Ukrainians Are Being Forcibly Deported, Officials Say

The American defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, said that the United States saw no sign that Russia planned to try to seize Odessa or other cities in the south in the “near term.”

Mr. Austin said Russia’s incremental gains had come though “brutal, savage techniques” largely aimed at civilians. Even as ​​the Russian Army seeks to strangle the strategic port city of Mariupol, vicious street battles there are costing it time and casualties.

The coming shape of the war could be most clearly seen in Mariupol, the coastal city, where Ukrainian officials said Russian forces on Sunday bombed a drama school sheltering some 400 people. The number of casualties was unknown.

Clearly, a stalemate does not mean an end to the bloodshed. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly called for direct negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in the hope of ending the war.

Mr. Putin does not think the time is yet right for talks, according to a senior Turkish official who was on a recent call between Mr. Putin and Turkey’s president. With Mr. Putin determined to pummel Ukraine into submission, Russia’s failure to achieve its initial objectives could presage an even deadlier phase of the war defined by large-scale casualties.

Here are the latest developments in Ukraine:

• At least 40 marines died in a Russian airstrike on barracks in the southern city of Mykolaiv.

• Mariupol’s city council said Russia had bombed a drama school where about 400 people had been hiding. It did not estimate the number of casualties, if any.

• Russian forces are taking thousands of Ukrainians against their will across the border into Russia who he feared could be compelled into forced labor, according to a city official. Russian forces have taken “between 4,000 and 4,500 Mariupol residents forcibly across the border to Taganrog,” Pyotr Andryuschenko, an assistant to the city’s mayor, said, referring to a city in southwestern Russia.

• Russia is using long-range missiles to devastating effect, even as its ground advance on key targets remains stalled.

• At least 847 civilians — including 64 children — have been killed since Russia’s invasion began, in what United Nations officials say is almost certainly an undercount.

“What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people,” said Mariupol mayor Vadym Boychenko.

“It is hard to imagine that in the 21st century people will be forcibly deported to another country.”

Up to 4,500 people may have been taken from Mariupol across the nearby Russian border by forces loyal to Moscow, Pyotr Andryuschenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, told The New York Times in an interview.

Officials in Moscow have not directly addressed these claims, but said on Friday that thousands of Ukrainians had “expressed a desire to escape” to Russia.

Recently evacuated Mariupol residents also told The New York Times that they had been in touch with people who had been apprehended in basements and taken across the border against their will.

Eduard Zarubin, a doctor from Mariupol, said he had been in touch with people from three families who had been forcibly taken to Taganrog, a Russian seaside town.

Mr. Andryuschenko said he believed many of the people who had been sheltering in the TerraSport athletic complex in the city center had also been taken away.

The situation in Mariupol, which for weeks has been without food, water, electricity or gas, has deteriorated drastically, with reports that Russian forces already hold three neighborhoods in the city. On Sunday morning, the Azov battalion, one of the regiments charged with the city’s defense, said four Russian naval vessels had shelled the city from the sea.

“After aircraft, artillery, various systems and tanks, the Russian occupiers are destroying the city with heavy weapons of warships,” the announcement, posted to Telegram, said.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the latest developments in Mariupol, where workers were still struggling to save people in the central Drama Theater, where an estimated 1,300 people were seeking refuge from the near constant shelling when it was targeted on Thursday.

Even as hope of finding survivors there faded, rescue crews were racing to the site of another brutal assault on Sunday, after a bomb struck an art school in the Left Bank district, where about 400 residents were hiding, according to city officials. The number of casualties was not known. The Ukrainians blamed the Russians for once again targeting civilians.

“The besieged Mariupol will go down in the history of responsibility for war crimes,” Mr. Zelensky said in his overnight speech to the nation.

“The terror the occupiers perpetrated on this peaceful city will be remembered for centuries to come. And the more Ukrainians tell the world about it, the more support we find. The more Russia uses terror against Ukraine, the worse the consequences will be for it.”

Russia has made some gains in the eastern part of the country, where Britain’s defense intelligence agency said forces were still working to encircle cities, and it continues to hold territory in the south around Kherson.

But with its ground forces meeting stiff Ukrainian resistance, Russia has increasingly turned to long-range missiles to target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure. In a war of attrition, analysts said, Russia hopes it can break down the Ukrainian military while crushing the public’s spirit with relentless assaults.

Russia initially planned to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to quickly seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and other major Ukrainian cities. The hope was that they would be able to force a change of government and install leaders loyal to Moscow.

It is now clear that plan has failed, analysts said. “Russian generals are running out of time, ammunition, and manpower,” Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, wrote earlier this week.

“An essential caveat to my assessment is that we, the West, led by the U.S., must accelerate and expand the support we are providing to Ukraine on the scale and with the sense of urgency of the Berlin Airlift.”

But he said he was confident that the Russian campaign was reaching its culmination. Culmination is a concept in war outlined more than a century ago by the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, who described it as the moment when “the remaining strength is just enough to maintain a defense and wait for peace.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has offered no indication that he wants to “wait for peace,” and the bombardment cities and towns across Ukraine shows no sign of letting up.

As the authors of report from the Institute for the Study of War note, history is filled with conflicts where the combatants are stalemated yet the fighting rages on. Some of the deadliest battles of World War I, including the Somme and Verdun, were fought during stalemates that they failed to break, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives.

Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Sunday that Russia had increased “indiscriminate shelling of urban areas resulting in widespread destruction and large numbers of civilian casualties.”

The Russian invasion has found its greatest success in the south, and the fighting over the strategic port city of Mariupol is some of the most brutal of the war. A Ukrainian defeat would give Russia control over the coast of the Sea of Azov and is critical to create a land bridge between Crimea — which Moscow annexed in 2014 — and Russia. But the cost of taking the now-ruined city might limit the impact of any Russian victory.

“If and when Mariupol ultimately falls the Russian forces now besieging it may not be strong enough to change the course of the campaign dramatically by attacking to the west,” according to the I.SW. analysis.

Elsewhere, the Russian positions seemed to be relatively static or were being pushed back by the Ukrainians. The Ukrainian military high command said Sunday that there had been no major Russian offensives in the past 24 hours, which suggests that the Russians were taking an operational pause as its forces regroup.

Perhaps the most significant Russian drive in the country is the one pushing north to Kryvyi Rih, a heavily fortified city of more than 600,000 that is also the hometown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

But given the difficulties Russia has had on other fronts seizing far smaller cities with greater combat power, military analysts said it was likely they would find themselves bogged down. “The Russians are in trouble, and they know it,” Mr. Hodges wrote. “That’s why they have reached out to China for help and why they are now recruiting Syrians.”

Residents would stand outside their buildings filming the destruction with their cellphones.

Each day, Russian forces drew closer and closer to the apartment complex. On March 3, one of the buildings was directly hit by a missile. More than 150 families were still in the 14-building residential complex at the time, a building manager told The New York Times.

And then, later that same day, troops were literally at Mr. Naumenko’s doorstep.

“We saw the Russian infantry on the security camera of our building,” he said. “From that moment, the Russians stayed.”

They made around 200 residents stay too, holding many of them hostage in the basements of their own buildings, forcing them to hand over their phones and taking over their apartments. Others were able to avoid detection but still were essentially prisoners in their own homes as Russian forces moved into the buildings, which had housed 560 families, and took up sniping positions.

The Times interviewed seven residents of the Pokrovsky apartment complex in the town of Hostomel, about 10 miles northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. All experienced the assault and the captivity firsthand before finding ways to flee. Using their accounts, along with footage from security cameras and cellphones, The Times was able to piece together what it looked and felt like as Russian forces closed in.

“It was really scary,” said Lesya Borodyuk, a 49-year-old resident, tearing up at one point as she spoke. “I wrote to my daughter. I was saying goodbye to her. I told her that probably we will be bombed now.”

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“This war was something I thought could never happen,” said Polina Loseva, 29, a web designer from Moscow working with a private Russian I.T. company that she did not want to name. “When it started, I felt that now, everything is possible. Already they are putting people in jail for some harmless words on Facebook. It was safer to leave.”

This is a different kind of exodus — tens of thousands of young, urban, multilingual professionals who are able to work remotely from almost anywhere, many of them in information technology or freelancers in creative industries.

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Russia is hemorrhaging outward-looking young professionals who were part of a global economy that has largely cut off their country.

Before the war broke out, only about 3,000 to 4,000 Russians were registered as workers in Armenia, according to officials. But in the two weeks following the invasion, at least an equal number arrived almost every day in this small country. While thousands have moved on to other destinations, government officials said late last week that about 20,000 remained. Tens of thousands more are looking to start new lives in other countries.

The speed and scale of the exodus are evidence of a seismic shift that the invasion set off inside Russia. Though President Vladimir V. Putin repressed dissent, Russia until last month remained a place where people could travel relatively unfettered overseas, with a mostly uncensored internet that gave a platform to independent media, a thriving tech industry and a world-class arts scene. Life was good, the émigrés said.

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For the new arrivals in Armenia, a sense of controlled panic overlays the guilt of leaving their families, friends and homeland, along with the fear of speaking openly and the sorrow of seeing a country they love doing something they hate.

“Most of those who left oppose the war because they are connected to the world and they understand what’s happening,” said Ivan, part-owner of a Cyprus-based video game development firm. He and many other Russian exiles interviewed in Armenia said they did not want to give their full names for fear of repercussions at home.

Ms. Loseva and her boyfriend, Roman Zhigalov, a 32-year-old web developer who works for the same company that she does, sat at a table in the crowded cafe with friends who were looking for a place to stay. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, she leaned against Mr. Zhigalov, closing her eyes as he put his arm around her shoulder.

“A month ago, I didn’t want to move to another country,” she said. “But now, I don’t want to go back. It’s not the country I want to live in anymore.”

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At other tables in the small cafe, young Russians tapped on laptops or checked their Apple watches. Some logged into Zoom meetings; others searched for places that they could afford to rent with their savings inaccessible.

But the plunge in the ruble, which at one point had lost about 40 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar, and the soaring housing costs in Armenia, which are priced in dollars, have left some who lived in stylish apartments in Moscow contemplating moves from budget hotels to even cheaper hostels with bunk beds and shared bathrooms.

Most of those who have come to Armenia work in I.T. and other sectors that rely on unfettered internet and international banking links, the country’s economy minister, Vahan Kerobyan, told The New York Times.

But among those who have fled Russia are also bloggers, journalists or activists who feared arrest under the country’s draconian new law that makes it a crime even to use the word “war” in connection with Ukraine.

Some of the recent Russian arrivals in Armenia said they have contracts that will pay them for at least a couple of months of working remotely if they can find a way to get the money. Others said they had been relocated to Armenia by U.S. and other I.T. firms, which continue to pay their salaries. But many have been left scrambling to access enough money to scrape together apartment deposits.

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Visa, Mastercard and PayPal have all cut ties with Russia, leaving only the Russian Mir bank card, which is accepted in Armenia and a very few other countries, for electronic payments.

Mira, 26, who works at an aid agency, said the night before she and her boyfriend left Moscow, they went from A.T.M. to A.T.M. for three hours, unsuccessfully trying to withdraw dollars. At every cash machine, people with bodyguards would push to the front of the line and withdraw $5,000 at a time until the machines were empty, she recalled.

“We couldn’t say anything because it felt really dangerous,” she said.

Tens of thousands of other Russian exiles have traveled to Georgia and Turkey. But Armenia, a former Soviet republic which has remained neutral in the conflict, has offered the softest landing. Unlike the reception in Georgia, none of the Russians interviewed said they had encountered hostility. Here, they can enter the country without visas or even passports and stay up to six months, and Russian is widely spoken.

For some, the anguish of leaving their country is compounded by the feeling that the world increasingly equates all Russians with their president.

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“I want to be with the rest of the world, not with Russia,” said Mr. Zhigalov, the web developer. “But we cannot be with the rest of the world because it feels like being Russian now is seen as a bad thing.”

Maria, a 30-year-old Russian travel guide editor who had arrived in Armenia the previous week, also worried about the hostility.

“What do people in America think of Russians?” she asked earnestly. “Do they hate us?”

Maria said she had been involved in anti-government protests in Russia in 2018.

“I was so scared,” she said of her decision to leave with her husband, a manager of a sports training center. “I was afraid of being arrested if I went out to protest. And to live there and do nothing, I don’t want to live like that.”

Most of the Russians interviewed said they left because crushing international sanctions had made it impossible to work for companies from other countries or with foreign clients, or because they feared that Russia could close its borders.

Like many of the men who left, her husband, Evgeny, feared that he could be conscripted and forced to fight in Ukraine. The couple scrambled to find a flight out of Moscow after most airlines had cut ties with Russia, eventually spending almost all the money they had on tickets for a flight to Yerevan.

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Many of those who left are entrepreneurs or freelancers in industries that relied on foreign clients, who have cut ties with them, even for work outside of Russia.

“They just tell us, ‘Sorry guys. We hope to work together in the future but right now, we cannot,’” Ivan, the video game developer, said of his European partners.

At another cafe, 35-year-old Alex, his blond hair pulled back with a hair tie and arms tattooed with milestones in his life, said he spent four hours at the Moscow airport while his flight was delayed, drinking gin and tonics.

“I just got drunk in the airport to get some courage,” he said. “I probably should have left earlier, but I’m in love with my country.”

Alex, who did not want to say what industry he worked in, said he cried as he listened to voice messages from Ukrainian friends who had been called up to fight.

“These guys were sitting around, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, playing music,” he said. “The next day, they had to go get a gun and defend their country. These were people who had never held a gun before. It’s horrible.”

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For many Russians, there is also the pain of a generational divide with parents and grandparents who grew up in the former Soviet Union.

“My parents, my grandma and grandpa are watching TV and totally believing the TV line so it hurts to speak with them,” said Mira, the aid worker. “At one point, I realized I loved them too much to argue. So I said, let’s not talk about it.”

“I don’t have any stable ground under my feet,” she said. “We are here now, but we don’t know where we will be in a week or a month, or even tomorrow.”

At the Yerevan airport last week, Viktoria Poymenova, 22, and her boyfriend, Bulat Mustafin, 24, from the Russian city of Mineralnye Vody, wheeled out a tower of suitcases, bulging backpacks and two small carriers holding their small rescue dog, Mukha, and their tortoiseshell cat, Kisya.

Mr. Mustafin, an engineer, worked as a technician for film projectors in cinemas, which are now unable to show films from Hollywood studios, since they have cut ties with Russia.

Ms. Poymenova teaches web programming for a Cyprus-based online school. Their plan was to find an affordable apartment in Georgia.

“If we don’t find one, we will come back here. And if we don’t find one here, we will go to Turkey. And if there is nothing, we will go to Serbia,” said Ms. Poymenova. “We just want a peaceful life, but it is very hard when your country is making such a disaster.”

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Russia invaded parts of Georgia 14 years ago, and Russian troops still protect South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two secessionist regions that broke away from Georgia during the 1990s and then expanded in 2008. That has put Russia in de facto control of roughly a fifth of Georgian territory.

To the Georgian government, this precarious dynamic makes it unwise to speak out too strongly against Russia, lest Russia turn on Georgia next.

“We live next to a volcano,” said Giorgi Khelashvili, a lawmaker for Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream. “The volcano just erupted, and it just happens that the lava is currently flowing down the other side of the mountain.”

But this cautious approach has put the Georgian government at odds with most of its population — creating a far more pointed clash between majority opinion on Ukraine and government policy than in most other European countries.

Tina Marghishvili, a farmer, once lived in South Ossetia before Russia took control of it. “I watch the Ukraine news, I remember 2008, and it makes me cry,” said Ms. Marghishvili, 57, who now lives in a camp for Georgians displaced by that 2008 war. “Georgia should be sanctioning Russia, blockading them, boycotting their exports.”

And for Ms. Marghishvili, the big mystery is: Why hasn’t the Georgian government already done that?

In the first week of the war, it is not clear how many Russian strikes hit their targets, but Piotr Lukasiewicz, an analyst at Polityka Insight, a Warsaw-based research institute, said that they did serious damage to Ukraine’s command and control centers.

“They disabled an important headquarters and communications center in the beginning with precision strikes,” he said.

Just as the Russians are plagued by logistical and resupply issues, the Ukrainians are struggling to replace the stationary systems that the Russians have destroyed or disabled.

“Gradually Ukrainians are losing their radars or warning systems,” Mr. Lukasiewicz said.

The Russians also have shown that their weapons can hit with precision. A strike on a barracks in Mykolaiv on Friday that was housing 200 marines, killing dozens, was among the deadliest of the war. It also came with little warning, according to the mayor, Oleksandr Senkevich, with no air alarms sounding. The strike raised questions about Ukrainian tactics and why they would have concentrated so many soldiers in one location on the front lines.

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Mr. Lukasiewicz said that Ukraine, like Poland, still bases many of its troops and command and control in the same locations where they were based when it was a part of the Soviet Union. This has given the Russians another advantage.

“For them to obtain the exact locations of barracks, headquarters and military units would simply involve going through the archives,” he said.

The expansion of targets to the west, he said, was a pretty obvious strategy: fighting the troops in front of you while trying to cut their supply lines and communications systems.

In recent days, Russian cruise missiles fired from the Black Sea have struck a sprawling training base just 12 miles from the Polish border and, separately, a location near the Lviv airport used to repair MiG fighter jets — a staple of what is left of the Ukrainian air force. In both instances, the Russians did not fire a single missile but barrages.

The Ukrainians claimed to have shot down more than a dozen, but a number got through. The same is true regarding recent missile strikes on airports in other parts of western and central Ukraine.

At the same time, Russia claimed on Saturday that it had used a hypersonic missile to hit an underground warehouse for missiles and aviation ammunition in a western Ukrainian village. If confirmed, that would be the first battlefield use of the weapon that flies at superfast speeds and can easily evade American missile defense systems.

The Ukrainians said that the type of missile had yet to be determined and a video of the strike released by the Russian ministry of defense did not clearly demonstrate that it was indeed a hypersonic missile.

Also on Saturday, an adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Anton Gerashchenko, claimed that Russia, for the first time in Kyiv, was using “projectiles that descend on parachutes.” Those bombs, unlike laser targeted long-range missiles, are designed to inflict maximum damage.

Benjamin Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, said that the recent strikes underscore how Russia’s targeting of civilians is part of their strategy.

“These strikes confirm that they do have precision capabilities, as we’d assumed,” he said in an email message. “Which also confirms that their use of indiscriminate strikes in cities is not because they don’t have precision munitions. It is deliberate, also as we’d assumed.”

In just over three weeks, Russia has launched more than 1,000 missiles and rockets at Ukrainian targets, according to the Pentagon. The vast majority, according to British officials, have been “dumb bombs” targeting civilians.

John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, warned recently that as Russian ground forces found their advances stymied by fierce Ukrainian resistance, they would rely more on long range cruise missiles and other rockets.

After the training base north of Lviv near the Polish border was hit, he said, Russia was doing more than just “sending a message.”

“They are clearly expanding some of their target sets here,” Mr. Kirby said.

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While experts have been puzzled by Russia’s failure to gain complete control over the Ukrainian skies, they are certainly dominant — Russian surface-to-air missile capabilities can reach anywhere in Ukraine, according to military analysts. Russia is believed to fly some 200 sorties per day while Ukraine flies five to 10.

The vulnerability of Ukraine’s military infrastructure is why President Volodymyr Zelensky has for weeks been asking NATO to “close the skies” with a no-fly zone — a step the alliance will not take. Mr. Zelensky acknowledged recently that such a move was unlikely, but stepped up his calls for air defense systems to help blunt the impact of the Russian aerial bombardment.

Slovakia has agreed to provide its S-300 air defense systems — which can shoot down cruise missiles — and MiG-29s to Ukraine “immediately” if it can get replacements in a timely manner, Slovakia’s defense minister, Jaroslav Nad, told reporters in a joint news conference with Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on March 17. Mr. Austin said there was no agreement to announce but that the discussions were an indication of the urgent work being done to help Ukraine defend itself.

Russia’s heavy use of missiles in the war also suggest some weaknesses that favor the Ukrainians.

These missiles, fired from hundreds of miles away, have no ability to hit mobile defense systems, according to a panel of military fellows at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan research group. That means “Russia has almost no ability to prevent mobile resupply,” the panel said.

Further, it is unclear how long Russia could sustain barrages of multiple cruise missiles aimed at a single target.

Dr. Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow for sea power and missile defense at the Royal United Services Institute, said Russia’s supply of cruise missiles may be limited. One report, he wrote recently, has suggested about 120 were produced in 2018.

“I’d expect the cruise missile arsenal to be large but not limitless,” he said in a statement. “They would have to be careful about what they hit.”