2.8 Million Have Fled Ukraine, Mostly to Neighboring Nations

“But we will try again,” Mr. Zelensky said. “Until we can help our people.”

As the siege of Mariupol, a city key to controlling southern Ukraine and access to the sea, continued over the weekend, Russia broadened its targets, striking a base in western Ukraine about 12 miles from the Polish border and NATO forces. Dozens were killed. Here are some of the latest developments:

• Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held a virtual meeting as Ukrainian officials hinted at progress in talks. A priority of the meeting was efforts to provide assistance and facilitate the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of civilians from Mariupol and other besieged cities.

• China dismissed U.S. allegations that Russia had asked it for military equipment and economic support. The White House has warned that direct military support or large-scale efforts to help Russia evade economic sanctions would have consequences. President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was meeting with China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, in Rome on Monday.

• Kyiv was hit by heavy artillery strikes on Monday morning, after days of severe fighting in the suburbs. One projectile struck an apartment building, blowing out windows and causing a fire. At least two people died, according to the local authorities.

• Fighting damaged a 16th-century monastery and cave complex that is a highly revered Orthodox Christian site for believers in both Russia and Ukraine.

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At least two people died, according to local authorities.

“We got out from the apartment and saw that the staircase was gone,” Maksim Korovii, a resident who was asleep when the building was hit, told Reuters . “Everything was on fire.”

The attacks reported on Monday followed days of intense fighting in suburbs northwest of the Kyiv.

The Azerbaijani leader, Ilham Aliyev, is one of hundreds of wealthy foreigners who have exploited Britain’s lax regulations to amass property and other assets, often under a web of offshore companies that disguise their ownership. Others have parlayed their fortunes into gilt-edged social status, endowing revered British cultural and educational institutions, or donating money to the Conservative Party.

Targeting these figures will be even more challenging than going after boldface names like Mr. Abramovich, whose ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are longstanding and well documented. But the protesters in Kensington said such an effort was crucial if Britain genuinely wanted to rid itself of the taint of dirty money.

“The crisis exposed the issue of Kremlin-linked money in the U.K., but it’s a much more systemic, global problem, with London sheltering this kind of money,” said Flo Hutchings, who helped found a neighborhood group, Kensington Against Dirty Money. “We hope this situation will have a snowball effect.”

European Union sanctions against Russia and Belarus do not apply to road transit of food and medications. That means cargo continues moving overland between the E.U. and Russia and Belarus. Hundreds of private trucks with Russian and Belarusian plates cross the border each day, with the line stretching for almost 10 miles on Saturday, according to the local police.

The protest inspired similar actions at other border crossings over the weekend, and another in front of the office of Poland’s prime minister in Warsaw, calling on the authorities to completely close the Polish border to Russian and Belarusian trucks.

According to TVN24, the biggest independent TV channel in Poland, the trucks arrive from Belarus mostly empty, drive through Poland to Germany, and then return to Belarus, packed with food, medication and other supplies.

Most of the trucks are eventually headed for Russia, according to the Polish liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza, which interviewed drivers.

The Polish media were alerted to the situation by a Ukrainian refugee, Miroslaw Zahorski, a former fruit farmer who started a grassroots campaign. He and others have been blocking the crossings, unscrewing the license plates of trucks waiting at the border and handing out flyers to the Belarusian and Russian drivers with details of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Polish-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce has said the trucks are a sign that supplies continue to flow from the European Union to Russia and Belarus and appealed to the Polish government to take action.

However, the most Poland can do as an E.U. member is call for the bloc to tighten sanctions, a decision that ultimately depends on a unanimous decision by the bloc.

“Since all of the E.U. states do not agree on this point, we are looking for legal loopholes to limit such activity locally,” said a Polish government spokesman, Piotr Müller, who called on other countries to join Poland’s efforts.

“For this to be effective, and not just a gesture, these actions need to be coordinated,” Mr. Müller said.

He added that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland would discuss the issue during a meeting with his Ukrainian and Lithuanian counterparts on Monday.

Meanwhile, the Polish authorities say they have increased checks at the Belarus border to ensure that cargo companies are not bypassing existing sanctions.

He was recently interviewed by The New York Times in a video about his brother, Vasyl Vyshyvanyi, a Ukrainian paratrooper who was killed during fighting near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine on March 3.

While driving to Vasyl’s memorial service in Lviv, Kyrylo reflected solemnly that “God takes away the best ones.”

A few days later, those words would resonate with the Vyshyvanyi family.

Aghaphia Vyshyvana, the mother of Kyrylo and Vasyl, reflected on the pain of losing her youngest son in an interview with The Times last week.

“They should stop the war, what I can say,” she said. “I have one more son I worry about. They could take him tomorrow.”

“I want the war to be over, that’s all,” she said. “For everyone to be alive and healthy. No mother feels such sorrow as I do. It’s too hard to get through this.”

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Mr. Kadyrov’s claim could not immediately be verified. But his background is well known. A close ally of President President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Kadyrov has brutally stamped out dissent in Chechnya, where security services torture detainees and carry out disappearances and extrajudicial killings. His government has targeted journalists and carried out a brutal pogrom against gays in the turbulent, predominantly Muslim region in the North Caucasus.

In Chechnya, Russia killed thousands of civilians and bombed cities to rubble in two wars as it crushed rebellions in the 1990s and early 2000s. Mr. Kadyrov’s father, who was installed as the Chechen leader by Mr. Putin, was assassinated in 2004 after seven months in office. His son was installed as Chechnya’s leader in 2007 at the age of 30.

Before the Russian invasion last month, Chechen troops were shown on social media discussing their plans to join the fight, stirring fears that they may employ similar scorched-earth tactics against civilian populations in Ukraine.

“He’s expanding the number of targets,” the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, adding that “he’s trying to cause damage in every part of the country.”

In recent days, Russian forces have been broadening their air war right up to the border with Poland, said John F. Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman. Before Sunday’s attack, Russian missiles also struck airfields in Lutsk and Ivano-Frankovsk, cities in western Ukraine near the Polish border. The airport in Ivano-Frankovsk was struck again on Sunday, according to the city’s mayor.

Pentagon and NATO officials reiterated on Sunday that they did not intend to directly confront Russian forces in Ukraine. But they are sending military supplies, and Russia has warned that it regards those convoys as legitimate targets.

The military base that was hit, which is called the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, has been a hub for Western military troops to train Ukrainian forces since 2015. Troops from the United States, Britain, Canada, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, among others, have trained 35,000 Ukrainians there under a project called “Operation Unifier.”

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But Western nations withdrew their forces ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the base has been used by Ukraine to train and organize the thousands of foreigners who have arrived in the country and volunteered to help defend it.

The Russian missiles struck the base during the predawn hours Sunday.

“They hit us when we were sleeping,” said one of the volunteer fighters, Jesper Söder, a Swede who had arrived at the base three days earlier. “We woke up to them bombing a building.”

At least 35 people were killed and 134 were wounded in the strikes, including both military personnel and civilians, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it killed 180 foreign fighters in the strikes. Neither figure could be independently confirmed.

Two senior Pentagon officials said the U.S. military believes the sites in western Ukraine were struck by cruise missiles fired from Russian warplanes. It was unclear where the Russian bombers were when they fired the missiles. Ukrainian officials said the planes had flown from Saratov, in southwestern Russia.

Until Sunday, the invasion of Ukraine, now in its 18th day, was most notable for Moscow’s indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, and even as it bombarded the military base in the west, Russia continued to punish ordinary Ukrainians.

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In the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, a Russian airstrike on a residential neighborhood killed nine people.

And in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces fired on a train carrying Ukrainian civilians, including more than 100 children, who were attempting to flee the violence. The train’s conductor was killed and Ukraine’s national railroad scrambled to send a new train to evacuate the surviving crew and passengers.

In the suburbs of Kyiv, Brent Renaud, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist working to document the toll the war has taken on refugees, was killed. Mr. Renaud, 50, had contributed to The New York Times in previous years, most recently in 2015.

The United Nations said Sunday at least 596 civilians had died in the war, including 43 children, while another 1,067 civilians had been injured. The U.N. said those figures most likely undercounted the actual death toll. Ukrainian officials said that 85 children had been killed and more than 100 injured.

In the besieged coastal city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said Sunday, at least 2,187 people have died since the start of the war. The figure could not be independently verified, but the situation has clearly become dire since Russian forces encircled the city nearly two weeks ago and began trying to pummel it into submission. Eyewitnesses who have managed to communicate to the outside world describe a hellish landscape, with dead bodies on the streets, little food or clean water and no medicine.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly requested that NATO members establish a no-fly zone over his country to deter Russian airstrikes, but even after Sunday’s attack on the military base, Western officials rejected his pleas.

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Mr. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said that the U.S. military remained concerned about NATO’s eastern flank on the border between Poland and Ukraine and that it was looking for ways to bolster the protection of that airspace. But he said the United States remained opposed to the idea of a no-fly zone.

A no-fly zone, he said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, “is combat — you have to be willing to shoot and to be shot at.”

“President Biden has made it clear that U.S. troops are not going to be fighting in Ukraine,” Mr. Kirby said, “and there’s a good reason for that, because the United States getting involved in combat in Ukraine right now or over the skies of Ukraine right now leads to war with Russia.”

Still, in the coming weeks, NATO plans to gather 30,000 troops from 25 countries in Norway for biannual military exercises, including live-fire drills. The exercises were announced more than eight months ago, but the training has taken on greater significance as the fighting in Ukraine approaches the Polish border and raises alarm across the alliance.

About 10,000 American troops — half of which were deployed since the invasion began — are now stationed in Poland. Late last week, the United States moved two surface-to-air missile batteries there from Germany. And on Saturday, President Biden approved sending an additional $200 million in arms and equipment to Ukraine.

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U.S. officials are also looking for ways to resupply and strengthen Ukraine’s air-defense capabilities, which are composed largely of Soviet- or Russian-made systems.

Among the options under discussion are transfers of similar equipment from NATO members in Eastern Europe, though there is concern these nations might then be left vulnerable themselves, U.S. officials said. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III is scheduled to meet with NATO defense ministers in Brussels this week and then travel to Slovakia, a NATO member located south of Poland on Ukraine’s western border.

American military officials say they believed that, after weeks of pummeling other parts of the country, Russia has begun to target western Ukraine in a bid to shut it down as a base of operations for the Ukrainian air force and a source of weapons and equipment. Arms and aid have flowed into western Ukraine from Poland and Romania.

But the American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, say they also believe that the Russians want to terrorize the refugees who have fled the violence in other parts of the country for what had been relative tranquillity in the west.

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As wounded foreigners and Ukrainians flooded hospitals after the attack at the military base, Ukrainian officials said their air defense systems had intercepted 22 of 30 Russian missiles. “The air defense system worked,” Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the Lviv regional military administration, said at a news conference. But it was not enough, he said, repeating calls for a no-fly zone.

Even in the absence of a no-fly zone, American officials said, Russian jets have been trying to avoid Ukrainian air space when they can, striking Ukrainian targets from Russian-controlled skies to evade the surprisingly effective Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles. Ukrainian forces have shot down at least 15 fixed-wing aircraft and at least 20 helicopters, according to a U.S. official.

When Russian bombers do enter Ukrainian air space, they are mostly flying quick in-and-out missions, officials said. In ideal military strategy, a country would destroy another country’s air-defense systems and then be able to fly freely through the air space. Russia has been unable to do that in Ukraine.

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As of Friday, Ukraine still had 80 percent of its air force intact — 56 warplanes — operating out of three bases in the country’s west. Pentagon officials believed that recent strikes there aimed to render those airfields inoperative, but it was unclear how effective they had been.

A senior Pentagon official said that as of Friday, Russians still had not targeted arms supply shipments coming into western Ukraine. There has been speculation that Russia may have been distracted by fighting in other parts of the country, but the stepped-up attacks in the west suggest that this may no longer be the case.

There were also signs that Russia, staggered by sanctions, may be having trouble sustaining its war, and that is has asked China for military equipment and support, according to U.S. officials.

“We are communicating directly, privately to Beijing that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them,” Mr. Sullivan, the national security adviser, said on CNN on Sunday.

Ukrainian and Russian officials said peace talks might resume Monday.

“Russia is starting to talk constructively,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser and a member of Kyiv’s delegation. “I think we will reach some concrete results, literally, in a few days.”

The Kremlin said it would not rule out the possibility of a meeting between President Putin and President Zelensky. “We would need to understand what the result of such a meeting would be and what would be discussed in it,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told the Interfax news agency on Sunday.

Reporting was contributed by Andriana Zmysla in Lviv, Yousur Al-Hlou in Kyiv, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Steven Erlanger in Brussels.

Many fear that an increasingly isolated Russia, where journalists and activists can face arrest if they are deemed to be spreading “false information” about the war, will be inhospitable to them. Some were workers in tech, law and other industries. Others are musicians and artists who see no future for their crafts.

Tens of thousands more Russians have fled to other countries, even though the fighting is taking place in Ukrainian territory. As they find themselves as foreigners, amid antiwar sentiment, some exiled Russians are working to organize mutual aid efforts. The invasion has caused an even larger exodus of refugees from Ukraine to seek safety in neighboring countries.

The departure of Russians from their land is a deviation from historical norms, said one expert.

“There has never been anything like this before in peacetime,” said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago.

The pain of leaving everything behind has been excruciating, many said — along with the guilt of perhaps not having done enough to fight Mr. Putin. Alevtina Borodulina, 30, an anthropologist, joined more than 4,700 Russian scientists in signing an open letter against the war. Then, as she walked with friends on central Moscow’s Boulevard Ring, one of them pulled out a tote bag that said “no to war” and promptly got arrested.

She flew to Istanbul on March 3, met like-minded Russians at a protest supporting Ukraine and now volunteers for the Kovcheg project to help other exiles.

“It was like I was seeing the Soviet Union,” Ms. Borodulina said of her last days in Moscow. “I was thinking that the people who left the Soviet Union in the 1920s probably made a better decision than those who stayed and then ended up in the camps.”

The Kremlin said it would not rule out the possibility of a meeting between President Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. “We would need to understand what the result of such a meeting would be and what would be discussed on it,” Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told the Interfax news agency on Sunday.

Russian politician Leonid Slutsky told RT Arabic, “If you compare the positions of the two delegations at the beginning of the talks and today, then you will see significant progress. My personal expectations are that this progress can in the coming days morph into a united position of the two delegations, into documents to be signed.”

Meanwhile, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman offered a more sober view on “Fox News Sunday,” cautioning that while Russian diplomats have started to show willingness to have “real, serious negotiations” to end the war in Ukraine, President Putin is still intent on continuing the war.

“The blast wave damaged the premises of the monastery, where many brothers and many refugees lived,” the statement said. “Almost all the windows were broken and church buildings were destroyed to varying degrees.”

Built into a high bank of the Seversky Donets River in eastern Ukraine, the Svyatogorsk Lavra is seen as one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers. Before the war, it drew thousands of pilgrims a year.

The war in Ukraine is also a conflict over the future of the Orthodox Church in the country. The Russian church has made no secret of its desire to unite the Ukrainian and Russian churches and control some of the holiest sites in Orthodoxy in the Slavic world, which are in Ukraine.

An independent Ukrainian church has been slowly asserting itself since the country’s independence in 1991, and received formal autonomous status within the Eastern Orthodox church in 2019.

In Ukraine today, churches and monasteries are divided between the independent Ukrainian church and a branch loyal to Moscow. The Svyatogorsk Lavra is visited by believers from both sides of this schism, but is controlled by the church subordinate to the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

If Ukraine prevails against the Russian invasion, the Moscow church will all but certainly be ejected from the country, including from sites such as the Svyatogorsk Lavra. If Russia wins, the Ukrainian church is unlikely to survive inside Ukraine.

Damage to monasteries or churches could also sway opinions of the war among believers in Russia, though Russian state media has generally shown little footage of destruction in the war.