The Biden administration has resisted Kyiv’s call to establish a no-fly zone in Ukraine, a measure that has little bipartisan support in Congress and one that U.S. officials fear could inflame tensions and risk a broader global conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. The White House is, however, set to announce $800 million more in security assistance Wednesday, a senior administration official said, as part of a government spending bill President Biden signed Tuesday that will provide $13.6 billion in new aid to Ukraine. Previous U.S. assistance has included shipments of antiaircraft and anti-armor systems.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday there is “hope for reaching a compromise” with the Ukrainian delegation in peace talks, echoing comments by Ukrainian officials that progress had been made. Lavrov, speaking in an interview with the Russian television channel RBC, said he was basing his assessment on the view of the Russian negotiators. Talks will continue Wednesday.
Nearly three weeks into their invasion, Russian forces are intensifying attacks on civilian targets across a number of Ukrainian cities. A suspected Russian strike on a 12-story apartment building in Kyiv on Wednesday morning injured two people and partially collapsed the upper floors, emergency services said, while in the port city of Mariupol, which is surrounded by Russian troops, hundreds of people, including doctors and medical personnel, are being held inside a regional hospital, according to Ukrainian officials. As many as 3 million people have fled the war-torn country since the invasion began — half of them children, according to the U.N. children’s agency.
Here’s what to know
- In a late-night video address, Zelensky welcomed the signing of the U.S. spending bill, saying it is “the first step toward the full restoration of Ukraine.” He also invited allies to visit Ukraine, while noting the dangers “because our sky is not yet closed to Russian missiles and planes.”
- Biden will travel to Europe next week for a NATO summit on the Russian invasion, the White House said Tuesday. Top officials in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia made a dramatic visit to Kyiv on Tuesday to demonstrate support for Ukraine.
- Following some successful evacuations from besieged cities in recent days, including Mariupol, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Wednesday accused Russian armed forces of compromising the flight of civilians by “firing at humanitarian columns of buses” and “gathering points” for evacuations, as well as taking people hostage.”
UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT
Japan will revoke Russia’s ‘most-favored nation’ trade status
Japan will revoke Russia’s “most-favored nation” trade status as a part of its latest sanctions against Moscow in response to its invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Wednesday.
Removing the trade status would result in higher tariffs for certain imported seafood items, including crabs and sea urchins, Japanese media reported. It also means that certain exports to Russia will be banned, including luxury goods, Kishida said in a news conference.
Japan also will freeze more assets of Russian elites and oligarchs and will further step up sanctions on cryptocurrency, he said.
Japan has been working alongside other Group of Seven countries to join in putting economic pressure on Moscow. It has taken the unusual step of accepting people fleeing Ukraine, despite Japan’s restrictive policies on taking in refugees. Japan is not legally labeling them refugees but accepting them as “evacuees” until policymakers can sort out the legal boundaries of harboring such migrants from Ukraine.
Many local government leaders, including those who were involved in Japan’s disaster recovery efforts after the 2011 triple crises of an earthquake, nuclear meltdown and tsunami, have offered to help Ukrainian evacuees, Kishida said. Japan’s immigration agency has also set up a help desk to assist Ukrainian evacuees, he said.
Ukraine’s combat losses strike a painful chord with U.S. military veterans
The last time Michael Hudson saw Nick Nikonov alive, the wiry Ukrainian had just bested him in a fight, bruising his ribs and jamming his thumb.
It was 2015, and Hudson, an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, was preparing for a deployment to Afghanistan. Nikonov, an officer in the Ukrainian military, was in the United States for training. He was intensely competitive and loved to spar, Hudson recalled, reflecting on their friendly bout.
Though hardened by the fighting he had seen in Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed separatists, Nikonov had a softer side, too. He was a family man, Hudson said, recounting how his friend brought toy dolls from Ukraine as gifts for Hudson’s daughters and took it upon himself to look in on them while Hudson was overseas. “Just like any Marine you would trust,” he said in an interview.
In Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, tens of thousands find refuge from war
KRYVORIVNYA, Ukraine — There is almost no place in Ukraine that feels truly safe.
Not underground bunkers. Not cities distant from daily bombardment. Certainly not military bases. Not even a relative’s house.
About the only place of true peace and refuge in this country these days is the one nature built — the high hills of the eastern Carpathians, thick with strands of silver firs dusted with fresh snow, dotted with villages now ballooning in size as tens of thousands flee here.
“As soon as we entered the mountains, we felt safe,” said Miroslava Patsyadi, a young mother and school librarian from the heavily shelled city of Bila Tserkva, south of Kyiv. “It’s a subconscious thing. My daughter can sleep again. Here, we saw that life will go on.”
‘No way’ Ukraine will join NATO any time soon, Boris Johnson says
LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday ruled out the prospect that Ukraine could join the NATO military alliance “any time soon.”
Johnson told reporters he has spoken to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who he said understands the “reality of the position” regarding joining the alliance. The prospect of Ukraine’s admission to NATO has been a key point of contention and one of the rationales used by Russia to justify its invasion.
“Everybody has always said — and we’ve made it clear to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin — there’s no way Ukraine is going to join NATO any time soon,” Johnson said. “But the decision about the future of Ukraine has got to be for the Ukrainian people.”
He added that Zelensky has the alliance’s full support in the current conflict and urged Putin to end his “barbaric attacks” on his neighbor.
On Tuesday, Zelensky hinted that he may have backed away, for now, from his long-standing desire for Ukraine to join NATO.
“It is clear that Ukraine is not a member of NATO. We understand this. … For years, we heard about the apparently open door but have already also heard that we will not enter there, and these are truths and must be acknowledged,” Zelensky said during an address to leaders of 10 North Atlantic countries led by Britain, a group known as the Joint Expeditionary Force.
In a video address to his war-torn nation overnight, Zelensky also said that negotiations with Russia are heading in a “more realistic” direction, as the war nears the end of its third week.
Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will continue Wednesday, and officials on both sides have projected optimism in recent days that a compromise could emerge. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that there is “hope for reaching a compromise” with the Ukrainian delegation, echoing comments by Ukrainian officials that progress has been made.
Ukraine holds off announcing evacuation routes from besieged cities
Ukraine will not announce humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians out of its most vulnerable cities Wednesday because it is not safe to do so, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in her daily briefing — a departure from a precedent set in recent days.
Vereshchuk accused Russian armed forces of “firing at humanitarian columns of buses” and at “gathering points where the evacuation of peaceful civilians had been planned from, and also taking accompanying people hostage.” She claimed Russians seized an intensive care hospital in Mariupol on Tuesday, took “400 peaceful people” hostage, including medical personnel, and are now launching attacks from the hospital. “This constitutes a huge threat to the movement of people via humanitarian corridors,” she said.
The deputy prime minister said her government has not received a response to a proposal it sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross on Tuesday for “the opening of humanitarian corridors today.”
“In these kinds of conditions, we cannot safely [transport] people out,” she said, including from the eastern cities of Izyum and Mariupol. Officials there say residents have been largely cut off from electricity, water, food and medicine for nearly two weeks because of a blockade by Russian forces.
Vereshchuk said Tuesday that about 20,000 people have been evacuated from Mariupol. While the figure was impossible to verify independently, it would represent one of the most successful large-scale attempts at getting civilians out of the city. “The question of organizing humanitarian corridors today for Izyum and Mariupol remains open,” she said Wednesday.
Vereshchuk also said authorities were making plans to distribute humanitarian aid to cities and towns that have been captured or surrounded by Russian forces. Aid convoys have also struggled to reach their destinations in recent days amid intense fighting.
The regional governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, said Wednesday in a Telegram post, “There is no cease-fire — there will be no humanitarian corridor today,” and he blamed Russian forces for disrupting past evacuation efforts. However, he said civilians may be able to leave the region of Luhansk in trains scheduled to depart Wednesday from Novozolotarivka around 2 p.m. local time if conditions improve.
More than 100 child deaths recorded in conflict so far, Ukraine says
At least 103 children have been killed and more than 100 wounded in the war in Ukraine as of Wednesday, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said in an update.
Most of the young victims were from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk and Kherson, the office said in a Telegram post. On average, about five children die in Ukraine every day, it said.
The prosecutor’s office said the actual toll was probably much higher and that it was difficult to confirm accurate numbers amid the fighting. It also issued a plea for evidence and information on possible Russian war crimes.
The office said bombing and shelling has damaged more than 400 educational institutions such as schools, 59 of which have been destroyed ― most of them in Donetsk and some in Sumy and the capital, Kyiv. Medical and rehabilitation centers, including for children with disabilities, have also come under fire, the update said.
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova has called for greater international cooperation in documenting and responding to violence against children and for a United Nations special mission to assess any violations of children’s rights during the war, the office added.
The U.N. human rights office said Tuesday that since the start of the Russian invasion, it has recorded 691 deaths of civilians overall, of whom at least 48 were children. It has stipulated that the figures are incomplete and the real tolls are much higher.
According to the U.N. children’s agency, half of the 3 million people who have fled the war in Ukraine are children. That means one child has become a refugee nearly every second since the start of the war, said James Elder, a spokesman for UNICEF.
Pope Francis led students in Italy in a prayer Wednesday for children in Ukraine, the Catholic News Service reported, asking them to think of the “little ones” fleeing bombs and their homes.
NATO defense ministers discuss boosting Ukraine — and avoiding a wider war
NATO defense ministers gathered in Brussels on Wednesday ahead of a summit next week to discuss ways of assuring nervous allies and deterring Russian aggression without getting drawn into a wider conflict.
Since Russian forces began building up around Ukraine, the 30-member alliance has sent thousands of extra troops to its eastern flank and deployed NATO’s Response Force for the first time. Its members have also sent tons of ammunition and weaponry into Ukraine.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg noted Wednesday as he arrived at the meeting that hundreds of thousands of troops are on heightened alert across the alliance, including 100,000 U.S. service members in Europe and about 40,000 under direct NATO command, mostly in the eastern part of the alliance.
He added that NATO “also has a responsibility to ensure this doesn’t escalate.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin emphasized the United States’ “ironclad” commitment to NATO’s Article 5, which requires member nations to go to the defense of any alliance member that comes under attack.
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov expresses hope for ‘compromise’ with Ukraine
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday there is “hope for reaching a compromise” with the Ukrainian delegation in peace talks, echoing comments by Ukrainian officials that progress has been made.
Lavrov, speaking in an interview with the Russian television channel RBC, said he was basing his assessment on the view of the Russian negotiators.
“They state that negotiations are not easy for obvious reasons but nevertheless there is some hope for reaching a compromise,” Lavrov said.
The Russian foreign minister said the Ukrainian delegation has issued similar statements expressing hope for an agreement.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Twitter late Tuesday that negotiations with the Russian delegation would continue Wednesday.
“There are fundamental contradictions,” Podolyak said. “But there is certainly room for compromise.”
In his lengthy interview, Lavrov took aim at the United States and said the conflict in Ukraine is “not as much about Ukraine as it is about the legal world order.”
“The U.S. has steamrolled all of Europe,” Lavrov said. “This is an epochal moment in modern history. It reflects the fight for what the world order is going to look like.”
The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, said Ukraine during the talks has proposed a model similar to that of Austria or Sweden, “neutral demilitarized state but a government with its own army and naval powers.”
“The preservation and development of Ukraine’s neutral status, the demilitarization of Ukraine — a whole range of issues related to the size of the Ukrainian army are being discussed,” Medinsky said, according to Russian state news service RIA Novosti.
War in Ukraine highlights limits of Facebook’s oversight board
Weeks into the war in Ukraine, Facebook’s parent company Meta is poised to tap its oversight board for guidance about a policy shift allowing users in Ukraine to post some calls for violence against Russian invaders.
It would mark the first time the panel has formally weighed in on the tech giant’s flurry of actions in response to the war, and it could shape its rules on violent rhetoric moving forward.
But the seemingly narrow scope and late timing of the board’s entrance highlight the limits of its powers, particularly involving high-stakes decisions happening in rapidly unfolding global conflicts.
Since Russia launched its invasion, the tech giant has shut down access to Russian state-media outlets in Europe and limited the reach of their posts, blocked digital advertising and monetization tools in Russia, and most recently temporarily exempted users in Ukraine in some cases from rules against calling for violence.
Russia raises hopes for return to stalled Iran nuclear talks
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday he has received “written guarantees” from the United States that Western sanctions on Russia related to Ukraine won’t affect Russia’s role in the Iran nuclear deal, potentially paving the way for a resumption of stalled talks to revive the agreement.
Lavrov was speaking alongside Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, who was visiting Moscow. Negotiations in Vienna on reviving the 2015 deal were suspended Friday after a new Russian demand for guarantees on the sanctions threw the discussions into disarray.
The State Department insisted that “nothing additional” has been offered to Moscow beyond the terms of the original Iran nuclear agreement, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. But “it has been logical to us, and should be logical to all parties, that we would not sanction Russia’s participation in nuclear projects that are part of a full return to the JCPOA,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
The U.S. could publicize any Russian election hacking plans much faster
Back in 2016, U.S. officials waited months to officially blame Russia for trying to influence the election by hacking Democrats’ emails.
Now researchers are urging the government to move a lot faster in the 2022 and 2024 elections to release any information it might garner about potential Russian cyber and disinformation campaigns.
The goal is to subvert Kremlin plans, blunt the force of any hack and release operations and help guard against deceiving American voters with phony claims during an election cycle.
It’s modeled on a rapid declassification of intelligence on Russia’s Ukraine invasion, which was widely celebrated by analysts who said it blunted Russian efforts to justify the invasion and helped strengthen U.S. allies’ opposition.
Who’s in Putin’s inner circle, and have they been targeted by sanctions?
As Russian President Vladimir Putin intensifies his war in Ukraine, the 69-year-old leader has become increasingly isolated, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials, including from some of his closest advisers.
Most people, including business leaders and politicians, who were once part of Putin’s inner circle now appear unwilling or unable to pressure him to reverse course, even as global sanctions send Russia’s economy into a tailspin.
Several prominent Russian businessmen, including industrialist Oleg Deripaska and billionaire banker Mikhail Fridman, have called publicly for peace. But, as the economic noose tightens around Putin and his associates, Western policymakers say they hope that more aides and former confidants will step up and challenge the president.
The Washington Post has identified some key players in the wider network of political and economic elites that surrounds the Russian leader, including oil executives, steel tycoons, media moguls and spy chiefs. Some have a net worth of at least $1 billion, according to Forbes.
Zelensky’s address to Congress part of a tradition of world leaders speaking to lawmakers
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers a virtual address to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, he will become the latest world leader in a long history of foreign and religious leaders to speak to the lawmaking body.
Joint meetings of Congress have historically been an opportunity for lawmakers to hear from an internationally respected figure. The gatherings became a standard part of foreign leaders’ visits to the United States after the end of World War II in 1945. Since then, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, South African President Nelson Mandela, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth II have all addressed Congress.
The session Wednesday will give members another opportunity to show bipartisan support for Ukraine after Russia invaded the Eastern European country three weeks ago.
Russian forces are struggling, stalling and failing to advance, U.K. says
Russian troops are “struggling” to advance in Ukraine following “challenges posed by Ukraine’s terrain,” Britain’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday in an intelligence update that outlined the factors contributing to the stalling of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion timetable.
The ministry credited the tactics of Ukraine’s military for “frustrating” Russian forces and “inflicting heavy losses.” It noted that the destruction of bridges by Ukrainian forces has slowed Russian troops trying to push into key cities.
The intelligence update reported that Russia has failed to “gain control of the air” and that this has further limited its options during the invasion.
“What we know is that Vladimir Putin’s plans are not going according to plan,” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told Sky News in an interview Wednesday. “He is not making the progress expected, and we know the sanctions we’ve put on are working.”
Truss said that sweeping sanctions imposed by Britain and other nations amid Putin’s invasion were having a “debilitating affect” on Russia’s economy. She said the British government has more people and businesses on its sanctions list.
