Russia’s Advance Has Slowed, but Destruction Is Growing

Despite hopes before the meeting that Moscow’s demands were narrowing, Russia’s envoy said that his country would not end its offensive until Ukraine surrendered, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, told reporters after the roughly 90-minute encounter.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, indicated that a cease-fire was not even on the table, and while he said that Russia remained open to talks, his remarks suggested that the Kremlin’s view of the conflict was detached from reality — at one point denying that Russia had attacked Ukraine at all.

The talks came on the 15th day of Russia’s military campaign. Here are other major developments:

• At least three people, including a child, were killed on Wednesday after a Russian missile strike devastated a maternity hospital in Mariupol, a statement from the local government said.

• Vice President Kamala Harris visited Poland, a NATO ally worried about Russian aggression, where she repeated U.S. pledges to “defend every inch of NATO territory” and emphasized American humanitarian and security assistance to Ukraine and its neighbors. But she sidestepped questions about Poland’s offer to hand fighter jets over to the United States to transfer to Ukraine, a proposal the Pentagon has rejected.

• The British government on Thursday imposed sanctions on seven Russian oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich, the owner of the Chelsea soccer club, and Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate with ties to Mr. Putin.

• The leaders of the European Union member states will meet on Thursday in Versailles, France, 103 years after world leaders gathered there to sign the treaty that ended the First World War. They are expected to discuss Ukraine’s appeal to join the bloc.

• More companies are pulling out of Russia, including the hotel chains Hyatt and Hilton. Hitachi said it was suspending exports to Russia and pausing manufacturing. The New York Times is tracking the pullouts.

The exchange of statements underscored the intensity of the information war underway among the world’s powers.

“Russia is inventing false pretexts in an attempt to justify its own horrific actions in Ukraine,” the State Department said in a statement, a stance that was reiterated in posts by the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, on Twitter, calling the accusations “preposterous.’’

The exchange showed the extent to which China has joined Russia as a proxy in trying to blame the United States for the conflict, even as the government in Beijing has sought to distance itself diplomatically from the carnage unfolding on the ground.

The accusation first emerged on Sunday when a spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Y. Konashenkov, claimed that Russian special operations forces had discovered documents detailing Pentagon-funded “secret biological experiments” at laboratories in two Ukrainian cities, Kharkiv and Poltava.

The ministry provided copies of documents, in Ukrainian, but their veracity could not be determined.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, used a question about the Russian accusations to accuse the United States of obfuscating about its work with biological and chemical weapons. Mr. Zhao has previously circulated conspiracy theories to deflect attention from China’s own policies, including one that linked the coronavirus pandemic not to Wuhan, where it began, but to research by the United States military at Fort Detrick, Md.

“Russia has a track record of accusing the West of the very crimes that Russia itself is perpetrating,” the State Department statement said, suggesting it could be laying the groundwork for its own attacks using prohibited weapons. “These tactics are an obvious ploy by Russia to try to justify further premeditated, unprovoked and unjustified attacks on Ukraine.”

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank that tracks the conflict, issued its own warning on Wednesday that the Russian statements could be part of an effort to lay the groundwork for its own chemical or biological attack. “Russia may conduct or fabricate such an attack and blame Ukraine and NATO to justify additional aggression against Ukraine,” it said.

Asked on Wednesday about the American statements, Mr. Zhao did not address them. Instead, he again cited Fort Detrick and insinuated that the United States was hiding secret work with biological weapons. The day before, he called the spread of disinformation “despicable and malicious.”

On Thursday, Global Times, the Communist Party newspaper, picked up another statement from General Konashenkov, this time saying, without evidence, that the American-funded labs in Ukraine were conducting experiments with coronaviruses in bats, the presumed source of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The entire city is without gas for cooking and heating, he said, after Russian shelling destroyed the pipes. Some neighborhoods have no clean water, he said, and the city has been disconnected from the national power grid, forcing residents to use their remaining gas supplies to keep the lights on. That gas supply is expected to run out in 24 hours, the mayor said.

Russian forces have already besieged the southern city of Mariupol for more than a week, where the situation has grown increasingly dire. People there are being buried in communal graves.

The mayor of Chernihiv, in a message posted online on Wednesday, said his city has run out of room to bury its dead.

“This is the first time in my life when I have to excavate the graves to bury five coffins together,” the mayor said. He has posted urgent pleas for help on the local government website over the past couple of days.

“Dozens of people have died,” he said in a message. “Dozens of multistory buildings have been ruined. Thousands of people have no place to live.”

The city, which lies directly along the Russian invasion route from Belarus to Kyiv, has come under attack since the first days of the war and the bombardment has intensified, according to local officials, eyewitness accounts and video evidence.

The Chernihiv Regional Military Administration issued a report on Thursday documenting an attack on Wednesday night, in which it accused Russian forces of opening fire in a residential community on the outskirts of the city. At least 10 houses were burned.

“During the last few days Chernihiv is being under violent severe bombings of Russian fighting aircrafts,” the mayor said. “Up to 17 bombings per day.”

Still, he said the city had no plans to surrender. “Everyone is looking at us,” he said. “We have to be strong.”

“The situation is a disaster that is really much deeper than somebody can imagine,” Mr. Ustenko said at a Peterson Institute for International Economics virtual event. “What is really needed to be done is to introduce a full embargo worldwide on Russian oil and gas. This is blood money.”

The country’s business sector has been crippled, Mr. Ustenko said, with 50 percent of businesses not operating and those that are running at less than full capacity. He added that Ukraine’s financial system and currency remained stable, given the circumstances.

The cost of building that Ukraine will face when it emerges from the war will be vast, Mr. Ustenko said.

The International Monetary Fund’s executive board approved $1.4 billion of emergency financing for Ukraine on Wednesday. The World Bank is also working to deploy a $500 million supplemental loan to help support Ukraine’s economy. And in the United States, the House approved $13.6 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine on Wednesday.

Mr. Ustenko said that beyond military support, Ukrainians will need aid for food, clothing and other basic needs.

As he called for a full embargo on Russian oil and gas, Mr. Ustenko said that he believed that the sanctions that were in place were working to cripple Russia’s economy.

“We are destroying them economically,” Mr. Ustenko said. “And destroying Russia economically maybe even has the same importance as the ground operation now.”

Britain’s visa approach is out of line with that of the European Union, which it exited in early 2020. The bloc has allowed all Ukrainians, regardless of family connections, to enter immediately, visa free, while fleeing the war.

Britain’s plans will not take effect until nearly three weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, so far driving more than two million people from their homes in the swiftest and largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

The shift in Britain is likely to ease the burden on U.K. visa application centers in Europe, where hundreds had been lining up for hours in the cold. But it does not address criticism from European leaders, opposition lawmakers and family members that visas are required at all.

During a question-and-answer session on Wednesday in Parliament, Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested that Britain would offer another humanitarian route to Ukrainian refugees, regardless of family connections. But no details on that process or when it would begin have been released.

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However, the government said it would grant legal permission for the club “to continue playing matches and other football related activity” in order to protect the country’s premier soccer league, “loyal fans and other clubs.”

Mr. Abramovich, 55, has been a high-profile figure in Britain for years because of his ownership of Chelsea, where he has made a habit of replacing coaches who failed to guide the club to success quickly.

As the billionaire owner of an elite soccer club, he has been the Russian oligarch best known to the British public at a time when the country’s relations with Moscow were often strained, particularly after the nerve agent attack in Britain in 2018 on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian agent, and his daughter.

Until Thursday, however, Mr. Abramovich had managed to avoid being the target of financial measures by Britain or other Western nations.

Mr. Abramovich has denied links to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. But in its statement, the British government said that Mr. Abramovich had a “close relationship” with Mr. Putin for decades. “This association has included obtaining a financial benefit or other material benefit from Putin and the government of Russia,” it said.

Also among the seven individuals added to the sanctions list is Oleg Deripaska, who the British government said has stakes in the Russian energy and aluminum company EN+ Group, and is best known in British political circles because of media reports about meetings in 2008 on his “super yacht” with politicians including Peter Mandelson, a cabinet minister in the previous Labour government.

The new move against the oligarchs is likely to defuse some of the criticism of Prime Minister Boris Johnson who has been accused of moving too slowly to tackle Russian influence in London.

Since he became prime minister in 2019, Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party, or its individual constituency associations, have received about $2.5 million from donors who are either Russian or who made money from Russia, according to calculations by the opposition Labour Party, based on disclosures to the Electoral Commission. Mr. Johnson has also been accused of ignoring the warnings of security officials when he nominated Evgeny Lebedev, a newspaper proprietor, to the House of Lords.

While Mr. Johnson’s government has pressed for strong financial and banking sanctions against Moscow, it has been criticized by some of its own lawmakers for being slow to accept refugees from Ukraine.

In a statement, Mr. Johnson said that the latest action showed that there would be “no safe havens for those who have supported Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine.”

It is unclear how many of these people died as a result of Russian attacks, but an A.P. journalist visiting the graves estimated that about half of them were killed during Russian shelling of the city.

On Wednesday, an apparent Russian airstrike damaged and destroyed buildings at a hospital complex in Mariupol, including a maternity ward. At least three people were killed, according to a statement from the local government, including a child, whose age was not immediately known.

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“The broad narrative he conveyed to me is that they will continue their aggression until Ukraine meets their demands, and the least of these demands is surrender,” Mr. Kuleba told reporters after he met for more than an hour around a U-shaped table in the seaside resort city of Antalya with Mr. Lavrov and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu of Turkey.

There had been some hope that the meeting on Thursday could yield a breakthrough because Russia appeared to narrow its diplomatic demands in recent days. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose top diplomat has held a total of 10 calls with his Ukrainian and Russian counterparts since the start of the war, said on Wednesday that the meeting could “crack the door open to a permanent cease-fire.”

But the separate remarks by Mr. Kuleba and Mr. Lavrov after their meeting dashed those hopes. And if the Kremlin really was prepared to step back from its maximalist demands, Mr. Lavrov appeared not to be authorized to make them.

“I have the impression that Minister Lavrov came to talk but not to decide,” Mr. Kuleba told Turkish television.

Mr. Lavrov stuck to President Vladimir V. Putin’s original demands from the start of the war, describing the goals of Russia’s invasion as the “denazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine. The Kremlin falsely describes the Ukrainian government as controlled by Nazis, indicating that the stated aim of denazification means replacing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government with a Russia-friendly one.

In a news conference that lasted nearly an hour, Mr. Lavrov took questions from Ukrainian, Russian and Western journalists and stuck to a narrative detached from reality. He harangued a Ukrainian reporter for peddling “fakes” about Russian actions in Ukraine. Asked whether the war could threaten countries beyond Ukraine, he said: “We do not plan to attack other countries. We didn’t attack Ukraine, either.”

Mr. Lavrov said Russia remained open to talks, leaving the door open to a meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin and pointing to Mr. Zelensky’s recent comments that he was prepared to make concessions over things like Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO to stop the war. Mr. Zelensky told Germany’s Bild newspaper in an interview published Wednesday that he was “ready to take certain steps” to end the war — but that he needed to speak directly to Mr. Putin in order to carry them out.

“We are ready to discuss security guarantees for the Ukrainian state along with security guarantees for European countries and, of course, for the security of Russia,” Mr. Lavrov said. “And the fact that now, judging by the public statements of President Zelensky, an understanding of just such an approach is beginning to take shape, inspires a certain optimism.”

But Mr. Lavrov said that for now, the main negotiating track was the one between Russian and Ukrainian officials who had been meeting in Belarus. Negotiators have met there for three rounds of talks, clashing over issues like limited cease-fires and civilian evacuations. One member of the Russian delegation said on Thursday that the date for a fourth round of those talks had yet to be set, the Interfax news agency reported.

Mr. Cavusoglu, who sat between Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Kuleba on Thursday, described the meeting as “extremely civilized,” without raised voices. Turkey, which has close ties both to Russia and Ukraine, has tried to play the role of a mediator in the conflict.

“No miracles should be expected in just one meeting,” Mr. Cavusoglu said. “This political-level meeting is an important beginning.”

Anton Troianovski reported from Istanbul, Marc Santora from Lviv, Ukraine. Safak Timur contributed reporting from Istanbul.

The Ukrainian defense forces’ main efforts are focused on preventing Russia from advancing on Kyiv, the military said.

In each of the areas where the Russians are trying to advance, there have been reports of fierce fighting. But information was limited, and with most details coming from the Ukrainians, it was difficult to assess their accuracy.

Still, it is clear that Ukrainian forces have so far been successful in defending the advance on Kyiv from the east. The Ukrainian defensive positions around the city of Chernihiv, a key city on Russia’s path toward the capital, are holding, the military said. Ukrainian forces also appear to have kept Russian forces from encircling Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, for the moment.

“Russian forces have likely begun renewed offensive operations into Kyiv and to continue its encirclement on the west, but have not made much progress,” the latest assessment from the Institute for the Study of War said.

In the south, Ukrainian defensive positions slowing the Russian advance on the key port city of Odessa are also largely holding for the moment.

The Ukrainian military said it would continue to defend besieged Mariupol even as the humanitarian catastrophe in the coastal city of a half-million residents grows by the day.

“The circular defense of the city of Mariupol continues,” the military command said.

Russia has launched more than 700 rockets and missiles at Ukrainian targets since the start of the war, according to the Pentagon and Ukrainian officials.

“Almost all of the missiles that have been fired from either inside Ukraine or from outside Ukraine have been targeted at sites in the eastern part of the country,” John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said at a briefing on Wednesday. “If you were to draw a line from Kyiv, down into Odessa, straight line, almost all those strikes are occurring to the east of that line.”

So it was notable that in recent days there have been strikes reported in two towns west of that line: Zhytomyr and Vinnystya.

This week, the mayor of Zhytomyr, Serhiy Sukhomlyn, reported that a bus carrying refugees came under attack in the area. There have also been reports of missile strikes in the area, and the airport in Vinnystya has come under rocket attack.

Military analysts speculated that Russian forces might be targeting these areas to slow the flow of arms from western Ukraine to the front lines.

Other articles on Thursday’s front page:

• Under a relentless Russian barrage on Mariupol, there is no heat or electricity, and people are boiling snow for water. The city is planning mass graves, including for a 6-year-old who died of dehydration, the authorities said.

• Four people were killed as they dashed across the concrete remnants of a damaged bridge in the town of Irpin, trying to evacuate to Kyiv. Their deaths resonated far beyond their Ukrainian suburb.

• Allies of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, arriving on private jets and yachts, are still welcome in the United Arab Emirates, which has not condemned the Ukraine invasion or enforced sanctions.

But the effects of the sanctions will touch nearly ever part of Chelsea’s business. Abramovich is now unable to sell the team, something he had said he planned to do, and the team cannot sell tickets to games or merchandise to fans. It is also forbidden from acquiring or offloading players in soccer’s billion-dollar transfer market under the current terms of its license.

The license, which the government said would be under “constant review,” will ensure that the team’s players and staff will continue to be paid; that fans already holding season tickets can continue to attend games; and that the integrity of the Premier League, which is considered an important cultural asset and one of Britain’s most high-profile exports, will not be affected.

But to ensure that no money flows to Abramovich, the club will no longer be able to sell new tickets to any games — including matches in the Champions League or the F.A. Cup if Chelsea continues to advance in those tournaments — or sell merchandise online or in its stores. And its business and daily activities may be seriously complicated, affecting everything from travel to sponsorship agreements.

Chelsea acknowledged the sanctions in a statement and said it intended to enter into discussions with the government regarding the scope of the license the team had been granted.

“This will include,” the team said, “seeking permission for the license to be amended in order to allow the club to operate as normal as possible.”

At the club on Thursday morning, staff members were said to be struggling to come to terms with what the government’s actions would mean them, their jobs, and the team. Many club officials, including Chelsea’s German coach, Thomas Tuchel, and Abramovich’s chief lieutenant, the club director Marina Granovskaia, were trying to understand what they could and could not do.

At the team’s Stamford Bridge stadium, security officials closed the team shop and blocked visitors from entering the grounds, and a club-controlled hotel stopped serving food and drinks in its restaurant. Elsewhere, the team’s jersey sponsor, the telecommunications company Three, said it was “reviewing our position” with the club, raising doubts about one of the team’s most lucrative sponsorships.

The freezing of Abramovich’s assets could make it impossible for him to follow through on his previously announced plans to sell Chelsea. Under the new arrangement with Chelsea, the British government will now have complete oversight of that process. And while it said it would not necessarily block a sale, the effect would be to heavily diminish any proposed sale price, and the proceeds “could not go to the sanctioned individual while he is subject to sanctions” — leaving Abramovich little incentive to move forward.

“Given the significant impact that today’s sanctions would have on Chelsea football club and the potential knock on effects of this, the Government has this morning published a license which authorizes a number of football-related activities to continue at Chelsea,” the British government said in its statement announcing the freezing of Abramovich’s assets. “This includes permissions for the club to continue playing matches and other football related activity which will in turn protect the Premier League, the wider football pyramid, loyal fans and other clubs. This license will only allow certain explicitly named actions to ensure the designated individual is not able to circumvent U.K. sanctions.”

The government later issued a fact sheet on what the sanctions against Abramovich would mean for the team and its fans. Among its bullet points:

• Chelsea is allowed to incur and pay “reasonable costs necessary for the club to host fixtures at its home ground,” including for security, stewards and catering.

• The transfer or loan of players into or out of any of Chelsea’s teams is not allowed, essentially locking the team out of the billion-dollar player trading market, and — for the moment — unable to strengthen its team in the summer transfer window when most deals are done.

• The team’s players, coaches and other staff members can continue to receive their salaries, but there will be limits on spending for travel to home and away matches, and such spending will only be available “for players and essential staff.” In practical terms, that could mean less luxurious flights and hotels on trips for games in the Premier League and the Champions League.

• Fans who already have tickets to Chelsea games, including season-ticket holders, will be allowed to attend and purchase refreshments. But no new tickets can be sold.

• Broadcasters are permitted to air Chelsea games and also to pay any television revenues to the club. But that money now will be subject to government oversight under the license the team was granted.

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“It’s potentially apocalyptic,” said Graeme Smith, a senior consultant for the International Crisis Group. “A huge surge in food prices could really tip Afghanistan over the edge.”

More than half of Afghanistan’s population is currently not eating enough, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. And one of the worst droughts in years has exacerbated Afghanistan’s hunger crisis. But the problem is not so much a lack of food as it is the ability to pay for it.

Fluctuating border restrictions, ever-rising import costs and a cash shortage spurred by U.S. sanctions on the new Taliban government, have, in some cases, doubled or tripled the price of basic necessities in Afghanistan in the past year.

Aqa Gul, an international trader based in Kabul, said that following Russia’s invasion, the prices of certain imported items such as milk biscuits and soap have climbed 10 percent. Nooruddin Zaker Ahmadi, the director of Bashir Nawid complex, a large import company in Afghanistan, said cooking oil prices have gone up 40 percent because of the war in Ukraine. Fuel prices have also climbed.

The price hike on basic commodities has been especially alarming at the World Food Program, which hopes to deliver cash, wheat and other necessities to the approximately 23 million Afghans in need of some kind of food assistance.

But with the increasing cost of essentials such as wheat and cooking oil, the W.F.P. will likely need an additional several million dollars on top of its $1.6 billion funding shortfall, from donors, said Hsiaowei Lee, the U.N. agency’s deputy country director for Afghanistan.

Safiullah Padshah and Najim Rahim contributed reporting.

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“Destroyed hospitals. Destroyed schools, churches, houses. And all the people killed. All the children killed,” Mr. Zelensky said.

“The air bomb on the maternity hospital is the final proof. Proof that the genocide of Ukrainians is taking place.”

In the hours after the attack, videos of the aftermath have spread around the world. They showed rescue workers attending to pregnant women caught in the blast as others searched frantically for children feared buried in the rubble.

“Europeans. You won’t be able to say that you didn’t see what happened to Ukrainians, what happened to Mariupol residents,” Mr. Zelensky said. “You saw. You know.”

Repeated efforts to bring relief to the city have failed and evacuation efforts collapsed under the fire of what Ukrainians say is Russian artillery. Mr. Zelensky said they would try again on Thursday.

“We are preparing six corridors,” he said. “We pray that people will be taken out of Mariupol” and other cities, he said.

About 35,000 people were evacuated on Wednesday through only three of six agreed upon corridors.

Both Russia and Ukraine appear to have softened their stance in recent days, raising hopes that a cease-fire might just be possible.

The Kremlin has narrowed its demands to focus on Ukrainian “neutrality” and the status of its occupied regions, and signaled that President Vladimir V. Putin is no longer set on regime change in Kyiv.

On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelensky has suggested that he is open to revising his country’s constitutionally enshrined aspiration to join NATO, and even to a compromise over the status of Ukrainian territory now controlled by Russia.

Mr. Zelensky said on Wednesday that he expected Mr. Putin to eventually cease hostilities and enter negotiations after watching his forces encounter fierce resistance in Ukraine. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Russian troops have been killed during the two-week invasion, a U.S. official said on Wednesday, up sharply from an estimate of 3,000 just days ago.

“I think he sees that we are strong,” Mr. Zelensky told Vice News during an interview in Kyiv. “He will. We need some time.”

The talks on Thursday will be held in the Turkish city of Antalya, in a coastal region that has for years been a popular destination for Russian tourists.

Turkey is a more neutral location than Belarus, where the first three rounds of talks have been held. Mr. Erdogan has stopped short of imposing sanctions against Russia over the invasion, but his country is a NATO member that has provided Ukraine with lethal armed drones.

Yet the Russian and Ukrainian demands are still far apart.

The Kremlin said this week that it would halt military operations if Kyiv were to enshrine a status of neutrality in its constitution and recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the independence of two Russia-backed separatist territories eastern Ukraine. That is still far from what Mr. Zelensky has said he would be willing to accept. Russia’s position could also puncture Mr. Putin’s image at home, opening him up to criticism that he waged a costly war for limited gain.

Even if Russia and Ukraine were to agree on a cease-fire, it would not necessarily mean the end of the war. Analysts caution that both sides could use it to build up strength ahead of a further escalation.

Mr. Kuleba said on Wednesday that his expectations for the talks in Turkey were low.

As Mr. Kuleba meets Mr. Lavrov, Vice President Kamala Harris will meet in Warsaw on Thursday with President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, a NATO ally on Ukraine’s western border. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who is visiting Poland this week, will also attend.

The United States and its NATO allies are trying to find ways to help Ukraine defend itself without getting pulled into a wider war against Russia. In a sign of how difficult that is proving, the United States and Poland publicly disagreed this week over proposals for sending Soviet-era fighter jets into the country.

Gen. Tod D. Wolters, the head of U.S. European Command, said in a statement early Thursday that the United States had “no plans to facilitate an indirect or third party transfer of Polish aircraft” to Ukraine.

Providing more air-defense systems and anti-tank weapons to Ukraine is the most effective way to support the country’s military, General Wolters said, and Ukrainian air defenses have been limiting the effectiveness of Russia’s significant air capabilities.

Transferring fighter jets from Poland to Ukraine would “not appreciably increase the effectiveness of the Ukrainian Air Force,” he added. It could also be “mistaken as escalatory and could result in Russian escalation with NATO.”