Missiles Strike Western City of Lviv, Mayor Says

Major cities including Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Mariupol are under assault as Russia resorts to destroying cities that it has been unable to seize. Relentless bombardments have deprived urban populations of food, water and heat, and conditions appear to be no better in some eastern cities controlled by Russia, where witnesses have described desolation and ruin.

More than 3.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country, the United Nations says, warning that the number will continue to rise.

In the besieged port city of Mariupol, rescuers have pulled some survivors from the ruins of a theater where hundreds of people had been sheltering before Russian forces struck it on Wednesday. Many were unaccounted for, and with communications largely out in the city, the extent of the casualties was still unknown on Friday.

The toll on civilians has led President Biden to sharpen his rhetoric and personalize his response to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. This week, Mr. Biden called him a “war criminal” and a “murderous dictator,” prompting protests from the Kremlin.

Here are the latest developments:

• With Mr. Biden scheduled to talk to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at 9 a.m. Eastern on Friday, Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken warned China against giving military aid to Russia. He said on Thursday that Mr. Biden would “make clear that China will bear responsibility for any actions it takes to support Russia’s aggression.”

• President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who has spent the week delivering video addresses to several Western governments, vowed in an overnight speech to continue seeking increased support. “I feel that we are being increasingly understood, in Europe, in the world, in different countries,” he said. “And it gives us more and more support, which we have been asking for, for so long.”

• Russia called for another emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Friday to discuss its widely debunked allegations that the United States is helping Ukraine develop biological weapons. The American and Ukrainian governments have strongly denied the claims, and the U.N. has said it has no evidence of such programs.

• The United Nations, in an emergency session of its Security Council on Thursday, highlighted widespread human suffering in Ukraine, estimating the number of civilian casualties to be 1,900, with 726 people killed — 52 of them children — since the invasion began. The actual numbers are likely much higher. The Russian ambassador strongly denied that his country’s forces had deliberately attacked civilians.

• The House voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to strip Russia of its preferential trade status with the United States, moving to further penalize the country over its invasion of Ukraine.

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Attacks in western Ukraine have been rare since the war began, and Lviv itself has seen few if any. But a Russian airstrike on Sunday at a military base near Poland’s border brought worries of more to come.

As the Russian military focused its attention on the south, the north and the area around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, the relative security of the west made it both a destination for internally displaced people and a hub for the inflow of Western aid.

The strike may have been an attempt to target the capabilities of Ukraine’s air force. According to a local news article from January, the plant at the airport had a contract to fix and modify MiG-29 fighter jets and was “the only enterprise in Ukraine that refurbishes MiG-29s for the Ukrainian Air Force.”

Maksym Kozytsky, the regional military administrator, said in a news conference that six missiles had been shot from a plane over the Black Sea toward Lviv, two of which were shot down. No one was killed and one person was injured, he said.

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Mr. Biden amplified his attacks on Thursday, calling Mr. Putin “a murderous dictator, a pure thug who is waging an immoral war against the people of Ukraine.” His secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, chimed in, saying: “Personally, I agree. Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.”

But what began as a visceral reaction by Mr. Biden also appears to reflect a strategic decision that branding Mr. Putin as a war criminal supports the administration’s case as it simultaneously tries to keep the Western alliance unified — amid differing views in Europe over the wisdom of cornering the Russian leader — and attempts to pressure China not to bail Mr. Putin out of his economic crisis and military mistakes.

And Mr. Biden’s comments came after three weeks in which the United States and its allies piled sanctions on Russia that the administration insisted were designed to force Mr. Putin to withdraw his forces from Ukraine. But diplomats and intelligence officials from several countries say those sanctions are seen by Mr. Putin as an effort to stoke Russian unrest, turning both wealthy oligarchs and ordinary Russians against his rule.

The White House says that “regime change” in Russia is not on Washington’s strategic agenda. But in past cases when presidents have called national leaders war criminals — Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or Bashar al-Assad of Syria — it has frequently been linked to an effort, covert or overt, to drive them from office.

After Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the lead Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, proclaimed that the carnage depicted in a video that Mr. Zelensky played for lawmakers was a direct result of a response by the Biden administration that had been “slow, too little, too late.”

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, traced the invasion by the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, back to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the failure to attack Syria after its leader used chemical weapons and the Russian seizure of Crimea, all of which, he made sure to note, “happened when Joe Biden was either vice president or president.”

Absent from that analysis were four years under President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly undermined NATO, sided with Mr. Putin over his own intelligence community on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and tried to bring Russia back into the community of developed economies. Also missing was Mr. Kennedy’s own trip, with seven other Senate Republicans, to the Kremlin on July 4, 2018, after a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee determined that Moscow had interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

Democrats argue that such criticism shows how single-minded the Republican Party has become about tearing down its opponents.

“Republicans have defaulted to attacking Joe Biden in a moment of national crisis,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “There’s this infection in the Republican Party right now, in which power matters more than anything else, more than democracy, more than the peaceful transition of power, more than winning wars overseas.”