Putin Raises Tensions by Putting Nuclear Forces on Alert

Mr. Lukashenko “has taken responsibility for ensuring that all planes, helicopters and missiles stationed on Belarusian territory remain on the ground during the Ukrainian delegation’s travel, talks and return,” Mr. Zelensky continued. The Belarusian leader is a close ally of Mr. Putin’s.

It was not clear when the talks would begin, and late Sunday a Russian state news agency reported that they would only start Monday morning.

But just before Mr. Zelensky’s announcement, Mr. Putin issued a new threat to the West, which has increasingly rallied behind Ukraine as its citizens and its military fight back against the Russian invasion. In brief remarks aired on state television, he told his defense minister and his top military commander to place Russia’s nuclear forces on alert.

The Ukraine Interior Ministry said on Sunday that 352 civilians have been killed since the invasion began, including 14 children.

And even as the talks near, satellite imagery showed a miles-long convoy of hundreds of Russian military vehicles bearing down on Kyiv.

Mr. Putin characterized his nuclear alert move as a response to the West’s “aggressive” actions. Not only are Western countries imposing “illegitimate sanctions” against Russia, Mr. Putin said, “but senior officials of leading NATO countries are allowing themselves to make aggressive statements directed at our country.”

In Britain, which has ruled out deploying its own troops to Ukraine, a top official said Sunday that she would support Britons who want to go to Ukraine to take up arms. “Absolutely, if that is what they want to do,” said Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

As part of the West’s intensifying reaction to the Russian invasion, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union commission, announced an E.U.-wide ban on all Russian aircraft. The bloc also said it will finance the donation of weapons to Ukraine and ban the Kremlin-funded global broadcaster RT.

On the economic front, the oil giant BP announced that it would “exit” its nearly 20 percent stake in Rosneft, the Russian state-controlled oil company, saying its involvement with Rosneft “simply cannot continue.” And FedEx and UPS said they were halting shipments to Russia.

Details about the meeting at the border were not yet clear, including who would participate. Mr. Zelensky earlier on Sunday had rejected holding talks in Belarus — as Russia has been demanding — because Russia staged part of its invasion from Belarus after amassing troops in the country. But Mr. Zelensky’s stance shifted after he spoke by phone with Mr. Lukashenko and received his assurances.

“I will say frankly that I do not really believe in the outcome of this meeting, but let them try to make sure that no citizen of Ukraine has any doubt that I, as a president, did not try to stop the war,” Mr. Zelensky said.

The operator of the fund, Norges Bank Investment Management, will neither buy nor sell shares in Russian assets, according to Line Aaltvedt, the fund’s spokeswoman. The fund will work with the Ministry of Finance to prepare a plan to divest from the Russian market. No timeline for the divestment was given.

The announcement on Sunday was part of a fleet of measures by the Norwegian government in support of Ukraine, including joining European Union sanctions and allocating up to 2 billion kroner for humanitarian aid. On Sunday, the E.U. also announced that it would finance the provision of weapons to Ukraine and ban Russian aircraft from E.U. airspace.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund was created in the 1990s to invest the country’s oil and gas revenue abroad. Since 2004, it has operated under ethical guidelines including bans on investing in companies that sell certain weapons.

Seven million Ukrainians are expected to be displaced as a consequence of the Russian invasion.

Ukrainians can stay visa-free in the European Union for up to 90 days, and they can move freely between member nations. According to the commission, many have already left the first country they arrived in and headed to countries with big Ukrainian diasporas, mainly the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain.

So far, a limited number of Ukrainians have applied for asylum, Ms. Johansson said, with most joining their relatives who already live in the European Union. “But things will change, and we need to be prepared for much higher number of people trying to come,” she added.

Ukrainian refugees were met with “impressive solidarity” from citizens and governments of the member nations bordering Ukraine — Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary — according to Ms. Johansson.

In Poland, a massive grass-roots mobilization of citizens is helping Ukrainian refugees — taking them into their homes, transporting them through the border, feeding them and clothing them. On the government level, Poland has prepared a train to transport wounded Ukrainians from the city of Mosciska to Warsaw, Poland’s capital, where they will be dispatched to different hospitals.

Poland, which already is home to millions of Ukrainians, has been the main destination for those fleeing the Russian invasion. Polish authorities said that so far 213,000 Ukrainians have crossed into the country. The country has opened its border with Ukraine to all, regardless of their legal status.

“Anyone fleeing from bombs, from Russian rifles, can count on the support of the Polish state,” the Polish interior minister, Mariusz Kaminski, told reporters on Thursday.

Slovakia announced that all Ukrainians coming to the country will get a temporary residency, with free health care and permission to work. And the government of the hard-line Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban passed a special decree last week, granting all Ukrainians temporary protection.

This stands in stark contrast to the earlier attitude of the nationalist Eastern European governments, which for years resisted taking in their share of the more than one million asylum seekers, mainly from Syria, who came to the bloc during the 2015 refugee crisis.

Polish authorities are currently building a wall at its border with Belarus, after thousands of Middle Eastern refugees and migrants tried to reach the country last year, with the vast majority being pushed back into Belarus by army and border guards. An unknown number of migrants remain stranded at the border, and aid organizations reported last week that a 26-year-old man from Yemen froze to death.

The list could still change at the final approval stage.

Earlier Sunday, the European Union announced that it was set to approve the closure of its airspace to Russian aircraft, ban transactions with the Russian Central Bank and block the state-funded RT and Sputnik from broadcasting in the European Union.

Another key part of the measures against Russia announced Sunday was the purchase and shipment of weapons by the European Union to help Ukraine fight Russia, the first time the bloc has ever taken such a step in its history.

The convoy of destroyed vehicles was filmed by a Ukrainian man along a road that leads from Bucha to Irpin, which is the next town en route to Kyiv.

A photo shared earlier in the day shows a large plume of smoke rising from the approximate location of a bridge connecting the two cities — an indication that yet another bridge may have been destroyed by Ukrainian forces to stop the Russian advance.

FedEx’s statement echoed UPS. “We are closely monitoring the situation and have contingency plans in place,” it said.

Deliveries in and out of Ukraine have also been suspended.

“The oxygen supply situation is nearing a very dangerous point in Ukraine,” it said. “This puts thousands of lives at risk.”

Oxygen supplies are needed to treat a range of patients, including the roughly 1,700 people being treated in Ukraine now for Covid-19, the W.H.O. said.

Complicating the situation, medical oxygen manufacturers in parts of the country are facing shortages of zeolite, a critical chemical product used to produce medical oxygen, and trucks are not able to transport oxygen supplies to hospitals, the W.H.O. said.

The organization was working with Ukrainian health authorities to identify immediate oxygen supply needs and looking for ways to import oxygen through regional networks, including transporting them through neighboring Poland.

The U.S. State Department announced on Sunday that it would provide about $54 million in humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, including food, drinking water, shelter, emergency health care and protection. The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday about whether oxygen would be included in that aid and when it would arrive.

The United Nations also announced on Thursday that it would allocate $20 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukraine. Martin Griffiths, the U.N. humanitarian chief, said in a statement that the funds would be used to provide health care, shelter, food, water and sanitation.

A spokesman for the U.N. said that the aid will include medical oxygen, which is ready to be sent, but that its delivery will depend on access and security.

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Many Russian protesters said they were dumbfounded by Mr. Putin’s decision to send troops and heavy weaponry into what many in Russia consider a “brotherly nation.” Millions of Russians have relatives or friends in Ukrainian cities. Many were raised in Ukraine and cherish childhood memories of it.

At the protests, many people said they came to express solidarity with the Ukrainian people and were confident that Mr. Putin’s decision will severely damage Russia.

Fyodor Gurov, for instance, said he never took part in protests before, but he was shocked when he read the news on Thursday that Russia attacked Ukraine, a country where his relatives live.

“I started feeling shame that I live in Russia,” Mr. Gurov, 22, said, speaking on the phone from a police van, where he was being detained.

On Sunday, Mr. Gurov said he came to stand in front of the Russian Foreign Affairs building in central Moscow with a poster saying “No to war!” Shortly after he came there, the police detained him, threatening to break his hand. A flight attendant, Mr. Gurov is also afraid of losing his job after European countries blocked airspace to Russian flights.

In Moscow, crowds of people moved around the city center, chanting “No to war!” To make it harder for police to detain them, they tried not to concentrate in a single place. Still, the police rounded up more than 1,100 people in the Russian capital alone and more than 1,100 in other Russian cities according to OVD Info, a rights group that tracks arrests at demonstrations in Russia.

Apart from arresting people at demonstrations, Russian authorities also said they would increase pressure in other spheres. Government employees who signed letters and petitions against the war, for instance, were threatened with dismissal.

The Russian prosecutor general’s office warned Russians on Sunday that the provision of loosely defined “assistance to a foreign organization or their representatives in activities directed against the security of Russia” can be qualified as high treason, punishable by up to 20 years behind bars. Russia’s communications watchdog announced on Friday it would partially limit access to Facebook as retaliation for restricting some pro-Kremlin media accounts.

On Sunday, many Russians also came to a bridge opposite the Kremlin to lay flowers to the spot where Boris Nemtsov, a prominent Russian opposition politician, was brutally shot to death seven years ago. Throughout his political career, Mr. Nemtsov spoke against any form of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Some people, who took part in the initial wave of protests on Thursday, could not go out again to avoid committing the same offense twice. Aleksei Kudasov, for instance, was arrested on Thursday and later released, so he decided not to take the risk, but said he was ready “to do everything to for this nightmare to stop.”

Mr. Putin’s decision will bring “nothing but grief to both sides of the conflict,” he said, adding that he would donate to rights organizations and will help spread truthful information about the conflict.

“People should not spend their nights in the metro for the president of another country to move tin soldiers on a map,” said Mr. Kudasov, 31, a copywriter. “Many of us have relatives and friends in Ukraine — to attack such a neighbor is an absolutely savage decision.”

Mr. Zelensky’s decision to remain in the capital, Kyiv, while it’s under Russian attack — and his family’s decision to stay in Ukraine — has moved many, particularly in contrast to the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, who fled Kabul as soon as the Taliban were on the outskirts, demoralizing what was left of the Afghan army.

He and his team have also made excellent use of social media, with impassioned speeches showing his presence on the streets of Kyiv going viral. Ordinary Ukrainians are reporting on events in Ukraine on TikTok, and some people are making videos hailing Mr. Zelensky and showing Ukrainians doing what they can to push back Russians — filling bottles meant for Molotov cocktails, volunteering to fight, being issued with automatic weapons and vowing to defend their country.

Mr. Zelensky’s response to a reported American offer to evacuate him — “I need ammunition, not a ride” — will most likely go down in Ukrainian history whether he survives this onslaught or not.

But Mr. Zelensky has also inspired European leaders to do more for Ukraine. Appearing onscreen during the emergency summit meeting of European Union leaders three days ago, on Feb. 24, he gave a passionate 10-minute speech that moved some reluctant leaders to endorse a harsher package of economic sanctions on Russia, a senior European official said.

His intervention will be part of history, said the official, who was in the room. It was very emotional, leaders were deeply affected.

The silence in the room was impressive and the impact was clear, the official added, and it was his impression that it made a major difference in persuading more reluctant countries, like Germany, Italy and Hungary, to agree to tougher financial and banking sanctions and the delivery of defensive weapons to Ukraine.

“This may be the last time you see me alive,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Mr. Zelensky’s actions and the tough resistance efforts from ordinary Ukrainian men and women — slowing down the Russian advance and volunteering to fight with automatic weapons — have also had an important impact on European opinion, European officials say, making it easier for their leaders to be bolder and to more freely accept refugees coming their way from Ukraine.

Ms. von der Leyen also announced a total closure of E.U. airspace to Russian aircraft.

The measure, she said, will exclude not just Russian airlines but also Russian-chartered private jets from all 27 member states’ airspaces, practically banning Russians from European skies. A number of countries had started announcing individual airspace closures on Saturday.

The bloc will also take steps to bar RT, the Kremlin-funded global broadcaster, as well as Sputnik, a news agency, from European airwaves, Ms. von der Leyen said.

“We will ban in the E.U. the Kremlin’s media machine,” she said. “The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and to saw division in our Union.”

Ms. von der Leyen said the bloc would also start developing fresh sanctions against Belarus, which has emerged as the key proxy and assistant for the invasion of Ukraine.

In an unusually emotive statement, Ms. von der Leyen, a German politician and former defense minister who is appointed to her E.U. role, not elected, was effusive in her praise of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and said Ukrainians were welcome to seek refuge in the E.U.

“President Zelensky’s leadership and his bravery, and the resilience of the Ukrainian people are outstanding and impressive,” she said. “They are an inspiration to us all.”

“We welcome with open arms those Ukrainians who have to flee from Putin’s bombs,” she said, “and I am proud of the warm welcome that Europeans have given them.”

Ms. von der Leyen’s announcements still needed to be approved formally and put into effect by the individual E.U. member states, following the normal decision-making structure of the bloc which is a club of sovereign states, not a federation.

“To be honest, we have reached the conclusion that this now turned into war,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in a televised interview on the CNN Turk news network.

Turkey on Sunday described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “war,” with consecutive tweets and statements from top officials of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Erdogan had earlier called the invasion a “military operation” of Russia that violated international law.

Ukraine has been appealing to Turkey to stop Russian warships from passing through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, which fall under the 1936 Montreux Convention.

Mr. Cavusoglu mentioned in his remarks Sunday that both countries still have the right to move vessels to home bases in the Black Sea.

“There shouldn’t be abuses,” he said. “It shouldn’t join the war after crossing the strait saying that it would go to its base.”

On Saturday, a short time after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine posted on Twitter indicating that Turkey had banned the Russia passage of warships through the Black Sea, Turkey denied there had been any measures taken.

A Turkish official close to Erdogan who asked to remain anonymous as he is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that Mr. Erdogan did not tell Mr. Zelensky that he had agreed to a ban on the passage of Russian military vessels.

The confusion may have come from a grammar mistake, which is common for Ukrainian speakers, since the language has no articles, and he may have meant to say “a” ban rather than “the” ban in his English language post.

“That was a very sad and awful exchange on the part of our president; this was Zelensky, now a world hero, asking for weapons, and it was an American president slow-walking the provision of those weapons in order to have Zelensky carry out a political investigation on his foe,” Mr. Romney said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It was wrong. It was in violation of a president’s responsibility to defend our nation and defend the cause of freedom and resulted in his being impeached.”

Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has zealously pursued Mr. Trump for his role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol from her position on the House’s Jan. 6 committee, voted against that first impeachment. On CBS’s “Face The Nation,” she said she did not regret that vote because Democrats were not diligent enough in gathering hard evidence to support it.

“You’ll see with the Jan. 6 committee, we have a very aggressive litigation strategy,” she said, “and I think there were a number of instances in the first impeachment where it would have been important and decisive to have witnesses testify who did not come in and testify.”

But other Republicans simply refused to talk about Mr. Trump and Ukraine.

“If you want to know what Donald Trump thinks about Vladimir Putin or any other topic, I’d encourage you to invite him on your show,” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians. They can speak for themselves.”

One Republican who did offer a view on Mr. Putin was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who suggested that the Russian president may be taking leave of his senses.

Mr. Putin “appears to have some neurophysiological health issues,” Mr. Rubio said on CNN, “but most telling is, this is a man who has long prided himself on emotional control. His recent flashes of anger is very uncharacteristic and show an erosion in impulse control.”

BP came under pressure in recent days from both the British government and opposition lawmakers over the Rosneft stake. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has taken a hard line against the Russian invasion ordered by President Vladimir V. Putin, arguing strongly that Europe needs to rapidly reduce its dependence on imports of natural gas from Russia.

In these circumstances, BP’s large holding in Rosneft looked increasingly untenable. The government’s concerns were expressed during a video call between Mr. Looney and the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, on Friday afternoon. A BP spokesman, David Nicholas, said the decision was made by the BP board “after careful and due consideration.”

Mr. Kwarteng praised the decision on Sunday. “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine must be a wake up call for British businesses with commercial interests in Putin’s Russia,” he said on Twitter.

It was not clear how BP would accomplish its exit from Rosneft. A BP spokesman said the company would begin to dispose of its stake, valued by BP at $14 billion at the end of last year, but did not yet know how it would accomplish that. Rosneft shares have plummeted in recent days, and the only buyers might be Russian state entities. The opportunity to buy a substantial slice of one of the world’s largest oil producers might also appeal to other state-owned companies like those from China willing to bargain-shop in Russia.

BP, in exiting Rosneft, might draw protests from investors over the resulting loss of dividends from the Russian stake as well as market value. On the other hand, some analysts welcomed BP’s move.

“While we’re surprised it happened so quickly, equity investors will now benefit from removal of Russian news flow volatility and much stronger” environmental credentials at BP, said Oswald Clint, an analyst at Bernstein, a research firm.

The board resignations will lead to accounting changes at BP. The company will no longer book its share of Rosneft’s profits ($2.7 billion last year) and reserves (about 55 percent of BP’s holdings) as well as production (about one-third).

BP received $600 million in dividends from Rosneft last year, and would have been expected to receive more this year because of higher oil prices.

BP also said it would write off at least $11 billion in the first quarter of 2022, but potentially much more, related to the Rosneft holding.

While BP is the Western oil company with the most to lose in Russia, it will remain a relatively large player that under Mr. Looney has been aggressively investing in offshore wind and other clean energy businesses, although these remain small compared with oil and gas at the company.

Moving away from Rosneft fits with this new tack. Biraj Borkhataria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said “the Rosneft stake is out of sync with BP’s longer-term strategic direction,” even though “walking away at this time is obviously not ideal from a shareholder value perspective.”

BP’s exit from Rosneft, once accomplished, will draw at least a temporary line on BP’s long experiment with Russia, which began early this century with the company investing $8 billion in a joint venture called TNK-BP with a group of Russian oligarchs headed by Mikhail Fridman.

After a decade of stormy relations among the partners, BP sold its share in the joint venture to Rosneft in 2013 for $12.5 billion in cash plus the 19.75 percent stake Rosneft.

Other large Western oil companies may also feel a chill over continued operating in Russia. TotalEnergies, the French giant, has a stake in Novatek, a Russian gas producer, and a share in a large liquefied natural gas facility in the Russian Arctic. Shell has a modest shareholding in an L.N.G. facility on Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East, where Exxon Mobil has been producing oil for a quarter of a century in a joint venture with Rosneft.

Analysts say that Russian operations have already lost relative importance in the portfolios of the Western oil industry. Russia may have vast troves of oil and gas, but the appetite for investing there has been curbed by the combination of climate change concerns and sanctions imposed on the Russian industry over Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Surging oil and gas prices and resulting higher profits may also help paper over whatever earnings hit the companies take in Russia this year, analysts say.

“At no point has Russia been under threat from NATO,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Sunday after Mr. Putin ordered the alert. “We have the ability to defend ourselves.”

But the longer-term U.S. response will almost certainly depend on what the Russian nuclear forces do in the next several days, as the commanders of the Russian strategic forces try to demonstrate that they are responding to Mr. Putin’s vaguely worded order, delivered for the cameras, to move “Russia’s deterrence forces” to a level of “special combat readiness.”

Both countries have various levels of alert, and it was unclear how Mr. Putin’s wording would be translated by the forces.

A vast nuclear-detection apparatus run by the United States and its allies monitors Russia’s nuclear forces at all times, and experts said they would not be surprised to see Russian bombers taken out of their hangars and loaded with nuclear weapons, or nuclear-equipped submarines leave port and head out to sea.

Both Russia and the U.S. conduct drills that replicate various levels of nuclear alert status, so the choreography of such moves is well understood by both sides. A deviation from usual practice would almost certainly be noticeable.

The ground-based nuclear forces — the intercontinental ballistic missiles kept in silos by both nations — are always in a state of readiness, a keystone to the strategy of “mutually assured destruction” that helped avoid nuclear exchanges at even the most tense moments of the Cold War.

Mr. Putin’s decision to put the forces on alert in the midst of the extraordinary tensions over the Ukraine invasion was highly unusual — and an escalation for the Russian leader, who several times in the past week has reminded the world of the size and reach of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Several days ago he warned the U.S. and NATO powers to stay out of the conflict, adding “the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”

Russia and the United States are limited to 1,550 deployed strategic weapons by the one remaining major nuclear treaty, New START. Both sides have smaller, tactical weapons designed for battlefield use, though the Russians have a far larger stockpile of them.

Until last week, the two nations were meeting regularly to discuss new arms-control regimes, including a revival of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which President Trump abandoned in 2019. But the U.S. said last week that it was suspending those talks, called the “Strategic Stability Dialogue.”