Pinned
Marc Santora
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
One week into the war and with cities under siege, a humanitarian crisis looms.
One day after Russian forces seized the first major city in their onslaught in Ukraine — potentially clearing the way for a bid to seize the entire Black Sea coast and cut off the country from world shipping — Russian forces on Thursday continued to lay siege to major cities, creating a dire humanitarian crisis.
One million people have fled the country, according to the United Nations. Millions more have left their homes and are seeking safety in the western reaches of Ukraine or taking shelter deep underground.
A vast network of Ukrainian volunteers has emerged to help those stranded in the cities under siege, but with each passing day their situation grows more grim as Russia steps up its bombardment of civilian areas and infrastructure.
Here are the latest developments:
The Russian invasion appeared to be making its biggest gains in the south, with the capture of the strategic port of Kherson on Wednesday, though it was unclear how they planned to hold the city and govern a population that has resisted them at every turn.
Russia continued its attacks on Kyiv, the capital, and Russian forces surrounded the key port city Mariupol, whose fall would enable two flanks of Russian and Russian-backed fighters to trap Ukraine’s forces in the southeast.
The International Paralympic Committee said on Thursday that athletes from Russia and its ally Belarus would be barred from competing in the Beijing Paralympic Games, which begin on Friday. It had previously said that the athletes would be allowed to compete as neutrals.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine claimed in a broadcast early Thursday that the Ukrainians had thwarted the Russian invasion plans. He acknowledged that Russian forces had taken control in some cities, but said they would be driven out: “I am sure of this: If they entered somewhere, it is only temporarily. We’ll drive them out. With shame.”
Civilians have built a large barricade on the road to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar, on the front line of Russian advances from Crimea in southern Ukraine.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said the European Union would finance the purchase and delivery of weapons for Ukraine, a shift from leaving the processes to individual member nations.
March 3, 2022, 5:41 a.m. ET
Ben Dooley
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan said on Thursday that his country would freeze the assets of Russian oligarchs with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, following similar decisions by the European Union and the United States.
March 3, 2022, 5:28 a.m. ET
Haley Willis
Newly released satellite images show the effects of war on Ukraine’s civilians.
The war in Ukraine is continuing to affect civilians on a large scale, according to satellite imagery released late Wednesday by Maxar Technologies. The images were captured on Sunday and Monday before cloud cover blanketed much of the country, hindering satellites’ ability to capture what is happening on the ground.
The imagery shows a large crater amid destroyed residential homes in a village northwest of the capital, Kyiv, as well as burning homes near the northern city of Chernihiv.
It also provides insight into Ukraine’s growing humanitarian crisis, showing long lines of people waiting outside grocery stores in various parts of the country. One image shows cars of refugees waiting to enter Hungary at the Luzhanka border crossing. More than one million people have fled Ukraine since the war began, according to the United Nations.
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March 3, 2022, 5:23 a.m. ET
Abdi Latif Dahir
Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya
Citing the devastating impact of Ethiopia’s civil war, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Thursday expressed concern over the escalating crisis in Ukraine and called for restraint. “Our experience has shown the devastating consequence that war inflicts upon families, communities, livelihoods and the economy at large,” Mr. Abiy wrote on Twitter. Mr. Abiy has been accused of planning the war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region before it began in November 2020. The conflict has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and led to widespread human rights violations, including massacres, ethnic cleansing and sexual violence.
As #Ethiopia closely follows the developments in Europe with great caution, we urge all parties to exercise restraint in the #Ukraine crisis. pic.twitter.com/jySRfQGY5z
— Abiy Ahmed Ali 🇪🇹 (@AbiyAhmedAli) March 3, 2022
March 3, 2022, 5:08 a.m. ET
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Reporting from Brussels
European Union officials said they expected Moldova and Georgia to follow Ukraine in applying for membership of the bloc. Expanding the E.U. eastwards has traditionally been a divisive topic among older member states, and there is no consensus currently that the bloc should grow in that direction, despite the Russian invasion.
March 3, 2022, 4:35 a.m. ET
Saif Hasnat
Reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh
As Russian forces push west from Kherson toward the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, a sailor from Bangladesh was reportedly killed on Wednesday when a rocket struck a vessel docked in the port of Olvia. The Bangladesh Shipping Corporation said that the vessel, a bulk carrier, had been stuck in Ukraine on its way to Italy. The crew managed to douse a fire caused by the attack, but an engineer identified as Hadisur Rahman was killed, the company said.
March 3, 2022, 4:01 a.m. ET
Austin Ramzy
Reporting from Hong Kong
A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry on Thursday denied that Beijing had advance knowledge of Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, calling a New York Times report that some Western intelligence indicated Chinese officials had told Russian officials not to invade during the Winter Games “purely false information.”
Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said such a report sought to “divert attention.” He repeated Beijing’s assertions that the United States deserves blame for the conflict because the expansion of NATO has threatened Russia’s security interests.
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March 3, 2022, 4:00 a.m. ET
Andrew E. Kramer
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
All passenger trains in Ukraine moving from east to west are now being used only for evacuating civilians, the Ukrainian railway company said on Thursday. It said that women, children and older people would be given priority, and that tickets would not be required. The company published a schedule of evacuation trains but said it would probably not be able to keep to it because of the fast-changing military situation. On Thursday morning, a train packed with exhausted, frightened people coming from the eastern city of Kharkiv stopped briefly in the Kyiv station before continuing west toward Lviv, near the Polish border.
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March 3, 2022, 3:55 a.m. ET
Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
France said on Thursday it was “strongly” recommending that its citizens leave Russia, unless they were there for “essential” reasons. The French foreign ministry also said that travelers in Russia should show “increased vigilance” because of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia.
March 3, 2022, 3:48 a.m. ET
Christopher F. Schuetze
Reporting from Berlin
Germany will send 2,700 shoulder-launched surface-to-air rockets to Ukraine, in addition to arms shipments the country has already announced, a government spokesman said on Thursday morning. The Soviet-made Strela rockets were in East Germany’s arsenal when Germany reunited more than three decades ago. Germany said last weekend that it would send more modern shoulder-launched anti-tank rockets and surface-to-air Stinger missiles to Ukraine, after decades of reluctance to send weapons into conflict zones.
March 3, 2022, 3:30 a.m. ET
Anton Troianovski
Echo of Moscow, a liberal Russian radio station, is shut down.
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The Kremlin forced Echo of Moscow, Russia’s flagship liberal radio station, to shut down its radio broadcast and website on Thursday, turning a symbol of the country’s newfound freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union into a symbol of the rapid crackdown on dissent in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
Aleksei A. Venediktov, the radio station’s longtime editor, said the station’s board of directors had “made the decision to liquidate the radio channel and website Echo of Moscow.” It was not immediately clear whether Echo might be able to maintain a voice on YouTube or other online platforms.
Gazprom, the state-run energy giant, owns the station, but has long allowed it to operate with some degree of independence in what analysts saw as an attempt by the Kremlin to maintain a facade of pluralism amid its creeping authoritarianism. Yet that mask came off after the invasion of Ukraine last Thursday prompted an outpouring of anger inside Russia.
The government took Echo of Moscow off the air on Tuesday for the first time since its famed coverage of the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, and it blocked its website. It also blocked the website of Dozhd, the country’s last remaining independent television channel, prompting its leading staff members to flee the country.
On Friday, Russian lawmakers are expected to consider newly draconian laws aimed at muzzling anything but the official narrative of the fighting in Ukraine, which the Kremlin says must be called a “special military operation” rather than invasion or a war. Under the law, “fakes” about the war could be punished by 15 years in prison, and many Russians fear even harsher measures in the days ahead.
“They have survived all stages of post-Soviet and even partly Soviet history,” Andrei Kolesnikov, the chairman of the Russian domestic politics program at the Carnegie Moscow Center research institute, said on Twitter about the radio station’s demise. “But they have not survived mature Putinism. This is a very bad sign. The regime is on its way to suicide, but it is pulling us all down into a whirlpool.”
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March 3, 2022, 3:22 a.m. ET
David Waldstein and Amy Chang Chien
The Paralympics, in a reversal, bars athletes from Russia and Belarus.
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BEIJING — On Wednesday night, the organizers of the Paralympic Winter Games were resolute that they had no option except to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete. On Thursday afternoon, they were equally resolute when they came to the opposite conclusion.
In a stunning reversal, the International Paralympic Committee bowed to heavy internal pressure and barred athletes from Russia and Belarus on the eve of the opening ceremony, extending the global sporting isolation of both countries in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
Citing threats by several federations to boycott the Paralympic Games, mounting discontent in the athletes’ village and fears that a “deteriorating” situation there could lead to violence, the International Paralympic Committee said the situation had changed so dramatically overnight that the viability of the Games would be in jeopardy if organizers did not expel the Russian and Belarusian delegations.
“The environment in the village is deteriorating,” said Andrew Parsons, the president of the I.P.C. He said rising anger and threats by multiple national committees, some under pressure from their governments, to withdraw from the Games had made the situation “untenable.”
Russia’s sports minister, Oleg Matytsin, told journalists in Moscow that the country was preparing an immediate appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland that would seek to overturn the exclusion of Russian athletes before the Games open.
“Today’s decision of the International Paralympic Committee to bar our team is a blatant violation of athletes’ rights and a manipulation of the Olympic Charter and human lives’ values in pursue of political goals,” Matytsin said, according to the state-run news agency TASS.
The announcement came less than a day after the committee had said it would allow athletes from both countries to compete as neutrals in Beijing, a response to the invasion that was widely criticized as inadequate. By Thursday morning, Paralympic officials met again and decided they had little choice but to throw out the two teams.
Parsons said that there had been no reports of confrontations or violence between athletes, but that tensions were rising. He said there was a “huge” concern for the safety of participants, including 71 Russians athletes.
“The village is not the place for fights,” Parsons said.
The move made the Paralympics the latest international sporting organization to bar Russian and Belarusian athletes and teams in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was staged with Belarusian support. Sports like soccer, tennis, auto racing and figure skating already have barred Russian and Belarusian athletes since the International Olympic Committee took the extraordinary step this week of suggesting global federations and event organizers put in place a global ban on athletes from the two countries as a result of their actions in Ukraine.
The Russian and Belarusian Paralympic delegations — whose athletes initially had been cleared to compete if they agreed to do so without their national names, flags or anthems — could appeal the decision in court. But the Games are set to hold their opening ceremony on Friday, and their first events on Saturday.
Russia’s Paralympic committee criticized the reversal as “completely unfounded,” and said it unfairly portrayed the Russian committee and its Paralympic athletes “as the perpetrators of the current political conflicts.”
“In this regard, the R.P.C. considers the I.P.C.’s decision illegal and reserves the right to defend the rights and interests of Russian para athletes” in court, it said in a statement.
Athletes from both Ukraine and Russia practiced on Thursday, sometimes side by side, but Parsons said the I.P.C. now would work with the Russian and Belarusian delegations to get their teams home from China.
On Wednesday, Parsons had said the I.P.C. could not remove the athletes from Russia and Belarus because there was no specific mechanism to do so in the organization’s constitution; at the time, he said it was the I.P.C.’s “duty” to allow the Russians to participate.
On Thursday, he acknowledged that the legal situation had not changed, but that the situation on the ground had. The executive board, he argued, was equally bound to protect the viability of the Paralympic Games in the face of growing discontent. By Thursday, for example, teams in wheelchair curling and sled hockey had informed Paralympic officials that they would refuse to play against Russian opponents.
“The I.P.C. is a membership-based organization,” he said, “and we are receptive to the views of our member organizations.”
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By then, Parsons said, a large number of members had reached out and urged the I.P.C. to reconsider its decision. Ukraine’s athletes released a statement voicing their disapproval, saying the claims of “political neutrality” from sports administrators were “a convenient lie used to deflect calls to stand up for human rights and peace.”
On Thursday, their team’s leader left no doubt about the country’s position. “Russia and Belarus must leave the Paralympic Games as soon as possible,” said Valerii Sushkevich, a member of Ukraine’s parliament and the president of the nation’s Paralympic committee.
Parsons, who had declared on Wednesday that the Russian and Belarussian athletes had a right to compete because they were not responsible for the invasion, expressed regret on Thursday that their dreams of competing at the Games would not be fulfilled.
“To the para athletes from the impacted countries, we are very sorry that you are affected by the decisions that your government took last week in breaching the Olympic truce,” he said. “You are victims of your government’s actions.”
The Games, though, will go ahead. The opening ceremony will take place in Beijing on Friday night, and competition begins Saturday in Alpine skiing, sled hockey, cross-country skiing and wheelchair curling.
Said Parsons: “We can at least preserve the experience for the around 600 athletes that are still competing here.”
March 3, 2022, 3:14 a.m. ET
Michael Schwirtz
Reporting from Ukraine
After capturing the strategic city of Kherson, Russian forces pushed west on Thursday, bearing down on another important port city, Mykolaiv, the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych, said in an interview. Mr. Senkevych said roughly 800 Russian vehicles, including a column of rocket launchers, was headed toward Mykolaiv from the north, east and south. As of Thursday morning, there had been no shelling inside the city, but Ukrainian forces dug in on the city’s perimeter have been fired on by long range rockets, forcing them to move positions constantly, Mr. Senkevych said, adding: “The city is ready for war.”
March 3, 2022, 3:05 a.m. ET
John Yoon
Reporting from Seoul
Britain’s defense ministry said that the Russian advance on Kyiv had made little progress over the past three days due to “staunch Ukrainian resistance, mechanical breakdown and congestion.” The main body of the Russian column advancing on Kyiv remained more than 18 miles from the city center.
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) March 3, 2022Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine - 03 March 2022
Find out more about the UK government's response: https://t.co/94E5eEDqiw
The cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Mariupol remained in Ukrainian hands despite heavy Russian shelling, the ministry said. “Some Russian forces have entered the city of Kherson but the military situation remains unclear.” Britain has significant intelligence capabilities in the region.
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March 3, 2022, 2:48 a.m. ET
Marc Santora
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
With the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine deepening, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the government was doing all it could to provide relief. “Our guys on the ground are working hard to organize ‘green corridors,’” he said, referring to safe passages that allow for critical relief to be moved through combat zones. He said the government was working to get civilians away from harm in Kyiv, Kharkiv and hard-hit cities in the south. They were also working to bring in medical supplies. “This is very difficult. Extremely difficult,” Mr. Zelensky said.
March 3, 2022, 2:42 a.m. ET
Marc Santora
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Ukraine early Thursday, a routine now watched closely by people across the country who have found inspiration in his words. He acknowledged that Russian forces had made gains in some parts of the country, but said they would not be lasting.
“I am sure of this: if they entered somewhere, it is only temporarily,” Mr. Zelensky said. “We’ll drive them out. With shame.”
March 3, 2022, 2:32 a.m. ET
Andy Parsons
The International Paralympic Committee said on Thursday that athletes from Russia and its ally Belarus would be barred from competing in the Beijing Paralympic Games, which begin on Friday. The committee said in a statement that while one of its bedrock principles was to separate sports from politics, it had come under pressure from a number of national committees to bar Russia and Belarus over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The Paralympic committee’s ability to hold the event, the statement said, had become threatened by warnings from several countries that they would pull out if Russia and Belarus were not barred. The committee reversed an earlier decision to let the two nations compete under a neutral flag.
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March 3, 2022, 2:31 a.m. ET
Anton Troianovski
Echo of Moscow, Russia’s flagship liberal radio station, is shutting down, the station announced Thursday. The station was a symbol of Russia’s newfound freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has now become an emblem of the Kremlin’s rapid new crackdown on dissent in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
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March 3, 2022, 2:02 a.m. ET
Steven Erlanger
Weapons donations pour into Ukraine, carrying a risk of Russian retaliation.
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BRUSSELS — The Dutch are sending rocket launchers for air defense. The Estonians are sending Javelin antitank missiles. The Poles and the Latvians are sending Stinger surface-to-air missiles. The Czechs are sending machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols and ammunition.
Even formerly neutral countries like Sweden and Finland are sending weapons. And Germany, long allergic to sending weapons into conflict zones, is sending Stingers as well as other shoulder-launched rockets.
In all, about 20 countries — most members of NATO and the European Union, but not all — are funneling arms into Ukraine to fight off Russian invaders and arm an insurgency, if the war comes to that. At the same time, NATO is moving military equipment and as many as 22,000 more troops into member states bordering Russia and Belarus, to reassure them and enhance deterrence.
“European security and defense has evolved more in the last six days than in the last two decades,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive arm, asserted in a speech to the European Parliament on Tuesday. Brussels has moved to “Europeanize” the efforts of member states to aid Ukraine with weapons and money and put down a marker for the bloc as a significant military actor.
But whether European weaponry will continue to reach the Ukrainian battlefield in time to make a difference is far from certain. However proud Brussels is of its effort, it is a strategy that risks encouraging a wider war and possible retaliation from Mr. Putin. The rush of lethal military aid into Ukraine from Poland, a member of NATO, aims, after all, to kill Russian soldiers.
World wars have started over smaller conflicts, and the proximity of the war to NATO allies carries the danger that it could draw in other parties in unexpected ways.
March 3, 2022, 1:16 a.m. ET
Ivan Nechepurenko and Anton Troianovski
As losses mount, the war’s reality begins to dawn on Russian civilians.
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The reality of war is dawning across Russia.
On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry for the first time announced a death toll for Russian servicemen in the conflict. While casualty figures in wartime are notoriously unreliable — and Ukraine has put the total of Russian dead in the thousands — the 498 Moscow acknowledged in the seven days of fighting is the largest in any of its military operations since the war in Chechnya, which marked the beginning of President Vladimir V. Putin’s tenure in 1999.
Russians who long avoided engaging with politics are now realizing that their country is fighting a deadly conflict, even as the Kremlin gets ever more aggressive in trying to shape the narrative. Its slow-motion crackdown on freedoms has become a whirlwind of repression of late, as the last vestiges of a free press faced extinction.
This week, lawmakers proposed a 15-year prison sentence for people who post “fakes” about the war, and rumors are swirling about soon-to-be-closed borders or martial law. The Education Ministry scheduled a video lesson to be shown in schools nationwide on Thursday that described the war against Ukraine as a “liberation mission.”
And in Moscow, the regional office of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia has been fielding 2,000 calls a day since last Thursday.
Ukraine has pushed to publicize the fact that many young Russian soldiers were dying or being taken prisoner — a reality that the Russian military did not acknowledge until Sunday, the fourth day of the war.
Many families of soldiers are in the dark. On Feb. 23, Razil Malikov, a tank driver in the Russian Army, called his family and said he would be home soon; his unit’s military drills in Crimea were just about wrapping up.
The next morning, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Malikov hasn’t been heard from since. On Monday, Ukraine published a video of a captured soldier in his unit, apologizing for taking part in the invasion.
“He had no idea they could send him to Ukraine,” Mr. Malikov’s brother, Rashid Allaberganov, said in a phone interview from the south-central Russian region of Bashkortostan. “Everyone is in a state of shock.”
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March 3, 2022, 12:26 a.m. ET
Alan Rappeport
The U.S. is preparing more sanctions aimed at Russian oligarchs.
The Biden administration is preparing another package of sanctions aimed at additional Russian oligarchs as the United States seeks to put more pressure on Russia’s economy and allies of President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a person familiar with the plans.
The timing of the next batch of sanctions is not clear, but White House and Treasury Department officials have been planning to add to the economic punishment the United States and its allies have already imposed on Russia, which has not deterred it from its aggression in Ukraine. The sanctions on Russian financial institutions and the country’s central bank have been the most significant since the Cold War, severing much of Russia’s economy from the rest of the world, and wealthy allies of Mr. Putin have been individually targeted.
So far, the United States and Europe have avoided putting restrictions on Russia’s energy sector, out of concern that doing so would disrupt global oil and gas markets. President Biden suggested on Wednesday that sanctions on Russia’s energy sector remained a possibility, and experts have been waiting to see if the United States will take that step.
“The only way you are really going to move the needle and impact the Russian government is through energy sanctions,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a partner at Oliver Wyman who advises banks on sanctions.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Wednesday that the Biden administration would keep trying to roll out sanctions that will inflict pain on Russia’s economy without hurting consumers in the United States or elsewhere.
“We have attempted to shield the energy sector from sanctions, that hasn’t happened entirely, but I think that’s appropriate given our objectives,” Ms. Yellen said at an event in Chicago.
But she did not close the door on that possibility, adding: “Nothing is off the table in terms of future sanctions.”
The Treasury Department released new guidance on Wednesday explaining in greater detail the restrictions that it was imposing on transactions associated with Russia’s central bank. It also reiterated that the sanctions were designed so that energy payments could continue.
The Justice Department announced on Wednesday the creation of a task force to go after billionaire oligarchs who have aided Mr. Putin in his invasion of Ukraine. The task force will marshal the resources of various federal agencies to enforce the sweeping economic measures that the United States has imposed.
The plans for new sanctions on oligarchs were reported earlier by Reuters and The Washington Post.
March 3, 2022, 12:16 a.m. ET
Andrew Higgins
Putin’s war unites Eastern Europe in alarm.
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Eastern European countries fear a catastrophe could be in the making, as President Vladimir V. Putin seeks to turn back the clock and reclaim Russia’s lost sphere of influence, perilously close to their frontiers. Even leaders in the region who have long supported Mr. Putin are sounding the alarm.
Warnings about Moscow’s intentions, often dismissed until last Thursday’s invasion of Ukraine as “Russophobia” by those without experience of living in proximity to Russia, are now widely accepted as prescient. And while there has been debate about whether efforts to expand NATO into the former Soviet bloc were a provocation to Mr. Putin, his assault on Ukraine has left countries that joined the American-led military alliance convinced they made the right decision.
A Russian attack on Poland or other former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact that now belong to NATO is still highly unlikely, but Mr. Putin has “made the unthinkable possible,” warned Gabrielus Landsbergis, the foreign minister of Lithuania, Poland’s neighbor to the north.
Memories of Soviet hegemony over what is now NATO’s eastern flank — imposed after the Red Army liberated the region from Nazi occupation at the end of World War II — vary from country to country depending on history, geography and convoluted domestic political struggles.
But outrage over Russian aggression, even in countries historically sympathetic to Moscow, has derailed years of work by Russian diplomats and intelligence operatives to cultivate allies like Ataka, an ultranationalist political party in Bulgaria that is so close to Russia that it once launched its election campaign in Moscow.
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March 2, 2022, 11:50 p.m. ET
Austin Ramzy
Reporting from Hong Kong
Asian markets were largely up in early trading on Thursday after similar increases in the United States as cautious signals from the Federal Reserve on raising interest rates outweighed concerns about the war in Ukraine.
The Nikkei 225 in Japan had climbed 0.8 percent by midday, and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong was up 0.5 percent. The Kospi composite index in South Korea rose 1.4 percent. Shares were up even as oil continued to climb, with the Brent benchmark up 3.5 percent and U.S. crude futures up 3.4 percent.
March 2, 2022, 11:10 p.m. ET
Mike Ives
Reporting from Seoul
Shelling in Kharkiv on Tuesday killed a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring mission to Ukraine, the group said in a statement. It said the victim, Maryna Fenina, died “while getting supplies for her family in a city that has become a war zone.” The group’s mission in Ukraine, which consists of unarmed civilians, was established during the turmoil of 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and the conflict in the east began.
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March 2, 2022, 11:02 p.m. ET
Vivek Shankar
Zelensky says Russian troops are ‘confused children’ who don’t know why they are in Ukraine.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine early on Thursday portrayed invading Russian troops as directionless and asserted that the invasion plans of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had been “ruined,” even as the first major Ukrainian city fell in the war.
“Our soldiers, our border guards, our territorial defense, even simple farmers are capturing Russian soldiers every day, and all of them are saying the same thing: They don’t know why they are here,’’ Mr. Zelensky said in a speech posted on his Facebook page. “These are not warriors of a superpower. These are confused children who have been used.”
Since the invasion started a week ago, Mr. Zelensky has issued a call to arms with daily speeches and social-media comments. His willingness to fight — he has said he’s Russia’s target No. 1 — against a superior army has as made him something of a folk hero for many people who oppose Russian invasion. He received a standing ovation on Tuesday when he addressed the European Parliament on a video link. His urging of a civilian resistance has echoes of Winston Churchill’s defiance of Nazi Germany.
“Even though there are ten times more of them, the enemy’s morale is getting lower and lower,” Mr. Zelensky said. “We are a people who have ruined our enemy’s plans in one week.”
But Russia has stepped up bombardments of civilian targets across Ukraine and has begun to make some advances. Russian forces now control the southern port of Kherson and have a path to Odessa as they try to capture all of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. They have also surrounded another southern port, Mariupol, and the second-largest city, Kharkiv, in the country’s northeast. And, they have massed a convoy outside the capital, Kyiv.
Mr. Zelensky said 9,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine so far, while the Kremlin put its losses at 498. Neither of those figures could be independently verified.
Among civilians, the United Nations has reported 227 deaths through March 1 and noted the number is likely higher. More than one million people have fled Ukraine, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
Daisy Gibbons contributed translation.
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March 2, 2022, 10:40 p.m. ET
Jesus Jimenez
Wells Fargo and Bank of America, two of the largest financial institutions in the United States, pledged on Wednesday to each donate $1 million to humanitarian relief in Ukraine. Wells Fargo will send money to the American Red Cross, the World Central Kitchen and United Service Organizations. Bank of America will donate to the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Ukraine and the World Central Kitchen, among other charities.
March 2, 2022, 9:40 p.m. ET
Jesus Jimenez
The BBC announced on Wednesday that it had turned to an old-fashioned form of radio broadcasting to keep Ukrainians informed about the war. The broadcasting company said it had launched two new shortwave frequencies, which can be heard on cheap, portable devices, that can be received clearly in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and parts of Russia. The BBC said it will broadcast four hours of World Service news in English a day on the shortwave frequencies, a move that recalls an era in Europe when the British broadcaster was one of the few sources of independent news in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Cold War.
March 2, 2022, 8:24 p.m. ET
Austin Ramzy
Reporting from Hong Kong
More than one million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began last week, Filippo Grandi, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, said on Thursday. “For many millions more, inside Ukraine, it’s time for guns to fall silent, so that life-saving humanitarian assistance can be provided,” he wrote on Twitter.
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March 2, 2022, 7:10 p.m. ET
Farnaz Fassihi
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court opened an investigation on Wednesday into allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide committed in Ukraine since 2013 and during Russia’s current invasion of the country. The prosecutor, Karim Khan, had previously said that he planned to seek approval from the court’s presidency to launch the investigation, but he said 39 nations had referred allegations to the court, enabling his office to move forward immediately.
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March 2, 2022, 6:57 p.m. ET
The New York Times
Times photographers document Ukraine under attack.
For weeks, fear inside Ukraine had grown. But once Russia’s invasion began on Thursday, hitting the country from the north, east and south, the war became unavoidably tangible for Ukraine’s people.
This is a full-scale military conflict, a development that once seemed unimaginable in Europe in the post-Cold War era. These images document a populace coping with the initial stages of an invasion, and struggling with uncertainty and fear.
March 2, 2022, 6:52 p.m. ET
Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes
China asked Russia to delay the war until after the Olympics, according to a Western intelligence report.
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A Western intelligence report said senior Chinese officials told senior Russian officials in early February not to invade Ukraine before the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, according to senior Biden administration officials and a European official.
The report indicates that senior Chinese officials had some level of direct knowledge about Russia’s war plans or intentions before the invasion started last week. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing on Feb. 4 before the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Moscow and Beijing issued a 5,000-word statement at the time declaring that their partnership had “no limits,” denouncing NATO enlargement and asserting that they would establish a new global order with true “democracy.”
The intelligence on the exchange between the Chinese and Russian officials was classified. It was collected by a Western intelligence service and considered credible by officials. Senior officials in the United States and allied governments passed it around as they discussed when Mr. Putin might attack Ukraine.
However, different intelligence services had varying interpretations, and it is not clear how widely the information was shared.
One official familiar with the intelligence said the material did not necessarily indicate the conversations about an invasion took place at the level of Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin. Other officials briefed on the intelligence declined to give further details. The officials spoke about the report on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the intelligence.
When asked by email on Wednesday whether Chinese officials had urged Russian officials to delay an invasion of Ukraine until after the Olympics, Liu Pengyu, the Chinese Embassy spokesman in Washington, said, “These claims are speculation without any basis, and are intended to blame-shift and smear China.”
China held the closing ceremony of the Olympics on Feb. 20. The next day, Mr. Putin ordered more Russian troops to enter an insurgent-controlled area of eastern Ukraine after state television broadcast a meeting between him and his national security council and, separately, a furious speech in which he said Ukraine should be a part of Russia. Early on Feb. 24, the Russian military began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including carrying out attacks on cities with ballistic missiles, artillery and tanks.
