Ukrainian assertions that it was pushing back Russian forces near Kyiv — where Moscow said it would scale back its assault — generally appear to be true, according to a Washington Post reporter on the ground. But heavy shelling continues elsewhere, and new satellite images of the bombed-out southern port city of Mariupol document severe damage to civilian infrastructure. The photos depict long lines outside a grocery store in the city, where local leaders have warned of a severe shortage of basic necessities.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a video address released late Tuesday, said Moscow’s assurances “do not silence the explosion of Russian shells.” Kyiv’s negotiators in Istanbul said they could exchange military neutrality for security guarantees, and an adviser to Zelensky said Ukraine was working with 10 nations — including the United States, Britain, China and Israel — on a security agreement that would ensure the “horrors that the Russians have brought to the Ukrainian people” are never repeated.
Here’s what to know
Refugee exodus from Ukraine tops 4 million, U.N. says
Return to menuMore than 4 million people have now fled Ukraine, the United Nations said Wednesday, an exodus amounting to roughly 10 percent of the country’s estimated prewar population.
In five weeks of Russia’s war on Ukraine, 6.5 million people have been internally displaced, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said earlier. Many more are stranded “or unable to leave due to heightened security risks, destruction of bridges and roads, as well as lack of resources or information,” it said.
The scale and speed of displacement have created what aid agencies describe as the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Nearly 1 in 4 people — and about half the children in the country — have been forced out of their homes in Ukraine, The Washington Post has reported.
More than half the refugees crossing the border have entered Poland, while others have gone to neighboring countries including Romania and Moldova. The International Organization for Migration said nearly 200,000 non-Ukrainians who were living in the country have also had to flee.
Russian, Chinese foreign ministers discuss Ukraine, ‘no limits’ partnership
Return to menuSHANGHAI — Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in China on Wednesday, in their first face-to-face meeting since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The two had a “detailed exchange of views on the situation in Ukraine,” Russian state media outlet Sputnik reported, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry. Sputnik said Lavrov briefed Wang on the progress of the “Russian special military operation” and on negotiations with Kyiv authorities.
Lavrov met Wang in China’s Anhui province, on the sidelines of multilateral meetings on Afghanistan.
Separately, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin reiterated at a routine news conference Wednesday that there were “no limits” to Sino-Russian cooperation, according to China’s official broadcaster CCTV. Wang said the two countries would strive for peace, safeguard security and oppose hegemony.
At the Beijing Olympics in February, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that there were “no limits” to the two nations’ partnership.
Hong Kong news channel Phoenix TV reported that both Wang and Lavrov said Wednesday that they hoped relations between the two countries would continue to develop.
Three humanitarian corridors set for today; Ukraine seeks 97 others
Return to menuThree humanitarian corridors, agreed on by Russia and Ukraine, will operate Wednesday, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a daily video update. She also said Ukraine called on Russia during peace talks in Istanbul to open 97 other corridors for the worst-hit areas.
“Three humanitarian corridors have been agreed on,” Vereshchuk said Wednesday. Buses will operate from the cities of Melitopol and Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, and private vehicles can run from Enerhodar to Zaporizhzhia, she added.
Berdyansk, about 50 miles southwest of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, has been a stop on the main evacuation route from the besieged southern port city.
The routes allow for the evacuation of people and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the war-torn cities.
In peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on Tuesday, Vereshchuk said, Ukraine submitted proposals to Russia to allow 97 humanitarian corridors to operate in the hardest-hit regions.
“Yesterday during the talks, the Russian delegation was given proposals on the organization of humanitarian corridors to the 97 worst-hit settlements,” she said. “Today we are continuing work on obtaining a reply to these proposals.”
The regions she mentioned included the capital, Kyiv, as well as Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernihiv, Luhansk and the Mykolaiv area, among others.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Kirill Timoshenko confirmed the three humanitarian exit routes set for Wednesday in a Telegram post. He also said 1,665 people reached Zaporizhzhia through humanitarian corridors using their own transport on Tuesday, about 936 of them from Mariupol and 729 from other regional cities near Zaporizhzhia.
Amar Nadhir contributed to this report.
U.N. warns of global food issues as Ukraine goes from ‘breadbasket to breadline’
Return to menuThe United Nations’ food aid division has warned of the reverberating effects from the war in Ukraine on global food supplies, as Ukraine goes from the world’s “breadbasket to a breadline.”
Speaking to the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday, World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley said the conflict will have more of an impact than anything the world has experienced since World War II. He described the humanitarian situation in Ukraine as a “catastrophe on top of a catastrophe.”
Together, Ukraine and Russia produce more than one-third of the wheat in global markets, as well as more than three-quarters of sunflower seed oil exports and one-third of the barley supply, according to WFP. The war is exacerbating existing shortages abroad, especially for food-insecure nations. Middle Eastern and African countries that rely heavily on Black Sea grains and vegetable oils are seeing food prices soar.
It is currently planting season for maize, and farmers are struggling to sow amid intense Russian shelling. June and July are the harvest seasons for wheat crops.
“The farmers are on the front lines,” Beasley said.
Food-security problems are likely to be exacerbated by a reduction in fertilizer supplies from Russia and Kremlin-friendly Belarus, which Beasley warned could result in a 50 percent drop in yields in many countries. Russia has also been blocking ships carrying grain exports from leaving the Black Sea, snarling a key global trade route.
Britain’s Concert for Ukraine raises nearly $15 million for displaced people
Return to menuThe Concert for Ukraine, a star-studded charity event, raised nearly $15 million to support people fleeing the Russian invasion, its organizers said. The donations will go toward securing supplies such as food, shelter and medicine.
The concert took place Tuesday at the Resorts World Arena in Birmingham, England. It was streamed by British broadcasters and kicked off with the Snow Patrol hit song “Run.” The crowd lit up the venue with glow sticks in the Ukrainian national colors of yellow and blue, while Ed Sheeran and Camila Cabello performed a new song against the backdrop of sunflowers, the Ukrainian national flower.
In the five weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, more than 10 million people have been displaced, with some 3.9 million fleeing into other European countries. More than half of the roughly 6.5 million internally displaced people are women, the United Nations said; many are also elderly, chronically ill or otherwise vulnerable.
Why the world is so worried about Russia’s ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons
Return to menuThe war in Ukraine has led to a resurgence of fears about the use of nukes.
Russia is armed to teeth with nuclear weapons, which some analysts fear it would consider using to escalate the conflict if it felt it was losing, and Ukraine’s Western backers are also armed with nukes, which means that the conflict — if it were to spiral beyond Ukraine — would pit nuclear powers against each other.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said last week that Russia should stop its “dangerous irresponsible nuclear rhetoric,” and warned that it could “never win a nuclear war.”
Only recently has Russia gone out of its way to tamp down the worries: Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told PBS Monday that “no one is thinking about” using nuclear weapons. But even as peace talks stir optimism, trust in Russian rhetoric remains low, after Moscow’s repeated claims that it would not invade Ukraine.
Ukraine-Russia talks stir optimism, but West urges caution
Return to menuISTANBUL — Ukrainian negotiators in Turkey said Tuesday they had offered a detailed peace proposal to their Russian counterparts, exchanging military neutrality for security guarantees, as Moscow said it would “drastically reduce” military activity near the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv “to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations.”
The declarations signaled a rare moment of optimism nearly five weeks into the bloody invasion. But U.S. and other Western leaders were skeptical, saying they would judge Russia by its actions and not its words. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Russia’s movement of troops away from Kyiv appeared to be minimal, and numerous explosions were heard in the city Tuesday night.
“We’re not convinced that the threat to the capital city has been radically diminished,” Kirby said.
On the front line outside Kyiv, Ukrainian forces claim to retake territory
Return to menuNORTH OF KYIV — Five weeks ago, Ukraine’s Western allies feared Kyiv would fall to Russian forces within days. Millions of people fled the capital and the surrounding areas, including the city of Irpin, where intense street battles have devastated local populations and forced civilians to live in apocalyptic conditions with little food, water and power.
But for now, in places like this military position, Ukrainian statements that they are pushing Russian forces back seem relatively true. Although the area is still dangerous, with shelling in the distance, Ukrainian soldiers said they are in more control here just north of Kyiv than they were even a few days ago. Still, in other areas close to the capital, intense shelling continued Tuesday, proving that the fight is far from over and casting doubt on claims of significant progress.
Putin calls on Ukrainian ‘militants’ to lay down arms in Mariupol
Return to menuPresident Vladimir Putin has signaled that Russia will keep fighting for Mariupol, a strategic Ukrainian port city devastated by recent attacks — unless local fighters lay down their arms.
During a call with French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, Putin apparently emphasized that to resolve a growing humanitarian crisis in the city, “Ukrainian nationalist militants must stop resisting and lay down their weapons,” according to a Kremlin readout of the call posted on Telegram. Paris has not yet published its own readout.
Pictures captured Tuesday by Maxar Technologies show the toll of Russia’s invasion on civilian infrastructure in the city, including houses and apartment buildings. The images also show long lines of people outside a grocery store. Leaders in Mariupol have warned for weeks of food and water shortages amid a Russian blockade.
Moscow has zeroed in on Mariupol because of its location between Russian-held Crimea and areas of eastern Ukraine held by Russian-backed separatists. Should it capture the city, it would be the Kremlin’s first major strategic victory of the war.
During weeks of intensive fighting, Russian forces have hit shopping centers and apartment buildings, an art school, a hospital and its maternity ward, and a theater where hundreds of people were taking shelter. As many as 300 people were killed in the attack on the theater, according to local officials and eyewitness accounts that couldn’t be independently verified while the city remains under siege.
Evacuations from the city resumed Tuesday, one day after they were halted across the country because of security concerns. More than 1,600 escaped Mariupol and a nearby region, officials said.
Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.
In India, Modi’s base is inundated with anti-U.S. commentary on Ukraine
Return to menuNEW DELHI — Turn on a television in India this past month and the arguments espoused by some of the country’s most popular media personalities follow a pattern: The United States provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine. The Americans were possibly developing biological weapons in Ukraine. Joe Biden, the president who fumbled the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, has no business criticizing India over the war he sparked in Ukraine.
While the Russian invasion has galvanized public opinion against President Vladimir Putin in many Western countries, it has had a strikingly different effect in India, reflecting a gulf between the United States and the world’s largest democracy in how each public perceives the war, Russia and the West.
In recent weeks, some Indian English-language newspapers catering to wealthy urban liberals have carried editorials nudging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take a tougher stance against Putin. But on mainstream talk shows and in the pages of magazines popular with Modi’s right-wing base — a far larger audience — it has mostly been fire and fury directed toward the United States, portrayed as the culprit and instigator of yet another international conflagration.
“The American media, the American establishment wants to conceal this: They don’t like this charge of having anything to do with biological weapons,” Arnab Goswami, the star anchor of India’s top-rated news channel, Republic TV, said in a monologue earlier this month after Moscow and Washington exchanged accusations about bioweapons possibly being researched and used in Ukraine.
Long lines outside grocery store in Mariupol, satellite images show
Return to menuMariupol lost power, mobile communications and Internet as Russia attacked — a blackout that has limited documentation of its residents’ suffering.
Satellite images help capture the Ukrainian port city’s devastation.
Pictures captured Tuesday by Maxar Technologies show the toll of Russia’s invasion on civilian infrastructure, including houses and apartment buildings, according to Maxar.
Maxar says its images from Tuesday also show long lines of people outside a grocery store. Leaders in Mariupol have warned for weeks of food and water shortages amid a Russian blockade.
Also documented: the Mariupol drama theater, where the number of people killed in an airstrike remains unclear. With fighting ongoing, Ukrainian officials have struggled to gather basic information.
Hundreds of people were believed to be sheltering in the theater when it was bombed. Citing eyewitness accounts, the Mariupol City Council has said the strike may have killed 300.
Here’s the status of some key Ukrainian cities under Russian attack
Return to menu- Kyiv: Despite Moscow’s pledge during peace talks in Turkey to “drastically reduce” military activity near Kyiv, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Russia’s movement of troops away from the capital appeared to be minimal, and airstrikes continued to hit the capital Tuesday. Ukrainian officials had previously warned that Russian troops were withdrawing to Belarus only to regroup and could return.
- Chernihiv: Ukrainian forces have pushed toward the borders of the Chernihiv and Zhytomyr regions, north and west of Kyiv, according to Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander overseeing the defense of the capital. Chernihiv has been under near-constant attack with power cut and resources dwindling, in a situation that echoes the humanitarian crisis in the besieged city of Mariupol in the south.
- Irpin: More than 95 percent of Irpin, a key battleground on Kyiv’s outskirts, is now under Ukrainian control, Syrsky told reporters Tuesday. A senior U.S. defense official could not confirm Ukraine’s declaration of victory.
- Mykolaiv: A missile struck the regional state administration building Tuesday in this southern city along a river feeding into the Black Sea, the local governor said. Ukrainian emergency services said seven people were killed and 22 injured. The attack, if confirmed, would be the largest on Mykolaiv’s downtown since the war began. The Ukrainian military’s efforts in Mykolaiv have delayed any plans for Russian forces to attack the strategic port of Odessa, about 70 miles southwest.
- Mariupol: The Kremlin signaled Tuesday it will keep fighting for this key southern port city, saying that unless “Ukrainian nationalist militants” stop resisting and lay down their arms, it will be difficult to “resolve the acute humanitarian situation” there. Evacuations from the devastated city resumed on Tuesday, with more than 1,600 escaping Mariupol and a nearby region, according to local officials.
- Kharkiv: Russian forces don’t appear to have conducted significant operations in or immediately around this city, Ukraine’s second largest, in the past day, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank.
Russian-held areas and troop movement
Separatist-
controlled
area
Russian troops have given up on encircling Kyiv and continue to fight to hold their current front-line trace near the city.
Russia is likely attempting to connect gains southeast of Kharkiv with its front line in the Luhansk region.
The Kremlin signaled it will keep fighting for Mariupol, as evacuations resumed.
Control areas as of March 29
Sources: Institute for the Study of War,
AEI's Critical Threats Project, Post reporting
Russian-held areas
and troop movement
Russia is likely attempting to connect gains southeast of Kharkiv with its front line in the Luhansk region.
Russian troops have given up on encircling Kyiv and continue to fight to hold their current front-line trace near the city.
Separatist-
controlled
area
The Kremlin signaled it will keep fighting for Mariupol, as evacuations resumed.
Sea of
Azov
Crimea
Annexed by Russia
in 2014
Active nuclear power plants with power-generating capabilities
Control areas as of March 29
Sources: Institute for the Study of War, AEI's Critical Threats Project, Post reporting
Russian-held areas
and troop movement
Russia is likely attempting to connect gains southeast of Kharkiv with its front line in the Luhansk region.
Russian troops have given up on encircling Kyiv and continue to fight to hold their current front-line trace near the city.
Separatist-
controlled
area
The Kremlin signaled it will keep fighting for Mariupol, as evacuations resumed.
Sea of
Azov
Crimea
Annexed by Russia
in 2014
Active nuclear power plants with power-generating capabilities
Control areas as of March 29
Sources: Institute for the Study of War, AEI's Critical Threats Project, Post reporting
Hannah Knowles, Marisa Iati, Mary Ilyushina, Isabelle Khurshudyan and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
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