Russia-Ukraine War: Russian
Missile Strike Kills at Least 22 on Independence Day
Here’s what we know:
The attack on a train station in the Ukrainian town of
Chaplyne came as the war-scarred nation braced for stepped-up attacks and
marked the six-month point since Russia’s invasion.
·
The
attack was one of the deadliest strikes on the country’s railways since April.
·
Zelensky says Ukraine is ‘reborn’ six months into the war.
·
U.N. officials paint a bleak picture as civilian casualties top
13,000.
·
Defiance is the mood of the day as Ukrainians celebrate their
independence.
·
On the eastern front, a Ukrainian unit sees little change on
Independence Day.
·
The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church won’t meet the pope next
month, a church official says.
·
Biden announces a nearly $3 billion package of arms and equipment
for Ukraine.
· A medic is killed while treating two wounded soldiers. ‘I would
give my life to replace his,’ one mourner said.
· The attack was one of the
deadliest strikes on the country’s railways since April.
KYIV,
Ukraine — A Russian
missile hit a train station in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 22 people,
President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday, in an attack that came as Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day and
brought home the harsh reality of the six-month-old war.
The attack, which
took place in an area about 74 miles east of the city of Dnipro in
Ukraine-controlled territory, was one of the deadliest strikes on the country’s
railways since April, when more than 50 people were killed when a rocket
slammed into a crowded railway platform in eastern Ukraine.
“Rescuers are
working,” President Zelensky said during a remote address to the U.N. Security
Council via video. “But, unfortunately, the number of dead may still increase.”
By Thursday
morning, officials said attacks in the area had killed 25
people and injured 31. The strike on the station came as the nation braced for
stepped-up attacks as Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day, and President
Zelensky said it was a reminder of the perils faced by people across his
nation.
“There is no such
war crime that the Russian occupiers have not yet committed on the territory of
Ukraine,” he said.
Ukrainian National Railways had no immediate
comment.
But the railway has had an outsized role
during the war, providing a critical lifeline for millions fleeing the
fighting. Trains have also helped bring in more than 100,000 tons of
humanitarian aid. Strikes on moving train cars have been exceedingly rare, and
the circumstances of Wednesday’s strike were not immediately clear.
But it came as
Russian missile launches triggered Ukrainian air defense systems across the
country. The Ukrainian military’s General Staff said in its daily bulletin on
the war that air and missile strikes on military and civilian targets had
continued unabated. “Today is a day especially rich in air alarms,” the
bulletin said.
Hours before the strike, a rocket slammed into a house in the same area,
killing an 11-year-old child, according to an official in the president’s
office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko. Two children narrowly escaped with their lives,
officials said. They had been buried under the rubble but were rescued by
emergency crews.
“Around 3 p.m. in
the Dnipropetrovsk region, in the Sinelnykove district, a Russian rocket hit a
private house,” Mr. Tymoshenko said in a statement.
Speaking remotely
to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky said he had received
information of a Russian missile strike in the Dnipropetrovsk region at the
Chaplyne railway station. “Four passenger cars are burning,” he said, according
to a translation provided by one of his aides. “At least 15 people have been
killed so far, about 50 injured.”
The attack took
place as Ukrainians were marking their Independence Day amid fears that Moscow
would use the high-profile moment to escalate its attacks.
The hope that the
day commemorating Ukraine’s 1991 separation from the Soviet Union would pass
without violence was shattered by the attack, which undermined celebrations
across Ukraine. Earlier in the day, in a speech prerecorded for security
reasons, Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine was a nation “reborn” in conflict with a
renewed sense of cultural and political identity, now wholly separate from
Russia.
Zelensky says Ukraine is
‘reborn’ six months into the war
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainians marked their
Independence Day — and six months since Russia’s invasion — with quiet resolve
on Wednesday, as President Volodymyr Zelensky pledged to prevail in the war.
In a defiant,
slickly produced speech standing before burned and destroyed Russian tanks on a
central avenue of the capital — prerecorded for security reasons — Mr. Zelensky
said Ukraine was a nation “reborn” in conflict with a renewed sense of cultural
and political identity, now wholly separate from Russia, and one that has
united democracies with a new sense of purpose.
Aiming his remarks
as much at foreign donors as at his domestic audience, the address was Mr.
Zelensky’s latest attempt to urge his nation to hold on, as tens of thousands
of soldiers huddled in trenches across a 1,500-mile front line scarred by blasted-out
towns and villages.
“Every new day is a
new reason not to give up,” he said. “Because, having gone through so much, we
have no right not to reach the end. What is the end of the war for us? We used
to say, ‘Peace.’ Now we say, ‘Victory.’”
Mass gatherings
were prohibited in the capital, Kyiv, as the United States and others warned
that Russia could intensify missile strikes on Independence Day, which
commemorates Ukraine’s 1991 separation from the Soviet Union.
In the evening, a
Russian missile strike hit a railway station in the town of Chaplyne in the
Dnipropetrovsk region in southern Ukraine, killing at least 22 people, Mr.
Zelensky told the United Nations Security Council in remarks delivered
remotely.
Earlier in the
afternoon, cluster munitions had struck in the Kharkiv region in northeastern
Ukraine, wounding two civilians, and missiles hit near the central
Ukrainian
town of Poltava, officials said.
It was a baseline
level of Russian long-range fire into Ukraine in recent weeks, not the intensification
that the country had braced for.
In Russia, state
media did not carry prominent mentions of the six-month mark. Russia’s Defense
Minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, said that Moscow intended to slow its military
campaign in Ukraine to reduce civilian casualties. “We are doing this
deliberately,” he said. Moscow has failed to honor previous pledges to protect
civilians or to ease its assault.
Russian forces are
moving to a more defensive posture in occupied areas of the southeast, and
Ukraine is using long-range missiles and other newly arriving weapons to try to
degrade Moscow’s combat abilities. Although Russia still maintains the
advantage in weapons and manpower, and now controls around 20 percent of
Ukraine, it has not seized significant new territory in weeks, as military
analysts say that Western military and economic support has allowed Ukraine to
regain its footing in the prolonged war.
The Biden
administration announced on Wednesday that it was sending nearly $3 billion in weapons and equipment previously
approved by Congress, the United States’ largest single package of military aid
to Ukraine’s forces.
It remains far from
clear when — or if — the steady assault will result in Ukraine’s taking back
significant amounts of territory. Ukrainian officials have said their strategy
involves both overt military strikes and covert activities designed to sow
chaos.
“No occupier feels
safe on our land,” Mr. Zelensky said on the eve of Independence Day. “All
collaborators know that they have no future.”
U.N. officials paint a bleak picture
as civilian casualties top 13,000
As Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day,
six months after being invaded by Russia, senior U.N. officials on Wednesday
offered a bleak assessment of the situation in the war-battered country.
Ukraine’s
vulnerability was called into sharp relief when President Volodymyr Zelensky,
addressing the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, announced during the session
that a railway station in eastern Ukraine had been targeted in a Russian
missile attack. Later, he said the attack had killed at least 22 people and
injured 50.
“There is no such
war crime that the Russian occupiers have not yet committed on the territory of
Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky told the Security Council via a video connection. “If
Russia is not stopped now in Ukraine, if it’s not stopped by the victory of
Ukraine then all these Russian murderers will probably end up in other
countries.”
Speaking before Mr.
Zelensky informed the Council about the railway attack, António Guterres, the
secretary general of the U.N., told the Council that the six-month point of the
war was a “tragic milestone” in a conflict in which thousands of civilians,
including hundreds of children, had been killed and injured and millions of
Ukrainians had been displaced.
“The world has seen
grave violations of international human rights law and international
humanitarian law committed with little to no accountability,” Mr. Guterres
said.
Rosemary DiCarlo,
the U.N.’s chief for political and peacemaking affairs, gave a stark update on
the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. Ms. DiCarlo said that, in the past six
months, the U.N. had recorded 13,560 civilian casualties there, including 5,614
people killed and 7,946 injured. The true numbers of civilians killed and
injured are likely to be far larger. Ukraine itself has reported that tens of
thousands have died in Russian bombardments and other attacks.
At least 17.7
million people, or 40 percent of the Ukrainian population, need humanitarian
assistance and protection, including 3.3 million children, she said.
Mr. DiCarlo warned
that, as winter approaches, the destruction caused by war, combined with the
lack of access to fuel or electricity because of to damaged infrastructure,
“could become a matter of life or death.”
Vasily Nebenzya,
Russia’s ambassador to the U.N., said the session on Wednesday had ignored
events on the ground, engaged in Russia-bashing and demonstrated “the unfailing
support of western countries for any actions of the Kyiv regime.”
Defiance is the mood of the day
as Ukrainians celebrate their independence
KYIV,
Ukraine — The Motherland
Monument — a 335-foot-tall stainless steel behemoth towering over Ukraine’s
capital, Kyiv — was designed to assert Soviet invincibility. On Wednesday, a
sprawling blue-and-gold Ukrainian national flag flew over it in a symbol of
defiance.
A Soviet general
secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, unveiled the monument in 1981: a figure of a woman,
a sword in her right hand and a shield in her left emblazoned with the Soviet
hammer and sickle. Ten years later, the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine was
free.
Drone operators
marking Ukraine’s Independence Day attached the national flag to a flying
machine and raised it into the sky above the steel giant. Ukrainians used the
celebration — exactly six months after Russia invaded — to tell President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that his
dreams of empire would not run through Ukraine.
“The statue is a
part of our history, we cannot deny,” said Yuriy Schygol, the head of the State
Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine. “But
31 years ago, we became independent. And today we are fighting to keep our independence.”
Defiance was the
mood of the day, with President Volodymyr Zelensky setting the tone in
an unannounced speech before a column of ruined Russian tanks and other
military vehicles in the center of the city.
But the uncertain
moment for the country was underscored by quiet streets, and a ban on mass
events. Later the peace was shattered when a missile strike on a train station
in the small town of Chaplyne near the city of Dnipro killed at least 22
people, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry.
Ukrainian and
American officials had warned that Moscow might mark the holiday by unleashing
a furious barrage of missiles. But in Kyiv, when the morning passed with
air-raid alarms but no strikes, people started to venture out.
Many cafes were
open, though service occasionally stopped for sirens. By evening, the tank
display in the city’s center was crowded, with many wearing traditional clothes
and Ukrainian flags wrapped around their shoulders.
After a church
service, Victoria Soshyna, 32, who was visiting Kyiv from the southern city of
Odesa, said she was not going to let fear keep her inside.
“We are strong, we are together, and we will
win,” she said.
She had just come
from St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, the center of the Orthodox Church of
Ukraine, where the leader of the nation’s faithful was holding a ceremony to
award soldiers and pray for their victory.
One of the
soldiers, Vadym Omelchuk, 58, nearly 6 feet 5 inches tall, served in the Soviet
Army from 1985 until 1991, when the country became independent.
He thought he would
never be a soldier again, and focused on training boxers in Kyiv. But the day
after Russia invaded, he enlisted to fight. As a member of the Territorial
Defense Forces, he helped liberate the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin and Bucha, where
Russian atrocities shocked the world.
“I saw what they did — it was the lowest a
human being could sink,” he said.
The leader of the
Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Epiphanius Dumenko, said in an
interview after the ceremony that the hardest moment of the war for him was
accepting that it was really happening.
But, he added, he
was now confident in victory.
“I could see that
people were spiritually strong and united, and that gave me hope,” he said. “No
one believed we would stand three days, a week, a month. Yet we stand.”
On the eastern front, a Ukrainian unit sees little
change on Independence Day.
OUTSIDE
BAKHMUT, Ukraine — The
Ukrainian commander, just a few yards from his unit’s position in a maze of
earthen trenches and dugouts along eastern Ukraine’s front line, pondered what
exactly his troops had done to mark their country’s 31st Independence Day.
The commander, Berlin,
who goes by a nickname like many Ukrainian soldiers, scoffed, clearly amused by
the thought.
“We have no
fireworks here for the holiday,” said Berlin, whose nom de guerre comes from
his ability to speak German. Berlin’s men were dug in outside the eastern city
of Bakhmut, just over a mile from a tree line bristling with Russian troops.
“We have no
wounded, no dead,” he added late Wednesday afternoon. “It’s already a holiday
for us.”
The whistles and
thuds of incoming Russian artillery fire reverberated somewhere off to the west
and Berlin, with a buzz cut and tired eyes, shrugged. The shells were hitting
another Ukrainian position. Not his.
While defiant
Ukrainians celebrated in Kyiv on Wednesday, which is also the six-month mark
since Russia’s invasion, Independence Day looked much the same as previous days
to these fighters at the front.
Since Russian
forces seized the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk earlier this summer,
taking a swath of eastern Ukraine’s mineral-rich Donbas region, Moscow’s
advance has focused on several smaller population centers, including Bakhmut.
Berlin, who hails
from the city, which had a prewar population of around 70,000, was appointed
the commander of his company roughly four days ago, he said. The last commander
had his hand sheared off by a Russian shell and Berlin happened to be next in
line.
The unit, which
once had around 120 soldiers, had been reduced to 55 men in recent weeks as
Russian forces pushed to take the city. The advance ultimately stalled on its
outskirts but both sides took heavy losses, Ukrainian military commanders said.
Berlin attributed
his unit’s casualties, the majority of them shrapnel wounds and amputations, to
Russian shelling from mortars and rockets.
“The rest are dead,” he said.
Thomas
Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak
The
leader of the Russian Orthodox Church won’t meet the pope next month, a church
official says
Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian
Orthodox Church, will not attend a gathering of religious leaders in Kazakhstan
next month where he had been expected to meet Pope Francis, the Russian state
news agency reported on Wednesday, highlighting a rift between the western and
eastern churches that appears to have been aggravated by the war.
Such a move,
reported by RIA Novosti, would be a blow to the pope’s efforts to keep a
dialogue open with Kirill, the chief religious backer of Russia’s war in
Ukraine, as he tries to mend a split between the two churches that stretches
back to 1054.
The Russian agency
quoted a senior Russian Orthodox leader, Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk,
as saying that the Russian Orthodox Church would be represented by an official
delegation and that Kirill would not attend the gathering or hold a meeting
with the pope on the sidelines.
The two leaders met
in Cuba in 2016, in what was the first meeting between a pope and the head of the Russian
Orthodox Church. The pope said in an interview with a
Spanish-language broadcaster last month that he planned to meet with Kirill again at the gathering
in Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan, but the Vatican had not made a formal announcement.
After the war in
Ukraine began, the pope and Kirill had a conversation via Zoom in which Kirill
spent 20 minutes reading prepared remarks. Recounting the conversation, Francis
told an Italian newspaper that he had told Kirill that the men were not
“clerics of the state” and said that the patriarch could not be “Putin’s altar
boy.”
Earlier Wednesday,
Francis called Daria Dugina, the Russian ultranationalist commentator killed over the weekend, a “poor girl blown up by a car
bomb,” prompting criticism from Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See.
In a speech on
Ukraine’s Independence Day and the six-month anniversary of Russia’s invasion
in which he called for “concrete steps” to end the fighting, the pontiff
referred to Ms. Dugina as an innocent victim of war.
“The madness of
war,” he said at his weekly general audience. “The innocent pay for war — the
innocent! Let us think about this reality and say to each other, ‘War is
madness.’”
Ms. Dugina, 29, was
the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent figure in Russian ultranationalist
circles and a supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine. At a televised memorial
service on Tuesday in Moscow, mourners called for vengeance and said her death
would strengthen Russian resolve in Ukraine.
Russian authorities
have accused the Ukrainian special services of ordering
and planning Ms. Dugina’s killing in a car bombing on a highway in a wealthy
district outside Moscow. Ukrainian officials have denied the claim and accused
Russia’s intelligence agency, the F.S.B., of carrying out the bombing.
The Ukrainian
ambassador to the Holy See, Andrii Yurash, said on Twitter that the pope’s
comments were “disappointing” and that Ms. Dugina was not an innocent victim but an “ideologist” of
Russian imperialism. He accused Russia of killing her as a “sacred victim.”
Vatican watchers
noted that Francis often has words of sympathy for victims and has treaded a
careful line on discussing Russian aggression. Pontiffs have traditionally
avoided picking sides in conflict to better preserve the church’s chances of
playing a constructive role in potential peace talks.
“Voluntarily, or
just speaking off-the-cuff, the pope expressed the position of the Holy See here,”
Paolo Rodari, a Vatican expert with the daily newspaper La Repubblica, said in
a phone interview. “The Vatican has condemned the Russian aggression, but has
not taken sides. Their position aims at keeping the diplomatic channels open
with the goal of a peace process.”
Biden announces a nearly $3 billion package of arms
and equipment for Ukraine.
WASHINGTON — President Biden said
on Wednesday that the United States would deliver nearly $3 billion worth of
arms and equipment to Ukraine, its largest single package of military aid aimed
at helping the nation battle Russian forces.
The announcement,
on Ukraine’s Independence Day and the six-month anniversary of the war, signaled Mr. Biden’s
continuing determination to assist in the fight against Russia’s invasion.
In a statement, Mr.
Biden said the latest financial assistance would allow Ukraine to purchase “air
defense systems, artillery systems and munitions, counter-unmanned aerial
systems, and radars to ensure it can continue to defend itself over the long
term.”
The effort to
bolster Ukraine’s military, which has garnered bipartisan support in Congress,
has now delivered more than $10 billion worth of weapons and other equipment.
The aid announced on Wednesday is part of the $40 billion assistance package Congress approved in May.
Mr. Biden
acknowledged the suffering of the Ukrainian people, but pledged to ensure that
the country’s sovereignty would be protected.
“Thousands have
been killed or wounded, millions have been displaced from their homes, and so
many others have fallen victim to Russian atrocities and attacks,” he said.
“But six months of relentless attacks have only strengthened Ukrainians’ pride
in themselves, in their country, and in their 31 years of independence.”
Since Russia
invaded Ukraine in February, the White House has prioritized sending weapons
and military goods from the Pentagon’s own stockpiles to Ukraine, authorizing
more than $8 billion in rockets, missiles, firearms, vehicles and other
hardware from Defense Department supplies.
But Wednesday’s
announcement could signal a significant shift in how the United States will
support Ukrainian forces in the future. The $3 billion President Biden pledged
will go to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a fund that allows
Ukrainian leaders to purchase military goods directly from the defense
industry.
Shifting the source
of Ukrainian military supplies from the Pentagon’s own stockpile, which is
large but not limitless, to items newly manufactured by the defense industry
indicates that the White House and military leaders are transitioning to a
sustainable model Kyiv can depend on for an open-ended war with Russia.
“This announcement
represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority
capabilities to Ukraine in the mid- and long-term to ensure Ukraine can
continue to defend itself as an independent, sovereign and prosperous state,”
Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement emailed to
reporters Wednesday afternoon. “It is the biggest tranche of security
assistance for Ukraine to date.”
The fund was set up
in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, and according to
a report from the Congressional Research Service, disbursed more than $1.3
billion to Kyiv from 2016 to 2021, which has gone toward sniper rifles,
rocket-propelled grenade launchers, counter-artillery radars, patrol boats,
night vision devices and other matériel.
According to
General Ryder, the $3 billion announced on Wednesday will be used for six new
NASAMS air-defense missile systems and additional ammunition for the two NASAMS
launchers the United States previously provided with Security Assistance
Initiative funds in July, as well as up to 245,000 additional rounds of
155-millimeter artillery ammunition and 65,000 rounds of 120-millimeter mortar
ammunition — up from the 561,000 155-millimeter and 20,000 120-millimeter
rounds previously sent to Ukraine. The money will also purchase more drones and
anti-drone systems, laser-guided rockets and radars designed to track incoming
enemy artillery fire.
Michael
D. Shear and John Ismay
KYIV,
Ukraine — When Ukraine’s
top military commander said this week that almost 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers had
been killed since Russia’s invasion six months ago, it was a rare public
accounting of the nation’s losses.
The numbers are
hard to verify. Ivan Marinchenko’s grief was not.
As his son, Oleg,
was laid out in the church before his burial, the 85-year old father was a
broken man. “Forgive me,” he said as he wept. “I could not save you.”
Oleg, 57, was
killed on Friday. His call sign was Architect and he was a chaplain and a
combat medic serving in the Kherson region in southern Ukraine. He was treating
two wounded soldiers in a bunker when a mortar round exploded.
He died. The two
wounded soldiers lived. At his funeral on the outskirts of Kyiv, the mourners
said he had been the shield that protected his comrades. His death gave them
life.
His death left his
34-year-old daughter, Ira, without a father and his wife, Tatiana, 54, without
a husband.
While it is often
the young who die in war, in Ukraine, the ranks of the soldiers are filled with
people of all ages and all backgrounds.
Oleg had more than
five decades to forge friendships.
“I would give my
life to replace his,” said Valentina Sadovska, 76, convulsing with grief. “I
didn’t even cry this much when my own husband died.”
Speaking at a forum
for veterans on Monday, Valeriy Zaluzhny, the commander of Ukraine’s armed
forces, said that this war was being fought by the entire country, not just the
army. Children and wives have watched their fathers and husbands go to the
front, he said, and they may be among “the nearly 9,000” who never returned.
Ukraine is cautious
in releasing information about military casualties and it was unclear whether
the number he gave was a full accounting. Moscow classifies military deaths as
state secrets and has rarely updated its official casualty figures.
None of that
mattered at the funeral on Friday, as Oleg’s father, wife and daughter reached
into his coffin to touch him and hold him close one last time.
Marc
Santora and Lynsey
Addario
For civilians near the front lines, Independence Day
is just another day of war.
PARASKOVIIVKA,
Ukraine — For some
civilians in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where wilted sunflower fields,
debris-covered highways and the distant thud of artillery serve as the gates to
the war’s front line, the country’s Independence Day on Wednesday means little.
“We have no news —
nothing — we live in the darkness. What is going on out there?” asked Antolii,
a resident of Paraskoviivka, a small salt-mining town in the province of
Donetsk, where Russian troops have slowly taken territory in recent weeks.
That does not mean
the 31st anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, marked on
Aug. 24, is insignificant, and Ukrainian authorities have urged people across
the country to be on guard, fearful that the Russians will launch a fresh set of
attacks on civilians far from the front.
Curfews are in
place, mass gatherings are restricted and some residents of big cities are told
to stay home for the day.
But after six
months of war, and Russia’s grinding campaign to capture the mineral-rich Donbas
region, Wednesday is just another day on a calendar for many Ukrainian
civilians on the front lines.
“It’s been the same
continuous shelling for weeks here, especially at nights,” said Antolii, who
declined to give his last name, before offering a bag of tea to a pair of
visiting New York Times reporters and wandering off.
Antolii’s town has
been without water for a month and without electricity for two weeks. It is
roughly five miles away from Russian positions.
Another man named
Antolii in Paraskoviivka said the town had been celebrating Independence Day
since 1992. “Nothing is going to happen,” he said. “We hope for the better.”
Nina Fedorivna, a
woman in a nearby town, said plainly: “We have constant shelling going on here,
round-the-clock, so it won’t be anything new if we’re shelled on Independence
Day.”
Further south,
roughly two miles from Russian positions in the small town of New York, which
takes its name from the U.S. city, the smell of burning sunflower seeds filled
the air. A factory where the seeds were stored was shelled on Sunday and had
been slowly burning since.
Svitlana, whose
older family member was being evacuated by a group of volunteers called the BASE.ua, looked on as the man was loaded into a van
already filled with other evacuees. When asked if she was worried about
increased Russian attacks on Wednesday, she shrugged, looking in the direction
of the burning factory.
“We don’t know
what’s going to happen,” Svitlana said quietly.
Thomas
Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak
Fearing energy shortages,
Germany prioritizes fuel shipments on railways.
Germany’s national railways will prioritize
transporting energy supplies as part of a slew of cabinet orders issued on
Wednesday to help ease any energy shortages triggered by Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, the federal government said on Wednesday.
The orders include
the first nationally mandated energy-saving measures in response to a looming
energy crisis. Among them are required reductions in temperature inside public
buildings and an overnight ban on illuminated advertisements and buildings.
The new measures
are expected to reduce gas consumption by at least two percent, Germany’s
energy and economy minister, Robert Habeck, said. “We still have a long way to
go,” he said after the cabinet meeting on Wednesday at which the orders were
issued.
Germany, Europe’s
largest economy, is bracing for an energy crisis this winter. The country
relies heavily on Russian gas for its industry and heating, and there are
worries Moscow could turn off the gas taps when colder days arrive to punish
the European Union for sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine. Already,
Russia has reduced gas flows to about 20 percent of capacity in the underwater
pipeline to Germany.
The crisis was
recently compounded by one of the worst droughts across Europe in hundreds of
years. Some German waterways are so low that barges are unable to pass with
full loads of coal to supply power plants.
Many coal plants
that were shut down as part of Germany’s program to reduce the use of fossil
fuels had to be restarted this year to pare down Germany’s reliance on Russian
gas — and to save gas for heating in winter.
With river traffic
hindered, the country must increasingly rely on railways, Volker Wissing, the
transportation minister, said. “This is not an easy decision, because when in
doubt it means that passenger trains will have to wait,” he said.
Train delays may
worsen the general travel chaos that Germany, like many other countries, has
been grappling with in recent months. Germany’s railways, like its airlines,
have been hampered by staff shortages because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The order requiring
railways to prioritize energy shipments does not need approval by the German
parliament, but it is temporary, lasting only six months.
Many of the
energy-saving measures issued on Wednesday are also six-month orders that do
not require parliamentary approval.
Those measures
include a requirement that public buildings be heated to no more than 66
degrees Fahrenheit — two degrees less than the previously recommended minimum
temperature. Exemptions would be made for facilities such as hospitals and
schools, the decree said.
Weeks earlier,
German cities and states had begun to save energy by shutting down public
fountains and turning off the lighting of public facades at night. Expanding on
those measures, the cabinet ordered that all buildings and advertisements that
are lighted at night for aesthetic reasons be turned off.
“Every contribution
counts,” Mr. Habeck said.
Erika Solomon and Christopher
F. Schuetze
A prominent Russian critic of the war is detained
after speaking out.
Police officers in masks and camouflage on
Wednesday stormed the home of Yevgeny Roizman, perhaps the most vocal critic of
the war in Ukraine still freely speaking out inside Russia, and detained him
for “discrediting” the Russian Army.
Mr. Roizman, a
popular former mayor of the city of Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains,
showed calm defiance as the police led him away, according to video footage
from the scene. He told reporters waiting outside his apartment door that he
was being investigated for “basically one phrase: ‘the invasion of Ukraine.’”
“I say this
everywhere, and will say it now,” he said. Referring to his own arrest, he
said: “We know all there is to know about our country. This is nothing new.”
Mr. Roizman now
faces three years in prison under the censorship law signed by President Vladimir V. Putin in March that
made it a crime to call the war in Ukraine a war or an invasion. The Kremlin
says it is a “special military operation.” The law has swept up thousands of critics, most of them ordered to
pay fines, but some facing prison sentences.
Those targeted by
the law include several high-profile opposition figures, like Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza, who were both jailed after
continuing to agitate against the war inside Russia even as many other
activists fled. Mr. Roizman also decided to stay, pledging he would not “move a
millimeter” out of his own country, and railed against the invasion in
interviews and in clipped, profanity-laced posts on Twitter.
Mr. Roizman’s
arrest is the latest sign that virtually all antiwar dissent has been outlawed
in Russia. Analysts had long speculated that the authorities feared cracking
down on the jocular and charismatic Mr. Roizman, 59, because of his popularity
in Yekaterinburg, one of Russia’s biggest cities. Beyond speaking out against
the Kremlin, he raised money for ill children, opened a museum of religious
icons, held regular office hours and went jogging with supporters and
journalists.
Despite the
Kremlin’s clampdown on dissent, several people came out to the streets of
Yekaterinburg to protest Mr. Roizman’s arrest. Some held posters calling for
his release. Others came to the city center, sitting silently on steps in front
of a monument to Vladimir Lenin.
At least one
protester was detained by police officers, according to It’s
My City, a local news website. One woman held a sign outside the private museum
of religious icons, founded by Mr. Roizman. It said: “You cannot put everyone
in jail,” according to footage by It’s My City.
In an interview last
week seen two million times on YouTube, Mr.
Roizman warned against the perils of evil triumphing.
“The worst thing is
when you suddenly see that there is a lot of evil, that evil is winning, that
evil is being supported,” he said. “Evil can only win when it joins together
with a lie.”
Anton
Troianovski and Ivan
Nechepurenko
Photographers have chronicled the war’s ordeals from
the start.
Atrocities against civilians. Thousands of
casualties, with the toll rising. Millions of refugees. Thriving cities
besieged and reduced to rubble.
For Ukrainians
living through a seemingly interminable war, the toll of the conflict is hard
to fathom: loves ones lost, families displaced, careers suddenly truncated,
livelihoods ruined. Then there are the countless homes and buildings destroyed
by missiles — factories, airports, railway stations, schools, hospitals,
churches and shopping malls. And the bombs continue to fall.
Photographers with
The New York Times and other news organizations throughout Ukraine have
chronicled the ordeal of war for the last six months.
In one image,
people walk past a civilian’s crumpled body in Bucha, where evidence unearthed
by local officials, residents and journalists suggested that the Russians had
killed civilians recklessly and sometimes sadistically.
Other images
include Ukrainians cleaning up debris in Kyiv after their building was hit by
missiles; an artillery unit on the frontline near Bakhmut; and the funeral of a
Ukrainian soldier who died fighting in the eastern province of Donetsk.
On the vast expanse
of wide-open flatland in the Donbas region, the brutal war has become bogged
down in fierce artillery duels and hard-fought battles for coal mining and
farming towns, as most of the civilian population has already fled.
Even where Ukraine
has succeeded in pushing the Russians back, there has often come unimaginable
terror. Retreating Russian troops left a trail of bodies in the suburbs of
Kyiv.
After drawn-out
street fighting in May and June, Moscow claimed the cities of Sievierodonetsk
and Lysychansk, cementing its control of most of Luhansk Province while
becoming embroiled through the summer in artillery duels elsewhere in the
Donbas.
Putin has called Ukrainian statehood a fiction.
History suggests otherwise.
KYIV, Ukraine — On the eve of Russia’s
full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia argued
that the very idea of Ukrainian statehood was a fiction.
Mr. Putin declared
Ukraine an invention of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, who
he said had mistakenly endowed Ukraine with a sense of statehood by allowing it
autonomy within the newly created Soviet state.
“Modern Ukraine was
entirely and fully created by Russia, more specifically the Bolshevik,
communist Russia,” Mr. Putin said.
As Ukraine
celebrated its independence on Wednesday, rebutting Mr. Putin’s revisionist
narrative of history was even more imperative for many Ukrainians, a defense
against what many historians see as Mr. Putin’s distortions of history.
Ukrainian identity
politics and nationalism have long been irritants in Russia since the feudal
czarist times that predated the Russian Revolution. Ukraine is seen by many
Russians as their nation’s “little brother” who should behave accordingly.
Ukraine and Russia
share roots stretching back to the first Slavic state, Kievan Rus, a medieval empire founded by Vikings
in the 9th century.
But the historical
reality of Ukraine is complicated, a thousand-year history of changing
religions, borders and peoples. The capital, Kyiv, was established hundreds of
years before Moscow, and both Russians and Ukrainians claim it as a birthplace
of their modern cultures, religion and language.
The history and
culture of Russia and Ukraine are indeed intertwined — they share the same
Orthodox Christian religion, and their languages, customs and national cuisines
are related.
Parts of modern-day
Ukraine did indeed reside for centuries within the Russian empire. Eastern
Ukraine, which came under Russian influence much earlier than the west, still
features many Russian speakers and people loyal to Moscow.
But other parts in
the west fell under the jurisdiction of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Poland or
Lithuania. “Putin’s argument today that Ukraine is historically subsumed by
Russia is just not right,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a
political risk consulting organization.
In the 20th
century, the Soviet government would eventually crush the nascent independent
Ukrainian state. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was banished
from schools and its culture was permitted to exist only as a cartoonish
caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.
Mr. Putin has also
argued that the myth of Ukraine was reinforced by the crumbling Soviet
government of Mikhail Gorbachev, which allowed Ukraine to slip free of Moscow’s
grasp. It was a weakened Moscow that “gave” Ukraine the right to become
independent of the Soviet Union “without any terms and conditions.”
But it was not
Moscow that granted Ukraine’s independence in 1991. It was the Ukrainian
people, who voted resoundingly to leave the Soviet Union in a democratic
referendum.
It is not clear
whether Mr. Putin believes his version of Ukrainian history or has simply
concocted a cynical mythology to justify his actions. But his contention that
Ukraine exists solely within the context of Russian history and culture is one
he has deployed at least as far back as 2008, when he attempted to convince
George W. Bush, who had expressed support for Ukraine’s NATO membership, of the
country’s nonexistence.
Michael
Schwirtz, Maria Varenikova and Rick
Gladstone
The war has reshaped Ukraine, Russia and the wider
world
For six months, a major land war has sown
horror in Europe.
It is a war in
which violence and normality coexist — death and destruction at the 1,500-mile
front and packed cafes in Kyiv, just a few hundred miles to the west.
It is a war fought
in trenches and artillery duels, but defined in great part by the political
whims of Americans and Europeans, whose willingness to endure inflation and
energy shortages could shape the next stage of the conflict.
And it is a war of
imagery and messaging, fought between two countries whose deep family ties have
helped turn social media into a battlefield of its own.
No one knows how it
will end. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, having silenced dissent, has proclaimed that “by and large, we haven’t started
anything yet in earnest.” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, emboldened
by a defiant populace and a mostly united West, has played down the chances of
a settlement and urged his people not to bend.
Will Western backing
hold as Europe braces for the possibility of a winter with little Russian oil
and gas? Will Mr. Putin, after strikes in Crimea and the killing of a
nationalist commentator, escalate the war? And will Mr. Zelensky be able to
sustain his nation’s determination against a nuclear-armed foe?
Mr. Putin now
controls about 20 percent of the country. But he appears as far as ever from
bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s fold — and there is little indication he is
prepared to stop fighting.
Anton
Troianovski, Andrew E.
Kramer and Steven
Erlanger
War gives the fight to preserve Ukraine’s cultural
identity new urgency.
KYIV,
Ukraine — At the
thousand-year-old Cathedral of Saint Sophia here, standing on an easel in front
of a towering Baroque golden altar, is a new, freshly painted icon that is just
a foot square.
It depicts a
17th-century Cossack military commander with a long gray beard. He looks humble
beneath the immense mosaics that have glinted since the 11th century — through
Kyiv’s sacking by the Mongols, its absorption into Poland, its domination by
the Soviet Union.
This icon has been
painted on three planks of knotty wood: the planks of an ammunition box
recovered from the devastated Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Out of Bucha’s mass
graves, in the wake of terrifying Russian atrocities against civilians,
something new has come to Saint Sophia: an image of mourning and resolve, of
horror and courage, of a culture that will not give up.
As Ukraine
celebrates its independence from Russia on Wednesday, many Ukrainian artists,
intellectuals and writers have sought to emphasize Ukraine’s unique culture as
a form of protest against President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims that Ukraine and
Russia “are one people” and his efforts to abolish their statehood.
“This is a war
about cultural identity,” said the curator Leonid Maruschak. With Russia actively trying to erase
Ukraine’s national identity, this country’s music, literature, movies and
monuments are not recreations. They are battlefields. Ukrainian culture, past
and present, has become a vital line of defense for the whole liberal order.
Every war endangers
cultural heritage. Walk through Kyiv or Lviv today, and on every other corner
is a statue bundled in flame-retardant blankets. Hapsburg stained glass is
sandwiched between particle board, and Soviet mosaics are overlaid with
plywood. The appalling damage to theaters, libraries and religious sites in
these past six months alone broadens a horrendous tide of cultural destruction
this century, in Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, Mali, Armenia and Afghanistan.
But the risks to
Ukrainian culture are more than mere collateral damage. For Mr. Putin, there is
no Ukraine as such; he maintains that Ukraine is a Soviet fiction, that the
Ukrainian language is a Russian dialect, that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” And so since February — indeed, since
2014, when the war first began in the east of Ukraine — cultural manifestations
of Ukrainian independence have been directly in the cross hairs.
The war has turned
contemporary Ukrainian culture into an archival enterprise — one in which
preservation is everyone’s job, and new creations are rooted in history the
enemy would deny.
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