few miles from the front line and has come under repeated assault.
After a social club was recently destroyed in shelling, the school became the last refuge for civilians, according to local officials, who said there were about 90 people in the building on Saturday when it exploded into flames.
Initial reports suggested that some 30 people made it to safety or were not caught up in the explosion, but that as many as 60 could be trapped. If the death toll is as high as local officials fear, it could be one of the deadliest single attacks since Russia renewed its offensive in eastern Ukraine less than a month ago.
Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk Regional Military Administration, said on Sunday morning that hope of finding survivors was fading.
“The chances of people still being alive are small,” he said in a statement, adding that rescue efforts continued.
“When the debris is cleared, I will report on the situation,” he wrote. “Maybe, someone will actually stay alive.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated on Friday that more than 3,300 civilians have been killed in the war, a number that independent observers say is likely a vast underestimate. Hundreds of schools and hospitals across the country have been destroyed since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.
In eastern Ukraine, where the fighting is now the most intense, many residents have fled the relentless bombardments. Officials estimate there are now only 50,000 people left in the Ukrainian-held part of Luhansk, where this school was located.
Reporting from Berlin
Ceremonies are being held at Soviet memorial sites across Berlin on Sunday and Monday to mark Germany’s surrender in World War II. With tensions high, German officials will not participate this year. Berlin police have banned the use of any Ukrainian, Russian or Soviet flags or symbols at the sites in an attempt to prevent any protests or clashes.
Reporting from Bucharest, Romania
Jill Biden spent the morning meeting with Ukrainian refugees in Slovakia. One woman at a makeshift crisis center told the first lady that she is at a loss for words trying to explain the war to her daughter, who she was clutching. The woman said her husband remained in Ukraine.
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
Russia said it had used missiles to destroy a Ukrainian Navy corvette near Odesa. In a statement, the country’s defense ministry said its forces had destroyed four Ukrainian warplanes, four helicopters, and three Bayraktar TB2 drones in the area over the past 24 hours.
President Volodymyr Zelensky is scheduled to meet virtually with the leaders of the world’s biggest economies on Sunday, following weeks in which the United States and its allies have promised billions of dollars in military aid to tip the war against Russia in Ukraine’s favor.
The meeting of the Group of 7 nations comes as Russia prepares for its annual May 9 celebration to honor the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Mr. Zelensky has warned that Russian forces will likely intensify their attacks this weekend and leading into Monday.
Mr. Zelensky has often used these virtual forums to plead Ukraine’s case with lawmakers and world leaders, asking for financial and military support and for Mr. Putin and his allies to be punished, usually in the form of sanctions.
Nations have responded with money, military equipment and training. President Biden has requested more than $60 billion in aid for Ukraine this year, more than the average amount the United States spent annually during its war in Afghanistan. And Britain, which announced more aid last week, and other NATO nations have sent equipment and provided Ukraine with financing.
In recent weeks, allies of Ukraine have argued that they will keep arming it until it wins and that they do not want to see Russia capable of rebuilding its military, which has suffered significant casualties and loss of equipment since the invasion. But they have stopped short of providing some weapons requested by Mr. Zelensky, like certain fighter jets.
The meeting with G7 leaders will come on the day before Russia’s Victory Day, when Mr. Putin likely hopes to display the spoils of his war. But the apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, is the latest development to contradict the Russian narrative of victory, while illustrating the complicated picture along the 300-mile front in eastern Ukraine.
The Russians have been trying to advance in the east for the past few weeks, pushing especially hard as Victory Day has approached. But Ukrainian forces — armed with new weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations — have mounted a counteroffensive.
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Continue reading the main storyPresident Volodymyr Zelensky lamented the loss of cultural treasures in his nightly address. After more than two months of war, he said, “nearly 200 cultural heritage sites already” had been destroyed or damaged.
SLOVIANSK, Ukraine — Russia’s push to give its president a showcase victory in Ukraine appeared to face a new setback on Saturday, as Ukrainian defenders pushed the invaders back toward the northeast border and away from the city of Kharkiv, with the Russians blowing up bridges behind them.
With less than 48 hours before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia aimed to lead his country in Victory Day celebrations commemorating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, the apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, contradicted the Russian narrative and illustrated the complicated picture along the 300-mile front in eastern Ukraine.
The Russians have been trying to advance in eastern Ukraine for the past few weeks and have been pushing especially hard as Victory Day approaches, but Ukrainian forces — armed with new weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations — have been pushing back in a counteroffensive.
The destruction of three bridges by Russian forces, about 12 miles northeast of Kharkiv, reported by the Ukrainian military, suggested that the Russians not only were trying to prevent the Ukrainians from pursuing them, but had no immediate plans to return.
A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the fighting, said Russian forces were destroying bridges not to retreat but because “we are pushing them out.”
He said the fight for Kharkiv was not over, and that although “at the moment we are dominating,” Russian forces were trying to regroup and go on the offensive.
Some military analysts said the Russian actions were similar to what Russia’s military had done last month in a retreat from the city of Chernihiv north of Kyiv.
Frederick W. Kagan, a military historian and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based public policy research group, said Russia’s strategy near Kharkiv could be an indicator that “the order to retreat to somewhere had been given and they were trying to set up a defensive line.”
Ukrainian forces have retaken a constellation of towns and villages in the outskirts of Kharkiv this past week, putting them in position to unseat Russian forces from the region and reclaim total control of the city “in a matter of days,” according to a recent analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group.
The setback is now forcing the Russian military to choose whether to send reinforcements intended for elsewhere in eastern Ukraine to help defend the positions on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the institute said.
The back-and-forth around Kharkiv is part of a more complex battlefield in eastern Ukraine that has left an increasing number of towns and cities trapped in a “gray zone,” stuck between Russian and Ukrainian forces, where they are subject to frequent, sometimes indiscriminate, shelling.
“The Russian occupiers continue to destroy the civilian infrastructure of the Kharkiv region,” the region’s governor, Oleh Sinegubov, said in a Telegram post on Saturday, adding that shelling and artillery attacks overnight had targeted several districts, destroying a national museum in the village of Skovorodynivka.
For Russia, perhaps the best example of anything resembling a victory was the long-besieged southeastern port city of Mariupol. Although much of the city has been destroyed by Russian bombardments, there were growing indications on Saturday that Russia’s control of the city was nearly complete.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s intelligence directorate said in a Saturday statement that Russian officers were being moved from combat positions and sent to protect a Russian military parade being planned in Mariupol.
Petro Andrushchenko, an adviser to the city council, posted a series of photos to Telegram on Friday that appeared to show how Russian forces were restoring “monuments of the Soviet period” across the city.
One image appeared to show a Russian flag flying above an intensive care hospital. Another image, posted on Thursday, showed municipal workers replacing Ukrainian road signs with signs in Russian script. The images could not be verified.
On Friday, 50 people were evacuated from the city’s Azovstal steel plant, the final holdout of Ukrainian forces and a group of civilians in the city. Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed on Friday during an attempt to evacuate civilians from the plant, said Mikhailo Vershinin, the chief of the city’s patrol police.
Mr. Vershinin, who was at the plant, said via a messaging app on Saturday that a rocket and a grenade were to blame. “Six were wounded, some seriously,” he said, and in the factory’s makeshift hospital, “there is no medicine, no anesthesia, no antibiotics and they may die.”
Both Ukrainian and Russian officials said Saturday that all civilian evacuations from the Mariupol factory had been completed.
There was no immediate confirmation from the Red Cross or United Nations, which have been helping to coordinate recent evacuations from the factory. A spokeswoman for the Red Cross said earlier on Saturday that efforts to evacuate the remaining civilians were “ongoing.”
Elsewhere, Russia launched six missile strikes on Saturday aimed at Odesa, Ukraine’s Black Sea port, according to the city council. Four hit a furniture company and destroyed two high-rise buildings in the blast, and two missiles were fired on the city’s airport, which already had been rendered inoperable by a Russian missile that knocked out its runway last week.
The goal of Russian forces — for now at least — appears to be seizing as much of the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas as possible, by expelling Ukrainian forces that have been fighting Russian-backed separatists for years in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Since Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24, about 80 percent of those two provinces have fallen under the Kremlin’s control.
The regional governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Haidai, said on Facebook on Saturday that a Russian bomb hit a school in the village of Bilogorivka where about 90 people had taken shelter. About 30 people have been rescued so far, he said. The bodies of at least two people were recovered from the rubble, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. Rescue operations were suspended on Saturday night and were to resume on Sunday, officials said.
Russian forces are trying to break through Ukrainian lines and encircle troops defending the area around the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk but are for now being held in check, Mr. Haidai said on Saturday.
“It is a war, so anything can happen, but for now the situation is difficult but under control,” Mr. Haidai said in a telephone interview. “They have broken through in some places and these areas are being reinforced.”
The Russians seemed “unlikely to successfully surround the town,” according to the latest update from the Institute for the Study of War.
The apparent aim of Russia’s military is to seize Sievierodonetsk or cut it off from the bulk of Ukrainian forces fighting in the east, and continue a push south to the major industrial city of Kramatorsk.
Mr. Haidai said Russia’s military had deployed units with better training and more combat experience than the Russian soldiers who were initially thrown into the invasion.
“In the beginning, they sent in newly mobilized soldiers from occupied territory,” he said. “But they can’t fight. They aren’t dressed in flack jackets. And so they just died by the dozen or the hundred. But they’re running out of these.”
Mr. Haidai said he had urged anyone who could to evacuate, but that about 15,000 people remained in Sievierodonetsk. Some, he said, are older and “want to die in the place where they were born.”
By contrast in the capital, Kyiv, and much of the country’s west, the atmosphere seemed worlds away from the constant bombardment of the war — despite the occasional and unpredictable Russian missile strikes. Cars have returned to Kyiv’s streets and people living there have resumed some semblance of their normal routines.
In an apparent concern over complacency, President Volodymyr Zelensky reminded residents to heed local curfews and take air raid sirens seriously.
“Please, this is your life, the life of your children,” he implored Ukrainians in an overnight address.
Residents of towns and villages in the country’s east have often been shaken awake with bomb attacks, typically between 4 and 5 a.m.
On Saturday morning, the small village of Malotaranivka became a target. A bomb struck at about 4:15 a.m., blasting apart homes and a small bakery, leaving a crater at least 15 feet deep and a wide radius of destruction. While no one was killed, residents expressed fury at the Russians.
“What kind of military target is this?” said Tatyana Ostakhova, 38, speaking through the gaping hole in her goddaughter’s apartment where she was helping to clean up. “A store that bakes bread so people don’t die of hunger?”
Such strikes have occurred with more frequency in the prelude to Victory Day in Russia, which Mr. Putin was expected to use as a platform for some kind of announcement about what he has called the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
“It’s like we’re in a dream,” said Svetlana Golochenko, 43, who was cleaning up the remnants of her son’s house. “It’s hard to imagine that this is happening to us.”
Malotaranivka is a small village of single-family homes and wood-framed apartment buildings about eight miles from Kramatorsk. Residents said that aside from a few checkpoints there was no military presence in the area, making the bombings by Russians even more incomprehensible.
“Who knows what they have in their empty heads,” said Artur Serdyuk, 38, who was covered in dust and smoking a cigarette after spending the morning cleaning up what was left of his home.
Mr. Serdyuk said he had just returned to bed after going out for a middle-of-the-night cigarette when the explosion hit. The blast blew the roof off his home and incinerated his outhouse, leaving nothing but a roll of toilet paper sitting in a pile of dust near the hole for the latrine.
His neighbor’s home was opened like a dollhouse, allowing a reporter to peer into the remains of the kitchen decorated with wallpaper featuring green peacocks.
Michael Schwirtz reported from Sloviansk, and Cora Engelbrecht and Megan Specia reported from London. Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia.
In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that with civilians evacuated from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukrainian officials were preparing a “second stage” to evacuate the wounded and medics. He said officials were also trying to evacuate the military forces holed up at the plant, but “this is extremely difficult.” A Mariupol police official said Saturday that there was no anesthesia, antibiotics or other medicine to treat them.
The regional governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Haidai, said on Facebook that a Russian bomb hit a school in the village of Bilogorivka where about 90 people had taken shelter. About 30 people have been rescued so far, he said. The bodies of at least two people were recovered from the rubble, according to Ukraine's State Emergency Service. Rescue operations were suspended on Saturday night and were to resume on Sunday, officials said.
Cora Engelbrecht and
All the women, children and elderly people who were trapped for weeks in the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol have been evacuated, Russian and Ukrainian officials said on Saturday, after days of start-and-stop efforts to get the last civilians out.
“This part of the Mariupol humanitarian mission has been completed,” Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said on Telegram. Her statement did not provide further details.
Hours later, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that “a humanitarian operation to evacuate civilians” from the complex was completed on Saturday, with help from representatives of the United Nations and the Red Cross.
The office of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine thanked the two international groups for helping with the “first phase” of evacuations. The office said on Telegram that the civilians who had been in the plant were rescued, more than 300 in all. The next goal would be to evacuate the wounded and medics, the office said.
There were no immediate details from Mariupol city officials, the Red Cross or the United Nations, which have been helping to coordinate recent evacuations from the steel factory, the last holdout of Ukrainian fighters in the ruined southern city. A spokeswoman for the Red Cross earlier on Saturday had said efforts to evacuate the remaining civilians were “ongoing.”
About 50 civilians were evacuated in a humanitarian convoy on Friday, and officials said at the time that about 200 were still believed to be holed up with the last Ukrainian fighters in the devastated complex.
Despite the mediation of international groups, there was still bloodshed, a Ukrainian official said. Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed during an evacuation attempt from Azovstal, according to Mikhailo Vershinin, the chief of the city’s patrol police. He said six other soldiers were wounded, some seriously.
“In the hospital there is no medicine, no anesthesia, no antibiotics and they may die,” he said in a voice message.
Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s City Council, said on Telegram that it was incomprehensible for soldiers to be killed “in the middle of an evacuation.”
“Politicians and world leaders are thanking each other for the successful evacuation of civilians,” he said on Telegram, adding that the Ukrainian soldiers “gave their lives for others to enjoy the fresh air.”
Evacuation efforts so far have not taken out Ukrainian fighters, many of whom are believed to be wounded. The Azovstal steel plant is the last bastion of resistance in Mariupol and has come under heavy bombardment from Russian forces.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s military said Russian forces were continuing to conduct “assault operations” in the area of the Azovstal plant, backed by artillery and tank fire.
Russian officials had declared a three-day cease-fire, starting on Thursday, to allow more civilians to exit the complex, though Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of attacks despite that announcement.
The United Nations and Red Cross teams have managed to extricate some 500 civilians in recent days from Mariupol, according to António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general.
Those who have made it out have shared harrowing accounts of the weekslong siege they had endured, describing how they had sheltered in the near-darkness of underground bunkers, with little food or water, as explosives of all shapes and sizes rained down day and night, slowly chipping away the steel and concrete overhead that was their only protection.
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
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The current phase of the war in Ukraine, as Russia focuses on trying to capture the country’s east and south, could prove at least as dangerous as Moscow’s first failed attempt to quickly seize major northern cities and topple the government, the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, said on Saturday.
The stakes are just as high in this phase, in large measure because President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is “in a frame of mind that he thinks he cannot afford to lose,” Mr. Burns said.
Mr. Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, has studied Mr. Putin for decades and in recent appearances has spoken about the risks the Russian president is willing to take to exert control over Ukraine.
“He’s convinced right now that doubling down still will enable him to make progress,” Mr. Burns said, speaking at an event in Washington sponsored by The Financial Times.
Mr. Burns repeatedly praised Ukraine’s fierce resistance to the Russian invasion, arguing that Mr. Putin’s biggest mistake so far in the war was to underestimate the Ukrainians’ will to fight and their ability to defend themselves.
Mr. Burns did not discuss in detail the American intelligence provided to the Ukrainians. Senior U.S. officials have said U.S. intelligence had helped Ukrainian forces target high-ranking enemy officers and sink Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.
But Mr. Burns said Ukrainians have supplemented the information they have received from American intelligence with their own knowledge and insights.
“It’s a big mistake to underestimate the significant intelligence capabilities that the Ukrainians themselves have,” Mr. Burns said. “This is their country. They have a lot more information than we do.”
Mr. Burns said China was closely monitoring the events in Ukraine, both the country’s strong resistance and the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the international community.
The Russian invasion has not eroded the ambitions of President Xi Jinping of China to take control of Taiwan, he said. But Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders, he added, are trying to look carefully at what lessons to “draw from Ukraine about their own ambitions and Taiwan.”
Mr. Burns said the C.I.A. spends a lot of time focusing on China’s reaction to the war in Ukraine and Beijing’s relationship with Moscow. He suggested driving a wedge between the two countries would not be easy.
“I would not underestimate Xi Jinping’s commitment to his partnership with Putin’s Russia,” Mr. Burns said.
Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said that all women, children and elderly people had been evacuated from Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant. Her statement, posted on Telegram, did not provide further details. There was no immediate confirmation from the Red Cross, which earlier Saturday said efforts to evacuate the remaining civilians were “ongoing.”
Reporting from Washington
C.I.A. Director William J. Burns said that the new phase of the Ukraine war, with Russia’s offensive in the country’s east, is at least as dangerous as the first parts of the invasion. Speaking at an event in Washington sponsored by the Financial Times, Burns said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is “in a frame of mind that he thinks he cannot afford to lose,” and so the stakes are high.
Efforts to retrieve the remaining civilians from the Azovstal plant in the southern city of Mariupol were “ongoing” on Saturday, according to a spokeswoman for the Red Cross, which worked with the U.N. to coordinate the first large evacuation from the steel complex this week. The spokeswoman would not share further details “until the situation allows, as it could seriously jeopardize the operation,” she said in a statement. About 50 civilians were evacuated in a humanitarian convoy on Friday, while about 200 were holed up in the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the city.
Reporting from Ukraine
Three Ukrainian soldiers were killed on Friday during an attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol’s Azovstal steel factory, said Mikhailo Vershinin, the chief of the city’s patrol police. Vershinin, who is at the factory, said a rocket and a grenade were to blame. “Six were wounded, some seriously,” he added in a voice message on Saturday. “In the hospital there is no medicine, no anesthesia, no antibiotics and they may die.”
Reporting from Irpin, Ukraine
Workers operate an iron ore mine belonging to the Metinvest Group in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. The company also owns the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where beleaguered Ukrainian soldiers have been trapped by Russian troops along with many civilians. The iron and coal industries have shaped the history of southeastern Ukraine, which has become the war's main arena.
Russia launched six missiles at Odesa, the city council said in a statement. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Four missiles targeted a furniture company and damaged two nearby high-rise buildings, the council said, adding that the other two missiles hit the city’s airport, which had already been demolished in a separate strike.
Reporting from Paris
In his inauguration speech, President Emmanuel Macron of France vowed to “act first to avoid any escalation following the Russian aggression in Ukraine.” Macron made clear that he would fight so that “democracy and courage prevail” in the struggle for “a new European peace and a new autonomy on our continent.”
Reporting from Bucharest, Romania
Jill Biden, the first lady, met with Ukrainian refugees in Romania on Saturday, listening to harrowing stories from women who fled Russian bombs and visiting with children as young as 5 years old who told her that their only wish was to return home.
Dr. Biden visited the Scoala Gimnaziala Uruguay school, a public school in the country’s capital that has taken in Ukrainian students. She and Carmen Iohannis — the Romanian first lady and a fellow teacher — spoke to children who were practicing lesson plans in English, including a student who picked up the language on YouTube. They also heard from educators, some of them refugees themselves, who spoke emphatically of the journey they had taken.
“I crossed the border with my 3-year-old son and everything I was thinking about was how to save my child from a city that was bombed,” Anastasia Konovalova, a Ukrainian refugee teaching at the school, told the first lady. “Thank God the Romanian people were here. I think even the Romanians didn’t expect that they could be so wonderful, because you don’t expect that from people.”
The first lady looked touched.
“We stand with you,” Dr. Biden said. “I hope you know that.”
In another classroom, Dr. Biden guided a 7-year-old girl named Mila over to a group of American journalists who had traveled to the country with the first lady and asked if they wanted to hear her message. The girl, who school officials said was from Kyiv, held up a paper cutout of a hand that was colored blue and yellow — like her country’s flag.
“I want to return to my father,” she said through a translator.
The Ukrainian students are among the more than 2.5 million children who have been displaced since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February, according to figures shared by the United Nations. Roughly 30,000 child refugees from Ukraine are in Romania now.
Romania has taken in some 850,000 of the more than five million Ukrainian refugees who have left the country since Russia’s invasion. Dr. Biden was there as part of a four-day tour of Eastern Europe meant to show the Biden administration’s increasing support for Ukraine and to highlight work by the United States and other organizations to help refugees in Europe.
The first lady plans to travel Sunday to a border crossing in Vysne Nemecke, Slovakia, near Ukraine’s western border.
The Biden administration is under pressure to accept more Ukrainians within America’s borders. In April, President Biden said that the United States would accept up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine. The United States is not considering airlifting Ukrainians into the country, as it did during the military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The first lady visited the U.S. embassy in Bucharest earlier Saturday, meeting with humanitarians who briefed her on their efforts to assist Ukrainians. Pablo Zapata, a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told her that 7,000 Ukrainians arrive in Romania each day.
In the meeting, Dr. Biden, a college English professor, focused on mental health resources for children and training for teachers. Officials told her that they were searching for ways to better equip educators to support children who had been traumatized.
“We do not believe that clustering or segregating them or offering only online Ukrainian education will be enough,” Madalina Turza, an adviser with the Romanian prime minister’s office, told her. “We are doing our best with our other partners.”
Amid fears that Russian forces will escalate their assault on Ukraine ahead of Victory Day, an annual holiday marking the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany, Dr. Biden said that she worried that the refugee crisis was nowhere near its end.
“It’s amazing. It’s solidarity here in Romania that you’re all working together,” Dr. Biden told the group at one point. “I think this is really, unfortunately, just the beginning. Just the beginning.”
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PARIS — In the past, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has used the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over the Nazis in 1945 to cement his steady militarization of Russian society, extol the values of heroic patriotism, and contrast Russia’s warrior spirit with what he sees as the moral decadence of the West.
This year, he will no doubt try to conjure “victory” from the indiscriminate destruction he has wrought in Ukraine. He will find some justification for a war that has gone far less well than expected against a Western-backed “Nazi” threat in Kyiv that he has invented.
As he does so, May 9 will be marked otherwise in Western Europe. President Emmanuel Macron will salute Europe Day in Berlin and Strasbourg, seat of the European Parliament, laying out his ambitious vision of a 27-nation European Union now compelled to move beyond mere economic heft toward becoming a more federal, and more forceful, world power.
“It will be a split-screen effect,” said Nicole Bacharan, a French foreign policy analyst. “On one screen, a magnificent Moscow military parade, on the other something more cumbersome and slow, but perhaps we in the European Union should celebrate not having a dictator laying down the law.”
Two Europes now face each other on a Continent where, for Mr. Putin’s Russia, the defeat of Nazi Germany in the “Great Patriotic War” enshrines the sacredness and glory of war, whereas in Paris and Berlin it symbolizes the imperative of peace.
The confrontation is between 19th- and 21st-century worldviews, with potential consequences that the 20th century illustrated at Verdun, Hiroshima and elsewhere. Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine has demonstrated that the risk of great conflagrations has not been consigned to the past.
From flattened Aleppo in Syria to besieged Azovstal, the steel mill that is the last outpost of resistance in the ruins of the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, his message has been consistent: Military force is effective in changing geostrategic reality in Russia’s favor.
Citing a Russian proverb, he said in 2014 that “for the community, even death is beautiful,” a trait that explained the nation’s “mass heroism in military conflicts.” He contrasted “the superior moral truths” pursued by the Russian people with the belief in the West that all that counts is economic success.
That, of course, is to misread Europe’s reasoning and long commitment to integration, undertaken not merely for the pursuit of prosperity, but to secure peace by doing so.
On May 9, 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, proposed fusing French and German steel production so that “any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.” So was the seed of a borderless Europe with a single currency planted and the Continent’s repetitive suicides ended.
It is this anniversary that Mr. Macron will recognize on Monday, in a Europe where hymns to bloodshed are shunned.
But Mr. Putin, after 22 years in power that have led him to a smoldering resentment of the West, is convinced that the French president, and all of Europe, should be recognizing something else: the immense Soviet sacrifice, involving the death of 27 million of its citizens, that saved Europe from Nazism.
“Our people were alone, alone on the difficult, heroic and sacrificial road to victory” over fascism, he said last year.
“He believes that Europe is ungrateful and that if the European Union was built, it was only through Russian sacrifice,” Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of “Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin,” said. “And he is utterly contemptuous of the idea that commerce can bring peace to nations.”
That, of course, is precisely what a European Union of 450 million citizens, with its economy of more than $17 trillion, is all about. As an alternative, Mr. Putin has offered his Eurasian Union to the likes of Ukraine, but Belarus as model is a hard sell if Berlin and Barcelona are on the table.
The magnetism of European democratic success, whatever its flaws, appears more life-threatening to Mr. Putin than NATO because it challenges the autocratic kleptocracy he has built around a web of oligarchs beholden to him.
Hence his violent reaction to Ukraine’s association with the European Union, and his horror at the E.U. flag draped down the facade of the Ukrainian foreign ministry in 2014, after the country drove out Mr. Putin’s corrupt toady president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.
From the start of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, it has been clear that Mr. Putin is not merely at war to restore Moscow’s empire by subjugating, or dismembering, Ukraine. He is also at war against the United States and its European allies that he has come to regard as godless agents whose humiliation of Russia at the Soviet Union’s breakup in 1991 can never be forgiven.
This wider war promises to be a long one, obliging Europe to restore at least some of the military focus it has largely shunned in the more than three decades since the end of the Cold War.
“The whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same ‘empire of lies,’” Mr. Putin said in his speech announcing a war to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, a state with a Jewish leader.
At one point in his long rule, Mr. Putin was prepared to recognize Soviet military crimes. As prime minister, he visited the Katyn Forest in 2010 to commemorate the Soviet murder there of thousands of Polish officers at the start of World War II.
He denounced the “cynical lies” that had hidden the truth of the slaughter in Katyn and said “there was no justification for these crimes” of a “totalitarian regime.”
“We should meet each other halfway, realizing it is impossible to live only in the past,” Mr. Putin said.
But in Europe a dozen years later, a “halfway” compromise between Russian militarism elevated to mystical, quasi-religious intensity and Franco-German “peace through union” appears almost unthinkable.
Mr. Putin has elevated Stalin once again to heroic status. Far from admitting any of its crimes, in Katyn or elsewhere, he has reconstituted the Red Army as the connective tissue of the new expansionist Russia.
Each year on Victory Day, Russian citizens parade bearing photographs of their heroic forbears in a spectacle known as “the immortal regiment.” On occasion, Mr. Putin, whose father was badly wounded in the war, has joined them. This time, a direct connection is being established between the war against Hitler and the current war on the fictive “Nazis” of Kyiv.
Against this blaze of militarist nationalism from a nuclear power, evoking what the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska called “magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns,” what does the pallid European Union have to counter Mr. Putin? What magnetism does its May 9 hold?
War in Ukraine has galvanized Europe. It generally views with urgency bringing Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova into the European Union. Calls are multiplying for an acceleration of decision-making on foreign and defense policy. Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister, called this month for “pragmatic federalism” in defense and other areas.
Federalism, a word associated with the idea of a United States of Europe, eventually under a federal government of some kind, suggests fast-forwarding European unity in ways that have seemed unthinkable for many years.
“We must overcome this principle of unanimity, which leads to a logic of crossed vetoes, and move towards decisions taken by a qualified majority,” Mr. Draghi said, alluding to a procedure that would allow approval once a certain threshold of support is attained. He added: “Protecting Ukraine means protecting ourselves and the project of security and democracy we have built together over 70 years.”
Germany’s coalition government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz supports majority voting on security and defense policy, but France is more hesitant.
Russian aggression has shifted Poland toward support for strengthening the union. Mr. Macron’s defeat of Marine Le Pen, the nationalist friend of Mr. Putin, in the presidential election last month has isolated the illiberal Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, in his connivance with Russia. The European Union, always querulous, seems bent on transformative change.
“It’s a spectacular coincidence of dates,” Dominique Moïsi, a French political scientist, said of May 9. “What is more real? Russian might and Mariupol destroyed, or normal European life in Strasbourg? We will have to fight like hell to stop him, as if our very future is at stake.”
Mr. Macron has been the leading proponent of a sovereign Europe, independent enough to claim “strategic autonomy,” and backed by the bolstering of European military power alongside and in coordination with NATO.
It appears certain that Mr. Macron will use May 9 to elaborate on this vision and to make clear the contrast between Mr. Putin’s model of war and the European peace magnet Mr. Schuman set in motion 72 years ago.
At the same time, however, Mr. Macron believes there is no alternative to negotiation with Mr. Putin.
Three years ago, he invited Mr. Putin to the presidential summer residence at Brégancon and declared that “Russia is European, very profoundly so, and we believe in this Europe that stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”
The Ukraine war has jolted, if not undone, that idea. “Mr. Macron knows Ukraine cannot resist without the United States,” Mr. Moïsi said. “You cannot build Europe as a power without America because you lose half of Europeans if you try. The unity of the West is the key to the unity of Europe.”
Whatever Mr. Putin declares on May 9, that unity has proved effective in defending Ukraine and hurting Russia. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III wants to see Russia permanently weakened, “to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
This will not happen overnight and it carries evident risks.
In “First Person,” the autobiography he published more than 20 years ago, Mr. Putin described cornering a rat in his dilapidated St. Petersburg apartment building as a boy.
“So, he turned around and jumped on me,” Mr. Putin wrote. “It surprised me and I was very afraid. It pursued me, jumping downstairs,” before the boy who would become president managed to slam a door on the rat.
“On that stairwell I understood once and for all what it is to be cornered,” Mr. Putin wrote.
If, as it seems to be, the rat story is any indication of the convictions of the man who now controls Russia’s nuclear arsenal, then direct, even reckless, attack is Mr. Putin’s response to feeling cornered.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the location of the Katyn Forest. It is in Russia not Poland.
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