Russia-Ukraine WarWhat Happened on Day 22 of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

The suffering in Ukraine’s cities shows no sign of ending, even as Western officials say Russia’s offensive has stalled.

Follow the latest updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Civilians arrived at an aid station in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, after being evacuated from the besieged town of Irpin. Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
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Survivors emerge from a bombed theater, but Ukraine’s civilian suffering grows.

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A satellite image shows the Drama Theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Monday, before it was bombed. The word “children” had been written in large white letters in Russian in front of the building and behind it.Credit...Maxar Technologies

KYIV, Ukraine — A day after a Russian strike reduced to rubble a theater in southern Ukraine where hundreds of people had been huddling for shelter, rescuers wading through the debris — even as Russian shells kept falling — began pulling out survivors one by one.

“Adults and children are emerging from there alive,” Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmila Denisova, reported early Thursday as the rescue effort continued at the Drama Theater in Mariupol, a southern port city under siege by Russian forces.

But information was scarce from the desperate city, which has been squarely in Moscow’s cross hairs since the invasion began three weeks ago. With as many as a thousand people, many of them children, reported to have taken shelter at the theater and still unaccounted for, fears remained that whatever hope emerged from the rescue scene Thursday would eventually be eclipsed by despair.

“Our hearts are broken by what Russia is doing to our people, to our Mariupol,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an overnight public address.

The rescue efforts at the theater came against a fearsome backdrop of thousands of civilian casualties across much of Ukraine. Taking heavy losses on the battlefield, Russian forces have increasingly been aiming bombs and missiles at towns and cities. Unable to capture urban centers, they are leveling them instead, and the toll on civilians is worsening.

In Mariupol, it was people sheltering in a theater where the word “children” was written in huge letters on the pavement on both sides of the building, clearly visible from the air. In Chernihiv, it was people waiting in a bread line. In Kyiv, it was a 16-story apartment building pierced by a missile fragment, and, amid the debris and broken glass outside, a man with a sweatshirt pulled over his head kneeling silently beside a body under a bloody sheet, holding a lifeless hand for several minutes and then staggering away in grief.

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A man grieving over the body of a victim after pieces of a Russian cruise missile fell onto a high-rise building in Kyiv.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

As a fourth consecutive day of peace talks Thursday yielded no announcements, and the United Nations Security Council held an emergency session on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, Western officials portrayed the Russian advance as bogged down.

While Russian forces have made a bit of progress in the south and east, said one of the officials, they are stalled outside Kyiv, the capital, where they have taken heavy casualties and — perhaps most surprising — have failed to achieve dominance in the air. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.

Given all the setbacks, the Western officials said they were no longer confident that Russia planned a ground assault on Kyiv, a major objective. “An ill-judged assault on a city as well-prepared and well-defended as Kyiv would be a very costly business,” one said. They cautioned that Russia could still decide to assault the city or, failing that, strangle it in a prolonged siege.

As cruise missiles hammered their capital, Ukrainian fighters described several successful, if modest, counteroffensives against Russian forces.

To the east of Kyiv, in the suburban town of Brovary, the thrust of the counterattack focused on artillery, according to Lt. Pavlo Proskochilo, the military commander in the town. He said Ukrainian artillery strikes had in some places forced the Russians to dig in, assuming more of a defensive than offensive posture.

“We hit them in the teeth,” he said. “They are now waiting for reinforcements.”

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Lt. Tetiana Chornovol, the commander of a Ukrainian anti-tank missile unit operating in Brovary.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

It was not clear whether Ukrainian forces had actually forced the Russians to pull back in any location, and in outlying towns, the regular booms and thuds of artillery fire were constant through the day.

But it was not just soldiers vowing to take the fight to the invaders.

Outside the apartment building in Kyiv damaged by the missile, Tetiana Vaskovska, a 58-year-old lawyer, angrily surveyed the wreckage of what had been her home of 25 years.

“I know how to shoot,” she said. “Give me a gun.”

In recent days, an increasingly brutal war of attrition has been unfolding on the ground and in the air, with fierce battles raging in the suburbs of Kyiv, and Russian warships on the Black Sea launching missiles at towns around the southern city of Odessa. Eyewitness accounts, official statements and satellite imagery paint a picture of destruction on a vast scale. More than three million people have fled the country.

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Tetiana Vaskovska recovering family photographs from her home after pieces of a Russian missile hit her building in Kyiv.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

On Thursday, President Biden heaped unrestrained scorn on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who ordered the invasion. A day after labeling Mr. Putin a war criminal, Mr. Biden, speaking at the Capitol, called him a “murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine.” On Friday, Mr. Biden will speak with the president of China, Xi Jinping, and plans to warn Beijing not to aid Moscow, his spokeswoman said.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken suggested that Mr. Putin “may be growing more desperate,” and warned that Moscow might be preparing to use chemical weapons and had begun to kidnap local officials in Ukraine and replace them with Mr. Putin’s allies.

The House of Representatives voted, 424 to 8, to suspend normal trade relations with Russia, another blow to a country whose economy is already staggering under Western economic penalties.

In recent days, Mr. Zelensky has been taking his case directly to Western lawmakers, urging them to help Ukraine fight Russia. To the British Parliament he recalled the Nazis’ campaign of terror. To Congress, he spoke of Pearl Harbor. On Thursday, it was Germany’s turn: Mr. Zelensky, addressing the Bundestag, offered multiple references to German atrocities inflicted on Ukraine and Russia, among others, in World War II, and analogies to the Berlin Wall.

“You are like behind the wall again,” he said. “Not the Berlin Wall but in the middle of Europe, between freedom and slavery.”

A British intelligence report said that Russian forces have “made minimal progress on land, sea or air in recent days,” and that they “continue to suffer heavy losses.” U.S. assessments have put Russian military deaths at 7,000, though the figure cannot be independently confirmed.

If Russia has miscalculated, the cost may not be limited to the battlefields of Ukraine. On Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron of France, who once famously accused NATO of “brain death,” said that the war had reinvigorated it, giving the military alliance “an electric shock, a wake-up call.”

But for all their struggles, Russian forces are reported to have taken control of large sections of Ukraine, particularly in the east and south. In eastern cities controlled by Russia, witnesses described desolation and ruin, as well as looting by Russian troops, where tens of thousands of people had once lived.

In the eastern city of Volnovakha, the Russian defense ministry declared it “liberated,” but after weeks of bombardment, Moscow’s prize was a landscape of rubble and ash.

About 200 miles north of Mariupol, the city of Izyum has been surrounded by Russian forces for two weeks.

“No water, no light, no heat, no food, no medicine, no communication. The situation is no better than Mariupol,” the deputy mayor, Volodymyr Matsokin, wrote on Facebook. “There is no one to bury the dead.”

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kyiv, Ukraine; Michael Schwirtz from Odessa, Ukraine; and Eric Nagourney from New York. Mark Landler contributed reporting from London; Marc Santora from Lviv, Ukraine; and Glenn Thrush from Washington.

Ivan Nechepurenko
March 18, 2022, 5:41 a.m. ET

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said in a phone call with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany that Ukraine was trying to “drag the negotiations by making a series of new unrealistic proposals,” according to the Kremlin’s readout of the call. It said Putin had expressed a willingness by Russia to find solutions “within the limits of its well-known principal approaches.”

Hikari Hida
March 18, 2022, 5:39 a.m. ET

Reporting from Tokyo

The new U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, who arrived in Tokyo last month, has offered to host Ukrainian “evacuees” at his home in Tokyo while more permanent housing is found, according to an embassy statement. Japan, one of the world’s least welcoming countries to refugees, has been using the word evacuee instead of refugee to describe people fleeing Ukraine.

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Ivan Nechepurenko
March 18, 2022, 5:16 a.m. ET

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that pro-Moscow separatists were “tightening the noose” around the southern city of Mariupol, where Russian artillery strikes have reduced much of the city to rubble. There was still scant information about casualties at a theater that was attacked on Wednesday where hundreds of people were believed to be sheltering.

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Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
Andrew E. Kramer
March 18, 2022, 4:38 a.m. ET

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

In Kyiv, a large explosion from what appeared to be a missile strike or aerial bombardment blew a crater about a dozen yards in diameter into the courtyard of a residential building, shattered windows for blocks around and left at least one body lying on the pavement. It appeared to be one of the larger blasts to hit a residential area in Kyiv. The burned chassis of cars, wheels and car parts littered the area.

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Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Hikari Hida
March 18, 2022, 4:29 a.m. ET

Reporting from Tokyo

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will address Japanese lawmakers via video link next week, Taro Kono, a member of the country’s House of Representatives said on Twitter. It will be Zelensky’s first address to a legislative body in Asia, after directly appealing to lawmakers in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Germany.

Megan Specia
March 18, 2022, 4:27 a.m. ET

Reporting from Warsaw

Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, said that it was revoking the broadcasting license of RT, which is funded by the Russian government, amid an investigation into the channel’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. RT is currently not on the air in Britain because of sanctions.

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Valerie Hopkins
March 18, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET

Missiles hit Lviv, a safe haven until now, the mayor says.

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Officials in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, said Russian missiles hit an aircraft-repair plant about four miles from the city center. Attacks in western Ukraine have been rare since the war began.CreditCredit...Associated Press

LVIV, Ukraine — The western city of Lviv, about 50 miles from the border with Poland, has been a harbor for Ukrainians fleeing violence since the war began. But on Friday morning, a missile strike about four miles from the city center shattered its relative peace, the city’s mayor said.

Mayor Andriy Sadovy said several missiles had struck an aircraft repair plant at the airport complex in Lviv, destroying the buildings. He said that work had previously stopped at the plant and that no casualties had been reported. Smoke could be seen rising from the city’s west, in the general direction of the airport.

Attacks in western Ukraine have been rare since the war began, and Lviv itself has seen few if any. But a Russian airstrike on Sunday at a military base near Poland’s border brought worries of more to come.

As the Russian military focused its attention on the south, the north and the area around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, the relative security of the west made it both a destination for internally displaced people and a hub for the inflow of Western aid.

The strike may have been an attempt to target the capabilities of Ukraine’s air force. According to a local news article from January, the plant at the airport had a contract to fix and modify MiG-29 fighter jets and was “the only enterprise in Ukraine that refurbishes MiG-29s for the Ukrainian Air Force.”

Maksym Kozytsky, the regional military administrator, said in a news conference that six missiles had been shot from a plane over the Black Sea toward Lviv, two of which were shot down. No one was killed and one person was injured, he said.

Megan Specia
March 18, 2022, 2:19 a.m. ET

Reporting from Warsaw

The mayor of Lviv said there had been at least one strike on the western Ukrainian city on Friday. Lviv has been a safe haven during much of the war and has seen few if any attacks. The mayor said a building near the airport had been hit, but not the airport itself. Others in the city described hearing blasts.

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Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Victoria Kim
March 18, 2022, 1:28 a.m. ET

Japan said it would impose sanctions on an additional 15 individuals and nine organizations from Russia. The list includes defense officials, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman and a state-owned arms export agency, Rosoboronexport. Japan had already suspended normal trade relations with Russia, frozen the assets of oligarchs with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin and prohibited the country from issuing new sovereign bonds in Japanese markets.

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David E. Sanger
March 18, 2022, 1:19 a.m. ET

By labeling Putin a ‘war criminal,’ Biden personalizes the Ukraine conflict.

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On Thursday, President Biden called Vladimir V. Putin “a murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war.”Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When President Biden declared to reporters on Wednesday that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a “war criminal,” he was speaking from the heart, his aides said, reacting to the wrenching images of civilians being dragged from ruins of buildings shelled by Russian forces.

But he was also personalizing the conflict, in a way past presidents have avoided at moments of crisis with the United States’ leading nuclear-armed adversary for most of the past 75 years. And his remark underscored how personal condemnation has become policy, as Mr. Biden and his top aides frame Mr. Putin to Americans, Russians and the world as an indiscriminate killer who should be standing trial at The Hague instead of running a faded superpower.

Mr. Biden amplified his attacks on Thursday, calling Mr. Putin “a murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine.” His secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, chimed in, saying: “Personally, I agree. Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.”

But what began as a visceral reaction by Mr. Biden also appears to reflect a strategic decision that branding Mr. Putin as a war criminal supports the administration’s case as it simultaneously tries to keep the Western alliance unified — amid differing views in Europe over the wisdom of cornering the Russian leader — and attempts to pressure China not to bail Mr. Putin out of his economic crisis and military mistakes.

And Mr. Biden’s comments came after three weeks in which the United States and its allies piled sanctions on Russia that the administration insisted were designed to force Mr. Putin to withdraw his forces from Ukraine. But diplomats and intelligence officials from several countries say those sanctions are seen by Mr. Putin as an effort to stoke Russian unrest, turning both wealthy oligarchs and ordinary Russians against his rule.

The White House says that “regime change” in Russia is not on Washington’s strategic agenda. But in past cases when presidents have called national leaders war criminals — Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or Bashar al-Assad of Syria — it has frequently been linked to an effort, covert or overt, to drive them from office.

Megan SpeciaVictoria Kim
March 18, 2022, 12:42 a.m. ET

Here are the latest developments in Ukraine.

A missile strike on the outskirts of Lviv, the western city that has been a haven for people fleeing embattled cities elsewhere in Ukraine, rattled the relative peace there on Friday. In Kyiv, the capital, air raids sounded as city officials reported that a residential area had been shelled. And explosions were heard in the strategically important southern city of Odessa, nestled on the Black Sea.

With the war now in its fourth week, Russia is keeping up its siege campaign, even as American and British intelligence officials say its overall offensive has slowed amid heavy losses, logistical problems and an intense Ukrainian resistance. The humanitarian toll also continues to mount.

Major cities including Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Mariupol are under assault as Russia resorts to destroying cities that it has been unable to seize. Relentless bombardments have deprived urban populations of food, water and heat, and conditions appear to be no better in some eastern cities controlled by Russia, where witnesses have described desolation and ruin.

More than 3.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country, the United Nations says, warning that the number will continue to rise.

In the besieged port city of Mariupol, rescuers have pulled some survivors from the ruins of a theater where hundreds of people had been sheltering before Russian forces struck it on Wednesday. Many were unaccounted for, and with communications largely out in the city, the extent of the casualties was still unknown on Friday.

The toll on civilians has led President Biden to sharpen his rhetoric and personalize his response to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. This week, Mr. Biden called him a “war criminal” and a “murderous dictator,” prompting protests from the Kremlin.

Here are the latest developments:

  • With Mr. Biden scheduled to talk to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at 9 a.m. Eastern on Friday, Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken warned China against giving military aid to Russia. He said on Thursday that Mr. Biden would “make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression.”

  • President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who has spent the week delivering video addresses to several Western governments, vowed in an overnight speech to continue seeking increased support. “I feel that we are being increasingly understood, in Europe, in the world, in different countries,” he said. “And it gives us more and more support, which we have been asking for, for so long.”

  • Russia called for another emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Friday to discuss its widely debunked allegations that the United States is helping Ukraine develop biological weapons. The American and Ukrainian governments have strongly denied the claims, and the U.N. has said it has no evidence of such programs.

  • The United Nations, in an emergency session of its Security Council on Thursday, highlighted widespread human suffering in Ukraine, estimating the number of civilian casualties to be 1,900, with 726 people killed — 52 of them children — since the invasion began. The actual numbers are likely much higher. The Russian ambassador strongly denied that his country’s forces had deliberately attacked civilians.

  • The House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to strip Russia of its preferential trade status with the United States, moving to further penalize the country over its invasion of Ukraine.

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John Yoon
March 18, 2022, 12:14 a.m. ET

Reporting from Seoul

Australia said it had placed sanctions on 11 more Russian banks and government entities, as well as two additional oligarchs with links to Australian business interests.

John Yoon
March 17, 2022, 11:15 p.m. ET

Reporting from Seoul

South Korea said it would move its temporary embassy in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv to a neighboring country because of “escalating military threats.” The country’s temporary consular offices in Romania and in Chernivtsi, a Ukrainian city south of Lviv, will remain open, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said. It did not say where the new embassy would be located.

Jonathan Weisman
March 17, 2022, 10:57 p.m. ET

Once quiet on Russia, Republicans now use the war in Ukraine to attack Biden.

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Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, told reporters this week that President Biden’s White House had “caused this,” referring to the war in Ukraine. Credit...Samuel Corum for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers in both parties have described their shared determination to support Ukraine in its fight against Russia as the most remarkable consensus in Congress since the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But the sense of common purpose has not translated into bipartisan backing for the commander in chief; if anything, it has sharpened Republicans’ lines of attack against President Biden.

After Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the lead Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, proclaimed that the carnage depicted in a video that Mr. Zelensky played for lawmakers was a direct result of a response by the Biden administration that had been “slow, too little, too late.”

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, traced the invasion by the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, back to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the failure to attack Syria after its leader used chemical weapons and the Russian seizure of Crimea, all of which, he made sure to note, “happened when Joe Biden was either vice president or president.”

Absent from that analysis were four years under President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly undermined NATO, sided with Mr. Putin over his own intelligence community on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and tried to bring Russia back into the community of developed economies. Also missing was Mr. Kennedy’s own trip, with seven other Senate Republicans, to the Kremlin on July 4, 2018, after a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee determined that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

Democrats argue that such criticism shows how single-minded the Republican Party has become about tearing down its opponents.

“Republicans have defaulted to attacking Joe Biden in a moment of national crisis,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “There’s this infection in the Republican Party right now, in which power matters more than anything else, more than democracy, more than the peaceful transition of power, more than winning wars overseas.”

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Jonathan Abrams
March 17, 2022, 10:46 p.m. ET

Brittney Griner is said to be ‘OK’ as a Russian court extends her detention.

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Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner is expected to be in custody until at least May after a Russian court on Thursday extended her detention.Credit...Getty Images

A Russian court extended the detention of the W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner by two months on Thursday, and denied an appeal from her legal team, who had hoped to have her transferred to house arrest.

Griner, 31, has been held in Russia since mid-February on drug charges that could carry a sentence of up to 10 years if she is convicted. Griner is “OK” and has seen her Russian legal team multiple times a week while she has been in custody, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be identified publicly because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The Russian Federal Customs Service said on March 5 that its officials had detained an American basketball player, who was later identified as Griner. Customs officials accused Griner of having vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage at the Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow.

On Thursday, the Russian news agency Tass reported that Griner’s detention had been extended to May 19 during a hearing. Griner’s legal team in Russia had hoped to have her transferred to house arrest at the hearing, but were not surprised that the appeal of her detention was denied, according to the person with knowledge of the situation.

The investigation into the charges is ongoing, and it is typical for a Russian court to add time to the detention until a trial date — if one is necessary — is set, according to the person. Thursday’s hearing did not deal with the merit of the charges, the person said.

The W.N.B.A. season begins May 6. Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and a seven-time All Star for the Phoenix Mercury, is one of the game’s most prominent stars.

She is being held at a time of increasingly tense relations between the United States and Russia after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month. U.S. officials have repeatedly accused Russia of detaining and sentencing American citizens for dubious reasons.

The continued detention of a high-profile American could even be an effort by Russia to gain leverage in the political and economic standoff with Washington over the invasion, experts say.

Tass reported that Griner had not been visited by U.S. consular officials, despite Russia’s willingness to facilitate a meeting. But last week, Representative Colin Allred, Democrat of Texas, told The New York Times that Griner had been denied consular access by Russian officials.

“It’s already a violation of international norms and the way these things are handled when they happen to Americans abroad,” Allred said last week.

Griner is among the many W.N.B.A. players who compete internationally to supplement their American salaries, and she has played for the Russian team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, for several years.

Those close to Griner have said little publicly about the detention since it became widely known on March 5, likely hoping to arrange for her return through quiet diplomacy.

On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, joined an increasing number of politicians and public figures who have shown support for Griner when she tweeted “Free Brittney” with a link to a BBC article about Griner.

David Moll
March 17, 2022, 10:44 p.m. ET

President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, will discuss the war in Ukraine and “other issues of mutual concern” at 9 a.m. Eastern on Friday, the White House said in a statement.

Azi Paybarah
March 17, 2022, 10:29 p.m. ET

Italy’s minister of culture said the country would help Ukraine rebuild the Drama Theater of Mariupol, which was destroyed on Wednesday as hundreds of people were hiding there for safety. Minister Dario Franceschini said theaters around the world “belong to the whole humanity.”

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Lynsey AddarioIvor Prickett
March 17, 2022, 9:31 p.m. ET

Lynsey Addario and

In photos: Russian strikes bring death and destruction to civilians in Ukraine.

Credit...Lynsey Addario and Ivor Prickett for The New York Times, Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Emergency workers in Kyiv escorted residents back into the apartments after their building was destroyed by a missile, one of the latest civilian targets decimated as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth week with no sign of ending.

Nearby a mourner kneels next to a body on the street. In Irpin, a few miles to the north, rescuers who combed through the rubble at another bombing site carry out a woman who was injured.

Russian forces are targeting refugee escape routes, heavily-populated residential areas, schools and hospitals, hoping to force Ukraine into submission. For the past four weeks, photographers with The New York Times and other news organizations throughout Ukraine have been chronicling the war and its toll.

Michael Crowley
March 17, 2022, 7:51 p.m. ET

The U.S. calls Putin a ‘war criminal,’ but proving it would be difficult. 

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Residents trying to salvage whatever they can after the shelling of a residential building in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Monday.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — A day after President Biden branded President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “war criminal” over civilian deaths in Ukraine, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Thursday echoed his assessment and said Mr. Putin would be held accountable.

“Yesterday, President Biden said that, in his opinion, war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. Personally, I agree,” Mr. Blinken said, citing a list of horrific Russian attacks that have killed unarmed Ukrainians, including children. “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.”

But the practical obstacles to punishing Mr. Putin are huge, experts said, though his battlefield commanders in Ukraine could be more vulnerable. Complicating matters is the fact that the United States does not officially recognize the International Criminal Court, which is the main forum for prosecuting war crimes.

Some experts said that declaring the Russian leader a war criminal could make it more difficult to negotiate a peace agreement with him, but that it might also give Ukraine and the West some leverage if Mr. Putin sought to bargain for immunity from any prosecution.

The back-to-back comments by Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken marked a clear change in U.S. language on the subject after weeks of noncommittal statements by American officials even as Ukrainian hospitals and apartment blocks were pounded to rubble.

Two weeks ago, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters that the United States had “not made conclusions” about whether war crimes were being committed in Ukraine, saying the question was the subject of an official legal review.

Growing evidence of horrific Russian attacks on civilian targets — including the bombing on Wednesday of a Mariupol theater that may have sheltered hundreds of people driven from their homes — has made that position hard to sustain.

Legal experts said U.S. officials must be mindful of not seeming to prejudge complex legal issues that may come to trial, and Mr. Biden and Mr. Blinken both couched their assessments in personal terms, stopping short of statements of U.S. government policy.

“I think he is a war criminal,” Mr. Biden said in response to a reporter’s question on Wednesday.

A Senate resolution unanimously approved on Tuesday condemned Mr. Putin for “alleged war crimes” in Ukraine.

“The reason for all their caution is that for any crime, there’s an evidentiary standard that has to be met,” said Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School who serves on a State Department legal advisory board. “If you’re having a trial, you can’t just say, Yeah we all pretty much assume that he knew what was going on.”

Ms. Hathaway said prosecutors would have to show that Russian commanders had intentionally targeted civilian structures, or struck them during attacks that failed to discriminate between civilian and military targets. In the case of Mr. Putin, prosecutors would have to demonstrate that he issued specific orders tied to those actions.

Apprehending and trying anyone accused of crimes, not least the sitting president of a nuclear-armed nation, is another matter. “There’s no marshal service that goes with the International Criminal Court,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey and a former top State Department official for human rights.

But Mr. Malinowski and others said war crimes investigations can have a powerful deterrent effect. While Russian officials might hope that sanctions against them will someday be lifted, an indictment for war crimes brings a permanent stigma and risk of arrest.

With Russia’s military campaign bogged down and Ukraine claiming to have killed several Russian generals, Mr. Putin’s commanders in the field might have a reasonable fear of being captured and eventually tried for what amounts to mass murder. Frontline troops could also be demoralized by the official investigations.

“The hope is that it creates a disincentive for the most exposed people, who also happen to be the people closest to the fighting,” Ms. Hathaway said.

And it is possible that Mr. Putin would be deposed and could somehow fall into foreign hands. The former nationalist Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, accused of war crimes during the breakup of Yugoslavia, was arrested by Serbian authorities after his 2001 ouster from office and delivered to The Hague for prosecution. (He died during his trial in 2006.)

The concept of international justice for war crimes was established during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi German leaders after World War II. It is based today on the Geneva Conventions, a series of treaties governing the wartime treatment of civilians, prisoners of war and others, which have been adopted by every nation.

Although multiple bodies and nations are investigating possible war crimes in Ukraine, experts said the International Criminal Court offered the best chance for real accountability. Based in The Hague, the court was established in 1998 after separate tribunals prosecuted mass atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, demonstrating the need for a standing judicial body to handle such cases.

Last month, the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, announced that he was opening an investigation into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Khan traveled this week to Poland and Ukraine to begin collecting evidence and met virtually with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In an interview with CNN from Ukraine, Mr. Khan said he would investigate whether there were instances where Ukrainian forces mounted attacks from populated areas that could make them legitimate targets. “But even then, it’s no license to use cluster bombs or use disproportionate attacks in concentrated civilian areas,” he added.

The United States has had a fraught relationship with the court and is not among its 123 member nations. President George W. Bush revoked President Bill Clinton’s signature on its founding document, saying he would not accept the court’s jurisdiction over American troops abroad. President Barack Obama cooperated with the court but never sought to make the United States a member.

The administration of President Donald J. Trump was vividly hostile toward the body, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo derided as a “kangaroo court” and biased against Israel. Mr. Trump even slapped sanctions on its top prosecutor and others after she began an inquiry into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

“Traditionally, the U.S. has objected to assertion of jurisdiction by the I.C.C. over U.S. nationals because the U.S. never accepted the jurisdiction of the court,” said Todd Buchwald, the head of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice during the Obama administration. “The question is, how do we think about this now?”

Other bodies could prosecute alleged Russian war crimes. The United Nations or allied countries could establish special tribunals, and individual nations can also assert what is known as universal jurisdiction, a legal concept allowing a nation’s court to try people for human rights crimes. In January, a German court following the principle convicted a former security official for the Syrian government on torture charges.

But the Syrian, Anwar Raslan, had migrated to Germany, where he presumably did not expect to be identified and apprehended.

Russian officials are highly unlikely to make themselves vulnerable to such arrests.

“A very big problem is actually getting people in the dock,” said Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University who served in senior national security roles in the Bush administration.

“I’m very doubtful that Putin will ever find himself in The Hague,” he added.

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

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Farnaz FassihiGlenn Thrush
March 17, 2022, 7:47 p.m. ET

U.N. officials at a Security Council meeting paint a dire picture of Ukraine’s suffering.

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A home in Kyiv damaged by pieces of a Russian missile on Thursday.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

The United Nations offered a dire portrait of widespread human suffering in Ukraine during an emergency session of the Security Council on Thursday, estimating the number of civilian casualties to be 1,900, with 726 people killed — 52 of them children — since the invasion began.

The actual numbers are likely to be much higher.

“Most of these casualties were caused by the use in populated areas of explosive weapons with a wide impact area,” Rosemary A. DiCarlo, the U.N. under secretary for political and peace-building affairs, told the council in a tense and grim afternoon meeting.

U.N.-affiliated international organizations, aware that Russia would deploy its veto power to block meaningful action in the council, used the session to place the brightest possible spotlight on the suffering visited on Ukraine’s population, enduring nearly nonstop Russian attacks and unable to shield the most vulnerable citizens.

For its part, Russia used the meeting to deny its troops had targeted civilians and to try to shift blame for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine onto the United States and its European allies, arguing members of the NATO alliance had armed Ukraine and used it as a pawn in a confrontation with Russia.

“You are fueling this conflict, pouring oil into it,” the Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said. He added that the weapons the West was providing Ukraine would end up in the hands of terrorist groups targeting Europe. “Do you know how dangerous it is for your own security?”

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, accused Russia of using the “council as a venue for its disinformation and for promoting its propaganda.”

Most of the meeting was focused on drawing attention to the plight of Ukrainian civilians.

Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said the war had severely disrupted health services and had cut people off from basic supplies because of widespread destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure. The W.H.O. has verified 43 attacks on health care facilities, during which 12 people were killed and 34 were injured, including health workers.

“The lifesaving medicine we need right now is peace,” he said.

Approximately 35,000 mental health patients in hospitals and other facilities in Ukraine are now facing a worsening shortage of medicine and other basic supplies, according to the W.H.O.’s Ukraine response team.

Of particular concern is a critical shortage of oxygen caused by the closure of eight facilities that produce the gas, which is essential for a range of chronic illnesses and a necessity in most surgeries.

Since only a third of Ukraine’s population is vaccinated against the coronavirus, the risk of a severe outbreak is rising, especially as residents huddle in close quarters to avoid being killed in a Russian attack, W.H.O. officials reported.

The impact of the fighting was having a particularly devastating effect on women and children, said Ms. Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador.

The three million refugees displaced so far “stuffed their lives into backpacks, and left their homes and everything they knew behind,” she told the Security Council. “Today, many of them know that their apartment buildings and streets have been bombed to rubble. And the horrors continue for those who remain in Ukraine.”

Mr. Nebenzya denied reports of his country’s forces targeting and killing civilians. As he has done repeatedly in council meetings since the war began, he called those reports “fakes” and “disinformation,” and claimed they resulted from Ukraine arming civilians to fight the war.

Mr. Nebenzya also denied that the theater in Mariupol that was destroyed by a strike was a civilian shelter where hundreds of people were staying. He alleged that armed Nazi groups in Ukraine were using the building to store weapons and had taken civilians as human shields.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Security Council has held multiple emergency meetings, but Russia has blocked legally binding resolutions intended to stop the war.

Russia vetoed one resolution that condemned its invasion of Ukraine and called on it to withdraw its troops. Another resolution, focused on humanitarian aid and calling for an end to hostilities, was withdrawn because Russia again threatened to veto it.

That resolution, put forth by France and Mexico, will go to the full General Assembly next week, where diplomats predict it will pass with a majority. General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding but they carry political weight.

Russia had drafted its own humanitarian resolution and had scheduled a council meeting on Friday for a vote. But American and European members of the council called the Russian document “a mockery” and predicted it would fail with a majority of no votes from the 15-member council.

Russia announced that it was suspending the vote on its resolution and instead called an emergency meeting on Friday morning to discuss its allegations that the United States has been providing funding and support for biological weapons programs in Ukrainian laboratories. The United States and Ukraine have denied that allegation, and the United Nations has said it has no evidence of a weaponized biological program in Ukraine.

Edward Wong
March 17, 2022, 7:07 p.m. ET

Reporting from Washington

The U.S. will punish China if it gives military aid to Russia, Blinken says.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, left, and President Xi Jinping of China met on Feb. 4 in Beijing, two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.Credit...Pool photo by Pavel Golovkin

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Thursday that the United States would punish China if President Xi Jinping chose to give military aid to Russia for the war in Ukraine, where Russian forces have killed thousands of civilians.

“We’re concerned that they’re considering directly assisting Russia with military equipment to use in Ukraine,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference in Washington. “President Biden will be speaking to President Xi tomorrow and will make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression, and we will not hesitate to impose costs.”

Mr. Blinken is the most senior U.S. official to explicitly warn China against giving military aid to Russia. He said that because of China’s ties to Russia, it had a special responsibility to try to persuade President Vladimir V. Putin to end his war.

But “it appears that China is moving in the opposite direction by refusing to condemn this aggression, while seeking to portray itself as a neutral arbiter,” Mr. Blinken said.

The White House announced on Thursday that Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi would talk on Friday as part of “ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication.” The two presidents are expected to discuss the war in Ukraine and competition between the United States and China, among other issues, the White House said.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi last spoke on Nov. 15 in a video call. The talk scheduled for Friday was arranged by Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, and Yang Jiechi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo, when the two met in Rome on Monday, said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary. During a seven-hour meeting, Mr. Sullivan warned Mr. Yang that China should not give aid to Russia.

“This is an opportunity for President Biden to assess where President Xi stands,” Ms. Psaki said at a news briefing on Thursday. She added that there had been an “absence of denunciation by China of what Russia is doing,” which “flies in the face, of course, of everything China stands for, including the basic principles of the U.N. charter, including the basic principles of respect for sovereignty of nations.”

“So the fact that China has not denounced what Russia is doing in and of itself speaks volumes,” Ms. Psaki continued. “And it also speaks volumes not only in Russia and Ukraine, but around the world.”

Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin met on Feb. 4 in Beijing, two weeks before the invasion, and issued a 5,000-word statement that said their two countries had a partnership with “no limits.”

U.S. officials told The New York Times on Sunday that Russia had asked China to give it military equipment and support after Mr. Putin began his full-scale invasion on Feb. 24. One official said Russia had also asked for economic aid to help blunt the harsh sanctions imposed on the country by the United States and its European and Asian allies.

The State Department sent cables to allies saying that China had given positive signals on military aid, a European official said on Monday. The official added that Russia had requested five types of equipment: surface-to-air missiles, drones, armored vehicles, logistics vehicles and intelligence-related equipment.

A senior Pentagon official gave some different details this week, saying the request from Russia included drones, secure radios and even meals ready to eat, rations for troops commonly known as M.R.E.s. The official said the United States had received indications before the Rome meeting that China was inclined to oblige the Russian request.

The officials spoke to The Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of diplomatic, military and intelligence matters.

Pentagon officials have detected that the Russian military is having problems with the performance of air-to-ground and ground-to-ground missiles in the war. The Russian ground offensive has stalled in parts of Ukraine, with columns of tanks and other armored vehicles sitting for days on roads. U.S. officials have given a conservative estimate that more than 7,000 Russian troops have been killed, more than the number of American troops killed in over 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

The Russian military has turned to a tactic it used in wars in Chechnya and Syria: firing barrages of missiles, rockets and shells at cities to kill civilians, including many women and children, to try to force a surrender. Although the United Nations has estimated the civilian death toll in Ukraine at 726, it is likely to be much higher; the official toll of civilians killed in the city of Mariupol alone was at least 2,400 earlier this week.

Even with the slaughter, Chinese officials have persisted in supporting Russia. They have blamed the United States for the war and echoed Mr. Putin in criticizing NATO. Chinese diplomats and state media organizations have amplified Kremlin propaganda and a conspiracy theory about Pentagon-funded bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Xue Hanqin, the Chinese judge at the International Court of Justice, sided with the Russian judge in dissenting from a ruling that Russia must immediately end its war in Ukraine. The vote was 13 to 2.

Starting in November, American officials shared intelligence about Russia’s troop buildup around Ukraine with Chinese officials and asked them to try to persuade Mr. Putin not to invade, but were rebuffed, U.S. officials have said. And a Western intelligence report said senior Chinese officials asked senior Russian officials in early February to hold off on invading Ukraine until after the Winter Olympics in Beijing, U.S. and European officials have said.

Qin Gang, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, wrote in an opinion essay published on Tuesday by The Washington Post that “assertions that China knew about, acquiesced to or tacitly supported this war are purely disinformation.”

Evan S. Medeiros, who served as a senior Asia director on the National Security Council in the Obama White House, wrote in an opinion essay published on Thursday by The Financial Times that Europe must put pressure on Beijing to stop supporting Moscow in the war.

“Its strategic alignment with Russia before the invasion, combined with its enabling of Russia since the first missile struck, is evocative of the 1950s Sino-Soviet alliance,” he wrote, referring to a period when Mao and Stalin coordinated on politics and foreign policy.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

A correction was made on 
March 17, 2022

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified a member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo who helped arrange a scheduled talk on Friday between President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China. The official is Yang Jiechi, not Wang Yi.

How we handle corrections

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Anton Troianovski
March 17, 2022, 6:53 p.m. ET

Why Vladimir Putin invokes Nazis to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

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Billboards quoting President Vladimir V. Putin in Simferopol, Crimea, this month. The one on the right reads “We want the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”Credit...Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters

Ukraine’s government is “openly neo-Nazi” and “pro-Nazi,” controlled by “little Nazis,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says.

American officials led by President Biden are responsible for the “Nazification” of Ukraine, one of Russia’s top lawmakers says, and should be tried before a court. In fact, another lawmaker says, it is time to create a “modern analogy to the Nuremberg Tribunal” as Russia prepares to “denazify” Ukraine.

In case the message was not clear, the Kremlin’s marquee weekly news show aired black-and-white footage on Sunday of German Nazis being hanged on what is now central Kyiv’s Independence Square. The men drop, dangling from a long beam, and the crowd cheers.

The language of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been dominated by the word “Nazi” — a puzzling assertion about a country whose president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and who last fall signed a law combating anti-Semitism. Mr. Putin only began to apply the word regularly to the country’s present-day government in recent months, though he has long referred to Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution of 2014 as a fascist coup.

The “Nazi” slur’s sudden emergence shows how Mr. Putin is trying to use stereotypes, distorted reality and his country’s lingering World War II trauma to justify his invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin is casting the war as a continuation of Russia’s fight against evil in what is known in the country as the Great Patriotic War, apparently counting on lingering Russian pride in the victory over Nazi Germany to carry over into support for Mr. Putin’s attack.

“This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive,” scholars of genocide and Nazism from around the world said in an open letter after Mr. Putin invaded. While Ukraine has far-right groups, they said, “none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine.”

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is Jewish.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Ukrainians say that the horrors of Russia’s invasion show that if any country needs to be denazified, it is Russia. Its war has brought devastation to Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol and widespread suffering to Kyiv.

And Mr. Putin, in a speech on Wednesday, used the us-versus-them language of a dictator to proclaim that Russian society needed a “self-purification” from the pro-Western “scum and traitors” in its midst.

Many believe that Mr. Putin’s stated determination to “denazify” Ukraine is code for his aim to topple the government and repress pro-Western activists and groups. It is an echo of how he has used Russian remembrance of the nation’s suffering and victory in World War II to militarize Russian society and justify domestic crackdowns and foreign aggression.

Ukrainians have closed ranks behind Mr. Zelensky, however, causing Mr. Putin to escalate the brutality of his war. Mr. Putin’s “denazification” mission increasingly means that he is determined to “destroy all Ukrainians,” the country’s information minister, Oleksandr Tkachenko, wrote on Facebook, in Russian, last week.

“This is worse than Nazism,” Mr. Tkachenko wrote.

It may seem hard to fathom that regular Russians could accept Mr. Putin’s comparison of neighboring Ukraine — where millions of Russians have relatives and friends — to Nazi Germany, the country that invaded the Soviet Union at the cost of some 27 million Soviet lives.

Like many lies, Mr. Putin’s claim about a Nazi-controlled Ukraine has a hall-of-mirrors connection to reality. Jewish groups and others have, in fact, criticized Ukraine since its pro-Western revolution in 2014 for allowing Ukrainian independence fighters who at one point sided with Nazi Germany to be venerated as national heroes.

Some fringe nationalist groups, who have no representation in Parliament, use racist rhetoric and symbolism associated with Nazi Germany.

Eduard Dolinsky, director general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, a group representing Ukrainian Jews, said that some in the country do derisively refer to those far-right groups as “Naziki” — “little Nazis” — as Mr. Putin does. On social media, Mr. Dolinsky in recent years has frequently called attention to things like the renaming of a major stadium in western Ukraine for Roman Shukhevych, a Ukrainian nationalist leader. He commanded troops that were implicated in mass killings of Jews and Poles during World War II.

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Ukrainian nationalist party supporters marching in Lviv in 2018 to commemorate the death of Roman Shukhevych, who commanded troops implicated in mass killings of Jews and Poles in World War II. Credit...Pavlo Palamarchuk/European Pressphoto Agency

“This problem did exist and continues to,” Mr. Dolinsky said in a phone interview from western Ukraine, a few days after fleeing Kyiv. “But it has of course receded 10 times in importance compared to the threat posed by Russia in its alleged fight against Nazism.”

Mr. Dolinsky’s posts about far-right issues in Ukraine were often amplified by Russian officials, who used them as evidence that the country was dominated by Nazis. Some Ukrainians criticized him for playing into Russian propaganda, but Mr. Dolinsky says he has no regrets — and notes he has steadfastly refused invitations to appear on Russian state television.

Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin analyst who appears frequently on state television, claims that Ukraine’s modern-day Nazis are not anti-Jewish but anti-Russian — because that is the agenda that he claims Western intelligence agencies set for them. In Russia’s increasingly convoluted propaganda narrative, reprised by Mr. Putin in his speech Wednesday, the West is backing Ukraine’s “Nazis” as a way to degrade Ukraine’s Russian heritage and use the country as a platform to destroy Russia.

“We are being convinced again and again that the Kyiv regime, for which its Western masters have set the task of creating an aggressive ‘anti-Russia,’ is indifferent to the fate of the people of Ukraine themselves,” Mr. Putin said.

Mr. Markov says the Kremlin started using the “Nazi” terminology to “get through to Western politicians and media” about the necessity of invading Ukraine. But the use of the word also appears geared toward Russians, for whom remembrance of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany remains perhaps the single most powerful element of a unifying national identity.

Now, the narrative goes, Mr. Putin is finally carrying out the Soviet Union’s unfinished business.

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A patriotic mural showing Soviet pilots from World War II, who were photographed during the Victory Parade in 1945 in Moscow. The sign in Russian reads: “The saved world remembers you!”Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

“From the point of view of Russian society, today’s Ukrainian fascists are successors to the cause of the fascism of that time,” Mr. Markov said, echoing a Kremlin talking point.

Even as state television ignores the devastation that Russian forces are causing in Ukraine, and the mounting tally of Russian casualties, it is filled with reports about Ukrainian extremist groups — ones that in reality occupy a marginal place in Ukrainian society. Reports about streets being renamed for Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader who at one point sided with Nazi Germany against the Soviets — before the Germans turned against him and put him in a concentration camp — offend older generations of Russians who heard about the evils of Nazi collaborators.

With Ukrainian nationalist groups now playing an important role in defending their country from the Russian invasion, Western supporters of Ukraine have struggled for the right tone. Facebook last week said it was making an exception to its anti-extremism policies to allow praise for Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion military unit, “strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard.”

Russia’s state media seized upon Facebook’s move as the latest proof that the West supported Nazis in Ukraine. They also highlight it when Western politicians, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, greet Mr. Zelensky with “Slava Ukraini!” — “Glory to Ukraine!” — a greeting used by Bandera’s troops.

“For people socialized in this Soviet culture, these are definitely negative associations,” said Vladimir Malakhov, a historian at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences who studies nationalism and ethnicity. “It’s anti-Semitism, it’s being anti-Russian, it’s radicalism.”

Mr. Dolinsky, of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, noted that there have been many Jews among the 3 million Ukrainians who have fled the country, and that some may not return. Mr. Putin’s war may thus deal a devastating blow to Ukraine’s Jewish community, he said.

“This will be among the results of this ‘denazification,’” Mr. Dolinsky said. “Our lives have been destroyed.”

Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco, Catherine Porter from Toronto and Maria Varenikova from Western Ukraine.

Farnaz Fassihi
March 17, 2022, 5:24 p.m. ET

Russia called for an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on Friday to discuss its allegations that the U.S. is helping Ukraine develop biological weapons, claims that the U.S. and Ukraine have denied. The U.N. has said it has no evidence of such programs. Russia’s ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said he would provide documents to support the allegations to the council president. The U.S. ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said the council could not be fooled and that Russia was trying “to use this council as a venue for its disinformation and promoting its propaganda.”

John Eligon
March 17, 2022, 5:12 p.m. ET

In countries friendly to Russia, some say they think Putin has a point in his war.

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A woman reads a Vietnamese newspaper featuring front-page coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine at her stall in Hanoi last month.Credit...Nam Nguyen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Most of the world has loudly and unequivocally condemned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for sparking a war with Ukraine. But in countries where governments have remained neutral, tacitly supported Russia or encouraged the dissemination of false or sanitized accounts of the war, citizens are voicing a much more complicated and forgiving narrative of his invasion.

Interviews with dozens of people in those countries — from Vietnam to Afghanistan to South Africa to China — reveal that while many are disturbed by the war and the loss of innocent lives, some are sympathetic to Russia’s justifications for its invasion of Ukraine and do not accept the good-versus-evil scenario presented by the United States and Europe.

Their views are shaped by factors such as their countries’ deep and historic ties to Russia and the history of interventions and atrocities perpetrated by some Western countries — as well as disinformation and censorship that in some places is propagated by the state.

Many found resonance in the argument that Ukraine’s effort to join NATO compromised Russia’s security. Some held on to a nostalgia for the old Soviet Union. Still others could not side with a West that they viewed as hypocritical. These attitudes have helped prime the pump for the flourishing of conspiracy theories about the war.

Vuong Quoc Hung, a 36-year-old stockbroker from Hanoi, said he had grown up watching documentaries and films on national television about the Soviet Red Army heroes who battled Nazi Germany during World War II. That made him fall in love with Russia, he said.

“So when Russia attacks Ukraine, people like me will sympathize with Russia, assuming that it is purely Russian self-defense,” he said.

The difficult balance for some, though, is that innocent Ukrainian lives are being lost. That toll is impossible to justify, some said, even if they think that Russia had the right to attack in self-defense.

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Julie Creswell
March 17, 2022, 5:11 p.m. ET

Koch Industries will continue to operate its factories in Russia.

Koch Industries, the industrial conglomerate run by the billionaire Charles Koch, has said it will continue to operate factories in Russia as other companies pull out after Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Dave Robertson, the president and chief operating officer, said in a statement dated Wednesday that the aggression in Ukraine was an “affront to humanity,” but that Koch would not stop operating two Russian glass factories in its Guardian Industries unit.

Guardian’s business employs 600 people and makes up a small portion of the privately held company, which had estimated revenue of $115 billion last year. Koch Industries will “not walk away from our employees there or hand over these manufacturing facilities to the Russian government so it can operate and benefit from them,” Mr. Robertson said.

In recent days, dozens of large corporations, including British American Tobacco, McDonald’s and Ikea, have said they were temporarily suspending sales, closing stores or winding down operations in Russia. Many had invested millions or billions of dollars in the country in recent decades.

Last week, the Russian government warned that it could nationalize the assets of Western companies that were pulling out of Russia and told its leaders to “act decisively” to preserve jobs in the country as its economy crumbled.

Since the conflict started, Koch Industries has provided financial assistance to employees and their families in Ukraine and will continue to do so, Mr. Robertson said.

March 17, 2022, 4:43 p.m. ET

Russia is destroying Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.

Famed for its poets, artists, writers and eye-popping architecture, Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, has long occupied an important place in the collective imaginations of both Ukrainians and Russians. These days, however, it is notable for something else: its searing scenes of destruction.

Closer to Russia than any other large Ukrainian city, Kharkiv has loomed large in President Vladimir V. Putin’s view of Ukraine as no more than an appendage of Russia unjustly snatched away by the machinations of foreigners and misguided Ukrainian nationalists.

During and after World War I, the city served as the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a largely Moscow-controlled entity. Most Kharkiv residents are Russian speakers, and many are ethnic Russians.

Last month, Dmytro Kuzubov put on his headphones and walked around Kharkiv for hours. He felt that the war would start soon and he wanted to visit some of his favorite places. The attacks started a few days later.

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The Kharkiv regional administration building laid in ruins after a rocket struck directly in front of it.Credit...Pavel Dorogoy/Associated Press
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A tram depot laid in ruins after sustaining heavy damage from shelling.Credit...Andrew Marienko/Associated Press

Unable to take control of the city, Russia has been destroying it in a relentless barrage. Evoking memories of Syria and Chechnya, Russia has been terrorizing the city’s inhabitants with overwhelming and indiscriminate force. It is following a similar plan in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv.

“The most horrible thing was the whistle of jets. I will remember them all my life,” said Mr. Kuzubov, who has since fled Kharkiv, along with hundreds of thousands of others.

The city is full of historic monuments, and home to more than two dozen universities and some 200,000 students and professors. At least 500 civilians have been killed, according to the city’s emergency services agency. The true number is likely higher, and rescue workers continue to dig through the rubble.

The scenes of destruction — a school, a mall, a tram depot, Kharkiv regional administration building, Kharkiv National University’s main building — are everywhere.

A kindergarten, where children once played, was pulverized into ruins.

A living room where lives once unfurled is now empty, its windows blown out.

And then there was the site of the Old Hem, a popular pub in the building’s basement, where a statue of Ernest Hemingway greeted patrons out front.

“It was one of my favorite places. A lot of stuff happened there — screaming, fights, drinking, funny songs,” said Alex Sedov, a third-generation Kharkivite. “It was a great place, and I’m very sad it’s gone.”

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Smoke came out of the ruins of the Old Hem, a popular pub located in the basement of a residential building.Credit...Pavel Dorogoy/Associated Press

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Catie Edmondson
March 17, 2022, 4:11 p.m. ET

The U.S. House of Representatives votes to suspend normal trade relations with Russia.

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With a lopsided 424-to-8 vote, the House voted overwhelmingly to further penalize Russia’s economy in response to the invasion of Ukraine.CreditCredit...Vitaly Nevar/Reuters

WASHINGTON — The House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to strip Russia of its preferential trade status with the United States, moving to further penalize the country’s economy in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The lopsided 424-to-8 vote came after President Biden announced last week that the United States and its European allies would take new steps to isolate Russia from the global trading system. All of the lawmakers who opposed the measure were Republicans.

The bill, which would allow the United States to impose higher tariffs on Russian goods, is the latest in a series of measures that lawmakers have approved to support Ukraine and punish Russia for its invasion. Others include a ban on Russian oil and gas products and a $13.6 billion military and humanitarian aid package.

The trade measure still needs Senate approval. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said he would work to move it through the chamber quickly.

The House vote came a day after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine delivered a searing speech to Congress via video link in which he urged lawmakers to do more to help his country and penalize Russia. His address, as well as a wrenching video he showed of Russian-inflicted carnage in Ukraine, hung heavily over the House floor on Thursday as lawmakers debated the trade bill.

Mr. Zelensky “showed us the absolute horrors that Russia is inflicting on the Ukrainian people in full view of the world,” said Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “And he pleaded for us to do more. With the legislation that stands before us at this hour, we intend to answer his call.”

Top lawmakers in the House proposed nearly a month ago to strip Russia of its trading status and begin a process to expel the country from the World Trade Organization. But last week, as the House worked to advance the legislation in tandem with a measure to ban the importation of Russian oil and gas products, Democrats stripped out the trade provision at the request of the Biden administration, which sought more time to confer with European allies about the move.

“Folks, I know I’ve occasionally frustrated you,” Mr. Biden said to House Democrats at their retreat in Philadelphia last week. “But more important than us moving when we want to is making sure all of NATO is together — is together. They have different vulnerabilities than we do.”

The move by the United States to strip Russia of its preferential trade status — known as “permanent normal trade relations” — carries symbolic weight, but trade experts have said it would have a limited economic effect compared with other sanctions that have already been imposed.

The legislation passed by the House would also suspend normal trade relations with Belarus, in recognition of its role in aiding Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

Stripping Russia of its trading status would be the latest in a growing list of economic penalties imposed on the country, whose economy is facing collapse.

The debate in Congress over how to best respond to Russia’s assault on Ukraine has taken on an increasingly bitter partisan tinge, as Republicans have moved to cast the invasion as an outgrowth of what they characterize as Mr. Biden’s shortcomings. Some of that spirit crept into the debate on the trade measure on Thursday, such as when Representative Tom Rice, Republican of South Carolina, criticized the Biden administration for “projecting weakness to Putin and his allies.”

Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, lavished praise on how both parties had worked together in a timely fashion to ban Russian energy products and advance the trade measure. Then he turned to criticizing Mr. Biden for failing to approve new gas drilling licenses at home.

For the most part, though, lawmakers trained their ire on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Speaking on the House floor, Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused him of committing war crimes against civilians and children, echoing comments made this week by Mr. Biden.

Ms. Pelosi said that “what Putin is doing in Ukraine — bombing civilians, targeting children — is outside” what she called “the circle of civilized human behavior.”

“He is committing war crimes,” she said, “and he must be held accountable.”

Ana Swanson contributed reporting.

Edward Wong
March 17, 2022, 3:58 p.m. ET

Reporting from Washington

Blinken added, “President Biden will be speaking to President Xi tomorrow, and will make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression, and we will not hesitate to impose costs.”

Edward Wong
March 17, 2022, 3:58 p.m. ET

Reporting from Washington

Blinken said that the United States was concerned China is “considering directly assisting Russia with military equipment to use in Ukraine.”

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Edward Wong
March 17, 2022, 3:58 p.m. ET

Reporting from Washington

The U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said at a news conference in Washington, “It appears that China is moving in the opposite direction by refusing to condemn this aggression, while seeking to portray itself as a neutral arbiter.”

March 17, 2022, 3:34 p.m. ET

Audra D. S. BurchJennifer MedinaJazmine Ulloa and

Russia’s attack rallies a divided nation: the U.S.

After two years of political divisions and economic disruptions bolstered by an unending pandemic, many Americans say they are coming together around a common cause: support for Ukraine, a country under daily siege by Russian forces.

The rare moment of solidarity is driven, in part, by the perception of America as a steadfast global defender of freedom and democracy. Many Americans say they see a lopsided fight pitting a great power against a weaker neighbor. They see relentless images of dead families and collapsed cities. They see Ukraine’s president pleading for help.

In polls and interviews since the attack, Americans across the political spectrum said the nation had a duty to respond to President Vladimir V. Putin’s brazen invasion — even if that means feeling, at least in the short term, the pinch of high gas prices and inflation.

“I understand we want to stay out of it, but what’s happening is worse than anyone could imagine. We can do without gas when there are children there being killed,” said Danna Bone, a 65-year-old retiree in McMinnville, Ore., and a Republican. “It’s horrific what’s happening there, and we need to be doing our part. I would like to see them doing more. What that looks like, I really don’t know.”

Yet interviews with more than three dozen Americans from Georgia to California show that, beyond broad consensus that Ukraine deserves support, they are unsettled and even divided on essential questions: How far should America go to defend Ukraine without thrusting the nation into another Cold War? Does the war demand U.S. military involvement?

Already, the issue of America’s role in Ukraine is scrambling U.S. politics and reinvigorating the bond between the United States and its European allies.

About a third of Americans said the United States was providing the appropriate amount of support to Ukraine, but an even larger share, 42 percent, is in favor of the country doing even more, the Pew survey showed. The same poll found, however, that about two-thirds of Americans do not support military intervention.

“I call it Russia’s unfinished business,” Roland Benberry Jr., 61, an artist and illustrator, said of the invasion. Mr. Benberry served in the Air Force in the early 1980s when Russia was considered an imminent threat. Thirty years later, he is experiencing those feelings again. “We thought the Soviet Union was gone, and it basically just went underground for a while.”

Mr. Benberry, a Democrat who lives in Oakland County, Michigan, believes that sanctions could be the most powerful and effective tool against Russia, and that the U.S. military should only get involved directly if the Ukrainian military is forced to fall back.

Indeed, for many Americans, the support for Ukraine firmly ends at the doorstep of military intervention.

On a suburban street in Macomb County, Michigan, Kathleen Pate, 75, has helped to organize donated clothing and medication to be sent to Ukraine. Her son and her daughter-in-law, who is from Ukraine, converted their garage into a makeshift donation hub.

“The support is overwhelming,” said Ms. Pate, a Republican who has spent her recent days worrying about Ukrainian families. “I can’t sleep at night. I can’t get it out of mind.”

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