Kyiv May 6, 4:55 a.m.
Moscow May 6, 4:55 a.m.
Washington May 5, 9:55 p.m.
Live Updates: Russian Forces Battle in Ukraine’s East to Feed Putin’s Hunger for a Victory
The fighting has intensified ahead of Russia’s May 9 Victory Day holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — Fighting raged on Thursday across eastern Ukraine, from the Kharkiv area in the north where Ukrainian forces regained ground, to Mariupol in the south, where Russians breached the last Ukrainian redoubt in a steel plant, as Moscow’s forces battled to present President Vladimir V. Putin with something he can call victory.
Some of the most ferocious combat took place between those two poles, in or near the north of the Donetsk region, where the earth heaved with constant artillery bombardment. Russian forces approached from the east, north and south, vainly trying to trap and destroy Ukrainian units in and around the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, and the towns of Lyman and Barvinkove.
At a busy medical field hospital in that cauldron, where the smoke of battle dulled the spring sunlight, a Ukrainian soldier with a concussion lay curled into a fetal position, while another, his face half torn away, lay dead in a black body bag. In Kramatorsk, now largely abandoned, three Russian airstrikes gutted a large apartment complex and a store selling bras and underwear, injuring 26 people.
The Kremlin is determined to reach some kind of milestone, Western officials and analysts say, by May 9, the day Russia commemorates the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany with a military parade full of bombast and martial spirit that Mr. Putin has turned into something close to a religious holiday. After more than two months of his vaunted military’s halting performance and heavy losses in Ukraine, they say, Russia’s autocratic leader needs something to show for the war’s massive cost in lives and treasure.
But it is difficult to evaluate how the actual fighting is going. The Russian advance appears to have been sluggish, with forces taking a few villages each day in one location, while losing just as many in another. Ukrainian forces are mounting a highly mobile defense, maneuvering in small units around the larger masses of Russian forces, ensuring that lines remain fluid and unpredictable.
“The front is swinging this way and that,” said a tattooed 24-year-old army paramedic named Zhenya who was resting at the field hospital. “At first they weren’t hitting nearby here, now shells are coming in over the fence.”
In Mariupol, perhaps the city most devastated by the Russian invasion that began on Feb. 24, furious close-quarters combat shook the sprawling Azovstal steel plant, as Russian forces finally began to penetrate the complex where the last Ukrainians have held out for two months in a warren of underground bunkers. The number of Ukrainian fighters remaining is unclear, but Ukrainian officials said that even after a recent trickle of evacuations, about 200 civilians are still trapped there.
“Heavy, bloody battles are raging,” Lt. Col. Denys Prokopenko, a Ukrainian commander at Azovstal, said in a video posted Wednesday night. On Thursday, Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to the city government, said that with nonstop shelling and fighting, the plant had been “turned into hell.”
In its latest assessment, the Institute for the Study of War, a research organization in Washington, said that Moscow wanted “to claim complete control of Mariupol by May 9, with Russian propagandists recently arriving in the city to set conditions for further claims of a Russian victory.”
With Russian efforts now concentrated farther south, Ukrainian forces have been pushing the Russians back in the Kharkiv area, recapturing towns and villages, and in some cases forcing Russian units beyond artillery range of the battered city.
The Kremlin had a muted response on Thursday to The New York Times’s report that the United States had supplied intelligence to Ukrainian forces that had helped them locate and kill Russian generals. Russia was already “well aware” that NATO and its member countries were sharing intelligence with Ukraine, said Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, who added that Western aid only lengthens the war and “cannot prevent the fulfillment” of Russia’s goals.
The Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, declined to comment directly, but said the United States did not specifically provide intelligence on the locations of Russian officers, “or participate in the targeting decisions of the Ukrainian military.”
After Russia’s initial drive in the north failed to take Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, its forces withdrew and began to focus on capturing territory in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but their progress has been slow and costly.
In a striking moment of candor, Mr. Putin’s closest foreign ally, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the ruler of neighboring Belarus, called the fighting a war — a term forbidden in Russia — and acknowledged that it was not going well for Russia. “I feel like this operation has dragged on,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
In the north of Donetsk, the dead and wounded flowed into the field hospital at a regular clip as Russian artillery pounded the rolling, wooded hills where Ukrainian troops were mounting their defense.
On a visit on Thursday, ordnance whizzed, thumped and boomed in all directions. Military paramedics brought wounded soldiers to the field hospital to stabilize them before sending them by ambulance to a military hospital farther from the front.
Ukrainian military officials asked that the precise location of the field hospital, about a 25-minute drive from Kramatorsk, be withheld to prevent the Russians from targeting it. Even so, Russian artillery shells landed nearby.
The toll on Ukrainian forces could be measured by the columns of ambulances racing away from the front lines, even as trucks and armored vehicles carrying troops and equipment headed in the opposite direction.
“We’re not making any kind of prognoses,” said Valeria Skorik, a press officer for the 81st brigade, among the units fighting in the northern part of the Donetsk region. “I’ve been asked by journalists about what kind of event we might have on May 9, but I’ve just decided not to answer.”
Western officials and analysts say that Mr. Putin could be planning to make a dramatic announcement on Victory Day, when he traditionally reviews the parade from an elevated platform in Red Square and delivers a speech surrounded by aged World War II veterans. He often has other heads of government with him, too, but the war has left Russia largely isolated, and the Kremlin says no foreign leaders were invited this year.
Speculation has centered on a possible claim of victory by Mr. Putin or, more ominously, an acknowledgment that Russia is at war and the announcement of a mass mobilization with expanded conscription, a move that would be unpopular.
Ukrainian forces in and around northern Donetsk appear to be holding the line for now, offering poor prospects for a Russian achievement there, despite Russia’s incessant hammering at Ukrainian military positions and towns.
The airstrike on Kramatorsk left a large crater and generated a shock wave so powerful that it blew out the interior walls of a row of apartments about 75 feet away and ripped steel doors off hinges. Touring the damage, Pavel Kirilenko, chief of the Donetsk region’s military administration, said that remarkably, no one had been killed.
“This is yet more confirmation that everyone needs to leave the city,” Mr. Kirilenko said. “The enemy is exclusively targeting elements of civilian infrastructure in order to spread panic — and not only spread panic, but to destroy the civilian population.”
In anticipation of a potential assault, officials have urged anyone who is able to leave the city as soon as possible. Many have done so: The streets of Kramatorsk, an industrial and administrative center with a prewar population of about 150,000, are largely empty. Most businesses are shuttered. Each day, buses leave the city center, evacuating residents to points west.
But not everyone has heeded the calls to leave. Inside the destroyed apartment building on Thursday was a woman in a bathrobe, cradling a small dog. She gave only her first name, Viktoria.
The explosion, at about 4:30 a.m., blew her balcony and the entire front wall of her apartment onto her and her husband as they slept. Her husband suffered a large head wound; drops of blood stained the mattress and floor. Her 24-year-old daughter was left with a broad cluster of bloody cuts from flying glass.
She said local officials had urged her to shelter in a school, at least for the night. But she said she just wanted to seal the front of her apartment in plastic to keep out the elements, and stay there for the night.
“There is shelling everywhere,” she said. “So where are we supposed to go?”
For the last defenders of Mariupol, long cut off from outside aid with their numbers and supplies dwindling, the situation was even more dire.
Russian forces managed to find their way into the four-square-mile Azovstal complex where they have been sheltering with the help of a former worker familiar with its layout, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Mr. Gerashchenko, on social media and speaking to reporters, said that an electrician who had worked at the steel plant showed the Russians tunnels to enter the complex.
He said the Russian desire to declare victory on May 9 explained why Russian state television hosts, who are some of Mr. Putin’s leading cheerleaders — including Vladimir Solovyov, under U.S. and European sanctions for promoting Kremlin disinformation — have traveled to Mariupol.
Communications from Azovstal briefly went dark on Wednesday, but on Thursday morning, fighters in the bunkers were again sending messages via social media platforms, promising not to surrender.
“It has been three days since Russian troops broke into the territory of Azovstal,” said Capt. Svyatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov regiment at the plant. “Heavy fighting continues to take a bloody toll.”
Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña from New York, Cora Engelbrecht and Marc Santora from Krakow, Poland, and Anton Troianovski from Istanbul.
An evacuation convoy should arrive by Friday at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where about 200 civilians are still trapped in underground bunkers where Ukrainian fighters report bloody battles with Russian forces, Martin Griffiths, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, said on Thursday.
The convoy is the latest joint effort by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have managed to evacuate about 100 people from the Azovstal plant in the past few days and more than 340 people from other parts of Mariupol on Wednesday.
Mr. Griffiths, speaking at a donor conference for Ukraine in Warsaw, said that the convoy would hopefully “receive those civilians remaining in that bleak hell that they have inhabited for so many weeks and months.” The city of Mariupol has been largely destroyed by shelling that began on Feb. 24, when Russia’s invasion started, and the Azovstal complex’s underground bunkers became something of a shelter of last resort as residents’ abodes and other havens were obliterated.
Mr. Griffiths said the operations had been “a herculean effort” and dangerous, but that “it would have been worth it to save one person.”
After weeks of focused effort, Russian forces finally penetrated the Azovstal complex’s bunkers this week. A Ukrainian commander there said in a recent video that “heavy, bloody battles are raging.”
In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russian forces had not stopped shelling the Azovstal complex, and called again for civilians to be evacuated.
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In his nightly speech, President Volodymyr Zelensky promoted a new global fundraising platform created by Ukraine’s government, saying that the platform, United24, would help bring the country the billions of dollars it needs to rebuild from the destruction caused by Russia’s invasion.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany said on Thursday that the German foreign minister would visit Ukraine, a sign that weeks of diplomatic bickering between the two countries may have subsided. The announcement came after a call between Zelensky and Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, which both countries said went well. Steinmeier had been disinvited from a visit to Kyiv last month over his past support for close German ties with Russia, and the spat had become a distraction for the German government.
Es ist gut, dass unser Bundespräsident Frank-Walter Steinmeier und der ukrainische Präsident @ZelenskyyUa miteinander gesprochen und Irritationen aus dem Weg geräumt haben. Außenministerin @ABaerbock wird nun in die #Ukraine reisen - ein wichtiges Ergebnis des Gesprächs.
— Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz (@Bundeskanzler) May 5, 2022
Former President George W. Bush met virtually on Thursday with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “We will continue to stand with Ukrainians as they stand up for their freedom,” Bush said in statement on Facebook.
WASHINGTON — The United States provided intelligence that helped Ukrainian forces locate and strike the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last month, another sign that the administration is easing its self-imposed limitations on how far it will go in helping Ukraine fight Russia, U.S. officials said.
The targeting help, which contributed to the eventual sinking of the flagship, the Moskva, is part of a continuing classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine. That intelligence also includes sharing anticipated Russian troop movements, gleaned from a recent American assessment of Moscow’s battle plan for the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the officials said.
The administration has sought to keep much of the battlefield and maritime intelligence it is sharing with the Ukrainians secret out of fear it will be seen as an escalation and provoke President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a wider war. But in recent weeks, the United States has sped heavier weapons to Ukraine and requested an extraordinary $33 billion in additional military, economic and humanitarian aid from Congress, demonstrating how quickly American restraints on support for Ukraine are shifting.
Two senior American officials said that Ukraine already had obtained the Moskva’s targeting data on its own, and that the United States provided only confirmation. But other officials said the American intelligence was crucial to Ukraine’s sinking of the ship.
The U.S. intelligence help to strike the Moskva was reported earlier by NBC News.
On April 13, Ukrainian forces on the ground fired two Neptune missiles, striking the Moskva and igniting a fire that eventually led to the sinking of the warship. Attention has also focused on whether the aging ship’s radar systems were working properly. Ukrainian and U.S. officials said the Moskva was possibly distracted by Ukraine’s deploying of a Turkish-made Bayraktar drone nearby.
Immediately after the strike, Biden administration officials were scrupulously silent, declining to confirm even that the Moskva had been struck. But in recent days, American officials confirmed that targeting data from American intelligence sources was provided to Ukraine in the hours before the Neptune missiles were launched.
The officials declined to elaborate on what specific information was passed along, but one official said the information went beyond simply a report on the ship’s location in the Black Sea, 65 nautical miles south of Odessa.
The sinking of the ship was a major blow to Russia and the most significant loss for any navy in 40 years.
Russia has denied Ukrainian missiles played any role in the Moskva’s demise, claiming instead that an onboard fire caused a munitions explosion that doomed the ship. Independent Russian news outlets based outside the country have reported that about 40 men died and an additional 100 were injured when the warship was damaged and sank.
Biden administration officials have declined to publicly confirm that American intelligence provided the targeting information that allowed Ukraine to hit the Moskva.
The Pentagon press secretary, John F. Kirby, asked about a report in The Times of London that a Navy P-8 spy plane from Sigonella air base in Italy was tracking the Moskva before it was hit by Ukraine, spoke of air policing missions in the Black Sea as part of a carefully worded response: “There was no provision of targeting information by any United States Navy P-8 flying in these air policing missions,” he said.
An American official said the Ukrainians asked the Americans about a ship sailing in the Black Sea south of Odessa. The United States identified it as the Moskva, and confirmed its location. The Ukrainians then targeted the ship. The Ukrainians carried out the strike without the prior knowledge of the United States. The official said the United States provided confirmation to the Ukrainian military, but other officials said it was not certain Ukraine could have hit the ship without U.S. assistance.
American officials have acknowledged publicly that actionable intelligence was provided to the Ukrainians in the run-up to Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, and that the practice has continued in the weeks since. But these officials have shied away from confirming American involvement in Ukrainian operations that have resulted in the deaths of Russian soldiers.
The U.S. assessment of Russia’s war plan for the Donbas region allowed a senior Pentagon official to say last week that Russia appeared to be “several days behind” schedule in its offensive there because of stiff Ukrainian resistance and continuing supply line problems.
Russian forces can always deviate from their plans, but American officials said the intelligence allows Ukrainian forces to avoid attack in some locations and position themselves to strike Russians in others.
Although the administration remains wary of provoking Mr. Putin to the point that he further escalates his attacks — President Biden has said he will not send American troops to Ukraine or establish a “no-fly zone” there — current and former officials said the administration found some value in warning Russia that Ukraine had the weight of the United States and NATO behind it.
Officials said Moscow had its own calculations to weigh, including whether it could handle a bigger war, particularly one that would allow NATO to invoke its mutual defense charter or enter the war more directly.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that American intelligence about Russian movements provided to Ukraine has allowed Kyiv to target and kill a number of Russian generals. On Thursday, Mr. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, acknowledged intelligence sharing with the Ukrainians but provided few details.
But Mr. Kirby said the Ukrainians have their own sources of intelligence, which they combine with others and choose what targets to strike. “They make their own decisions,” Mr. Kirby said. “And they take their own actions.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNN, Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said the Biden administration had been loath to discuss intelligence sharing for fear of saying anything “that will escalate the conflict.”
“We are providing real-time intelligence to Ukraine to help it defend itself,” Mr. Schiff said. “I don’t think the administration wants to go into specifics about just what kind of what circumstances, but we want to make sure that Ukraine is successful.”
For decades, the Moskva, a potent embodiment of Russian naval power in the Black Sea, bristled with missiles and loomed ominously on the horizon, inspiring awe in those who saw it.
But American Navy officials who toured Russian cruisers when there was U.S.-Russian military cooperation in the late 1990s and early 2000s said the Moskva had problems. There was little visible damage control equipment aboard the warship for quickly putting out shipboard fires.
The officials said they could not see fire extinguishers or fire hoses in passageways throughout the ships. On American ships, such equipment is stored close at hand to allow the crew to rapidly extinguish fires, which is critical at sea.
Russian media reports have said a fire onboard ignited an ammunition magazine, seriously damaging the Moskva. American officials say the Neptune missiles most likely caused the fire, which the crew could not contain before the aging vessel ultimately sank while being towed to port.
“The Russian military had long debated whether to retire the Moskva,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russia studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington County, Va. “It was an aging Soviet cruiser in dire need of modernization.”
But with a shortage of cruisers and destroyers, Moscow ultimately decided to extend its service. It was the Moskva’s guns, in fact, that fired on Ukraine’s Snake Island in the first days of the war.
Reporting from Washington
Jill Biden, the first lady, is leaving late Thursday for Eastern Europe, where she will visit with Ukrainian refugees, displaced by the Russian invasion, and tour the Slovakian border with Ukraine, according to her office.
The first scheduled stop is on Friday in Romania, where she will meet with U.S. troops as part of her initiative to support military families, called Joining Forces. On Saturday, she will meet with Romania’s first lady, Carmen Iohannis, to express support for the country’s government, which has taken in some 850,000 of the more than five million Ukrainian refugees logged since the Russian invasion began in February, according to figures shared by the United Nations Refugee Agency.
The trip will be Dr. Biden’s second overseas. Last summer, she led a delegation to the opening ceremony for the Olympics in Tokyo.
But this visit has higher diplomatic and humanitarian stakes. Her planned visit on Sunday to a border crossing in Vysne Nemecke, Slovakia, near Ukraine’s western border, will make her the latest high-profile Biden administration official to come close to the conflict zone. While there, Dr. Biden will visit with aid workers and tour a nearby chapel that serves refugees and volunteers.
Dr. Biden, a college English professor, will also visit a public school on Sunday that is hosting Ukrainian students. The East Wing of the White House said that she would spend time with mothers and children as the families participate in activities to celebrate International Mother’s Day. The first couple’s daughter, Ashley Biden, will accompany Dr. Biden on the trip. Mark Gitenstein, a longtime Biden confidant who serves as U.S. ambassador to the European Union, will also join for part of the trip.
“Dr. Biden is inspired by the resilience and strength of the Ukrainian people and hopes to communicate that Americans are standing with them,” Michael LaRosa, her press secretary, wrote in an email detailing the particulars of the weekend trip. “On Mother’s Day, she will meet with Ukrainian mothers and children who have been forced to flee their home country because of Putin’s war.”
For first ladies dating back to Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting troops abroad — and showcasing soft diplomacy — has become something of an informal requirement.
As first ladies, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama all traveled solo to military bases overseas to visit troops. (“I have a feeling I’m signing checkbooks,” Barbara Bush joked to one Marine as she tired of signing autographs during a 1990 visit to a base in Saudi Arabia.)
But Dr. Biden’s trip involves more diplomatic complexities than visiting American soldiers. The war in Ukraine has triggered a vast refugee crisis and presented President Biden with urgent foreign policy issues. In the last few weeks, he has shifted from a position of not wanting to create the appearance of a direct conflict between Washington and Moscow to one of heightened rhetoric and support for Ukraine.
It has been 10 weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine. More than a month ago, Mr. Biden declared in Poland that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “cannot remain in power,” a remark that administration officials were quick to say was not intended as a call for regime change. A week ago, Mr. Biden called for $33 billion more in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III have visited Kyiv. And this weekend, the first lady will tread even closer to the Ukrainian border than the president has, to showcase the administration’s support.
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Continue reading the main storyThe Justice Department said on Thursday that Fiji, at the request of the United States, had seized a $300 million, 348-foot yacht owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Suleiman Kerimov. In a statement, the Justice Department said that Kerimov had been designated as one of a group of Russian oligarchs who “profit from the Russian government through corruption and its malign activity around the globe, including the occupation of Crimea.”
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
On a highway west of Kyiv, Ukrainian workers on Thursday were rebuilding a bridge over the Irpin River between the capital and the suburb of Stoyanka. During the early stage of the war, bridges connecting Kyiv with its suburbs were destroyed by shelling or by Ukrainian forces seeking to slow down the Russian advance.
Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus and close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia’s invasion had “dragged on” and called for an end to the “war,” using a word that the Kremlin has assiduously avoided.
Mr. Lukashenko made the remarks in an interview with The Associated Press. Over nearly 90 minutes, he continued to defend the invasion, saying the Ukrainian government was “provoking Russia” and that no one had “closer, more open or friendlier relations” with Mr. Putin than himself.
But his use of the word “war” was itself a departure from the Kremlin’s talking points — its officials use the phrase “special military operation,” and in March, Mr. Putin signed a law making it a potential crime in Russia to simply call the war a “war” on social media or in a news article or broadcast. Mr. Lukashenko also declined to repeat Mr. Putin’s assertion that the campaign was on schedule.
“I am not immersed in this problem enough to say whether it goes according to plan, like the Russians say, or like I feel it,” he told The A.P. in Minsk, the capital. “I want to stress one more time: I feel like this operation has dragged on.”
Although backed by a brutal security system at home, Mr. Lukashenko has become almost completely dependent on Russian support in recent years. After an implausible landslide victory in a contested presidential election, he called on Mr. Putin for help in suppressing protests, and Russia fortified his security forces and kept its markets open to Belarus as Western relations withered.
In the interview published Thursday, Mr. Lukashenko called Mr. Putin his “big brother.”
Before Russia’s invasion, Mr. Lukashenko allowed the Kremlin to deploy thousands of troops in Belarus, along with tanks, artillery and warplanes. When the invasion began, those forces crossed Belarus’s border toward Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
But speaking to The A.P., Mr. Lukashenko claimed he stood for peace and was working toward a diplomatic resolution of the war.
“We categorically do not accept any war. We have done and are doing everything now so that there isn’t a war. Thanks to yours truly, me that is, negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have begun,” he said. He added, however, that Russia “can’t by definition lose this war.”
LVIV, Ukraine — For years, no one paid attention to the side wall of the former St. Mary Magdalene Catholic church in Lviv. It was, after all, the location of the toilets, where stained tiles covered layers of mold-encrusted plaster and paint from a Soviet renovation in the 1960s.
But four years ago, the new management of a cultural center in what had been the church went looking in the midst of their own renovations for a rumored hidden artwork. After dismantling the restrooms and painstakingly removing layers of paint and plaster, a scarred, century-old masterpiece began to emerge — a dramatic mural by the Polish artist Jan Henryk de Rosen.
“This beautiful masterpiece was hidden for many, many decades,” said Teras Demko, co-director of the Organ Hall, which has a concert hall for organ, chamber and symphonic music along with an art gallery. “During the Soviet regime, they tried to hide all mentions of anything connected to the sacred world.”
The coronavirus pandemic limited attendance, and the Russian invasion forced the center to close briefly. Its reopening amid the arrival of tens of thousands of people fleeing the hard-hit east to this relatively safe western city is giving the rediscovered mural a whole new audience. The Organ Hall is offering free or discounted tickets to provide “a portion of normal life” in the middle of the war, Mr. Demko said.
De Rosen used pigment mixed with beeswax thinned with alcohol for his works. In this one, painted in the late 1920s or early 1930s, a stylized Jesus is baptized by Saint John while other disciples watch from shore.
A white line runs through the middle of the mural where the men’s and women’s restrooms were separated by a partition, destroying part of the work. But traces of de Rosen’s typically expressive faces, painted from real-life models, and his sinuous lines depicting the Jordan River remain, and the gold leaf surrounding the mural and decorating the vaulted ceiling still gleams.
The church was originally constructed on the site of a 17th century one, later destroyed and then renovated in the early 1920s. In the 1960s, when what is now Ukraine was part of the officially atheist Soviet Union, the church was one of thousands closed down.
De Rosen, who died in the United States in 1982, was one of the most prominent 20th century painters in the world of religious art. He was commissioned to paint murals at the papal summer residence in Italy and did dramatic frescoes with art nouveau influences that cover the interior of the Armenian cathedral in Lviv.
De Rosen, a World War I veteran who served as a translator at the Versailles peace conference, emigrated to the United States in 1939 when war broke out again.
In the United States, he taught art at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Among other works, he painted the murals in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. His ceiling mosaic in Washington’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is considered one of the largest of its kind in the world.
Mr. Demko said the cultural center has no plans to restore the mural to its original vivid colors. He said it was a reminder of Russia’s past attempts to erase Ukraine’s heritage and its current effort to do it again.
“This place doesn’t serve a sacred function, so it doesn’t need to be painted like an icon,” he said. “It should tell the story so it doesn’t happen again.”
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The Israeli government said on Thursday that President Vladimir V. Putin apologized to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel for remarks by Russia’s top diplomat that Jews were “the biggest antisemites.”
The Kremlin acknowledged that Mr. Putin discussed the Holocaust with Mr. Bennett, but did not mention an apology.
The Israeli government said that the leaders discussed the comments, by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which drew condemnation from Mr. Bennett and provoked a strong backlash among Jews in Israel and beyond.
“The prime minister accepted President Putin’s apology for Lavrov’s remarks and thanked him for clarifying his attitude towards the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust,” the statement said.
After Mr. Lavrov’s remarks, Israel’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to Israel to explain Mr. Lavrov’s remarks, and the Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, demanded an apology.
Mr. Lavrov made the remarks in an interview on Sunday with 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 later said that he viewed the remarks with the “utmost severity,” saying they were “untrue and their intentions are wrong.”
He 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 was among the fiercest criticism it has leveled at the Russian government since the invasion of Ukraine.
Both governments said on Thursday that Mr. Putin and Mr. Bennett also discussed options to evacuate people from the besieged steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine, where an unknown number of civilians and Ukrainian fighters are holding out. Mr. Putin “promised to allow the evacuation of civilians, including wounded civilians, through a U.N. and Red Cross humanitarian corridor,” the Israeli statement said.
The Russian statement said that its forces were “ready to ensure the safe exit of civilians,” but warned that the Ukrainian authorities should order “the remaining militants” at the plant to lay down their arms.
Mr. Bennett had spoken with Mr. Zelensky on Wednesday about the proposed evacuations, reflecting Israel’s attempt at a fragile balancing act between Russia and Ukraine.
Since the invasion began, Israel has tried to support Ukraine without starting a showdown with Russia, which has a large military presence in Syria, Israel’s neighbor. Israel coordinates with Russia when striking Iranian, Syrian or militia 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.
Reporting from the Donetsk region, Ukraine
One Ukrainian soldier lay curled in a fetal position with a concussion. Another named Pyotr was in a black body bag, his face half torn away. The hazy smoke of battle dulled the spring sunlight.
The soldiers had been taken to a field hospital near the Ukrainian front line, where the ground heaved under the pressure of incoming shells as a battle for the eastern Donbas region raged on Thursday.
All along a sprawling eastern front, Russian forces were fighting ferociously in an effort to turn the course of the war and present President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with something he can claim as a success after months of setbacks.
Battles were taking place from near the field hospital in the northern Donetsk region to the devastated southern port of Mariupol, where Russian troops breached the perimeter of the Azovstal steel factory on Thursday and sought to destroy the last remaining Ukrainian forces holding out there.
The deadline for a Russian victory, it seems, is May 9, when Russia commemorates the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany with Victory Day celebrations, including a military parade in Moscow, full of bombast and marshal spirit, for a holiday that Mr. Putin has turned into something close to a nationalist holiday.
It is not yet clear what Mr. Putin plans to tell the Russian people from the dais in Red Square, where he usually delivers a Victory Day speech surrounded by aging veterans of World War II.
But Western officials and analysts predict that, after more than two months of halting performance by the Russian military, the country’s autocratic leader wants to point to something to justify the war’s cost in lives and treasure.
But with Victory Day celebrations just four days away, it was still difficult on Thursday to evaluate how the actual fighting was going.
The Russian advance had been sluggish, with forces taking a few villages each day, then losing ground again. Ukrainian forces were mounting a highly mobile defense, maneuvering in small units around the larger masses of Russian troops, ensuring that lines remain fluid and unpredictable.
“The front is swinging this way and that,” said a tattooed, 24-year-old army medic named Zhenya, who was taking a rest at the field hospital. “At first they weren’t hitting nearby here, now shells are coming in over the fence.”
The dead and wounded flowed into the triage point at a regular clip as Russian artillery pounded the rolling, wooded hills where Ukrainian troops were mounting their defense. It lies in a wooded area about a 25-minute drive from the city of Kramatorsk. Military officials asked that its precise location be withheld to prevent it from being targeted.
Already, Russian artillery shells have landed inside a courtyard of a building being used for triage, and on Thursday ordnance whizzed, thumped and boomed in all directions. Medics brought soldiers wounded at the front lines to the field hospital to stabilize them before sending them by ambulance to a larger military hospital farther from the front in Kramatorsk.
The toll the offensive has taken on Ukrainian forces could be measured by the columns of ambulances racing away from the front lines in the direction of major cities, as trucks and armored vehicles carrying troops and equipment headed in the opposite direction toward the fight.
“We’re not making any kind of prognoses,” said Valeria Skorik, a military press officer for one of the brigades among those fighting in the northern Donetsk region. “I’ve been asked by journalists about what kind of event we might have on May 9, but I’ve just decided not to answer.”
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Reporting from London
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel during a phone call on Thursday that the Kremlin was willing to ensure the safe exit of civilians from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, according to Russian state media. But even as they spoke, heavy battles were raging at the plant, where desperate Ukrainians are bunkered in the city’s last pocket of resistance with no clear path to safety.
For Russia, the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol is a potent symbol.
It is a predominantly Russian-speaking city in the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas, the one where President Vladimir V. Putin falsely claimed Ukraine was carrying out a “genocide” before launching his invasion.
The Azovstal steel plant in the middle of the city has also become the last bastion of Ukrainian military’s Azov regiment, whose origins in a far-right military group, the Azov Batallion, have lent a veneer of credibility to Mr. Putin’s false narrative that the country is overrun by “Nazis.” The steel plant is the last holdout of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol as Moscow’s forces mount a final push to seize control of the city.
In weeks of fierce fighting, much of the city of more than 400,000 was leveled, and Ukrainian officials said more than 20,000 civilians were killed. But despite the horrific toll, Russian state media outlets are now highlighting Russia’s capture of almost all of Mariupol as a long-anticipated victory in Mr. Putin’s campaign to “denazify” Ukraine.
That message is particularly important to the Kremlin this week, as it prepares for May 9 celebrations on Monday, when Russia marks the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The looming Victory Day holiday — one of the most important dates on the calendar for Russians as they remember the 27 million Soviets killed in World War II — is already being used by the Russian government to channel national pride into support for the war.
Vladimir Solovyov, a hawkish state television host, traveled to Mariupol this week and was captured on video holding court in the city in military fatigues, later telling viewers that local residents “wanted to touch me and hug me.”
Another host, Dmitri Kiselyov, highlighted the fight for Mariupol last Sunday on his marquee weekly news show, which declared: “Denazification is when the neo-Nazis from the Azov Battalion rot alive in cold factory basements.”
But perhaps the most striking sign of Mariupol’s importance ahead of May 9 is that one of Mr. Putin’s most powerful aides, deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko, visited the city this week. He was shown meeting with a man described as a Mariupol World War II veteran, and looked on as the man became the first Mariupol resident to get a passport of the breakaway “Donetsk People’s Republic,” which Mr. Putin recognized as independent in February.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kiriyenko helped unveil a statue to “Grandma Anya” — a Ukrainian woman filmed greeting Ukrainian soldiers with a Soviet banner last month, apparently thinking they were Russian, according to Russian media.
Anya has become a symbol for proponents of the war in Russia of the idea that some Ukrainians are in fact greeting Russian troops as liberators. Mr. Kiriyenko, in his speech, evoked the May 9 holiday and called her “a living symbol of the continuity of generations. Continuity in the fight against Nazism and fascism.”
In a short video released Thursday, the Ukrainian government identified her as Anna Ivanova and said her home had been hit by a Russian shell; she says in the video that it was “very lousy” that Russia had invaded.
Mr. Kiriyenko is in charge of domestic politics in Mr. Putin’s administration, and the fact that he is becoming closely involved in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine is being seen as a signal that the Kremlin may be planning to incorporate the territory into Russia. In Mariupol, Mr. Kiriyenko said that it would not be possible to hold Victory Day parades on Monday in Donetsk and Luhansk, the main cities of the Donbas, but he pledged they would take place in the future.
“This time will come, and it will come soon,” Mr. Kiriyenko said.
Russian state media have given short shrift to the devastation in Mariupol, and have falsely claimed that Ukrainian forces firing at their own city are largely to blame. At Wednesday’s statue unveiling, Denis Pushilin, the head of the Donetsk separatist region, acknowledged the destruction but also invoked World War II to promise that the city would be rebuilt, according to a news release issued by his office.
“I am sure that we will also manage it,” Mr. Pushilin said, “especially because Russia is with us.”
Reporting from Kramatorsk, Ukraine
Russian fighter jets launched three airstrikes on the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Thursday morning, injuring at least 26 people, and gutting a large apartment complex and a store selling bras and underwear.
No one was killed, said Pavel Kirilenko, head of the Donetsk regional military administration, as he toured the site around a large crater. The blast wave from the explosion was so powerful that it blew out the interior walls of a row of apartments about 75 feet away and ripped steel doors off their hinges.
“This is yet more confirmation that everyone needs to leave the city,” Mr. Kirilenko said. “The enemy is exclusively targeting elements of civilian infrastructure in order to spread panic — and not only spread panic but to destroy the civilian population.”
Russian forces, pressing into Ukraine from the east, are seeking to secure something President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia can present as a success ahead of Monday’s Victory Day holiday in Russia, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany. Kramatorsk lies in Moscow’s cross hairs, and Ukrainian and Western officials say that in the coming days Russia’s military may seek to encircle or capture the city.
In anticipation of a potential assault, officials have urged anyone who is able to leave the city as soon as possible. Many have done so: The streets of Kramatorsk, which had a prewar population of about 150,000, are largely empty. Most businesses are shuttered. Each day, buses leave the center of town evacuating residents to points west.
But not everyone has heeded the calls to leave. Inside the destroyed apartment building on Thursday was a woman in a bathrobe, cradling a small dog. She gave only her first name, Viktoria.
The force of the blast, which occurred at about 4:30 a.m., blew her balcony and the entire front wall of the apartment onto her and her husband as they slept. Her husband suffered a large head wound; drops of blood stained the mattress and floor. Her 24-year-old daughter was left with a broad cluster of bloody cuts caused by flying glass.
She said local officials had urged her to take shelter in a school, at least for the night. But she said she just wanted to seal the front of her apartment in plastic to keep out the elements, and stay there for the night.
“There is shelling everywhere,” she said. “So where are we supposed to go?”
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Reporting from Krakow, Poland
A Ukrainian commander in Mariupol said on Thursday that the Russians had broken their pledge to allow civilians to leave the steel factory as “heavy fighting continues to take a bloody toll.” Svyatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Battalion, appealed to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to find a way to help wounded Ukrainian soldiers who, he said, are “dying in agony.”
Reporting from Paris
President Emmanuel Macron told an international donor conference in Warsaw that France would increase its financial support for Ukraine to $2 billion, up from $1.7 billion. Macron, speaking by video, said that France had already sent 800 tons of medical and humanitarian goods to Ukraine, saying its needs “call for a new effort by the international community.”
BERLIN — Germany’s federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday, according to their offices, in an attempt to repair a diplomatic spat that has become a sore spot between the two countries and an irritating distraction for the German government.
Mr. Steinmeier was publicly disinvited by the Ukrainian government from a planned visit to Kyiv last month because of his past support for close ties between Germany and Russia. Though his current role is largely ceremonial, he previously served two terms as foreign minister.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said repeatedly that he would not travel to Kyiv unless Ukraine made amends for the snub.
“This is a problem for the German government, and also for the German people, that the German president was asked not to come, and this will have to be addressed,” Mr. Scholz told reporters on Wednesday after a two-day government meeting focused on the invasion.
Both parties on Thursday’s call described it as “very important and very good,” according to the German president’s office. They promised to remain in close contact.
Since the invasion of Ukraine began, Mr. Steinmeier has publicly expressed regret over some of his Russia policies, including his longtime support of the now halted Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would have delivered Russian gas directly to Germany, bypassing a link through Ukraine.
The official phone call occurred a day after Germany’s opposition leader, Friedrich Merz of the center-right Christian Democrats, went to Kyiv to meet with Mr. Zelensky.
There was no word yet on whether the call would pave the way for a visit by Mr. Scholz.
Ukrainian forces appear to have made gains in the battleground of Kharkiv in recent days, regaining some strategic territory in a constellation of towns around Ukraine’s second most-populous city — an advance that analysts say could hinder Moscow’s assault in the eastern Donbas region.
Roughly 20 miles from the northeast border between Ukraine and Russia, Kharkiv was an early target in Moscow’s invasion. Russian forces have pummeled the city, attacking many neighborhoods with rockets, cluster munitions and guided missiles. With Moscow intensifying its assault in the east, the Russian onslaught has grown fiercer.
But the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which has advanced outside the city in recent days, made a breakthrough on Monday as troops retook the city of Staryi Saltiv, about 30 miles east of Kharkiv, according to military updates from Ukrainian and Russian officials.
The operation was confirmed on Tuesday by a senior American defense official who said that Ukrainian troops had managed to push Russian forces about 25 miles east, calling the advance another indication of the “stiff Ukrainian resistance.”
It was not clear whether the towns remain contested, and some areas near Kharkiv that Ukrainian forces claim to control were still being shelled by Russian troops in recent days.
If Ukraine pursues its counteroffensive farther east, it could unseat Russian forces from strategic positions in the northeastern region of Kharkiv and help the Ukrainians regain total control of the city, according to a recent assessment by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington research group that has been tracking the war in Ukraine.
The offensive is less likely to thwart Russian lines of communication further east near the city of Izium, which has become a staging ground for the Russian military as it pursues an offensive to encircle the Donbas region, the report said.
Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, said in a statement on Thursday that he had briefed Gen. Mark A. Milley, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Ukrainian military’s efforts to bolster counterattacks in Kharkiv and Izium.
Russian forces continue to bombard the region indiscriminately, according to the region’s governor, Oleh Sinegubov, who reported shelling in a string of northern and eastern villages on Tuesday and urged residents to stay off the streets where they could become targets.
Mr. Sinegubov said that the most intense fighting remained east, especially near the town of Barvinkove, where Russian forces were suffering significant losses, he said.
Russian troops captured several villages west of Izium last week, according to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, with the likely aim of bypassing Ukrainian forces on two roads running south toward Barvinkove and the nearby city of Sloviansk, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
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Continue reading the main storyRussian forces mounted a furious assault on the Azovstal steel factory on Thursday after breaching Ukrainian perimeter defenses, seeking to destroy the last pocket of resistance in the ruined city of Mariupol and allow Moscow to claim a victory ahead of a symbolically important Russian holiday.
“It has been two days since the enemy broke into the territory of the plant,” Lt. Col. Denys Prokopenko, a Ukrainian commander, said in a video posted overnight. “Heavy, bloody battles are raging.”
A few hours later, Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to the city government, said that there had been nonstop shelling overnight and into the morning. The last patch of Ukrainian resistance beneath the hulking remains of what had once been one of Europe’s largest steel plants has been “turned into hell,” he said.
Ukrainian fighters have successfully defended the plant from a direct assault for weeks. But Russian forces managed to find their way into the four-square-mile complex with the help of a former worker familiar with its layout, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Mr. Gerashchenko, on social media and speaking to reporters, said that an electrician who worked at Azovstal showed the Russians the tunnels they could use to enter the complex. He tied the assault to a Russian desire to declare “victory” in Mariupol before the Monday holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
He said that is why the Kremlin recently dispatched Vladimir Solovyov, a national television host under sanctions by the West for his role in pushing Russian propaganda, to Mariupol.
In a sign of the city’s importance to Moscow, Russia is estimated by Western military analysts to have committed 12 to 14 battalions of around 1,000 soldiers each to the fight for Mariupol, roughly 10 percent of all its combat forces in Ukraine.
A senior Pentagon official said on Wednesday that only around two battalions remained, along with some units of Chechen fighters. The rest have been dispatched to the eastern front to be redeployed.
The decision to storm the factory could still prove costly — something President Vladimir V. Putin seemed to recognize when he ordered troops on April 21 to hold back from a full-on assault. Fighting inside tunnels creates challenges even for a technologically superior conventional force such as Russia’s, and could result in more casualties for Moscow’s troops, military experts say.
Ukrainian defenders in the city have exceeded the expectations of many outside observers — surviving despite being outnumbered, outgunned and cut off from resupply.
Their city has been bombarded, leaving people desperate for food, many civilians dead and hundreds of buildings razed. When the city’s defenses were breached, battles raged in the streets for weeks. With their numbers dwindling, an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers fell back to the plant.
It is unclear how many soldiers are still inside the complex. The Ukrainian government estimates that there are some 200 civilians still inside, including about 30 children.
The Russian government said that it would open humanitarian corridors in Mariupol to facilitate evacuations, but it was unclear how people in the steel factory could find a path to safety. Several hundred people have managed to evacuate in recent days.
Communications from the facility briefly went dark on Wednesday, but on Thursday morning, fighters in the bunkers were again sending messages via social media platforms, promising not to give up.
“The situation is extremely challenging but, nevertheless, we continue to keep the defense,” Colonel Prokopenko said.
Reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia
Russia is “well aware” that the United States, Britain and NATO are sharing intelligence with Ukraine’s military, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said. Peskov told reporters that this Western aid makes the war drag on longer, but “cannot prevent the fulfillment” of Russia’s goals.
When Karen Shainyan opened his Facebook page one recent day, it was overflowing with messages reading “Congratulations!”, as if it were his birthday. There were also expressions of sympathy.
It took Mr. Shainyan, a Russian gay rights advocate and a journalist, a moment to digest the mixed messages: The Kremlin had just labeled him a “foreign agent” — a designation that many opposition figures take as validation of their work, but one that significantly complicates their lives.
The government uses the label to ostracize and diminish opposition figures and organizations — tantamount to branding them enemies of the state. More than 400 people or organizations have been designated foreign agents since the label first started at the end of 2020, with new names now announced virtually every Friday. There is no prior warning or explanation from the government.
Analysts and opposition figures say the designation is a way of ratcheting up the repression that is contributing to the surge in exiles.
Mr. Shainyan was, by his own reckoning, in good company. The seven other people on the foreign agents list that week included a prominent political scientist; a journalist with a wildly popular interview program; and a well-known cartoonist who consistently skewered President Vladimir V. Putin.
Some of those designated, like Mr. Shainyan, had already departed Russia, with the label seemingly meant to coerce them into staying away. “They want to squeeze the active people — not to kill them or to put them in jail — but to squeeze them out, across the border,” he said in a telephone interview from Berlin, where he had landed after fleeing Russia last month.
Those being pushed out joined an exodus of tens of thousands of Russians who have fled the country since the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, a flood of talented, highly educated Russians who have decided that they would prefer exile to living in an authoritarian state.
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Continue reading the main storyEmily Schmall and
NEW DELHI — One after the next, the entreaties have streamed into India. Buying Russian oil, President Biden told India’s prime minister, is not in your country’s interest. Undermining sanctions, a U.S. official starkly warned, could bring “consequences.” Taking a harder line on Russia, a parade of American and European emissaries argued, is a global imperative.
But for India, the decision to hold tight to its neutrality on Russia’s war in Ukraine is no longer just about keeping its options open in a world with multiple centers of power. It has evolved into a lucrative case of economic opportunism: Russian oil is just too good a deal to pass up.
India’s purchases of Russian crude have soared since the conflict’s start, rising from nothing in December and January to about 300,000 barrels a day in March and 700,000 a day in April. The crude now accounts for nearly 17 percent of Indian imports, up from less than 1 percent before the invasion. Last year, India imported about 33,000 barrels a day on average from Russia.
With Russian oil banned in the United States and Europe now proposing an embargo of its own, India can buy the crude at substantial discounts, powering its energy-thirsty economy at a lower cost. Indian refiners can also use the crude to make products like diesel and jet fuel and sell it at better-than-usual margins abroad.
As India leverages the war to help fuel its post-pandemic economic recovery, trade between it and Russia is likely to increase with the conflict dragging on, analysts say. That could further complicate American and European efforts to choke off Russia’s economic lifeblood and strain U.S.-Indian relations as the two nations seek to work together to counter China.
“If oil is available and at a discount, why shouldn’t I buy it? I need it for my people,” Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s finance minister, said last month.
The reshuffling of Russia’s oil exports became evident days after President Vladimir V. Putin launched his assault on Ukraine in late February, as tanker traffic that used to head from Russian terminals on the Black Sea to Northern Europe bent instead toward India.
That traffic could get busier. The European Union announced on Wednesday that it hoped to phase in a ban on Russian oil in the coming months, a move that came days after Russia cut off gas to Poland and Bulgaria, increasing the possibility of an energy war. While Europe may be moving away from crude purchases from Russia, it is eager to buy the same oil after it is refined in India — one of the conundrums in crimping Moscow’s energy revenues.
In September 2017, as President Vladimir V. Putin presided over the televised destruction of what he called the last of Russia’s chemical arms, he hailed their elimination as “a huge step towards making the modern world more balanced and safe.”
Now, years later, President Biden and other Western leaders are warning that Russia may carry out chemical strikes in Ukraine. No hard evidence has emerged of chemical arms deployed in or near the theater of combat, in contrast to the Russian leader’s clearer nuclear warnings. Still, analysts see the threat of chemical warfare as real, because Mr. Putin has long shown a willingness to ignore the international ban on chemical weapons.
This helps him create an atmosphere of toxic intimidation, they say, that may give Russia a battlefield edge without ever having to fire a shot.
“He’s already scaring people,” said Hanna Notte, an expert on Russia’s use of chemical arms at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. The wide apprehension, experts noted, is prompting the West to provide Kyiv with gear and training meant to thwart any chemical strikes.
“It’s a war of narratives,” Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet diplomat who negotiated arms-control treaties, said of Ukraine and Russia, which have each accused the other of preparing for chemical warfare. He added that they “blame each other, so there’s definitely an attempt at scoring points in an information war.”
Concerns about chemical warfare were raised on April 11 when the Azov Regiment, a Ukrainian military unit in the besieged city of Mariupol, reported that a Russian drone had dropped a “poisonous substance” into the sprawling steel mill where the defenders had taken refuge. The victims were said to have suffered dizziness, respiratory pain and eye inflammation. The claims made in a video released by the regiment remain unverified.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague, said it was “monitoring closely the situation in Ukraine” and was investigating the reported attack.
Chemical weapons are relatively cheap and easy to make compared with biological and nuclear arms. But modest amounts can result in mass casualties. Military textbooks show victims covered in burns and giant blisters. The eyes, nose and lungs — organs easily in contact with the air or aerosolized toxins — are especially vulnerable.
“The weapons terrify people and generate panic,” said Leiv K. Sydnes, a chemist at the University of Bergen in Norway who has advised the treaty organization. “The military purpose is to undermine the trust of soldiers and civilians in their shelters, fortifications and hiding places.”
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