Russia Bombards Ukraine Cities and Accuses U.S. of ‘Economic War’

March 9, 2022, 6:31 p.m. ETMarch 9, 2022

March 9, 2022

Richard Pérez-Peña

Outside a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Wednesday.Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

Russian forces bombarded Ukrainian cities, prevented hundreds of thousands of civilians from escaping and destroyed a maternity hospital on Wednesday, while the Kremlin accused the United States of waging “an economic war” against Russia.

The misery wrought by Russia’s Ukraine invasion on Feb. 24 deepened further in both countries — destruction and deprivation in Ukraine, and the toll of the West’s tightening vise grip on Russia’s economy.

Perilous conditions were getting worse in several Ukrainian cities where Russian forces were closing in, increasingly striking civilian targets and leaving people trapped without basic needs like water, food, heat and medicines. In the halting efforts to evacuate, thousands of people were able to flee the city of Sumy, but in other cities, for the fourth day in a row, Ukrainian officials said that Russian shelling thwarted most attempts to create safe corridors for escaping civilians.

Things were especially dire in the southern port of Mariupol, where Russian strikes hit several civilian buildings on Wednesday, including a maternity hospital, sending bloodied pregnant women fleeing into the cold. Hundreds of casualties have been reported, people have taken to cutting down trees to burn for heat and cooking, trenches have been dug for mass graves and local authorities have instructed residents on how to dispose of dead family members — wrap the bodies, tie the limbs and put them on the street.

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Bodies were buried in a mass grave on Wednesday on the outskirts of Mariupol.Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

At the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant, seized by Russian troops in the days after President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion, the outside electricity supply was cut off, threatening the ability to safeguard the nuclear waste stored there, the International Atomic Energy Agency said. For now, the plant has backup power and no radiation leaks have been detected, the agency said, but its warnings signaled that Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear accident in history, could once again pose a threat to the region.

The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia were expected to meet on Thursday for the first time since the invasion. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, host of the meeting, said Wednesday that he hoped it would “crack the door open to a permanent cease-fire,” but such a prospect remained uncertain at best.

Mr. Putin, seeking to regain Moscow’s lost sway over Ukraine, continued to demand that his neighbor unilaterally disarm and guarantee that it would never join the NATO alliance, conditions that Ukrainian and NATO officials have described as unacceptable.

The war has claimed thousands of lives and prompted more than two million people to leave Ukraine in less than two weeks, one of the swiftest and biggest refugee flows ever seen. The United Nations said Wednesday that its monitors had confirmed 516 civilian deaths and 908 injuries, acknowledging the figures were doubtless too low, partly because of the inability to count casualties in and around southeastern cities, like Mariupol, where fighting has been intense. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Russian troops have been killed during the two-week invasion, 

With brutal tactics, Russia is gaining ground in Ukraine.

 

Ukrainian soldiers cross a destroyed bridge.Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

A campaign of terror

The war in Ukraine is a mismatch.

On one side is the Russian military, among the world’s largest and strongest forces. On the other side is Ukraine, a medium-sized country whose infrastructure is being destroyed during the fighting. Although Ukraine has powerful allies — like the U.S. and Western Europe — those allies have chosen not to send troops, partly because they do not see Ukraine as vital to their national interests and because they fear starting a larger war with nuclear-armed Russia.

The reality of this mismatch explains the developments of the past 48 hours. After some surprising setbacks in the first few days of the invasion, Russia has since used brutal tactics, often targeting civilians, to make progress.

Russian troops have taken control of areas in both the east and south of the country. In the east, Russia is hoping to isolate — and then crush — Ukrainian forces that for years have been battling Russia-backed separatists near the Russian border. In the south, the goal appears to be to control the Black Sea coast, potentially cutting off Ukraine from sea access.

Russian-occupied areas as of 3 p.m. Eastern on March 2. | Source: Institute for the Study of War

Russia has also intensified its bombing of Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, from planes and missile launchers stationed outside the cities. (Here’s footage of bombs hitting a residential area of Chernihiv, a city on the route to Kyiv from the north.)

The strategy, my colleague Eric Schmitt said, is “to terrorize the population and force them to flee, or beg their government to surrender — and to pummel Ukrainian government buildings to disrupt their wartime operations.”

The humanitarian disaster is likely to increase in the coming days. “We cannot collect all the bodies,” the deputy mayor of Mariupol, a southern city, told CNN. The mayor said that the electricity was out and that Russia was blocking food from entering the city.

More than a million Ukrainians, out of a population of about 40 million, have fled. Many have headed west, away from the areas where Russia is advancing, in the hope of entering bordering countries like Poland or Romania. A million more people are internally displaced.

Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, is filled with people carrying suitcases, according to Valerie Hopkins, a Times correspondent there. Hotels are cramming people into rooms so that they do not need to sleep at the train station. Valerie spoke with one 20-year-old woman traveling with her mother who had packed only three sweatshirts, a pair of socks and her dog. The two of them had left everything else behind.

Russia’s challenges

It still seems possible that Russia will not be able to win a quick victory.

Russia does not yet control the skies over Ukraine, and its military is struggling to make much progress in the north, near Kyiv. A miles-long convoy of hundreds of military vehicles has largely stalled, about 18 miles from Kyiv. It is facing fierce Ukrainian opposition, as well as shortages of fuel and spare parts, a reflection of the failure to conquer Kyiv immediately.

Morale among Russian troops may also be a problem. Pentagon officials told Eric that some Russian soldiers appeared not to have known that they would be invading Ukraine until the war began. Ukrainian officials quoted what they claimed was a Russian soldier’s text to his mother, recovered from his phone after he died: “There is a real war raging here. I’m afraid. We are bombing all of the cities together, even targeting civilians.”

The U.S., E.U. and Britain are continuing to send arms to Ukraine’s military, over land routes. And the West has continued to impose sanctions, which seem to be inflicting significant damage on Russia’s economy.

All of which raise the prospect that the war, which already seems to be somewhat unpopular within Russia, will become even more so.

‘No matter what’

Still, Vladimir Putin is signaling that he will respond to setbacks with more destruction. He also seems willing to allow Russia to pay a high price, in both economic terms and soldiers’ lives.

During a 90-minute call yesterday with French President Emmanuel Macron, Putin said that Russia would achieve its goal in Ukraine “no matter what.” In a televised address yesterday, Putin told Russians that he was determined to fight the war.

Paul Poast, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, pointed out on Derek Thompson’s “Plain English” podcast that Russian leaders have a long history of accepting large casualties among their own troops to win wars. “I’m starting to think that that is what they’re expecting is going to happen here,” Poast said. “It doesn’t matter about the morale, it doesn’t matter if the equipment breaks down. They’re just going to be able to overwhelm eventually the Ukrainians because they don’t expect direct military involvement by the West.”

There are other plausible outcomes, though. The Ukrainian resistance could prove so stout that Russia finds itself in a yearslong quagmire. Or Western sanctions could create such instability in Russia that Putin loses support among the officials around him.

Regardless, the coming weeks are likely to be filled with tragedy for Ukraine.

Kremlin Vows Victory in Ukraine as Refugees Swell to One Million

Defiant Ukrainians slowed the invasion, but Russian forces gained ground in the south, and the Kremlin insisted the week-old campaign was “going according to plan.”



Ukrainian children riding an evacuation train through Kyiv as it traveled west toward Lviv while Russian attacks against Ukrainian targets continued on Thursday.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

By Michael Schwirtz and Richard Pérez-Peña
March 3, 2022

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ODESSA, Ukraine — Russian forces advanced deeper into southern Ukraine on Thursday, appearing intent on seizing the country’s entire Black Sea coast, as the number of people fleeing Ukraine reached one million just a week into Russia’s invasion and bombardment of cities and towns.

Defiant Ukrainians, bolstered by a huge influx of weapons from NATO countries, have put up surprisingly effective resistance, while Moscow’s forces have run into a host of logistical problems, according to Western military and intelligence assessments.

But the Russians, with numerical and technological superiority, have been slowed, not stopped, and the Kremlin insisted in a statement that the war was “going according to plan.”

Russian forces surging out of Crimea cut off Mariupol, a port city to the east, while to the west, where they seized the city of Kherson on Wednesday, they advanced on the port of Mykolaiv, leaving them just 60 miles from Odessa, a vital shipping center and the largest city in the south.

In a second round of talks held in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine agreed to establish “humanitarian corridors,” with possible cease-fires in them, for civilians to evacuate the most dangerous areas, and to allow food and medicine to reach those places. But there was no sign of progress on resolving the overall conflict.




Damaged buildings following shelling in Borodyanka, near Kyiv. PHOTO: REUTERS/MAKSIM LEVIN



Russia deepened its military offensive in southern Ukraine, penetrating the city of Kherson, as the campaign stalled in the north of the country and the two sides prepared to resume cease-fire talks (

Kherson is the first regional capital to come under Russian occupation after more than a week of heavy fighting and shelling. Local authorities said they were working to restore electricity and heat, deliver food and other vital supplies to the city and collect dead bodies from its streets.

Ukrainian forces have managed to stymie Russia’s advance on the capital of Kyiv and second-largest city, Kharkiv. The resistance has pushed the Kremlin to shift to a strategy of indiscriminate attacks, shelling civilian areas in an attempt to demoralize Ukraine’s population.
Russia stepped up pressure on Ukraine to hold a second round of cease-fire talks. The first round, on Monday, didn’t achieve concrete results.
WSJ Podcast: Brett Forrest looks at the impact of the Russian attack on civilians in Kyiv.
Live updates: Follow WSJ's full coverage of the conflict.

Russia’s near-monopoly on naval power in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov should have provided additional firepower to assist ground troops. Instead, their advance has been sluggish, hampered by operational breakdowns and a seeming inability of commanders to coordinate disparate military forces, which if combined effectively should have easily overwhelmed Ukraine’s defenses.

Unshaven and haggard, Mr. Zelensky, who has emerged as an anti-Kremlin hero in the West for defying Mr. Putin and remaining in Kyiv, held his first news conference since the invasion, in a room lined with sandbags in case of shelling. He expressed willingness to compromise but did not specify on what issues, and held out little hope of reaching an agreement anytime soon. “The Russian side has long ago formed the answers to their questions,” he told reporters.

Mr. Zelensky, like some Western officials, said many Russian soldiers, including some taken prisoner, had no idea they would be sent into Ukraine and were aghast to learn it, not understanding why they would be conducting such a war. “They don’t know why they are here,” he said in a speech posted on his Facebook page. “These are not warriors of a superpower. These are confused children who have been used.”
Moscow had sought to play down the number of Russian casualties for much of the first week of the war, limiting public comments to saying that the losses it had suffered were significantly lower than those on the Ukrainian side, Evan Gershkovich reports.
Late Wednesday the ministry gave its first official accounting, saying 498 soldiers had been killed and 1,597 injured.
Ukraine hasn’t released its casualty figures, but says its military has killed 5,840 Russian troops. Ukrainian officials have put the invasion’s civilian death toll at about 2,000.
Over the past week, one million people in Ukraine have fled to neighboring countries, according to the United Nations.

The U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are coming under increasing pressure to do more to help Ukraine, even as they face diminishing options for doing so, Nancy A. Youssef and Bojan Pancevski report.
One of the more drastic options discussed publicly has been a no-fly zone, which would stop Russian aircraft from launching strikes over Ukraine, eliminating a key military tactic. But the idea has been dismissed by the U.S. and NATO countries.
Sanctions, however, won’t have an immediate effect on the battlefield, Western leaders have acknowledged. They hope that the economic hit will bite the Russian economy rapidly, meaning that as the bombs fall on Kyiv, there will be Russian bank runs and Russian businesses collapsing.
The Biden administration canceled a routine test launch of an Air Force Minuteman III missile to avoid escalating nuclear tensions with Russia, reports Michael R. Gordon.

The aggressive sanctions that Western allies leveled against Russia left loopholes to allow payments for critical oil and gas supplies that fuel Europe and the world, but businesses are going even further, slapping a toxic label on anything to do with Russia, report Patricia Kowsmann, Julie Steinberg and Leslie Scism.
The impact of those sanctions has begun to reverberate on average Russians, Ann M. Simmons reports. (

Restrictions on technology sales that the U.S. and its allies are clamping on Russia are adding to the uncertain climate for businesses, though how hard the export controls hit the Russian economy, trade specialists said, will depend on enforcement, reports Kate O'Keeffe.

The U.S. is expected to ban Russian-flagged ships from entering U.S. ports, according to officials familiar with the matter, extending sanctions against the country following its invasion of Ukraine, Nancy A. Youssef and Costas Paris report.
The move, which follows a similar ban in the U.K., would be largely symbolic. Russian commercial ships represent less than 1% of cargo volumes to the U.S., according to shipping and port officials. Russian firms own a large fleet of oil tankers that usually aren’t Russian-flagged.

 

A Surge of Unifying Moral Outrage Over Russia’s War

Ukrainians take to social media, and taboos are tumbling as countries abandon neutrality and people abandon indifference to support their cause.

A protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Paris on Saturday.Credit...Adrienne Surprenant/Associated Press

By Roger Cohen

Published March 1, 2022Updated March 3, 2022

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PARIS — The man the Kremlin holds in dismissive contempt, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, has emerged as an online hero. His Twitter account has leapt by hundreds of thousands of followers a day (he now has 4.3 million). Often dressed in olive-green fleece and cargo pants, he has accused Russia of war crimes, signed a formal application to join the European Union, and morphed into a symbol of hope and grace under pressure.

As Russia pursues its ruthless invasion, Mr. Zelensky has used social media adroitly to outmaneuver his nemesis, President Vladimir V. Putin. So, too, have many of the 44 million citizens of Ukraine. TikTok, the video-sharing app with more than a billion active users, has shaped views of the conflict and contributed to an intense wave of global sympathy for Ukraine. Call it Resistance 4.0, the influencers’ war against an unprovoked Russian invasion.

Mr. Putin’s assault against a phantom “genocide” in Ukraine meets the nimbleness, even the humor, of a people unified and galvanized by the Russian leader’s obsessive talk of their nonexistence as a nation. The Russian leader also claims the war is nonexistent and is in fact “a special military operation.”

Technology, blamed of late for every ill from the death of truth to the spread of loneliness, restores feeling and revives human connection as the war unfolds. Brave civilians brandishing newly acquired rifles against armored divisions cannot leave the onlooker cold.

“I don’t really have any choice because this is my home,” Hlib Bondarenko, a computer programmer who has lined up for his weapon in Kyiv, tells The New York Times in a video. This is not the remote, clinical war of drones and satellites. It poses perhaps the most acute moral question of war, especially one pitting the weak and righteous against Goliath: What would I do?

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1:50‘I’m Ready’: Ukraine’s Civilians Take Up Arms

Volunteer fighters armed with assault rifles patrolled central Kyiv on Friday, ready to defend their country.CreditCredit...Michael Downey for the New York Times

The answer appears to be: something, at least. Protest marches have unfurled under blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags across Europe and the United States, from Chicago to Warsaw, from Berlin to New York. Ukrainians living abroad have lined up to return home and fight. As with the Spanish Civil War, when volunteers flocked to support the left-leaning government against a military rebellion, the conscience of Europe has stirred. Taboos have tumbled.

Swedish and Finnish and Swiss neutrality has evaporated. Postwar Germany’s refusal to prioritize military spending and send arms to conflict zones has ended. A united 27-nation European Union has decided, for the first time, to provide Ukraine with more than half-a-billion dollars in aid for lethal weapons. The outright collapse of the Russian economy is declared an objective by the French economy minister.