Russian Invasion of UkraineWhat Happened on Day 44 of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Moscow denied responsibility for a missile strike in the eastern city of Kramatorsk that killed at least 50 people. But the Pentagon said Russian forces were behind it.

  1. Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  2. Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press
  3. Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press
  4. Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  5. Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
  6. Anatolii Stepanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Follow our live news updates on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Pinned

A missile strike in eastern Ukraine kills 50 people waiting for trains to escape the fighting.

Video
Video player loading
Thousands of people were reportedly at the station in the city of Kramatorsk when it was attacked on Friday. In recent days, officials had encouraged civilians to evacuate the region in anticipation of heavy fighting to come in the east.CreditCredit...Anatolii Stepanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

One moment, they were packed onto the platforms at the Kramatorsk train station, hundreds of women, children and old people, heeding the pleas of Ukrainian officials imploring them to flee ahead of a feared Russian onslaught.

The next moment, death rained from the air.

At least 50 people were killed and many more wounded in a missile assault on Friday morning that left bodies and luggage scattered on the ground and turned the Kramatorsk station into the site of another atrocity in the six-week-old war.

“There are just children!” one woman cried in a video from the aftermath.

The missile struck as officials in Kramatorsk and other cities in eastern Ukraine had been warning civilians to leave before Russian forces mount what is expected to be a major push into the region, where their troops have been regrouping after withdrawing from areas around Kyiv, the capital.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russia had hit the station with what he identified as a Tochka-U short-range ballistic missile as “thousands of peaceful Ukrainians were waiting to be evacuated.”

Image
Clearing out bodies after the rocket attack in Kramatorsk.Credit...Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“Lacking the strength and courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” Mr. Zelensky said. “This is an evil that has no limits. And if it is not punished, it will never stop.”

Russian officials, denying responsibility, said a Ukrainian battalion had fired the missile in what they called a “provocation.” The Russian Defense Ministry said that Tochka-U missiles are only used by the Ukrainian armed forces and that Russian troops had not made any strikes against Kramatorsk on Friday.

A senior Pentagon official said the United States believed Russian forces had fired the missile. “They originally claimed a successful strike and then only retracted it when there were reports of civilian casualties,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential intelligence assessment.

The train station was hit as a top European Union delegation was visiting Mr. Zelensky’s government, and the images of yet another mass killing provoked new Western outrage.

Whether one or more missiles struck the station was not immediately clear, and there was no way to independently verify the origin of the attack. Several parked cars were also hit, catching fire and turning into charred hulks. The waiting area was strewn with bodies and belongings.

After the strike, the Ukrainian police inspected the remains of a large rocket next to the train station with the words “for our children” written on it in Russian. It was unclear who had written the message and where the rocket had come from.

The mayor of Kramatorsk, Oleksandr Honcharenko, said 4,000 people had been at the station when it was attacked, the vast majority of them women, children and elderly people. At least two children were among the dead, he said.

The head of the military administration in the region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said 50 people had been killed, including 12 who died in the hospital. Another 98 were wounded, including 16 children, he said.

After the attack, Kramatorsk officials said they were trying to find cars and buses to evacuate civilians to western areas presumed to be less vulnerable to Russian attacks.

Image
A fragment of what Ukraine’s president described as a Tochka-U short-range ballistic missile following an attack at the railway station in Kramatorsk.Credit...Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press

Ukraine’s railway service said that evacuations would proceed from nearby Sloviansk, where shelters and hospitals have been stocked with food and medicine in anticipation of an imminent Russian offensive.

Western countries, which have been shipping arms to Ukraine and tightening sanctions on Russia to punish President Vladimir V. Putin for the invasion, saw the Kramatorsk slaughter as new justification to intensify their efforts.

“The attack on a Ukrainian train station is yet another horrific atrocity committed by Russia, striking civilians who were trying to evacuate and reach safety,” President Biden said on Twitter. He vowed to send more weapons to Ukraine and to work with allies to investigate the attack “as we document Russia’s actions and hold them accountable.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France called the strike “abominable.”

“Ukrainian civilians are fleeing to escape the worst,” he wrote on Twitter. “Their weapons? Strollers, stuffed animals, luggage.”

The station was hit as the Slovak president, Eduard Heger, and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, were traveling to Kyiv in a show of support for Mr. Zelensky and his country’s bid for European Union membership.

Mr. Heger announced that Slovakia had given Ukraine an S-300 air defense system to help defend against Russian missiles and airstrikes.

Image
A man hugs a woman in Kramatorsk after the strike.Credit...Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press

To make the transfer possible, the Pentagon said it would reposition one Patriot missile system, operated by U.S. service members, to Slovakia. It was the latest buildup in arms and troops along NATO’s eastern flank, as the alliance seeks to deter any Russian incursion.

“Now is no time for complacency,” Mr. Biden said in a statement announcing the Patriot repositioning. “As the Russian military repositions for the next phase of this war, I have directed my administration to continue to spare no effort to identify and provide to the Ukrainian military the advanced weapons capabilities it needs to defend its country.”

The attack on the railway station came after Russian forces had spent weeks shelling schools, hospitals and apartment buildings in an apparent attempt to pound Ukraine into submission by indiscriminately targeting civilian infrastructure, ignoring Geneva Convention protections that can make such actions war crimes.

Last month, an estimated 300 people were killed in an attack on a theater where hundreds had been sheltering in the battered port of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said. In recent days, growing evidence has pointed to atrocities in the devastated suburbs of Kyiv, where Ukrainian troops found bodies bound and shot in the head after Russian forces had retreated.

Ms. von der Leyen visited one of those suburbs, Bucha, on Friday before meeting with Mr. Zelensky.

“It was important to start my visit in Bucha,” she wrote on Twitter. “Because in Bucha our humanity was shattered.”

Russia has said its troops have been falsely accused and that the evidence against them is fake.

The repercussions of the fighting are spreading far beyond Europe. The United Nations reported on Friday that world food prices rose sharply last month to their highest levels ever, as the invasion sent shock waves through global grain and vegetable oil markets. Russia and Ukraine are important suppliers of the world’s wheat and other grains.

Image
Damaged cars outside the railway station in Kramatorsk.Credit...Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press

The report of rising prices came as the British government said Russia was heading for its “deepest recession since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” estimating that the economy could shrink by as much as 15 percent this year.

On Friday, the European Union formally approved its fifth round of sanctions against Moscow, which included a ban on Russian coal and restrictions on Russian banks, oligarchs and Kremlin officials. The coal ban, which will cost Russia about $8.7 billion in annual revenue, takes effect immediately for new contracts. At Germany’s insistence, however, existing contracts were given four months to wind down, softening the blow to Russia and Germany alike.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, meeting with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in London on Friday, applauded what Mr. Johnson called the “seismic decision” by Germany to turn away from Russian fuel. Britain has pushed for a total ban on Russian energy, a move that Germany, which heats half its homes with Russian gas, has resisted.

Mr. Johnson acknowledged the obstacles to transforming Germany’s energy system “overnight,” but said “we know that Russia’s war in Ukraine will not end overnight.” Mr. Scholz said Mr. Putin had tried to divide European powers, but “he will continue to experience our unity.”

On Friday, Russia retaliated for some of the punishments from the West, declaring 45 Polish Embassy and Consulate staff “persona non grata,” and ordering them to leave Russia. Poland had expelled the same number of Russian diplomats.

Russia’s Justice Ministry also said it had revoked the registration of several prominent human rights groups in the country, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which have accused Russian troops of committing war crimes in Ukraine. The ministry accused the groups of violating an unspecified Russian law. The decision means the organizations are no longer allowed to operate in Russia.

Human Rights Watch said that forcing its office to close would not change its determination to call out Russia’s turn to authoritarianism. The group said it had been monitoring abuses in Russia since the Soviet era.

“We found ways of documenting human rights abuses then, and we will do so in the future,” it said.

Image
An unattended casualty at the Kramatorsk train station.Credit...Anatolii Stepanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Megan Specia reported from Krakow, Poland, and Michael Levenson from New York. Reporting was contributed by Jane Arraf from Lviv, Ukraine, Aurelien Breeden from Paris, Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul, Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels, Michael D. Shear and Eric Schmitt from Washington, and Mark Landler and Chris Stanford from London.

Alexandra E. Petri
April 9, 2022, 6:24 a.m. ET

Women in Poland volunteer as drivers to offer safe transit to Ukraine’s refugees.

Image
Katarzyna Garbarska, a volunteer with Women Take the Wheel, drove Marina Bardash and her daughters from the Polish border with Ukraine toward the city of Katowice this month. Ms. Bardash and her daughters are refugees from Kyiv.Credit...Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York Times

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, women around Poland have been making trips to the Polish-Ukrainian border to offer rides to the multitudes of refugees seeking safe passage out of the country.

Most of the more than four million people who have fled Ukraine are women and children, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And because both groups are at high risk of exploitation and trafficking, the volunteer collective Women Take the Wheel is helping them make the journey.

“Feeling safe and secure is one of humans’ basic needs,” said Ella Jarmulska, 38, an entrepreneur from a village on the outskirts of Warsaw who helped found the group and serves as one of the drivers. “To provide them with some sense of security was as basic a reaction as giving water to a thirsty person,” she said.

Women Take the Wheel, an informal group with about 600 members, uses Facebook, WhatsApp and other messaging platforms to communicate and coordinate assistance.

The amplified perils that women and children face are part of what motivated Ms. Jarmulska to issue an appeal for female drivers on Facebook after making her first trip to the border, near the town of Dorohusk. On that trip at the onset of the war, Ms. Jarmulska saw dozens of men standing by their cars outside the reception sites — hastily erected centers for arriving refugees — “looking like bouncers at a club.”

As a woman, Ms. Jarmulska empathized with those arriving, alone or with children, after a difficult journey to a different country where the language is foreign and men, however well-intentioned, are offering rides, sometimes late at night. It can “add to the trauma and state of fear,” she said.

“What can I do to make it easier on them?” Ms. Jarmulska asked herself that evening.

Image
Ella Jarmulska, center, smiled after driving Wayne, Dana and their 10-day-old son, Sebastian, to Warsaw as part of her effort with Women Take the Wheel.Credit...Ella Jarmulska

Kasia Garbarska saw the discussion on Facebook and an opportunity to further mobilize the effort, suggesting the volunteers travel in groups: an extra safety precaution, she said, and a way to maximize space.

Through her job with the marketing department in Warsaw’s City Hall, where she has worked with some of the reception points for refugees in the city, Ms. Garbarska heard the fears that female refugees expressed, including the dangers associated with taking rides from unknown men.

“They do not feel safe,” said Ms. Garbarska, 56, who volunteers as a driver at least once a week. “So if we can do anything to make them feel a little bit safer, that is what we have to do.”

There is no vetting process for the drivers, but that is being addressed, Ms. Jarmulska said, adding that she closely examined a person’s Facebook profile before accepting any request to join. Some cars are outfitted with blue-and-gold signs of the group’s name and its logo — a van with the symbol for “women” underneath it. (The image was designed by Ola Jasionowska, the artist behind the lightning bolt that became the image of the women’s movement in Poland two years ago.) And volunteers are instructed to check in at reception centers and with the local authorities before offering any transportation.

Women Take the Wheel will offer transportation and widen its network of female volunteers as long as there is a need, Ms. Jarmulska said. It’s a matter, she said, of “showing up with your hand out and heart open.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
The New York Times
April 8, 2022, 10:24 p.m. ET

Photographers capture scenes of destruction and civilian deaths in Ukraine.

On Sunday, Tatyana Petrovna, 72, went to the garden where the bodies of two of her relatives lay. She brought flowers, some cookies and poppy seed crackers to place beside the body of Roman, who was found with his brother-in-law and another civilian.

On Wednesday, emergency responders removed part of a rocket that landed in a suburb outside Kharkiv.

In Borodianka, a commuter town not far from the capital, Kyiv, as many as 200 people were missing and presumed dead on Tuesday, buried in the rubble of destroyed buildings.

A woman and child, like other Ukrainian refugees, wait in the ticket hall of the railway station in Przemysl, in southeastern Poland, on Thursday. The city has been a transit point for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing violence since the beginning of the war.

For the past seven weeks, photographers with The New York Times and other news organizations throughout Ukraine have chronicled the war.

Alexandra E. Petri
April 8, 2022, 9:56 p.m. ET

Zelensky calls the train station missile attack a war crime.

Image
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, at a meeting in Kyiv on Friday.Credit...Ukrainian Presidential Press Service, via Reuters

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine described a missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station that killed at least 50 civilians trying to evacuate from the fighting, including children, as “another war crime of Russia” in his nightly videotaped address to the nation.

Moscow has denied responsibility for the attack, but U.S. military officials say they believe Russian forces launched the missiles.

Mr. Zelensky said the strike on innocent civilians massed at the station would be investigated, along with other alleged atrocities by Russian troops, including the apparent murders of civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, the capital.

The Ukrainian president has called for an international tribunal to investigate war crimes, alluding to the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.

On Friday, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, visited a mass grave in Bucha and lit candles in a nearby church in memory of the 67 victims exhumed there so far and other civilians found shot to death in the streets. The E.U. has set up a joint team with Ukraine to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the war.

“It is the unthinkable that has happened here,” Ms. von der Leyen said during her visit. “We have seen the cruel face of Putin’s army.”

Russia has denied its soldiers committed atrocities in Bucha and has suggested, without evidence, that Ukrainian forces were responsible.

In his address, Mr. Zelensky vowed that the Kremlin would be held accountable for the attack on the train station.

“Like the massacre in Bucha, like many other Russian war crimes, the missile strike on Kramatorsk must be one of the charges at the tribunal, which is bound to happen,” Mr. Zelensky said.

He also thanked Ms. von der Leyen “for her personal involvement and assistance in setting up a joint investigation team to establish the full truth about the actions of the Russian occupiers and bring all those responsible to justice.”

Legal experts have said that bringing war crimes charges against the Kremlin would be difficult. The burden of proof is very high, requiring prosecutors to show that soldiers and their commanders intended to violate international law that establishes the rules of war.

Prosecutors would have to show, for instance, that Russian commanders intentionally targeted civilian structures, or struck them during attacks that failed to discriminate between civilian and military targets.

To bring charges against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, prosecutors would have to demonstrate that he issued specific orders that led to specific atrocities or that he knew about the crimes or did nothing to prevent them.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Andrew E. KramerIvor Prickett
April 8, 2022, 9:33 p.m. ET

Andrew E. Kramer and

Reporting from Chernobyl, Ukraine

Russians blunder at Chernobyl: ‘They came and did whatever they wanted.’

Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

As the staging ground for an assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most toxic places on earth, was probably not the best choice. But that did not seem to bother the Russian generals who took over the site in the early stages of the war.

“We told them not to do it, that it was dangerous, but they ignored us,” Valeriy Simyonov, the chief safety engineer for the Chernobyl nuclear site, said in an interview.

Apparently undeterred by safety concerns, the Russian forces tramped about the grounds with bulldozers and tanks, digging trenches and bunkers — and exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation lingering beneath the surface.

In a visit to the recently liberated nuclear station, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986, wind blew swirls of dust along the roads, and scenes of disregard for safety were everywhere, though Ukrainian nuclear officials say no major radiation leak was triggered by Russia’s monthlong military occupation.

At just one site of extensive trenching a few hundred yards outside the town of Chernobyl, the Russian army had dug an elaborate maze of sunken walkways and bunkers. An abandoned armored personnel carrier sat nearby.

The soldiers had apparently camped out for weeks in the radioactive forest. While international nuclear safety experts say they have not confirmed any cases of radiation sickness among the soldiers, the cancers and other potential health problems associated with radiation exposure might not develop until decades later.

Mr. Simyonov said that the Russian military had deployed officers from a nuclear, biological and chemical unit, as well as experts from Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power company, who consulted with the Ukrainian scientists.

But the Russian nuclear experts seemed to hold little sway over the army commanders, he said. The military men seemed more preoccupied with planning the assault on Kyiv and, after that failed, using Chernobyl as an escape route to Belarus for their badly mauled troops.

“They came and did whatever they wanted” in the zone around the station, Mr. Simyonov said. Despite efforts by him and other Ukrainian nuclear engineers and technicians who remained at the site through the occupation, working round-the-clock and unable to leave except for one shift change in late March, the entrenching continued.

The earthworks were not the only instance of recklessness in the treatment of a site so toxic it still holds the potential to spread radiation well beyond Ukraine’s borders.

In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Mr. Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the man, he said.

The most concerning moment, Mr. Simyonov said, came in mid-March, when electrical power was cut to a cooling pool that stores spent nuclear fuel rods that contain many times more radioactive material than was dispersed in the 1986 catastrophe. That raised the concern among Ukrainians of a fire if the water cooling the fuel rods boiled away, exposing them to the air, though that prospect was quickly dismissed by experts.

As they retreated from Chernobyl, Russian troops blew up a bridge in the exclusion zone and planted a dense maze of anti-personnel mines, trip wires and booby traps around the defunct station. Two Ukrainian soldiers have stepped on mines in the past week, according to the Ukrainian government agency that manages the site.

In a bizarre final sign of the unit’s misadventures, Ukrainian soldiers found discarded appliances and electronic goods on roads in the Chernobyl zone. These were apparently looted from towns deeper inside Ukraine and cast off for unclear reasons in the final retreat. Reporters found one washing machine on a road shoulder just outside the town of Chernobyl.

Mauricio Lima
April 8, 2022, 8:08 p.m. ET

Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine

Volunteers pack up medical supplies and rations of food, both for people and their animals, in a fortified basement on the outskirts of Lviv in western Ukraine. The packages will be sent to the town Bucha outside Kyiv and to other cities in the east.

Image
Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Eric Schmitt
April 8, 2022, 7:24 p.m. ET

The Pentagon says Russia fired the missiles that hit Kramatorsk station, killing at least 50 people.

Image
The railway station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, after a missile strike at the station on Friday.Credit...Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press

A senior Pentagon official said on Friday that Russian forces carried out a missile strike on a train station in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, that killed at least 50 people and wounded nearly 100 others.

Earlier in the day, Russia had denied responsibility for the missile strike, in which several children died.

“They originally claimed a successful strike and then only retracted it when there were reports of civilian casualties,” the Pentagon official said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

“It’s our full expectation that this was a Russian strike,” the Pentagon official said. “We believe they used the short-range ballistic missile.” The official added that the missile used appeared to be a “SS-21,” the NATO nomenclature for a Tochka-U missile.

The Pentagon assessment aligned with statements by Ukrainian officials blaming Russia for the strike. Russia’s Ministry of Defense accused Ukraine’s armed forces of attacking the station.

Pentagon officials said they did not have complete understanding of Russian targeting priorities, but they noted the Kramatorsk railway station was a regional rail hub near the front lines in Donbas, the contested region in the country’s east.

Destroying transportation hubs like railway stations would make sense if Russia’s goal were to stop Ukrainian reinforcements from arriving or to keep Ukraine’s forces in the east in place, Pentagon officials said. “You could see where there might be a logic there to why you would hit it,” the official said.

Killing civilians trying to board trains to escape the fighting would have been a grisly bonus for the Kremlin, Pentagon officials said, describing such a strike as part of Moscow’s campaign to terrorize Ukrainians.

For weeks, Russian forces have bombarded urban centers like Kyiv, the capital, and Mariupol, a Black Sea port city under siege. In Mariupol, shelling has struck a hospital, a theater being used as a shelter and apartment buildings, leaving bodies in the streets and survivors with dwindling food and water.

Russian battalions have retreated in the past week from northern cities, after being battered and bloodied by Ukrainian resistance. Some of those forces have regrouped in Russia and in Belarus, an ally of Moscow, to rearm and resupply. Many units are likely to be repositioned for what analysts predict will be a renewed Russian offensive to seize eastern Ukraine.

But it could be weeks or longer before the units who have retreated from northern Ukraine are combat ready again, officials said. “We haven’t seen any indications that there are fresh reinforcements fully trained, fully armed, fully ready to join,” the senior Pentagon official said.

Moscow also appears to be preparing to mobilize a wave of as many as 60,000 reservists to bolster the Russian war effort in the east, the senior Pentagon official said, though it was unclear how successful that mobilization will be.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Ivan NechepurenkoJane Arraf
April 8, 2022, 6:48 p.m. ET

‘For the children’: a chilling message at a Ukrainian train station destroyed in a missile strike.

Image
Ukrainian servicemen next to the fragment of a missile with a phrase in Russian, “for the children,” in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Friday.Credit...Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press

Not far from the train station in eastern Ukraine that was hit by a missile strike on Friday, a fragment of a missile was photographed lying on the grass, with two words spray-painted in Russian: “za detei.” It translates in English to “for the children.”

At least 50 people were killed and nearly 100 injured in the attack — including children, who were trying to evacuate the area with their families.

It is still unclear where the missile originated from, or whether the message on the missile was written before or after it landed. The Ukrainians said the missile had been fired by the Russians; the Russians blamed the Ukrainians.

But Russian linguists said that, given the syntax, the implication of the slogan on the missile was clear: “For the children” suggests an act of revenge — something done in exchange for something else — and not as a gift or delivery, as in “here is something for the children.”

“To me the meaning is immediately obvious: It is revenge for the children,” said Izabella Tabarovsky, a Russia expert at the Woodrow Wilson Center who is a native Russian speaker.

“In English it could mean something meant for the children, but that is not how it works in Russian.” she added. “It would be a different preposition.”

Bella Ginzbursky-Blum, a senior lecturer of Russian language and culture at William & Mary, agreed. “While the preposition could be translated as ‘for,’ it does not mean intended for the Ukrainian children,” she said. “The meaning is more ‘on behalf of or for the protection of the Russian children.’”

Ms. Ginsburzky-Blum also noted the grammatical construction was commonly used in wartime to express support for a cause — in phrases like “for the Motherland,” for instance.

If the missile and the inscription came from Russian forces, the reference to revenge would be consistent with a refrain heard often in Russian propaganda, accusing Ukraine of killing Russian children in the contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where fighting has been going on since 2014 between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces.

Russian officials, denying responsibility, said a Ukrainian battalion had fired the missile in what they called a “provocation.” The Russian Defense Ministry said that Tochka-U missiles like the ones that hit the station are only used by the Ukrainian armed forces and that Russian troops had not made any strikes against Kramatorsk on Friday.

A senior Pentagon official said on Friday the United States believed the station had been hit by a missile fired by Russian forces. “They originally claimed a successful strike and then only retracted it when there were reports of civilian casualties,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

Valerie Hopkins
April 8, 2022, 6:18 p.m. ET

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

A writer who endured 962 days in a separatist prison takes up arms for Ukraine.

Stanislav Aseyev spent two and a half years in a notorious prison run by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, where he said he and other inmates were regularly tortured, beaten, demeaned and forced to wear bags on their heads. Yet, even he was unprepared for the grim scenes of abuse and executions that he witnessed in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

“I was still not ready for this,” he said. “I did not think that I would see genocide with my own eyes, despite the fact that I have a lot of experience in this war.”

Mr. Aseyev, a 32-year-old journalist, had documented his time in prison in a memoir published in 2020, “The Torture Camp on Paradise Street.” Today, he bears witness to a new brutality, the Russian invasion.

“I had thought that it was all over, that I still had a very long process ahead to work on it,” he said of the lingering scars in an interview. “But now it’s all irrelevant, because now the old psychological traumas from captivity are again beginning to slowly make themselves felt.”

Jerked back to wartime, Mr. Aseyev has also chosen a new way to address his fears and anger. He has taken up arms for the first time in his life, defending his adopted city as part of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer unit in the Ukrainian army.

Mr. Aseyev’s story is an extreme version of the one many Ukrainians are experiencing today, as the Russian military spreads violence throughout the country. His experiences have seen him — someone raised with Russian language and Russian culture, with a worldview relatively sympathetic to Moscow — reject all of that to the extent that he is not only ready but willing to kill Russian soldiers.

He was born in the town of Makiivka, just outside Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine. As a native Russian speaker, he grew up listening to Soviet rock bands like Kino, reading Dostoyevsky and learning history from a predominantly Russian perspective.

Before the separatist war that broke out in 2014, he says he was sympathetic to President Vladimir V. Putin’s vision of Ukraine as part of “Russky Mir,” or “Russian World,” a nationalist and chauvinistic ideology focused on the idea of Russia’s civilizational superiority. “I really had such ‘Russky Mir,’ illusions about Putin, Great Russia, all these things,” he said.

Those were shattered by his experiences after 2014. He now prefers not to speak Russian, except to talk to his mother.

In 2014, Makiivka, a place that Mr. Aseyev has described as “a city of Soviet sleepwalkers,” was occupied by Russian-backed separatist forces loyal to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. Many of his friends signed up to fight on the side of the pro-Moscow rebels, buying the Russian propaganda line that Ukrainian fascists had taken control in Kyiv. Shortly thereafter, he said, he realized that the separatists were the ones committing human rights abuses.

In 2015, he started writing about the abuses for news outlets. He continued that line of reporting under a pseudonym for two years, until he was detained on June 2, 2017.

Mr. Aseyev was first taken to “The Office,” a prison camp in Donetsk that had served as office space before the war. After beatings and electric shock torture, he said, he spent six weeks in solitary confinement, in a cell so cold that he had to grasp bottles of his own urine to stay warm.

Then he was transferred to Izolyatsia prison, named for a former insulation factory. There, Mr. Aseyev says, he was beaten and tortured for more than two years. He was released in a prisoner exchange in 2019, after 962 days inside.

Mr. Aseyev said that his own persecution, and the Russians’ pummeling today of cities around Ukraine, many of them Russian-speaking areas, belied the Kremlin’s assertion that it went to war to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers.

“They don’t care who they kill,” he said. “I am a Russian speaker, I grew up on Russian culture, on Russian music, books, cinema, even Soviet in a sense.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Alan Rappeport
April 8, 2022, 3:45 p.m. ET

The U.S. is attacking Russia’s economy. Critics question the strategy’s effectiveness.

Image
Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, spent last week in Europe coordinating a crackdown on Russia’s attempts to evade sanctions.Credit...Pool photo by Greg Nash

WASHINGTON — When Russia imposed retaliatory sanctions on top American officials last month, its government targeted President Biden and his top national security advisers, along with Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, whose agency has been crafting the punitive measures aimed at crippling Russia’s economy.

Russia’s move, while wholly symbolic, underscored the central role that the Treasury Department has been playing in designing and enforcing the most expansive financial restrictions that the United States has ever imposed on a major economic power.

Those restrictions amount to an economic war against Russia, which is entering a critical phase as the toll of fighting in Ukraine continues to escalate and as the Russian government attempts to find ways to evade or mitigate fallout from Western sanctions.

In an attempt to prevent Russia from skirting the penalties, Mr. Adeyemo, a 40-year-old former Obama administration official, spent last week crisscrossing Europe to coordinate a crackdown on Russia’s evasion tactics and to plot future sanctions. In meetings with counterparts, Mr. Adeyemo discussed plans by European governments to target the supply chains of Russian defense companies, some of which the U.S. sanctioned last week, and he talked about ways the United States could help provide more energy to Europe so that European countries could scale back purchases of Russian oil and gas, a Treasury official said.

On Wednesday, five days after Mr. Adeyemo returned, the Biden administration announced additional sanctions on Russian banks, state-owned enterprises and the adult daughters of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Still, while the U.S. and its allies have enacted sweeping penalties aimed at neutering Russia’s economic power, it remains to be seen whether the restrictions are working.

Over the past six weeks, the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia have imposed sanctions on large financial institutions in Russia, its central bank, its military industrial supply chain and Mr. Putin’s allies, seizing their yachts and planes. Imports of Russian oil to the United States have been banned, and Europe is developing plans to wean itself off Russian gas and coal, albeit slowly. This week, the Treasury Department prohibited Russia from making sovereign debt payments with dollars held at American banks, potentially pushing Russia toward its first foreign currency debt default in a century.

But thus far Russia has kept paying its debts. Currency controls imposed by Mr. Putin’s central bank, which restricted Russians from using rubles to buy dollars or other hard currencies, along with ongoing energy exports to Europe and elsewhere have allowed the ruble to stabilize and are replenishing Russia’s coffers with more dollars and euros. That has raised questions about whether the measures have been effective.

“I think we’re grappling with the aftershocks of the shock and awe of the sanctions that were put in place and the recognition that sanctions take time to fully impact an economy,” said Juan C. Zarate, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes. “It’s asking too much of sanctions to actually turn back the tanks, especially when sanctions have been implemented after the invasion.”

Mark Landler
April 8, 2022, 3:15 p.m. ET

Reporting from London

Britain took a hawkish lead on Russia, but its influence on Europe is in question.

Image
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany outside Mr. Johnson’s residence on Friday in London.Credit...Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock

LONDON — When Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain welcomed Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany to 10 Downing Street on Friday, the two men worked hard to avoid echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s famous admonition to President George H.W. Bush three decades ago, “This is no time to go wobbly.”

Mrs. Thatcher was urging Mr. Bush not to let up pressure on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. Mr. Johnson is urging Germany not to let up pressure on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. But the prime minister was also determined to project unity, and whether he was as persuasive with Mr. Scholz in private as his hawkish predecessor was with Mr. Bush in 1990 is not yet clear.

Speaking after their meeting, Mr. Johnson said Germany had committed to weaning itself off Russian energy, even if the European Union has rejected British calls for a clear timetable to eliminate imports of Russian gas. President Vladimir V. Putin, he said, was betting that he could divide European allies on this issue, but he had failed.

“This is not easy for any of us, and I applaud the seismic decisions taken by Olaf’s government to move Germany away from Russian hydrocarbons,” Mr. Johnson said. “We cannot transform our respective energy systems overnight, but we also know that Putin’s war will not end overnight.”

Britain, under Mr. Johnson, has staked out the most aggressive role of any major European power in its support for Ukraine and its condemnation of Russia. Yet its influence on Germany and France is questionable, given that Britain, having left the European Union, no longer has a seat at the table in Brussels.

“We are doing all we can, and we are doing a lot,” Mr. Scholz said of Germany’s efforts to reduce its dependence on Russia. But he warned that it would require massive investments to install the infrastructure to import gas from other countries.

Image
Mr. Scholz and Mr. Johnson during a news conference on Friday.Credit...Pool photo by Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock

For Mr. Scholz, the economic and political costs of cutting off Russian gas outweigh anything Mr. Johnson can say to him.

After making a landmark commitment to increase Germany’s military spending soon after he took office, critics say, Mr. Scholz has begun to feel the weight of his country’s geopolitical role in Europe. That has stoked concerns that he could end up enabling Mr. Putin by continuing to do business with Russia, much as critics now say his predecessor, Angela Merkel, did.

“There is vacuum of leadership in Europe, and Germany should be the country filling that vacuum,” said Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democrat who chaired the German Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee until 2021. “But instead of leading, we are too slow, too late, and we are doing too little to impose maximum pressure on Russia.”

Mr. Johnson, however, steered clear of criticism on Mr. Scholz’s visit to London, his first as chancellor. To the extent he showed daylight with a European leader, it was with President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has come under scrutiny for continuing to talk to Mr. Putin since the war began. Mr. Johnson has not spoken to him since before Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border.

“Negotiating with Putin does not seem to me to be full of promise,” he said. “That is not to say that I don’t admire the efforts of those who try to find a way through, but for myself I am very skeptical and indeed cynical.”

Mr. Johnson has made Britain an early and avid supplier of weapons to Ukraine. On Friday, he announced fresh shipments of an antiaircraft missile system, known as Starstreak, and 800 antitank missiles. The defense minister, Ben Wallace, said Britain would also provide Ukraine with armored vehicles. Last week, he convened a donor conference of more than 35 countries to pledge weapons.

Image
Ukrainian fighters training in early March to use a British-provided NLAW antitank weapon.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Before it left the European Union, Britain often acted as a bridge between the United States and Europe, using its close ties with Washington to argue for American positions with France and Germany. That brought mixed results even before Brexit, and it seems even less plausible now.

“It’s very unlikely Britain could play a bridging role, because it has tried to outflank even Poland in being hard-line toward Russia,” said Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair during the later Iraq war. “Boris Johnson sees himself as being the vanguard rather than a bridge.”

The risk for Britain, Mr. Powell said, is that it is viewed in other European capitals as merely a “running dog for the Americans.” That is convenient for the Biden administration, he said, because “they can always rely on him to come out and say something even more extreme than they do.”

Mr. Johnson has forged a highly visible relationship with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, calling him virtually every day. On Mr. Zelensky’s virtual speaking tour of foreign parliaments, his first stop was Britain’s House of Commons, where he singled out Mr. Johnson to thank him for his support.

“Having someone who is out on a limb is helpful because you can use them to shame other countries,” Mr. Powell said.

For Mr. Johnson, the war in Ukraine has utterly eclipsed a skein of political scandals at home. He has certainly shown an astute capacity to seize the moment. Last week, he recorded a video for the Russian people in which he tried to separate them from Mr. Putin. “Your president stands accused of committing war crimes,” he said in passable Russian. “But I cannot believe he’s acting in your name.”

On Friday, Britain imposed sanctions on two daughters of Mr. Putin and a daughter of the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. They were the latest in what critics say is a long-overdue effort to crack down on wealthy Russians, many of whom have poured ill-gotten gains into London real estate.

“Before the crisis, the U.K. position was seen as hypocritical because of the failure to tackle Russian wealth flowing into London,” said Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank. “But now it’s done things that people have been urging them to do for years.”

Mr. Johnson has also pounded away at the need for Europe to reduce its dependence on Russian energy, a goal that is easier for Britain since it is far less reliant on it than its Continental neighbors. On Wednesday, Britain announced it would stop buying Russian coal and oil by the end of 2022, and gas “as soon as possible thereafter.”

“He’s right to be a flag-bearer on the energy issue, even if it’s easier for us to do that,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to the United States. “The Europeans will say, ‘What are you doing on Londongrad?’” he said, referring to the flood of suspicious Russian money. “And the answer is, ‘Not enough yet.’”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Tyler Hicks
April 8, 2022, 2:44 p.m. ET

Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine

Residents of a neighborhood in Kharkiv examined damage around their homes after an overnight bombing, with some choosing to flee the area. The city in northeastern Ukraine has come under heavy Russian bombardment, suffering hundreds of casualties.

Image
Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Image
Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Michael D. Shear
April 8, 2022, 2:24 p.m. ET

Receiving a U.S. missile system, Slovakia sends air defenses to Ukraine.

Image
Patriot missile systems of the U.S. Army stationed at Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport in Rzeszow, Poland. Patriots are a surface-to-air missile system used by the United States and its allies.Credit...Reuters

WASHINGTON — The United States on Friday sent a U.S. Patriot missile system to Slovakia to make way for that government to deliver an older, S-300 air defense system to Ukraine to defend against attacks by Russian missiles and aircraft, President Biden announced.

The Patriot missile system is an American surface-to-air missile system that is used by the U.S. Army and allies of the United States around the world to defend against attacks, primarily from enemy aircraft.

Mr. Biden said the decision to send the Patriot system to Slovakia for use in its own defense made it possible for the transfer of the S-300, a Russian-made system, to Ukraine.

“I want to thank the Slovakian government for providing an S-300 air defense system to Ukraine, something President Zelensky has personally raised with me in our conversations,” Mr. Biden said in a statement, referring to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “To enable this transfer and ensure the continued security of Slovakia, the United States will reposition a U.S. Patriot missile system to Slovakia.”

Slovakia’s prime minister, Eduard Heger, traveled to Ukraine on Friday with the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, to discuss further aid for Mr. Zelensky’s government.

On Friday, he confirmed that Slovakia had sent Ukraine the S-300 air defense system, saying on Twitter that in the face of Russian aggression, “it is our duty to help, not to stay put and be ignorant to the loss of human lives.”

In an interview in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, on Thursday, Mr. Heger said his country was ready to provide Ukraine with an air defense system so long as it could secure a replacement system for its own defense. He added, “We need to help Ukraine in every possible way to win this war.”

Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly pressured Mr. Biden and other world leaders to do more to secure the skies over Ukraine, which has been hammered by Russian bombs and missiles.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly refused to consider ordering the American military to enforce a no-fly zone, insisting that to do so would risk a direct clash with Russian fighter jets and the possibility of escalating the conflict into a war between nuclear superpowers. European nations have taken a similar stance.

Mr. Zelensky has also pressed for allies to send fighter aircraft to Ukraine, something that the United States has declined to do. But Mr. Biden has recently said the allies will do more to provide more advanced weapons other than planes to help Ukraine defend itself and fight back against the Russians.

“Now is no time for complacency,” Mr. Biden said in the statement. “As the Russian military repositions for the next phase of this war, I have directed my Administration to continue to spare no effort to identify and provide to the Ukrainian military the advanced weapons capabilities it needs to defend its country.”

According to the Pentagon, the Patriot system provided to Slovakia will come from U.S. European Command, which is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany.

“This deployment of Patriot capabilities to Slovakia aligns perfectly with our previous efforts to bolster NATO’s defensive capabilities and to demonstrate our collective security requirements under Article 5 of the NATO treaty,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III in a statement sent to reporters. “It complements the NATO multinational battle group in eastern Slovakia, which includes air defense elements from Germany and the Netherlands.”

The missile battery and its crew of U.S. service members are expected to arrive in coming days, the Pentagon said in a statement, while the length of their deployment has yet to be determined.

Matthew Goldstein
April 8, 2022, 2:16 p.m. ET

The Cayman Islands says firms have frozen $7.3 billion in response to sanctions of Russian oligarchs.

Image
Roman Abramovich, one of Russia’s wealthiest men, is believed to have invested with dozens of U.S. funds over the past decade.Credit...Matt Dunham/Associated Press

Financial regulators in the Cayman Islands say companies there have frozen $7.3 billion in accounts believed to be tied to Russian oligarchs in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a statement on Thursday, regulators in the islands, a British territory in the Caribbean, said they had received more than 400 compliance reports regarding asset freezes from financial service providers there as a result of sanction orders by Britain and the United States.

The Cayman Islands has long been a major administrative hub for offshore investment funds managed by U.S. hedge funds and private equity firms. The regulators did not provide any information about the ultimate owners of those frozen funds, nor did they identify any hedge funds, private equity firms or other investment vehicles holding those frozen accounts.

Robert James Berry, director of the territory’s Financial Reporting Authority, said in a statement that the asset freezes showed that financial services firms were able to “identify funds or economic resources owned or controlled, directly or indirectly,” to sanctioned oligarchs.

In response to a request for additional information, Mr. Berry said that the matter of sanctions was “an almost daily evolving situation” and that regulators were not in a position to release more details.

Advocates for increased financial transparency have said it is difficult to determine just how much money Russian oligarchs have in U.S. investment funds because those firms are not required to conduct the same kind of customer due diligence checks or anti-money-laundering inspections as banks.

One of Russia’s wealthiest men, Roman Abramovich, is believed to have invested several billion dollars in hedge funds and real estate-oriented private firms in the United States, The New York Times has reported. British officials imposed sanctions on Mr. Abramovich on March 10, but officials in the United States have not, in part because he has served as an intermediary in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

Mr. Abramovich is believed to have invested with dozens of U.S. funds over the past decade, but only a few have acknowledged having money tied to him. A small firm in Tarrytown, N.Y., helped arrange investments for Mr. Abramovich, which were made by the trustees and agents for a series of shell companies in the British Virgin Islands and more recently in the Channel Islands.

The Osiris International Group, a firm that serves as the registered agent for some of those entities, filed notices on March 15 with financial authorities in the British Virgin Islands that it was resigning from that post.

Miles Walton, a managing director at Osiris, said in an emailed statement that he could not comment on former or current clients. But he said the firm “complies with all applicable sanctions” and “does not represent or assist any sanctioned individual.”

Last week, two Democratic lawmakers called on the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to take immediate steps to require private funds in the United States to conduct the same kind of investor background checks as banks. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said scrutiny of offshore money needed to be enhanced to permit regulators to track assets from oligarchs and even terrorists.

And on Friday, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Mr. Whitehouse, introduced legislation that would authorize financial regulators to require any company buying real estate, airplanes and yachts to disclose the ultimate beneficial owner. Mr. Whitehouse said the bill would “shine the light of transparency on these shady transactions.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Ivan Nechepurenko
April 8, 2022, 2:01 p.m. ET

Reporting from Istanbul

Russia’s Justice Ministry said it had revoked the registrations of several prominent international organizations in the country, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that have accused Russian troops of committing war crimes in Ukraine. The ministry said that they had violated an unspecified Russian law.

Aurelien Breeden
April 8, 2022, 1:56 p.m. ET

Reporting from Paris

Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, told France 5 television on Friday that the Russian strikes on the Kramatorsk train station in eastern Ukraine were “crimes against humanity.”

Matina Stevis-Gridneff
April 8, 2022, 1:46 p.m. ET

Reporting from Brussels

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, started her visit of Ukraine today in Bucha, north of the capital, Kyiv, and the town where Russian forces are accused of atrocities. She and Slovakia's prime minister were also due in Kyiv, meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials, before heading to Warsaw.

Image
Credit...Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Farnaz Fassihi
April 8, 2022, 1:16 p.m. ET

Reporting from New York

The United Nations condemned the strike on the Kramatorsk railway station, which killed scores of civilians who were waiting to be evacuated. “They are gross violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, for which the perpetrators must be held accountable,” said Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for the secretary general.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Graham Bowley
April 8, 2022, 12:51 p.m. ET

Officials say Russian artwork seized by Finns should be returned home.

Image
Crates of art from Russian museums that were seized by Finnish customs officials. Officials later decided the art, which had been on loan to institutions in the West, was not subject to sanctions.Credit...Finnish Customs

Finland’s foreign ministry said Friday that it had authorized the return of three shipments of Russian art that had been on loan to museums and galleries but were impounded by Finnish customs officials on their route back to Russia.

The paintings and sculptures, valued at 42 million euros ($46 million), had been on loan from Russian museums to institutions in Italy and Japan. They were seized last weekend at Vaalimaa, a Finnish border crossing, on suspicion of contravening European Union sanctions imposed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Hanni Hyvärinen, a spokeswoman for Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, said in a telephone interview that the decision had been made in conjunction with European Union authorities. In a statement, the ministry said the union planned to exempt certain cultural objects from sanctions.

“Legislative changes will take effect on April 9, 2022, and these changes will include the ability for member states to issue permits for the export or other transfer of cultural objects that are part of official cultural cooperation to Russia,” the statement said. The European Union on Friday said that it was amending existing rules to allow an exemption for “cultural goods which are on loan in the context of formal cultural cooperation with Russia.” It did not say why such cultural goods were being exempted.

Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow in the Brussels office of the research group the German Marshall Fund, said, “Often under these type of sanctions, cultural items are exempt because they are non-pecuniary and they are not related directly to the war effort.”

The seizure had posed substantial questions on how Europe might handle the return of art on loan from Russian museums, which for decades have sent some of the world’s greatest art to exhibitions that provided audiences in the West glimpses of cultural treasures that rarely travel.

Most recently, art from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and other Russian institutions, for example, has been on display at museums in Paris, London and Rome.

Proponents of cultural exchanges as bridge-building exercises had hoped that officials would abide by the international agreements that govern such loans. But other analysts said that art closely associated with the Russian state or sanctioned individuals could be legitimate targets of sanctions that are intended to isolate Russia for a war that has targeted civilians and devastated cities.

Hyvärinen could not confirm whether the art had already left Finland.

The Russian culture minister, Olga Lyubimova, posted on the messaging app Telegram that the European authorities had “clarified that the exhibits that participated in European exhibitions do not fall into the sanctions list.”

She said the artworks had been shown at two exhibitions in Italy — in Milan and Udine — and featured work from collections at the State Hermitage and the Tsarskoye Selo, Pavlovsk and Gatchina museum reserves; the State Tretyakov Gallery; and the State Museum of the East.

Works exhibited at the Chiba City Museum in Japan had come from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. Lyubimova said that the Russian authorities had already begun organizing the return of the collections.

The long-term impact of the war on collaborations between Russian and European museums still remains unclear.

Since 2011, Russian state museums have refused to lend artworks to museums in the United States, fearing they might be confiscated, and some European art scholars were concerned a similar freeze could now occur between Russian museums and those in Western Europe.

The governments of Austria, Britain, the Netherlands and Spain have already asked cultural organizations not to collaborate with Russian state museums, even if they had been planning exhibitions with them for years. Russia has also stopped some international collaborations.

Thomas C. Danziger, an art market lawyer who advises on international loans, said the release of the artworks in Finland did not calm his fears about a chilling effect on loans.

“The underlying basis for international loans of artwork is confidence in your counter party,” he said. “The seizure of these works — even though they have been released — affects the confidence of the international art world in this system.” He said that “even the slightest risk that a work of art won’t be returned by the borrower would be sufficient to kill many — if not most — prospective international loans.”

Mr. Kirkegaard said that since art can have great symbolic value, European authorities may have decided that keeping the artworks was not worth the potential propaganda value to President Vladimir V. Putin, since the seizure could “play into his narrative that this is really about the West wanting to destroy Russia.”

After customs officials stopped the works at the border, the Finnish authorities suggested the seizures were justified because the artworks might qualify as “luxury goods” — a category that the EU recently included in sanctions. But analysts said that this category of sanctions was not likely intended to cover art owned by museums.

Daniel Fried, a former State Department official who coordinated sanctions policy during the Obama administration, said art crossing borders could be seized under European sanctions rules if it were owned privately by an oligarch, or by another person or entity on the sanctions list.

But even if any artworks do qualify for sanctions, they would be subject under current European Union regulations to only an “asset freeze” — not confiscation. “You don’t get access to it anymore,” said Jonathan Hackenbroich, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

In the same way that Western authorities have recently seized oligarchs’ yachts and other possessions, there would be no transfer of ownership of the art and it would still belong to the original owners, to be returned to them should the sanctions be lifted.

Alex Marshall contributed reporting.

Thomas Gibbons-NeffJohn Ismay
April 8, 2022, 12:07 p.m. ET

Residents of a Ukrainian town are discovering a new threat: land mines with a timer.

Image
Teams of bomb disposal technicians working to recover ordnance around Kharkiv, Ukraine, have come across a new kind of danger: rocket-scattered mines that detonate on a timer hours after landing.Credit...Photographs by Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Image
A local resident took a photo of a PTM-1S land mine that landed in Bezruky.
Image
Technicians removing an undetonated rocket loaded with cluster munitions in the village of Ridnyi Krai.

BEZRUKY, Ukraine — When Sergiy, a 47-year-old construction worker, got out of bed on Sunday morning, stretching his legs in a small town in northeastern Ukraine, he discovered a chilling new hazard in a war filled with them: He had woken up in a minefield.

He had heard a rocket land near his home in Bezruky around 1 in the morning, but thought little of it. There had been plenty of rockets since Russian forces invaded in late February. But what landed in his yard was a new weapon for the town’s residents to add to their growing lexicon of destruction: They knew the Smerch, the Grad, the Hurricane — and now they were introduced to the PTM-1S land mine, a type of scatterable munition.

“Nobody understood what it was,” said Sergiy, declining to provide his surname out of fear of retribution. The weapons roar in like any rocket, but instead of exploding instantly, they eject up to two dozen mines that explode at intervals, parceling out death in the hours afterward.

Since the start of the invasion, Russia has made clear that it is willing to mete out violence and destruction to achieve its aims, often indiscriminately. It has launched cruise missiles, sent in tanks and fired mortars, artillery and rockets. Now it has also turned to something less ominous in appearance, but just as brutal.

These scatterable mines, banned under some interpretations of international law and never officially recorded during this war, have appeared only sparingly in Bezruky and elsewhere in the periphery of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The weapons add yet another element of peril for civilians trying to navigate parts of the ruined landscape.

The mines are green tubes about the size of a liter of soda, packed with three pounds of explosives. They are often used to disable tanks but had, in Sergiy’s case, landed where his 8-year-old daughter likes to play when the weather is pleasant.

“These weapons combine the worst possible attributes of cluster munitions and land mines,” said Brian Castner, a senior arms researcher for Amnesty International. “Any one of these indiscriminate attacks is unlawful, and they’re happening on top of each other.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Ivan Nechepurenko
April 8, 2022, 11:06 a.m. ET

Reporting from Istanbul

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said that it had declared 45 Polish embassy and consulate staff in the country “persona non grata” in retaliation for the expulsion of the same number of Russian diplomats from Poland. They were ordered to leave Russia before Thursday.

Mark Landler
April 8, 2022, 11:04 a.m. ET

Reporting from London

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain tried to project unity in a meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany. “I applaud the seismic decision taken by Olaf’s government to move Germany away from Russian hydrocarbons,” he said. Britain has pushed for a total ban on Russian energy, but Germany has stopped short of banning imports of Russian gas, which heats half its homes.

Matina Stevis-GridneffIvan Nechepurenko
April 8, 2022, 10:37 a.m. ET

As Europe adds new Russia sanctions, fatigue may be setting in.

Image
A Russian train transporting coal in 2020. Credit...Maxim Babenko for The New York Times

Reaching into the sensitive energy sector for the first time, the European Union on Friday formally approved its fifth round of sanctions against Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, banning coal imports and targeting more high-profile individuals and banks.

But these sanctions were harder to agree on than previous rounds, and important exceptions defanged some measures. That suggested the E.U. was reaching its pain threshold, even as news emerged of a new strike that left dozens of civilians dead at an eastern Ukrainian train station.

The banning of Russian coal, a $4.4 billion measure, would be effective immediately for new contracts, but at Germany’s insistence old contracts would be given four months to wind down, softening the blow to Russia and Germany alike.

And an ambitious proposal by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, to ban all vessels operating for Russian firms from E.U. ports was watered down to only affect vessels bearing the Russian flag, accounting for about a third of 3,500 vessels operating in Russia.

The measure will include vessels that ditched the Russian flag after the Feb. 24 invasion and registered in new countries, but it won’t impact a large number of vessels that operate for Russian firms but carry flags of low-tax countries, a popular practice in global shipping. Greece, Cyprus and Malta, which are major shipping and yachting destinations, argued that it would be too big an administrative burden to determine whether vessels were Russian-operated unless they actually bore the country’s flag.

The complications suggest major challenges for banning Russian oil and gas down the line, a key demand by Ukrainian leaders, and a move supported by the United States and a growing number of European institutions. Several E.U. countries are heavily reliant on Russian oil and, even more so, on gas imports, and are loath to cut supplies abruptly.

“We’ve given Ukraine nearly 1 billion euros. That might seem like a lot but 1 billion euros is what we’re paying [Vladimir V.] Putin every day for the energy he provides us with,” said the bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, on Wednesday in a speech to the European Parliament. “Since the start of the war, we’ve given him 35 billion euros, compared to the 1 billion euros we’ve given Ukraine to arm itself.”

In recent weeks, the ruble has rebounded to its prewar value against the dollar and the euro, in part propped up by capital controls and other interventions by the Russian central bank.

Government officials in Moscow on Thursday claimed Russia has so far been doing well at withstanding sanctions. “The authors of that strategy believed that sanctions would destroy our economy in a matter of days,” said Mikhail Mishustin, the Russian prime minister. “Their scenario has not been fulfilled.”

And Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters on Friday that there was plenty of demand for Russia’s coal.

“Clearly, coal is still a very popular commodity,” he said. “As the Europeans ban it, the flows of coal will get redirected to alternative markets.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Jane Arraf
April 8, 2022, 10:07 a.m. ET

Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine

The head of the Donetsk Military Administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko, says that 50 people are dead in train station attack, including 12 who died in the hospital. Another 98 were wounded, including 16 children, he says.

Image
Credit...Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Rick Gladstone
April 8, 2022, 9:41 a.m. ET

The United Nations Children’s Fund, which has been delivering tons of emergency supplies to Kramatorsk, expressed shock over the deadly attack on the train station. “We do not know yet how many children were killed and injured in the attack, but we fear the worst,” said Murat Sahin, UNICEF’s Ukraine representative.

Chris Stanford
April 8, 2022, 9:22 a.m. ET

Reporting from London

Driven by disruptions caused by the war, world food prices rose sharply last month to their highest levels ever, the United Nations reported on Friday. Russia and Ukraine are key suppliers of the world’s wheat and other grains.

Megan Specia
April 8, 2022, 9:19 a.m. ET

Reporting from Krakow, Poland

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv called the attack on the train station in Kramatorsk “another atrocity committed by Russia in Ukraine,” adding that “the world will hold Putin accountable.”

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Thomas Gibbons-Neff
April 8, 2022, 8:22 a.m. ET

Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine

Andriy, a resident of Kramatorsk who declined to provide his last name, said that he had arrived at the train station 40 minutes after the attack and that he had seen about 20 people dead on the ground. He said the strike had seemed to target the passenger platforms.

Jane Arraf
April 8, 2022, 7:36 a.m. ET

Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine

Kramatorsk’s mayor says that at least two children were among the civilians killed in the attack on the train station. He says officials are trying to find buses and cars for emergency evacuations.

Megan Specia
April 8, 2022, 7:21 a.m. ET

Reporting from Krakow, Poland

The mayor of Kramatorsk said there were 4,000 people at the city’s railway station in eastern Ukraine at the time of the attack, and that most were women, children and older people.

Image
Credit...Anatolii Stepanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ivan Nechepurenko
April 8, 2022, 6:59 a.m. ET

Reporting from Istanbul

After the attack on the Kramatorsk train station, people rushed to leave the station’s platforms, which were suddenly strewn with the dead and wounded. “There are so many corpses, there are children, there are just children,” one woman screamed, according to a video from the scene shared on Telegram and verified by The New York Times.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
Eshe Nelson
April 8, 2022, 6:56 a.m. ET

Russia’s central bank said it would cut its interest rate from 20 percent to 17 percent beginning Monday, saying that capital controls had effectively stopped financial stability concerns from worsening. Despite increasing sanctions on the economy, Russia’s currency has regained most of its losses since the war began.

Megan Specia
April 8, 2022, 6:48 a.m. ET

Reporting from Krakow, Poland

The death toll in the train station attack rises to 39, the local council says.

Image
Police officers outside the train station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Friday.Credit...Fadel Senna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Kramatorsk City Council said that by 1 p.m., the death toll from the shelling of a train station in the eastern Ukrainian city on Friday had grown to 39, and that 87 people had been wounded.

“The Russians are deliberately trying to disrupt the evacuation of civilians,” the City Council said in a statement.

The local government body vowed that evacuations would continue, however. “Anyone who wants to leave the region will be able to do so,” it said.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT