Kyiv May 3, 6:54 a.m.
Moscow May 3, 6:54 a.m.
Washington May 2, 11:54 p.m.
Live Updates: West Works to Put Ukraine Pledges Into Action
Civilians continued evacuating from Mariupol with accounts of life under siege. A senior U.S. diplomat warned that Russia appeared to be preparing to annex two regions in eastern Ukraine and possibly a third in the south.
Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Kharkiv, Ukraine Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Irpin, Ukraine David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Moshchun, Ukraine Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Kharkiv, Ukraine Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Lviv, Ukraine Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Irpin, Ukraine David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Kharkiv, Ukraine Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Michael Schwirtz and
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Ukrainian civilians evacuated from the ruined city of Mariupol carried with them fresh accounts of survival and terror on Monday as Western nations worked to turn their increasingly expansive promises of aid into action, preparing billions of dollars in military and economic assistance, an oil embargo and other once-unthinkable steps.
Despite early-morning shelling, the halting evacuation, overseen by the Red Cross and the United Nations, was seen as the best and possibly last hope for hundreds of civilians who have been trapped for weeks in bunkers beneath the wreckage of the Azovstal steel plant, and an unknown number who are scattered around the ruins of the mostly abandoned city.
Those who had been trapped in Mariupol outside the steel mill described a fragile existence, subsisting on Russian rations cooked outside on wood fires amid daily shelling that left corpses lying in debris.
Yelena Gibert, a psychologist who reached Ukrainian-held territory with her teenage son on Monday, described “hopelessness and despair” in Mariupol, and said residents were “starting to talk of suicide because they’re stuck in this situation.”
Heavy fighting in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions has yielded minimal gains for the forces of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Western officials say. But the Russians continued to fire rockets and shells at Ukrainian military positions, cities, towns and infrastructure along a 300-mile-long front, including bombarding the Azovstal plant, where the last remaining Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol are hunkered down.
On Monday, Ukraine said it had used Turkish-made drones to destroy two Russian patrol vessels off the Black Sea port of Odesa, just before Russian missiles struck the city, causing an unknown number of casualties and damage to a religious building.
The U.S. State Department said that Russia’s war aims now include annexing Donetsk and Luhansk — partially controlled before the Feb. 24 invasion by Russia-backed separatists — as soon as mid-May, and possibly the southern Kherson region as well.
“We believe that the Kremlin may try to hold sham referenda to try to add a veneer of democratic or electoral legitimacy, and this is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook,” Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told reporters at a State Department briefing in Washington.
As the war drags on and evidence of atrocities mounts, the West’s appetite has grown for retaliation that would have been rejected out of hand a few months ago. The U.S. Senate is preparing to take up President Biden’s $33 billion aid package for Ukraine, including a significant increase in heavy weaponry, and the European Union is expected this week to impose an embargo on Russian oil, a significant step for a bloc whose members have long depended on Russian energy.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, days after becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Kyiv since the war began, met in Warsaw with President Andrzej Duda of Poland on Monday, in an effort to strengthen Washington’s partnership with a key NATO ally that has absorbed millions of Ukrainian refugees and helped funnel arms to the battlefield.
Ms. Pelosi called for the “strongest possible military response, the strongest sanctions” to punish Russia for the invasion, despite Moscow’s threats of retaliation against the West. “They have already delivered on their threat that killed children and families, civilians and the rest,” she said.
More than two months into the invasion, Russia is struggling to capture and hold territory, according to a senior Pentagon official who briefed reporters on background to discuss intelligence. The official called Russia’s latest offensive in eastern Ukraine, the region known as Donbas, “very cautious, very tepid” and, in some cases, “anemic.”
“We see minimal progress at best,” the official said on Monday, citing incremental Russian advances in towns and villages. “They’ll move in, declare victory, then withdraw their troops, only to let the Ukrainians take it.”
Britain’s defense intelligence agency said that of the 120 battalion tactical groups Russia had used during the war — roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces — more than a quarter had likely been “rendered combat ineffective.”
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including its Airborne Forces, have “suffered the highest levels of attrition,” the British assessment said, adding that it would “probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.”
As the fighting raged in eastern and southern Ukraine, Moscow on Monday faced a growing diplomatic backlash after the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said that Jews were “the biggest antisemites.”
Mr. Lavrov made the remarks on Sunday to an Italian television journalist who had asked him why Russia claimed to be “denazifying” Ukraine when its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was Jewish and members of his family had been killed in the Holocaust.
Mr. Lavrov replied that he thought Hitler himself had Jewish roots, a claim dismissed by historians, and added, “For a long time now we’ve been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest antisemites are the Jews themselves.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to Israel to explain Mr. Lavrov’s remarks, while Israel’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, demanded an apology. The Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said of Mr. Lavrov’s remarks, “The goal of such lies is to accuse the Jews themselves of the most awful crimes in history, which were perpetrated against them.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader and highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the United States, called Mr. Lavrov’s comments “disgusting.”
Those who escaped Mariupol and reached the southern city of Zaporizhzhia had managed to survive in a Russian-occupied city crushed by intense shelling, where Ukrainian officials say more than 20,000 civilians have been killed. About 20 civilians who were sheltering under the Azovstal mill got out of the city on Saturday, about 100 did so on Sunday and an unknown number followed on Monday.
Every morning at about 6 a.m., Ms. Gibert said, residents outside the plant lined up for rations handed out by Russian soldiers. First, they had to listen to the Russian national anthem and then to the anthem of the separatist Ukrainian region known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, she said.
A number was scrawled on the hand of each resident there, and then they waited, sometimes all day, to receive boxes of food, Ms. Gibert said. Inside a typical ration box was macaroni, rice, oatmeal, canned meat, sweet and condensed milk, sugar, butter. It was supposed to last a month, but didn’t always — especially when shared with a teenage boy, Ms. Gibert said.
In a city where many residential buildings have been destroyed and the remainder lacked power, heat or, much of the time, running water, Ms. Gibert said she and her son were among the lucky ones.
“Our apartment is still partially intact,” she said. “On one side, we have all our windows.”
Anastasiya Dembitskaya, 35, who reached Zaporizhzhia with her two children and a dog, said a drop in fighting in Mariupol over the past few weeks had allowed spotty telephone service to return and small markets to open, selling food from Russia and Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory at stratospheric prices.
“They’ve begun to at least remove the trash, which is good,” Ms. Dembitskaya said. “The bodies and the trash and the wires that were lying everywhere.”
Ksenia Safonova, who also arrived in Zaporizhzhia, said that she and her parents had wanted to leave Mariupol weeks ago but were pinned down by rocket fire.
“When we tried to leave, intense shelling started,” she said. “Everything was exploding. Jets were flying overhead and it was too scary to leave.”
When food became scarce, she said, her family relied on rations handed out by the Russian troops. She pulled out a can of preserved meat that she said was part of a Russian humanitarian aid package. Its expiration date was Jan. 31, nearly a month before the invasion began.
Ms. Safonova and her family were finally able to leave Mariupol on April 26 in a minibus with six other people. At checkpoints on the way to Zaporizhzhia, she said, Russian soldiers insulted her and her family, warning that Ukrainian forces would not welcome them and might shell them when they arrived.
Once, she said, the soldiers tried to trick them into revealing their loyalty to Ukraine.
“At one checkpoint they yelled ‘Glory to Ukraine,’ to see whether we would yell, ‘Glory to the heroes,’ though, of course, we knew that would end badly,” she said, referring to a patriotic greeting among Ukrainians that has become widespread during the war.
“We still know truth is on our side,” she said.
Michael Schwirtz reported from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, and Michael Levenson from New York. Reporting was contributed by Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt from Washington, Myra Noveck from Jerusalem, Marc Santora from Krakow, Poland, Monika Pronczuk from Brussels and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain will give a virtual address to Ukraine’s parliament on Tuesday, Downing Street said. He is expected to call this Ukraine’s “finest hour” — a Winston Churchill reference that echoes the one made by Zelensky during his speech to British lawmakers in March.
After some civilians who evacuated Mariupol over the weekend reached Zaporizhzhia on Monday, Zelensky said in his nightly address that evacuations would continue on Tuesday “through humanitarian corridors from Berdyansk, Tokmak, Vasylivka.”
Denmark has become the latest of several countries to reopen its embassy in Kyiv. The Swedish embassy plans to return on Wednesday and the U.S. embassy hopes to return by the end of May, said Kristina Kvien, the acting U.S. ambassador.
Today, US Chargé d’Affaires Kristina Kvien returned to Ukraine for the first time since the beginning of the war. “We are thrilled to be back!” she said at a press conference in Lviv. The embassy hopes to return to Kyiv by the end of May, she added. pic.twitter.com/R6Bm1anxr6
— U.S. Embassy Kyiv (@USEmbassyKyiv) May 2, 2022
WASHINGTON — Russia appears to be preparing to annex two regions in eastern Ukraine and possibly a third in the country’s south, a senior American diplomat said on Monday, citing “highly credible” reports of Moscow’s plans.
Michael Carpenter, the American ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that the Kremlin would likely stage “sham” elections in the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in mid-May to formally seize control of both.
The ambassador would not specify the origin of these reports or how he was able to make such a prediction.
A similar referendum in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, could follow, he said. The Russian language is dominant in all three areas.
“This is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook,” Mr. Carpenter told reporters at the State Department on Monday.
He said it was not certain that Russia would ultimately move to annex any of the regions, much less be successful in doing so, but that “this is the planning that we are seeing.”
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia recognized the independence of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic a few days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in late February. Moscow-backed separatists in the regions have been fighting against Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Mr. Putin annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 just hours after 97 percent of voters in a referendum there approved seceding from Ukraine. The vote was criticized as fraudulent, and much of the world has since refused to recognize Crimea as part of the Russian Federation.
Mr. Carpenter said it was also possible that Russia’s leaders would try to take over other parts of Ukraine, by imposing “puppets and proxies” in local governments and forcing out democratically elected officials. He said that this had appeared to be Moscow’s initial aim in Kyiv — a plan that included installing a new constitution in Ukraine — but that Russian forces had been forced to drop back to the country’s east and south after they were unable to take the capital.
Now, he said, Moscow appears intent on imposing its school curriculum, currency and local leadership in areas where Russian forces are suspected of abducting political opponents, educators and journalists, and cutting off internet services to isolate residents from independent sources of information.
Mr. Carpenter acknowledged there was little that the O.S.C.E. could do to stop Russia, although he cited efforts by the West and other international allies to hammer Moscow with economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation. He said the organization was working to distribute humanitarian relief to Ukrainian people who have been wounded in the war or forced from their homes since Russia invaded, and was helping to document war crimes and other human rights abuses for future prosecutions.
“Part of what we’re trying to do is to expose Russia’s intentions,” Mr. Carpenter said, adding that “unfortunately, we have been more right than wrong in exposing what we believe may be coming next.”
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A missile strike on a residential building in Odesa killed a 15-year-old child, Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Operational Command South, told reporters on Monday. Another child was taken to the hospital for treatment. The building was near a religious institution, which also suffered damage.
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. is making a push for Russians with information to share to reach out to the spy agency on the dark web.
The C.I.A. took to YouTube and various social media platforms Monday to post instructions on how Russians could use secure virtual private networks, or VPNs, to download a secure browser to contact the agency via the anonymity of the dark web.
The instructions, written in Russian, are meant to be relatively simple to follow. Russians are told to use a VPN to contact the C.I.A. They can also download the Tor browser, which allows users to access the dark web and submit information anonymously, without either the agency knowing where it came from or Russian security services knowing someone was contacting the Americans.
“We are providing Russian-language instructions on how to safely contact C.I.A. — via our dark web site or a reputable VPN — for those who feel compelled to reach us because of the Russian government’s unjust war,” said Susan Miller, a C.I.A. spokeswoman.
While Russia is blocking Western social media, YouTube remains accessible. The agency is also using other undisclosed means to push out its instructions.
The C.I.A. first created a way to anonymously contact the agency via the dark web in 2019, when it posted a version of its website accessible with a Tor browser. But the messages posted Monday were the first time the agency has posted the instructions in Russian.
Using a Tor browser protects users’ anonymity by encrypting the traffic and bouncing it through so many way points it becomes extremely hard to trace.
An agency official said the C.I.A. wanted to provide Russians concerned about the war in Ukraine with a way to contact the agency without Moscow’s security services being able to intercept.
In the past, the agency has struggled with covert communications, with both the Iranians and Chinese penetrating one secret system set up by the agency. While it is theoretically possible for an intelligence service to track someone on the dark web, it would be immensely resource-intensive.
The C.I.A. asks Russians contacting it on the dark web to provide their name, position, the information access they have — as well as a way to follow up securely. While any Russian is welcome to contact the agency, American intelligence officers are likely mostly interested in Russian government officials with access to secret information.
Reporting from Bucha, Ukraine
A Ukrainian farmer drove his tractor through a swath of destruction in the village of Moshchun on Monday. Just a few miles northwest of Kyiv, Moshchun’s ruined homes bear witness to the fierce fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces around the country’s capital in the first phase of the war.
Vera and Nicole thought they had endured the worst of the war as Russia besieged their city, Mariupol, for weeks. The sisters helped neighbors bury neighbors, melted snow for drinking water and survived a bombardment that tore a hole in the ceiling of their home.
But by mid-March, they knew it was time to leave. They heard that the Russian invaders were sweeping the southern port city and transferring Ukrainians by bus either to Russia or to Russian-controlled territory.
The sisters took Vera’s 4-year-old son, Kirill, slipped out of Mariupol on foot and embarked on a harrowing journey. They said they crossed a heavily mined road strewn with corpses; encountered a Russian sniper near a church who waved them on; and survived an artillery barrage in a field of flowers. After two days, the trio staggered onto a highway, only to be met by a Russian soldier who directed them to a packed bus.
The bus took them to a school in the nearby town of Nikolske, which they said had been converted into a Russian-operated registration center where Ukrainians were filling out forms with their personal information.
That was their first brush with what Ukrainian and U.S. officials and human rights groups have called “filtration” centers that they say are part of a system of forced expulsions of Ukrainians to Russia.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Washington
American officials believe that Russia is seeking to annex the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine as soon as mid-May, and possibly the southern region of Kherson after that, through what Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, derided as “sham” elections. “This is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook,” Carpenter told reporters at the State Department.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
It had been a sound missing from Ukraine’s capital for months. Then, on a balmy spring afternoon, the chatter of children’s voices again filled a playground.
In a park beside the sky-blue cathedral of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, in central Kyiv, a few young children clambered over a jungle gym and rocked on a seesaw.
Mothers stood idly by, chatting. The scene captured the mood of Kyiv these days, as tension slowly seeps out of a city that for weeks had been in the grips of an almost unimaginable, electric state of alarm.
In the early days of the war, families fled. The thud of artillery echoed through the streets. Countless sandbag checkpoints went up. And looming over the city was the prospect of fighting in the streets or a drawn-out siege.
Now, a month after the Ukrainian Army defeated the Russian forces that had partly encircled Kyiv, the city is enjoying a return to something like normalcy.
For most of April, more residents returned to the capital than left, though the mayor has recommended that most families refrain from returning while threats from the ongoing war linger.
The prewar population of the metropolitan area of Kyiv was about four million; it dropped by half over a few hectic days in February. Despite some families returning, many people with children remain in western Ukraine or as refugees in Europe, facing an uncertain future.
Back in March, Honey Café, a cozy bakery and coffee shop on Yaroslaviv Val Street that for unclear reasons reopened for business quickly, seemed the only spot in town to sit down for coffee. Even so, waiters warned, “Don’t sit near the windows,” lest an explosion spray glass shards.
Today, sidewalk cafes are popping up throughout Kyiv. Some restaurants are packed again, the once usual, if unwelcome, state of affairs. At Tin Tin Food Spot, a restaurant beside the city’s bicycle racing track, a lunchtime crowd filled every seat on Sunday afternoon.
The mood of the residents is one of deep gratefulness: that the city is still standing, that life can resume. It has made for a general sense of bonhomie.
On a recent hourslong walk, meandering through the cobblestone back streets of the Golden Gate and Podil neighborhoods, passers-by smiled or nodded pleasantly.
The chestnut trees were in bloom. And from time to time, on the crests of hills, the city’s still-intact skyline of golden church cupolas and high-rise buildings came into view.
To be sure, the war is still raging in eastern Ukraine. Cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv are shelled daily. And few in Kyiv discount another attempt on the capital, should the Russian Army muster the strength. Tens of thousands of residents of Kyiv have relatives in combat in the east who are in grave danger.
The vicious street fighting and widespread human rights abuses by the Russian Army in Kyiv’s suburban towns, including Irpin and Bucha, left residents traumatized and most likely facing months or years of emotional adjustment before any sense of safety returns, officials and aid workers have said.
And countless families have been separated as they have been forced to flee their homes, either as internally displaced people or as refugees to other countries in Europe.
Russian cruise missiles, fired from hundreds of miles away, still target the capital from time to time, striking military sites and residential buildings. But they are isolated strikes, for now posing little general risk to residents.
And so, after weeks of upheaval and clenched nerves, Kyiv has become a city where, at the least, just one ordinary spring day can again be enjoyed as a small blessing.
WASHINGTON — Russia’s offensive in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine is “anemic” and “plodding,” and slowed by a risk-averse approach designed to avoid the heavy casualties that Russian troops suffered in the first phase of the war, a senior Pentagon official said on Monday.
The assessment builds on a Defense Department analysis released last week that Russia appeared to be “several days behind” schedule in its fighting goals for the Donbas because of stiff Ukrainian resistance and continuing supply line problems.
“We see minimal progress at best,” the Pentagon official said, citing incremental Russian territorial gains east of Izium and nearby hamlets. “They’ll move in, declare victory, then withdraw their troops, only to let the Ukrainians take it.”
In this latest phase of the nearly 10-week-old war, Russia is attacking the region on three fronts: from Izium in the north; from eastern Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting since 2014; and from the besieged port city of Mariupol in the south, the official said.
But Russian forces have made only uneven progress at best, and are a long way from their goal of encircling tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops in a pincer movement, according to the Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.
“It’s very cautious, very tepid,” the Pentagon official said. “In some cases, the best word to describe it is anemic.” Many Russian forces continue to be plagued by low morale and supply problems, the official added.
Ukrainian forces are putting up strong resistance elsewhere. Russia continues to bombard Kharkiv, a major city northwest of the Donbas, but in the past 48 hours, Ukrainian forces have pushed Russian troops nearly 25 miles east of the city into the northern Donbas, the Pentagon official said.
In another sign of Moscow’s sense of urgency, a majority of the dozen battalion groups that had been fighting in Mariupol have been redeployed to the larger fight unfolding to the northeast in Donbas, the Pentagon official said.
Moscow now has 93 battalion groups fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine — up from 85 more than a week ago, but still well below the 125 it used in the first phase of the war, the Pentagon official said. When at full strength, each battalion group has 700 to 1,000 troops, but many of the battalions have suffered casualties that have eroded their combat readiness, the official said.
New shipments of advanced weapons from the United States and Western allies continue to flow into the country. About 80 of the 90 howitzers committed have been transferred to the Ukrainians, as have about half of the 140,000 rounds for 155-millimeter artillery.
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Reporting from Bucha, Ukraine.
She called him Sunshine. He called her Kitty.
They met nearly 20 years ago when she was working at a hospital and he sauntered through the door, young, muscular and beautiful, to fix the roof.
Iryna Abramova said she made the first move and followed him to where he smoked cigarettes behind a wall. They started talking and fell in love, she said, “word by word.”
But a few weeks ago, the special connection she had with Oleh, the love of her life, and everything they built together ended in a single cruel gunshot. What follows is difficult for Iryna to describe, she said, because it feels so raw and real but, at the same time, it’s still almost impossible to believe.
On the morning of March 5, Iryna said, Russian soldiers attacked her house. They threw a grenade through the window, which started an enormous fire, and marched her and Oleh outside at gunpoint.
What happened next is a microcosm of events in Bucha, a town not far from Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, where the worst atrocities since Russia’s invasion began have been uncovered.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
A Russian missile attack hit targets in the city of Odesa Monday evening, including infrastructure and at least one religious building, according to local authorities. “There are dead and wounded in Odesa,” said Maksym Marchenko, the head of the regional military administration.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
A curfew in the Black Sea port city of Odesa was extended on Monday as recent events in neighboring Moldova have military authorities on heightened alert that Russia could be looking to open a new front in its war against Ukraine.
A string of explosions last week at government buildings in Transnistria, the Moscow-backed separatist region in Moldova that borders Ukraine to the southwest, has raised concerns that Russia could be preparing to deploy forces there and then move on to Odesa.
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Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the Odesa region’s military administration, said that the threat of an amphibious assault by Russia on the region has faded as Moscow has moved its warships further from the coast after the sinking of its Black Sea flagship, Moskva, but that Odesa continued to be targeted by rocket strikes.
On Sunday, an Onyx missile fired from Crimea destroyed a runway at an Odesa airport. On Monday, a Russian missile struck a bridge outside Odesa for the third time, in an apparent attempt to isolate the region, according to Mr. Bratchuk. The bridge is now destroyed.
Ukraine’s military has already bolstered its troop presence on the border with Moldova. Mr. Bratchuk said that Russia was most likely trying to force Ukraine to shift resources away from the eastern front and other areas of the south.
There are several thousand Russian and Russia-backed troops stationed in Transnistria, which reaches within 25 miles of Odesa. Local authorities there blamed Ukraine for the attacks last week, while Ukraine accused Russia of orchestrating the blasts as a pretext for further aggression.
“We have always considered Transnistria as a springboard that may pose certain risks for us — for the Odesa and Vinnytsia regions,” Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said during an appearance on Ukrainian national television last week. “That’s why everything there is thought out from the point of view of defense.”
Moldova, a former Soviet state that has only an estimated 3,250 soldiers in its army, has expressed alarm at the growing turmoil and last week put its forces on high alert. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington research institute, said that “increased Russian strikes on Odesa, along with continued dissemination of disinformation in Transnistria, may indicate that Russian forces are preparing for a drive on Odesa ostensibly from east and west.”
However, in their latest analysis, issued Sunday night, the military analysts said that Russian forces did not have “the capability to conduct such a large and complex operation at this stage of the war” and were not likely to succeed in seizing Odesa.
“Russian forces may try to do so anyway or may hope that appearing to prepare for such an operation will draw Ukrainian forces to the area around Odesa,” the analysts added.
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Reporting from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine
Ksenia Safonova arrived in Zaporizhzhia from Mariupol on Monday with stories of a Ukrainian soldier from the Azov regiment who helped her and her family escape their neighborhood in the early days of the war. He evacuated them in his private car to another part of the city, away from the shelling.
“I can’t say who he is, because he is wanted by that side, and we really hope that they don’t find him, because he’s a really good guy,” said Ms. Safonova, 24. “His regiment saved newborns and young children.”
The family relocated to a place near the Azovstal steel factory, but soon that area also came under attack. For months, Ms. Safonova said, she and her parents were pinned down by rocket fire.
“When we tried to leave, intense shelling started,” she said. “Everything was exploding. Jets were flying overhead and it was too scary to leave.”
When food became scarce, she said, her family became reliant on rations handed out by the Russian troops occupying the city. She pulled out a can of preserved meat that she said was part of a Russian humanitarian aid package. Its expiration date was Jan. 31, nearly a month before the war started.
Ms. Safonova and her family were finally able to leave Mariupol on April 26 in a minibus with six other people. At checkpoints on the way to Zaporizhzhia, she said, Russian soldiers insulted her and her family, warning that Ukrainian forces would not welcome them and might shell them when they arrived.
Once, she said, the soldiers tried to trick them into revealing their loyalty to Ukraine.
“At one checkpoint they yelled ‘Glory to Ukraine,’ to see whether we would yell, ‘Glory to the heroes,’ though, of course, we knew that would end badly,” she said, referring to a patriotic greeting among Ukrainians that has become widespread during the war.
“We still know truth is on our side,” she said.
Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine
Residents from the small town of Ruska Lozova continued to stream into Kharkiv, some 12 miles south, amid continued fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the area. Ruska Lozova, a town of 6,000, had been under Russian occupation since March, but Ukrainian troops claimed to have retaken it late last week.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
The Ukrainian authorities have identified more than 1,200 civilians killed by Russian forces around the Kyiv region, according to the deputy head of the Kyiv regional police, Maksym Ocheretianyi. Another 280 victims remain unidentified, he said. “One hundred, forty-eight people were found in mass graves,” he said during a news conference on Monday.
New York Times reporter Michael Schwirtz has covered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from its beginning. He has reported from the front on military developments, destruction inside villages and cities in the eastern part of the country and more.
To give readers a glimpse of what day-to-day life has been like for Ukrainians since the war upended their country, Michael spoke by phone from Zaporizhzhia with Claire Moses, a writer for The Times’ Morning newsletter.
“People miss their former life — the lives they’ll probably never get back, at least not in the same way,” he said.
“They’re in mobilization mode. Either they’re volunteering or fighting or taking care of their relatives. I don’t know what people are doing in moments of self-reflection. But when they’re out and about, you don’t see a lot of despair. Everyone’s so stoic, even in the midst of a bombing.”
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Continue reading the main storyMonika Pronczuk and
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine merits the strongest possible military response and the toughest sanctions, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Monday, adding that the West should not be deterred by the threat of retaliation from Moscow.
Following her visit to Kyiv over the weekend, Ms. Pelosi held talks on Monday in Poland with President Andrzej Duda, a meeting aimed at deepening Washington’s partnership with a key NATO ally as the United States significantly escalates its involvement in Ukraine’s fight against Russian forces.
Ms. Pelosi said that the “strongest possible military response, the strongest sanctions” are necessary “to make the case that this is not tolerable.”
“We shouldn’t do anything less because of a threat from Russia,” she said. “They have already delivered on their threat that killed children and families, civilians and the rest.”
Russia’s war has placed Poland in a critical position, with an increasing number of American military personnel stationed there. Poland has also become a transit point for weapons and humanitarian aid into Ukraine, and the main destination for Ukrainian refugees.
The Polish government has also been a staunch advocate for harsher sanctions against Russia, including in the energy sector. On Monday, European Union energy ministers were meeting in Brussels to discuss further steps to limit Russian energy exports, including a gradual phaseout of Russian oil.
Russia’s state energy firm, Gazprom, cut off gas shipments to Poland and Bulgaria last week, causing prices for natural gas futures in Europe to jump and underscoring how difficult it is for many European countries, including Germany, to reduce their reliance on Russia’s energy sector.
After becoming the most senior American official to visit Kyiv since the war began, Ms. Pelosi on Sunday vowed to back Ukraine “until victory is won.” She will soon return to Washington, where members of Congress from both parties have called for swift approval of President Biden’s request for more artillery, antitank weapons and other hardware for Ukraine.
The Senate this week will likely take up Mr. Biden’s request for an additional $33 billion in military aid, putting the United States on pace to spend as much on helping Ukraine as it did each year on average on the war in Afghanistan.
Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the Senate would take up the aid package “as soon as we get back to the Senate tomorrow. And I think we need to push it very, very quickly.”
Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, said on ABC’s “This Week” that “time is of the essence. The next two to three weeks are going to be very pivotal and very decisive in this war.”
Ms. Pelosi said she also discussed with the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw, Mark Brzezinski, the possible enlargement of NATO’s military presence in Poland as part of “an ongoing conversation about how we support global security.”
She reaffirmed “our nation’s pledge to continue supporting Poland’s humanitarian efforts” and hailed the country’s people for taking in more than three million refugees from Ukraine, more than any other nation, with most of them being hosted by individuals.
JERUSALEM — The Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, condemned on Monday a recent claim by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, that Jews were “the biggest antisemites.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry also summoned the Russian ambassador to Israel to explain Mr. Lavrov’s remarks, while the Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, demanded an apology.
The backlash followed an interview Mr. Lavrov gave on Sunday to an Italian television journalist who asked him why Russia claimed to be “denazifying” Ukraine when the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was Jewish. Mr. Lavrov replied that he thought Hitler himself had Jewish roots, a claim dismissed by historians, and added, “For a long time now we’ve been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest antisemites are the Jews themselves.”
Mr. Bennett said that he viewed Mr. Lavrov’s remarks with the “utmost severity,” saying that the comments were “untrue and their intentions are wrong.”
Mr. Bennett added, “The goal of such lies is to accuse the Jews themselves of the most awful crimes in history, which were perpetrated against them, and thereby absolve Israel’s enemies of responsibility.”
Separately, Mr. Lapid said that Mr. Lavrov’s comments were “both an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error.”
“Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust,” he added. “The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”
The Israeli government’s response is among the fiercest criticism it has leveled at the Russian government since the invasion of Ukraine.
Israel has been engaged in a tricky balancing act: supporting Ukraine while trying to avoid a showdown with Russia, which has a large military presence in Syria, Israel’s neighbor. Israel coordinates with Russia when striking Iranian, Syrian or Lebanese military targets on Syrian soil, and does not want to unduly rock its relationship with Moscow. Israel is also concerned about possible fallout for Russian Jews.
In general, Israeli officials are very sensitive about how the Holocaust is invoked by politicians abroad. Mr. Zelensky himself was criticized in Israel when, during a virtual address in March to the country’s Parliament, he compared the suffering of Ukrainians to that of Jews during the Holocaust.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine
Life, such as it is in Mariupol right now, revolves around a big-box supermarket called the Metro, one of the few places in the city not destroyed, said Yelena Gibert, a psychologist. She arrived in Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine, with her teenage son on Monday and offered a glimpse of what residents have endured in Mariupol over two months of Russian bombardment and occupation.
Every morning at about 6 a.m., Ms. Gibert said, residents lined up for rations handed out by Russian soldiers. First, though, they must listen to the Russian national anthem and then the anthem of the separatist Ukrainian region known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, she added.
A number is scrawled on the hand of every resident there, and then they wait, sometimes all day, to receive their box of food, Ms. Gibert said.
Inside a typical ration box is macaroni, rice, oatmeal, canned meat, sweet and condensed milk, sugar, butter. It’s supposed to last a month, but doesn’t always — especially when shared with a teenage boy, Ms. Gibert said.
Food is often prepared outdoors on a wood fire, though Ms. Gibert and her son were among the lucky ones in a city where electricity and many residential buildings have been destroyed.
“Our apartment is still partially intact,” she said. “On one side, we have all our windows.”
Most people are desperate to leave the city, Ms. Gibert said. And they can. Each day, three buses sit in the parking lot of the Metro store waiting to drive those willing to go to Russia. Many do, she said.
But for those who wish to travel to Ukrainian-held territory, such as Zaporizhzhia, there are few options other than private cars, which many do not have.
“There are so many people that want to go to Ukraine right now and they do not know how,” she said. “There are people who are ready to go by foot.”
She described a general feeling in Mariupol of “hopelessness and despair,” saying residents “are starting to talk of suicide because they’re stuck in this situation.”
Ms. Gibert had the option to go to Russia weeks ago. She was born in the northern Russian region of Murmansk, and most of her family is there.
“All of my relatives are in Russia, and of course, they want me to go there,” she said. “I love them, and I understand them, but I can’t. When you are being bombed, how can you forgive this?”
Reporting from Brussels
Speaker Nancy Pelosi thanked Poland for its generosity following her meeting with President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw. Asked about a possible enlargement of the NATO troop presence in the country, Ms. Pelosi said there was “an ongoing conversation about how we support global security.”
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Amid reports of shelling around the steel factory in Mariupol, city officials said the evacuation coordinated by the United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross would continue. “Despite all the difficulties, the evacuations of civilians from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia must take place,” the city council said in a statement.
Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine
One of the most popular gas stations in Kharkiv is under siege. Not from Russian forces, though they shell this eastern Ukrainian city daily, but from motorists trying to refuel their vehicles.
Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, especially oil depots in recent days and weeks, have crippled the fuel supply in much of the country.
“What do I do? How can I explain to people that this is not my fuel station and it’s not me who’s deciding how many liters of petroleum anyone gets?” said Maria, the manager of an Okko fuel station in the city center.
Kharkiv was once Ukraine’s second largest city at roughly 1.4 million people. And though many have fled, a large population still remains. Morning rush hour is still noticeable, traffic lights still work and street cleaners continue to carry out their duties.
Maria, who did not provide her last name because she feared for her safety, said that her station’s regular supply of fuel did not arrive two days ago. Despite the attacks, a shortage of this scale was the first since the war began in February, she said.
The company has instructed her that only civilians with prepaid gas cards can get fuel, and usually only around five liters (about a gallon). Meanwhile, the military has a separate arrangement where they can continue to get gas for their vehicles, she added.
No such fortune for the police. One officer walked in Sunday afternoon asking if he could fill up his cruiser without the prepaid gas card.
Maria responded: “Not now.”
While some gas stations have closed in the city because of fuel shortages, Maria’s station has remained open because of its extensive food and snack selection, making it a popular stop for soldiers, volunteers, medical workers and police officers who continue to stream through her doors.
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Continue reading the main storyReporting from Krakow, Poland
The Ukrainian military said that it destroyed two high-speed Russian patrol ships off the coast of Odesa, using two Turkish Bayraktar drones.
💬Головнокомандувач ЗС України генерал Валерій Залужний:
— Defence of Ukraine (@DefenceU) May 2, 2022
Сьогодні на світанку біля острова Зміїний було знищено два російські катери типу Раптор.
Працює #Байрактар.
Разом до Перемоги!🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/3wxlwjDtdx
The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.”
The assessment added to U.S. and British intelligence reports that Russian forces have suffered heavy losses in the conflict, even as Moscow presses its offensive in the east and south.
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including its Airborne Forces, “have suffered the highest levels of attrition,” the agency said, adding, “It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.”
The British military recently estimated that some 15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and likely twice as many had been wounded in the fighting.
The Russian invasion force was estimated to include around 120 battalion tactical groups, each with 700 to 1,000 soldiers. In the opening weeks of the war, Russia sought to attack from multiple directions, spreading its forces across a vast area that included Kyiv in the north, Kharkiv in the east, Mariupol in the southeast and Mykolaiv in the southwest.
But the Kremlin’s plan to seize the country quickly failed and Russia withdrew, with many remaining units going back to Belarus and Russia to recover.
As Russia launched its renewed offensive two weeks ago aimed at seizing territory in eastern Ukraine, the Pentagon estimated last week that Moscow now has 92 battalions in Ukraine, giving it a sizable advantage over Ukraine in troop numbers.
In recent days, the Ukrainian military claimed to have destroyed several Russian command centers in the east and south. In one strike in the Russian-controlled city of Izium, some 200 soldiers, including at least one general, were killed, according to the Ukrainian military. It was not possible to verify the claims.
Still, Russian forces have shown little sign of pulling back. The Ukrainian military said that Russia continued to deploy more troops to the eastern front and was looking to expand its territorial control across southern Ukraine.
Despite the heavy losses, Russian forces continued to bombard targets in the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, an area collectively known as the Donbas. Russians are also deploying more antiaircraft missile systems in the east and, in the south, trying to penetrate Ukrainian defenses in the Kherson region and pounding the area around the city Mykolaiv with artillery fire, the Ukrainian military said on Monday.
Reporting from Brussels
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is meeting in Warsaw with Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, days after her visit to Kyiv underscored the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. As the meeting began, Mr. Duda said the war was a “crucial” moment for Poland, which has taken in most of the millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine.
Reporting from Hong Kong
The U.N. refugee agency says that more than 5.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began, including more than three million who went to Poland.
Michael Schwirtz and
The first people to flee Mariupol during a brief cease-fire this weekend started arriving in the city of Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine, on Monday morning, with international observers expressing optimism that more civilians would be able to leave a steel plant in Mariupol despite Russian attacks resuming.
As of Monday morning, evacuees from the Azovstal steel plant had not yet arrived in Zaporizhzhia. But other residents of Mariupol who had taken advantage of the brief cease-fire began to trickle into the parking lot of a home-goods store that has served as a way station for refugees fleeing territory controlled by Russia.
“The day before yesterday it was relatively quiet,” said Anastasiya Dembitskaya, describing the situation in Mariupol on Sunday. She arrived in Zaporizhzhia on Monday morning with her two children and a dog.
Residents of Mariupol were invited to join a convoy on Monday that was being overseen by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Hundreds of civilians have sheltered for weeks in the Azovstal plant alongside Ukrainian fighters, who had become increasingly trapped as Russian forces expanded their control of the key port city.
About 20 women and children were able to leave on Saturday from Azovstal, followed by about 100 on Sunday. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that they were headed northwest to Zaporizhzhia.
“Today we finally managed to start the evacuation of people from Azovstal,” Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday in his nightly address. “After many weeks of negotiations, after many attempts, different meetings, people, calls, countries, proposals. Finally. There was not a single day when we did not try to find a solution that would save our people.”
Ms. Dembitskaya said that she had hoped to bring her sister and parents with her but that they had refused to leave behind their home, which was one of the few still in one piece, along with their dogs and cats. Ms. Dembitskaya, 35, described Mariupol as a largely unlivable city, desolated by more than two months of continuous shelling by Russian forces.
But with a reduction of fighting in Mariupol in the past two or three weeks, signs of life have also begun to return, she said. Though power and water remain cut off, there is now spotty telephone service, she noted, and small markets have begun to appear, selling food brought in from Russia and Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory and sold at stratospheric prices.
“They’ve begun to at least remove the trash, which is good,” Ms. Dembitskaya said. “The bodies and the trash and the wires that were lying everywhere.”
Marc Santora contributed reporting.
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