Russia-Ukraine conflict: U.S. and Russia Accuse Each Other at U.N. of Stoking Ukraine Crisis (Published 2022) (2024)

The United States and Russia engaged in a bitter diplomatic brawl Monday at the U.N. Security Council over the Ukraine crisis, with the Americans accusing the Russians of endangering peace by massing troops on Ukraine’s borders and Kremlin diplomats dismissing what they called hysterical U.S. fearmongering.

“The situation we are facing in Europe is urgent and dangerous,” the United States ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said in her opening remarks. “Russia’s actions strike at the very heart of the U.N. charter.”

Her Russian counterpart, Vasily Nebenzia, portrayed the Americans as provocateurs, “whipping up tensions and provoking escalation,” as he insisted that Russia had no plan to invade Ukraine.

“You are almost pulling for this,” he said, looking at Mrs. Thomas-Greenfield. “You want it to happen. You’re waiting for it to happen, as if you want to make your words become a reality.”

The meeting — requested by the United States last week — was the highest-profile arena for the two powers to sway world opinion over Ukraine. And it had all the Cold War atmospherics of the angry debates that once punctuated council sessions during the tense days of faceoffs between the United States and Soviet Union decades ago.

The current crisis surrounding Ukraine has been smoldering since Russia annexed the former Soviet Republic’s Crimean Peninsula nearly eight years ago after a Russia-friendly government in Ukraine was ousted.

Events in recent weeks have brought U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest point since the Cold War. Russia has sent more than 100,000 troops to the Ukrainian border, and President Vladimir V. Putin has demanded that NATO never admit Ukraine as a member — all part of his effort to protect and enlarge his country’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

The Biden administration has vowed to respond to a Russian invasion of Ukraine with crippling economic sanctions.

The Security Council meeting adjourned after two hours with no action taken — although none had been expected. Mr. Nebenzia left the meeting before it was over. Mrs. Thomas-Greenfield said afterward that the Russians “didn’t give us the answers we hoped they’d provide.”

But the Biden administration regarded the meeting as an important venue to display the resolve of the United States and its allies to confront Russia over Ukraine.

“If Russia is sincere about addressing our respective security concerns through dialogue, the United States and our Allies and partners will continue to engage in good faith,” Mr. Biden said in a White House statement about the meeting. “If instead Russia chooses to walk away from diplomacy and attack Ukraine, Russia will bear the responsibility, and it will face swift and severe consequences.”

Mr. Putin, who has not spoken publicly about Ukraine since December, maintained his silence.

At one point during the meeting, Mrs. Thomas-Greenfield said the Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s borders reflected “an escalation in a pattern of aggression that we’ve seen from Russia again and again.” If the Russians invaded Ukraine, she said, “none of us will be able to say we didn’t see it coming.”

Mr. Nebenzia said Russia wanted peace and accused the United States and its Western allies of manufacturing a fake crisis to weaken Russia and drive a wedge between it and Ukraine.

He said the United States was behind the 2014 change of government in Ukraine that had driven a pro-Moscow leadership from power and had installed “nationalists, radicals, Russophobes and pure Nazis.” He accused his American counterpart of having made a “hodgepodge of accusations but no specific facts.”

The White House said on Monday that it had developed “specific sanctions packages” to strike at Russian “elites” who are “in or near the inner circle of the Kremlin” should President Vladimir V. Putin order an invasion of Ukraine.

President Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the sanctions were being coordinated with American allies, chiefly in Europe. She confirmed reports that President Biden has authorized taking steps that go far beyond what the Obama White House approved after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

Ms. Psaki said nothing about going directly after Mr. Putin’s own assets, but senior officials have said in recent days that some of the names on the list include oligarchs and others who are widely believed to be holding assets for the Russian leader.

“The individuals we’ve identified are at or near the inner circle of the Kremlin and play a role in government decision-making or are at a minimum complicit in the Kremlin’s destabilizing behavior,’’ Ms. Psaki said. “Many of these individuals are particularly vulnerable targets because of their deep financial ties with the West, because they would be hurt by sanctions that are tying them to Western financial systems.”

She called the list, which the White House did not publish, “one piece of our effort to hit Russia from all angles” in the event of an invasion.

Many of those said to be on the list have known for years they were potentially in American cross-hairs, and some have presumably moved their assets to try to put them out of reach. But the extent of their success may not be known unless the sanctions are invoked.

Until Monday, the White House had talked publicly only about cutting off Russia’s largest banks from conducting financial transactions; restricting the export of key technologies needed by major Russian manufacturers, including arms suppliers; and limiting access to consumer goods, especially those containing American-made or American-designed microelectronics.

In the past, the United States has been cautious about striking directly at the assets of Mr. Putin, his cabinet and his advisers. Now, Mr. Biden and his aides have concluded that it would be better strategy to signal that they would be personally cut off from the international financial system and that their cash and investments could not be parked in Western markets.

In a striking departure, the United States also plans to ban the children of some elite Russian figures from attending prestigious universities in the United States and Europe. Like the Chinese elite, many powerful Russians send their children to the best colleges and graduate schools in the United States and Europe.

British government officials also confirmed on Monday that they planned parallel sanctions.

KYIV, Ukraine — A bomb is about to go off.

Callers have communicated some variation of those words to the police in Ukraine at least 300 times in the past month, a spate of fake bomb threats that officials say is designed to sow panic and fear.

With tens of thousands of Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s borders and the West warning that war could break out any day, the bomb threats have added to the growing sense of anxiety in the nation of 44 million.

While the Pentagon warned on Friday that Russia had now amassed enough troops to launch a full-scale invasion of the country, analysts have said that Russian aggression aimed at destabilizing the government could come in many forms. And it is the collapse of the state from within — abetted by Russian efforts — that Ukrainian officials have called the most clear and present danger.

The rate of bomb threats in January in Ukraine was six times higher than the average for last year.

The Ukrainian police say they have checked more than 3,000 buildings since the beginning of January in response to more than 300 phoned-in bomb threats. So far the threats have all turned out to be fake — causing disruption but no damage or loss of life.

In a statement, the country’s security service said the goal was obvious: creating chaos, stirring fear and undermining the government.

The threats have been mostly aimed at schools and shopping malls, forcing evacuations and closures and in some cases keeping children out of classes for days.

Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, wrote on social media that the fake bomb alerts were mostly coming from Russia, from Russian-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine and from Russian allies, including Belarus.

The threats come as Ukraine braces for more cyberattacks — which could range from efforts to cripple the country’s infrastructure to propaganda campaigns aimed at sowing fear and confusion.

A Ukrainian government website was recently hacked and a message was posted: “Be afraid and expect the worst.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly expressed his concern that internal destabilization poses perhaps an even greater danger than an invasion. Panic, he has said, puts the economy in danger.

It is this concern that prompted him to publicly call on the United States and other European leaders to cool their talk of war being imminent. At the same time, he has blamed Russia for the bomb threats and efforts to cause turmoil within Ukraine.

“Why are you doing this?” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference in comments directed at Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, in which he mentioned both the military buildup at the border and the flurry of bomb threats. “To threaten us? What is this sadomasochism? What is the pleasure of this? Of someone being afraid?”

Russian officials have repeatedly denied meddling in Ukraine’s internal affairs. And they say they have also been dealing with their own wave of bomb threats, which have forced Russian schools and shopping centers to evacuate tens of thousands of people. They have blamed Ukraine for the surge.

In Ukraine, the fake bomb alerts have disrupted classes at dozens of schools, and some Ukrainians are blaming the government for the problem.

“It’s getting scary,” said Anastasia Kuznetsova, a parent in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine. Her 9-year-old daughter could not go to school for nearly two weeks this month because of repeated bomb threats to the building.

Olena Ronzhyna, mother of a 12-year-old from Cherkasy, in central Ukraine, said people were upset and blaming the government.

“Children have been home for almost a month,” she said.

Yet Ms. Ronzhyna believes that if Russia is hoping to damage Ukraine by undermining trust in its government, it will not work. Ukrainians have always taken great pride in their deep distrust of their government, and they relish criticizing it harshly and openly.

“We never trust any of our governments,” she said. “Starting from the first day after an election.”

— Maria Varenikova

The diplomatic push to avert a wider conflict between Russia and Ukraine continued with President Emmanuel Macron of France speaking to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, by telephone on Monday for the second time in four days.

The Kremlin said the two leaders had discussed Ukraine and Mr. Putin’s demands for “security guarantees” that would include a legally binding halt on NATO expansion to the east. They agreed to stay in touch by phone and to “work promptly on the possibility of holding an in-person meeting,” the Kremlin said.

The French presidency said in a statement that the phone call was part of “the same logic of de-escalation” as the previous exchanges between the two presidents. An in-person meeting was not ruled out, though nothing was scheduled yet, the statement said.

With the retirement of the German leader Angela Merkel, Mr. Macron has sought to position himself as Europe’s chief voice in international affairs, casting himself as a NATO ally who is independent of Washington and has open channels to U.S. adversaries.

In 2014, after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists took control of a slice of eastern Ukraine, France and Germany formed the “Normandy format” talks with Russia and Ukraine — excluding the United States to keep superpower rivalry out of the mix.

The Normandy group helped broker a cease-fire in eastern Ukraine in 2015, and has continued to meet since then — including last week, when diplomats from the four countries gathered in Paris to discuss the latest crisis.

The French presidency said Mr. Macron and Mr. Putin welcomed “positive progress” made by talks under the Normandy format, and that they would continue to “pursue dialogue.”

A bipartisan group of senators, moving to pressure the Biden administration to take a tougher stance against Russia, is racing to finalize sweeping legislation that would impose strict sanctions on Moscow, lawmakers say.

The legislation, which is still being negotiated, is an effort to illustrate broad resolve on Capitol Hill to impose what proponents call “severe consequences” in the event of an invasion. It is based on a measure sponsored by Senate Democrats that would impose sanctions on top Russian officials, including President Vladimir V. Putin, as well as the nation’s banking sector. It also would provide Ukraine with additional military equipment, beyond the $650 million in security assistance the United States has sent Kyiv in the past year.

“These are sanctions beyond any that we have ever levied before,” Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “And I think that that sends a very clear message.”

Senators are also discussing including in the package a bipartisan bill that would piggyback off the Lend-Lease Act, famously used in World War II, to loan and lease military equipment to Kyiv until Russia draws down troops on the Ukrainian border. That plan was reported by Politico.

Taken together, the proposed sanctions package would be the most expansive passed into law to date, going beyond what the Biden administration has contemplated.

It is an effort to display bipartisan Senate unity, weeks after Senate Democrats rejected a Republican-led bid to impose sanctions on the Russian natural-gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. Democrats said it would drive a wedge between the United States and Germany, which has championed the pipeline and depends on Russian energy, and give up a key point of Western leverage during diplomatic negotiations.

How and when to counter Nord Stream 2 has continued to be the thornie*st issue holding up the broader measure currently under discussion. Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said on Sunday that it remained “the last ‘t’ crossed, ‘i’ dotted before we put the ball across the finish line.”

Republicans in the Senate have largely pressed to impose punishing sanctions on the pipeline, even as some of their anti-interventionist colleagues in the House have opposed confronting Russia. But the balance has been trickier for Senate Democrats.

Top Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have urged senators to impose immediate, mandatory sanctions on the pipeline, arguing that the Biden administration’s earlier decision to waive such sanctions emboldened Russia.

The Biden administration, however, has maintained that the pipeline is nearly completed and that sanctions would only erode the U.S. relationship with Germany.

WARSAW — As the United States ramped up warnings of a Russian attack, and Western allies called for unity against possible aggression, the leaders of two NATO members bordering Ukraine headed for a gathering in Madrid over the weekend called “Defend Europe.”

But instead of tackling the Russian threat to Europe’s eastern frontier, the meeting attended by the prime ministers of Poland and Hungary, Mateusz Morawiecki and Viktor Orban, focused on what the populist leaders cite as their most pressing threats: immigration, demographic decline and the European Union.

Even as the two NATO members rely on the alliance for their security, their decision to press issues in Madrid that have long driven a wedge between them and the United States and the European Union highlighted the extent to which domestic political concerns remain at the forefront of their calculations.

The meeting brought together right-wing populist — and for the most part, Kremlin-friendly — standard-bearers from across Europe, and it underlined just how much domestic politics have complicated what the United States views as a clear-cut case of bullying by Russia, a nuclear-armed autocracy, against Ukraine, a vibrant, albeit highly dysfunctional, democracy.

A declaration issued after the Madrid gathering made no mention of Ukraine, though it did lament “Russian aggressive actions on Europe’s eastern border.” It instead stressed the need to form a united front in favor of “family policies,” Christianity and keeping out immigrants. The European Union, the statement said, had become “detached from reality,” leading to “demographic suicide.”

After weeks of wavering, Polish authorities said on Monday that they would offer “defensive weapons” to Ukraine. Prime Minister Morawiecki, who travels to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, on Tuesday, expressed his “unwavering support” for Ukraine against “Russian neo-imperialism.”

But Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of Law and Justice and Poland’s de facto leader, has said nothing about the Ukraine crisis. He fulminates regularly against the European bloc, claiming in December that it was becoming a German-led “Fourth Reich.”

Mr. Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, has gone further than any other European national leader in reaching out to Moscow and demonizing the European bloc. He will travel to Moscow on Tuesday to meet President Vladimir V. Putin, and, facing a tough election in April, he has built his Fidesz party around combat with the European Union.

Benjamin Novak contributed reporting from Budapest and Anatol Magdziarz from Warsaw.

More than a month of bluster and posturing, menacing military maneuvers and high-level diplomatic meetings has not made the security crisis gripping Europe any easier to assess.

Just a week after top diplomats from the United States and Russia sat down in Geneva on Jan. 21 to seek a way of de-escalating tensions around Ukraine, the Pentagon warned that Russia had amassed a fighting force large enough to attack its neighbor, a nation of 44 million, on a scale and at a time of its choosing. That could include a full-scale invasion, which would be likely to result in fierce fighting and potentially the worst bloodshed on the continent since the end of World War II.

“You can imagine what that might look like in dense urban areas, along roads and so on and so forth,” said Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Friday. “It would be horrific. It would be terrible.”

The U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, described an array of Russian infantry troops, artillery and rockets assembled at the Ukrainian border, which he said “far and away exceeds what we would typically see them do for exercises.”

Still, Mr. Austin said, “There is still time and space for diplomacy.”

No one is sure what Mr. Putin’s intentions are, and trying to divine them is at the heart of the uncertainty surrounding the crisis.

His spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday that Mr. Putin would state his views on the situation “as soon as he determines it to be necessary.”

“I can’t give you an exact date,” Mr. Peskov said.

Mr. Putin has not spoken in public about Ukraine since Dec. 23. During that time, the Biden administration has moved to rally Western nations to demonstrate that the cost of military aggression would be severe and swiftly felt.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and member nations are not bound to come to its defense, but the United States has placed 8,500 troops on high alert to be dispatched to Eastern Europe to support allies nervous that Russian aggression might not stop in Ukraine.

American officials also announced last week that they were making plans to impose sanctions on some of Russia’s largest financial institutions — penalties that could disrupt Russia’s economy in ways that would go far beyond previous Western actions.

The United States and Germany are also increasing their warnings that natural gas would not flow through a new $11 billion pipeline from Russia to Germany if Russia were to invade Ukraine.

Still, there is concern that Mr. Putin may be willing to pay a high price to bring Ukraine back into what he sees as Russia’s natural sphere of influence.

In July, he wrote a 5,000-word essay expanding on his frequently voiced conviction that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.”

And at the center of the current maelstrom, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sought on Friday to offer the perspective of a nation where conflict is not theoretical, but a daily reality.

About 14,000 people have been killed in the breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, where the Ukrainian military has been at war with Russia-backed separatists since 2014.

To speak of war as imminent was both wrong and dangerous, Mr. Zelensky said. It could result in economic and social instability that could itself cause the state to struggle to survive.

“We don’t need panic,” he said.

NOVI YARYLOVYCHI BORDER CROSSING, Ukraine — On the other side of this border in northern Ukraine, not visible through the thick pine and birch forests that crowd the E-95 highway but noticeable to passing truckers, a force is gathering in Belarus more potent than anything seen in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, officials and military analysts say.

Russia has deployed tanks and artillery, fighter jets and helicopters, advanced rocket systems and troops by the thousands all across Belarus, augmenting a fighting force that already envelopes Ukraine like a horseshoe on three sides. Russia says the troops have deployed for military exercises scheduled to commence next month, but the buildup in Belarus could presage an attack from a new vector, one in proximity to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

With much of Ukraine’s military might concentrated in the country’s east — where a war with Russian-backed separatists has raged for eight years — military analysts and Ukraine’s own generals say it will be difficult for the country to muster the forces necessary to defend its northern border.

“As a result of Russia taking control over Belarus, 1,070 kilometers of our border with Belarus became a threat,” said Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, referring to a distance of about 665 miles. “This is not a threat from Belarus — Ukraine has a very warm attitude toward the Belarusian people — but a threat from Russia moving through Belarus.”

LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia were scheduled to speak in a phone call on Monday or Tuesday, and Mr. Johnson was to make a visit to Ukraine Tuesday as his government attempts to defuse the escalating crisis with both diplomacy and deterrents.

Britain will propose legislation this week to let ministers impose a wider range of sanctions on Russia in the event of a new invasion of Ukraine, the British foreign secretary said on Sunday. The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, discussed the plan in an interview with the broadcaster Sky News, presenting it as part of a broad range of efforts to deter further aggression from Mr. Putin.

But Mr. Johnson’s plans on Ukraine were complicated by a different crisis, with the prime minister’s political future uncertain after weeks of media reports that parties were hosted at Downing Street when the rest of the country was under lockdown restrictions.

A highly anticipated British government investigation into those parties was made public on Monday, and Mr. Johnson went before Parliament to face a withering questioning by lawmakers.

The prime minister’s office had said he would speak with Mr. Putin late Monday, but as the grilling of Mr. Johnson stretched into the evening, Downing Street said their call might be delayed until Tuesday.

David Lammy, the Labour Party’s spokesman on foreign affairs, said, “Amid a dangerous crisis threatening peace in Europe, a vital diplomatic opportunity has been missed as Boris Johnson scrambles to hold on to his job.”

Britain is already supplying defensive weapons to Ukraine and has offered to increase its troop deployments elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The offer to bolster troops was designed to “signal to Putin that the very thing he fears, that is, more NATO close to Russia, would be the consequence of invading Ukraine,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, said on Monday during a visit to Hungary.

The new legislation would seek to broaden Britain’s current sanctions so there would be “nowhere to hide” for oligarchs and “any company of interest to the Kremlin and the regime in Russia,” Ms. Truss said.

Britain has long been a financial hub for Russia’s wealthy and well-connected, with one British parliamentary report describing London as a “laundromat” for illicit Russian money.

While the British Parliament typically takes weeks or months to pass a bill, emergency procedures allow it to legislate in as little as a day under some circ*mstances.

Russia turned down the temperature on another potential provocation in Western Europe on Saturday, backing out of a plan to conduct naval exercises next week in international waters off Ireland’s coast, which had drawn protests from Irish fishing groups and the Irish government.

The naval drills were set to take place 150 miles off Ireland’s southwest coast — outside its territorial waters but within Ireland’s exclusive economic zone, an area where the country has sovereign rights over marine resources.

Fishing groups raised concerns that the activity could disrupt marine life and jeopardize an important region for their trade. One organization had planned to peacefully protest the exercises.

Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, described the proposed drills in an interview last week with the Irish public broadcaster RTE as “simply not welcome and not wanted right now.”

While acknowledging that Russia’s plans did not breach the international law of the sea, he said in a statement that his department had raised several concerns with the Russian authorities “in light of the current political and security environment in Europe.”

Moscow then decided to move the exercises outside the Irish exclusive economic zone “as a gesture of good will,” the Russian ambassador to Ireland, Yuriy Filatov, said in a statement released on Saturday. Mr. Coveney said on Twitter that he welcomed Russia’s response.

The U.S. military has noted signs that Russia and its proxies are stirring up discord and confusion far from Ukraine to distract the United States and its European partners.

Russian surveillance aircraft last week flew near Al Tanf, a military outpost in Syria near the Jordanian border where some 200 American troops are training allied Syrian militia members. Two Russian warships are in the Red Sea waiting to steam into the eastern Mediterranean, where an American aircraft carrier is conducting a naval exercise.

In West Africa’s Sahel region, supporters of a military coup in Burkina Faso took to the streets this week waving Russian flags, showing their desire to pivot away from France, the former colonial power, and toward Moscow.

French officials suggested that the Russian Embassy may have paid the supporters to wave flags, as the Russians have done in Mali, a country north of Burkina Faso that recently signed a deal to bring in several hundred Russian mercenaries to help combat a growing Islamist insurgency there. France and several other European countries operating in Mali have strenuously opposed the country’s plan to recruit mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked firm.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Sunday that Russia would seek clarity from NATO on its intentions to follow through with certain Kremlin requests to alter its approach to security, days after the United States and its allies delivered a formal rejection to Moscow’s demands NATO retreat from Eastern Europe and bar Ukraine from joining the alliance.

Mr. Lavrov’s statement, delivered in an interview with Russia’s main government television channel, indicated that while Moscow was displeased with the Western responses, as expected, there was still some flicker of hope for further diplomacy.

Through the foreign ministry, Mr. Lavrov said, an official request was sent Sunday to both NATO and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, a European security alliance of which Russia is a member, “with an urgent demand to explain how they intend to fulfill their obligation not to strengthen their security at the expense of the security of others.”

“If they do not intend to, then they must explain why,” he added. “This will be the key question in determining our further proposals, which we will report to Russia’s president,” he said.

While Mr. Lavrov did not indicate what specific issue in the NATO responses was unclear, the Kremlin has been highly critical of NATO’s so-called open-door policy of granting membership to former Communist bloc countries without taking Russia’s security concerns into account. In his remarks Sunday, Mr. Lavrov reiterated a frequent Kremlin complaint that NATO in the years since the Soviet collapse had crept ever closer to Russia’s border.

“Now they’ve come up to Ukraine, and they want to drag that country in,” he said. “Though everyone understands that Ukraine is not ready and will make no contribution to strengthening NATO security.”

Though Ukraine has been promised a path to NATO membership, Western officials openly acknowledge that the country is years away from membership. But even with roughly 130,000 Russian troops parked on the border with Ukraine and Moscow threatening unspecified “military-technical” measures should its demands not be met, neither the United States nor NATO has budged in its contention that any country that wishes to join can do so if it meets the requirements, no matter Russia’s objections.

While the United States and its allies have rejected the core of Russia’s demands, they have offered second-tier proposals meant to lower the temperature that Moscow has indicated it would be open to discussing.

In remarks last week, Mr. Lavrov was largely dismissive of the American and NATO responses to its demands, which were delivered in writing as requested by the Kremlin to the foreign ministry last week. But he said some proposals “contained kernels of rationality,” like limitations on short and medium range missiles.

MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Residents in this frontline port city observed a moment of silence last week for those killed by rocket fire there seven years ago.

The shelling, on Jan. 24, 2015, killed 30 people, nearly all civilians, and wounded more than 100, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The group traced at least 19 rockets to separatist-controlled territory. Mariupol is 14 miles of the front line of a conflict between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists that continues today.

“We witnessed it all,” said Natalia Nikolaevna, a 68-year-old resident of Mariupol. “My husband had a cut in his leg. I had shrapnel in my head,” she said, recalling the rocket attack.

“My soul is crying,” she added. “We are afraid of everything now.”

As fears of an escalation with Russia intensify, soldiers at a memorial ceremony — who have for years fought in the continuing conflict with Russia-backed separatists — resolved to defend the city if it comes to that.

“You see what’s happening at the border now? We’re getting ready,” said Volodymyr, a Ukrainian Marine commander who asked that his full name be withheld for security reasons. “But I think Ukraine will prevail.”