Mariupol Awaits Aid as Russia Sends Mixed Signals Over War

Peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials were also expected to resume by video link on Friday. Discussions began in Turkey on Tuesday, after which Russia promised to reduce its presence around Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and in the country’s north.

Ukraine’s government has said it is willing to discuss forsaking any aspirations of joining NATO, as well as making territorial concessions if security guarantees are provided by other nations.

But even as the high-level talks proceed, people caught up in the fighting continue to suffer. Russian troops have surrounded Mariupol for weeks, and the few residents who have managed to escape have painted a dire picture of deteriorating conditions there.

There were reports on Thursday from a Ukrainian official that Russian forces had stopped some evacuation buses on their way to Mariupol. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is involved in the aid effort, said in a statement that it was “desperately important that this operation takes place.”

“The lives of tens of thousands of people in Mariupol depend on it,” the organization added.

In the north of Ukraine, Russia appears to be holding ground around Kyiv and repositioning troops rather than withdrawing them, according to Western defense officials.

Air and missile strikes have continued in the Chernihiv and Kyiv regions, despite Russian claims of reducing activity in those areas, Britain’s Defense Ministry said in an assessment on Friday morning.

Ukrainian forces have retaken two villages south of Chernihiv, located on a key route between that city and Kyiv, the assessment found. Russia has also handed back control of the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant and surrounding areas to the Ukrainians.

But in an overnight speech, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine urged caution amid the hopeful signs that his forces had regained some control.

“We know what they are planning and what they are doing,” he said of Russia. “We know that they are moving away from the areas where we are beating them to focus on others that are very important.”

In other developments:

• Two Ukrainian helicopters crossed into Russia and struck an oil depot in the city of Belgorod, injuring two people, the regional governor said. It was the first time that Russia reported an airstrike on its territory since the start of the war.

• Europe faces a Russian deadline of Friday to begin paying for natural gas imports in rubles or risk having the supplies shut off, a standoff that jeopardizes a resource vital to many of the region’s economies. European leaders have rejected the Kremlin’s demands.

• Leaders from China and the European Union will meet on Friday for their first summit in two years. Brussels is likely to seek assurances from Beijing that it will not support Russia militarily in Ukraine or help Moscow to circumvent sanctions.

• Hundreds of Syrian fighters are en route to join Russian forces in Ukraine, effectively returning the favor to Moscow for helping President Bashar al-Assad crush rebels in his country’s 11-year civil war, according to people monitoring the flow of mercenaries.

The standoff could create a dilemma for Japan as the resource-poor nation tries to balance its tough position on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a dependence on fossil fuels that was hardened by the closure of most of the country’s nuclear power plants after the Fukushima meltdown in 2011.

Japanese companies are partners with the Russian energy firms on offshore oil and gas projects near northern Japan. One liquefied natural gas project, Sakhalin-2, supplies about 8 percent of the liquefied natural gas used by Japanese power companies. As of 2019, the fuel accounted for about 34 percent of Japan’s electricity production.

Mr. Kishida said on Thursday that Japanese companies would not pull out of Sakhalin-2, which he described as “extremely important to Japan’s energy security.”

“To provide time to secure a sustainable alternative, our nation’s policy is not to withdraw from the project,” he said in remarks to Parliament. But the government is “advancing measures intended to lessen energy dependence on Russia,” he added.

Shell, a major investor in Sakhalin-2, which is 50 percent owned by Russia’s Gazprom, said in late February that it was pulling out of the project.

While Japan has been quick to place a range of economic sanctions on Russia, it has been careful to avoid the energy sector, where it is heavily dependent on imported fuels.

Japan’s domestic energy rates have been rising steeply in recent months. That poses a potential threat both to Japan’s fragile economy, which has struggled to rebound from the pandemic, and to Mr. Kishida’s political fortunes. He will face a key parliamentary election this summer and has been cautious to avoid any policies that might threaten his chances of securing a comfortable majority.

Hisako Ueno and Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

Belgorod, which has a population of about 400,000, sits less than 20 miles from the Ukrainian border. The region has been a staging ground in recent weeks for Russian troops entering eastern Ukraine.

The oil depot was set ablaze in the strike and two people were injured, according to the region’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov.

“The fire at the oil depot happened as a result of an airstrike of two helicopters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that entered the territory of Russia at low altitude,” Mr. Gladkov said in a social media post on Friday.

Firefighters, he added, “are trying to localize the fire as quickly as possible. Nothing threatens the population.”

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Ms. Vereshchuk, the deputy prime minister for the reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, said about 30 buses were waiting outside Berdyansk in the hope they would be allowed on Friday to go through to Mariupol, which had been under heavy bombardment for weeks. She said that about 600 refugees from Berdyansk boarded buses and would be taken to Zaporizhzhia on Friday morning.

A team from the International Committee for the Red Cross was also preparing to try and enter Mariupol with two trucks of aid, including food, water, medicine and other supplies, officials for the organization in Geneva said.

The Russian defense ministry said on Thursday it would open an evacuation corridor from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia on Friday morning at the request of French and German leaders. The ministry said it wanted the United Nations refugee agency and the Red Cross to participate in the evacuation.

Ms. Vershchuk said on Thursday morning the Ukrainian side would honor a cease-fire to allow the evacuation to take place and that the government would “do everything possible to ensure the buses arrive in Mariupol.”

“Our military has fully confirmed and guarantees a full cease-fire,” she said. “So, at 9 a.m. we will start the evacuation.”

She said Russian soldiers had confiscated 14 tons of food and medicine that had been taken into another occupied town, Melitopol, on a dozen buses that had been sent in to evacuate people.

Previous attempts to halt the fighting and allow civilians to leave Mariupol have failed when fighting resumed on the main roads out of the city. Some civilians have made it through on their own, traveling through Russian checkpoints and braving land mines and artillery fire, often with white fabric tied to their cars and signs reading “children.”

Ms. Vereshchuk said on Thursday afternoon that more than 1,400 people had reached Zaporizhzhia in their own cars on Thursday, with roughly 600 of them coming from Mariupol and the rest from other towns held by the Russians.

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The lack of a unifying military leader in Ukraine has meant that Russian air, ground and sea units are not in sync. Their disjointed battlefield campaigns have been plagued by poor logistics, flagging morale and between 7,000 and 15,000 military deaths, senior U.S. officials and independent analysts say.

It has also contributed to the deaths of at least seven Russian generals as high-ranking officers are pushed to the front lines to untangle tactical problems that Western militaries would leave to more junior officers or senior enlisted personnel.

A senior American official said that NATO officials and the intelligence community had spent weeks waiting for a Russian war commander to emerge. No one has, leaving Western officials to conclude that the men making decisions are far from the fight, back in Moscow: Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu; Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian military; and even President Vladimir V. Putin.

On Wednesday, Biden administration officials, citing declassified U.S. intelligence, said that Mr. Putin had been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s problems in Ukraine. The intelligence, American officials said, also showed what appeared to be growing tension between Mr. Putin and Mr. Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.

Russian officials have disputed the American intelligence assertion, with the Kremlin on Thursday calling it a “complete misunderstanding” of the situation that could have “bad consequences.”

But it is hard to run a military campaign from 500 miles away, U.S. military officials said. The distance alone, they said, can lead to a disconnect between the troops who are doing the fighting and the war plans being drawn up in Moscow. Instead of streamlining the process, they said, Russia has created a military machine that is unable to adapt to a quick and nimble Ukrainian resistance.

A second senior American official said that Russian soldiers, who have been taught not to make a single move without explicit instructions from superiors, had been left frustrated on the battlefield, while Mr. Putin, Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov continued to plot increasingly out-of-touch strategy.

This top-down approach means that Moscow transmits instructions to generals in the field, who then transmit them to troops, who are told to follow those instructions no matter the situation on the ground.

“It shows up in the mistakes that are being made,” said retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe during the Kosovo war.

Last week, Ukrainian forces blew up the Russian warship Orsk, which had docked in southern Ukraine. Describing the incident, General Clark asked: “Who would be crazy enough to dock a ship in a port” before first securing the area?

That the Russian planners who sent the Orsk into the port were inattentive to the potential danger shows that no one is questioning decisions coming from the top, officials said. The troops at the bottom are not empowered to point out flaws in strategy that should be obvious, they said.

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Military analysts said a complex chain of events, originating with a broken-down command structure that begins in Moscow, had led to the deaths of the Russian generals.

“I do not see the kind of coherent organizational architecture that one would have expected given the months of exercises and presumably even longer period of planning in advance of the invasion,” retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, who served as the head of the military’s Central Command and as the top commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, said in an email.

In an American war command structure, a four-star field commander would coordinate and synchronize all subordinate air, land and naval forces, as well as special operations and cyberoperations. The campaign would have a main objective, a center of gravity, with operations supporting that goal.

In the case of the deaths of some of the Russian generals, for instance, the problem originated far away from the battlefield, when Moscow did not respond quickly enough after Ukraine jammed Russian communications, the analysts said.

Mr. Putin’s own dishonest portrayal of the mission of the Russian military may have hurt its ability to prosecute the effort, which the Russian president initially presented publicly as a limited military operation.

General Clark recalled teaching a class of Ukrainian generals in 2016 in Kyiv and trying to explain what an American military “after-action review” was. He told them that after a battle involving American troops, “everybody got together and broke down what happened.”

“The colonel has to confess his mistakes in front of the captain,” General Clark said. “He says, ‘Maybe I took too long to give an order.’”

After hearing him out, the Ukrainians, General Clark said, told him that could not work. “They said, ‘We’ve been taught in the Soviet system that information has to be guarded and we lie to each other,’” he recalled.

Mr. Putin’s decision to send the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov to the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol this week for a victory lap despite the fact that Mariupol has not fallen yet demonstrates the Russian president’s continued belief that the biggest battle is the information one, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security services expert.

The feared Chechen “is a general, not a real military commander,” he said, adding, “This shows that what Putin still believes is that propaganda is the most important thing here.”

Russian officials are now signaling that Mr. Putin might be lowering his war ambitions and focusing on the eastern Donbas region, though military analysts said it remained to be seen whether that would constitute a meaningful shift or a maneuver to distract attention ahead of another offensive.

The Russian army has already committed more than half of its total combat forces to the fight, including its most elite units. Moscow is now tapping reinforcements from outside Russia, including Georgia, as well as rushing mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a private military company, to eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Putin has also signed a decree calling up 134,000 conscripts.

“They seem to have no coherent concept of the amount of force it will take to defeat the Ukrainian regular and territorial forces in urban terrain, and to retain what they destroy or overrun,” said Jeffrey J. Schloesser, a retired two-star Army general who commanded U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan. “Hundreds of thousands of more Russian or allied troops will be necessary to do so.”

Someone had reported him as he strolled around the city photographing its squares, churches and other landmarks — many now buttressed with sandbags.

The police officers took him to their car and scrolled through the recent photos on his mobile phone, leafed through his sketchbook, and checked what channels he subscribed to on the social messaging app Telegram.

“They were even reading my memes to check if I am making fun of us or them,” he said in an interview, meaning Ukrainians or Russians. Luckily for him, the officers found a meme of ragtag Russian soldiers with televisions for heads — an allusion to the intense propaganda Moscow is churning out — and let him go.

Valeriy, 32, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of recriminations, is not alone in having to look over his shoulder. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine now into its second month, suspicion has settled like a fog over the country, joining anger and unity as the dominant emotions.

Ukrainians have been shaken by reports of “dyversanti” — saboteurs and diversionary groups working for Russia who mix into the civilian population, sow confusion and mistrust, and possibly even alert the enemy to potential targets. Civilians who were already living in fear are seeing spies everywhere.

“With this level of anxiety, and trying to find sources of danger, the more you imagine things when you don’t know what the beast looks like,” Valeriy said.

In the first weeks of the war, the police and administrators fielded more than 17,000 calls a day about supposedly suspicious activity, Lviv’s regional governor, Maksym Kozytsky, said in an interview. Now law enforcement bodies are fielding about 10 percent of that volume, he said. But that’s still more than 1,000 a day.

There are legitimate reasons for suspicion. During the first month of the war, Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the S.B.U., dismantled 20 saboteur groups and apprehended 350 more saboteurs, a spokesman, Artem Dekhtiarenko, said last week.

And many more could be on the way: Recruiters across Syria have been drawing up lists of thousands of interested candidates to be vetted by the Syrian security services and then passed to the Russians.

Syria has grown in recent years into an exporter of mercenaries, a grim aftereffect of years of war that gave many men combat experience but so damaged the country’s economy that people now struggle to find work. So they have deployed as guns-for-hire to wars in Libya, Azerbaijan, the Central African Republic — and now Ukraine.

“In general, money is the motivation,” said Bassam Alahmad, the head of Syrians for Truth and Justice, an advocacy group that has researched the Syrian mercenary trade. Some Syrians feel loyalty to Russia because of its support for Mr. al-Assad, he said, while others sign up to fight because they simply need the money and believe recruiters’ promises that they will have noncombat jobs, such as guarding bases or oil facilities.

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“Some people don’t mind fighting, but there are groups that are definitely taking advantage of people’s needs,” Mr. Alahmad said. “The result is the same: People are paying this price. People are participating in wars that aren’t theirs.”

On Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that about 1,000 mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a Russian military contractor, were already in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, where Russia has installed two separatist enclaves, and that they included Syrians.

Syria’s long-running war drew in foreign powers such as Iran, Turkey, Russia and the United States, all of which worked with Syrian military groups on the ground to advance their interests.

Some of those partnerships now facilitate mercenary traffic.

Russia and Turkey together dispatched about 10,000 Syrian fighters to bolster their preferred sides in the conflict in Libya, Mr. Alahmad said, and Turkey sent about 2,000 Syrians to Azerbaijan during last year’s war in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russia has sent small numbers of Syrians as far as Venezuela, where Moscow has interests in the oil industry.

Using mercenaries is not considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, but there is a separate United Nations treaty that criminalizes it. Ukraine is a signatory to that treaty, but Russia is not.

“What we are seeing is predatory recruitment,” said Sorcha MacLeod, the chair of the United Nations Working Group on the use of mercenaries. “They are taking advantage of the poor socioeconomic situation that these people find themselves in.”

The war in Ukraine could pull in large numbers of Syrians, given the scope of the battle, the high number of Russian dead and wounded and Russia’s close ties with the Syrian military. But much about the deployments and activities of Syrian mercenaries remains murky because of the covert nature of their work.

Western officials, experts tracking the issue, recruiters and returned fighters described a messy system in which men with few options scramble for limited opportunities to risk their lives for salaries they could not match at home.

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The war in Ukraine has caused interest to spike, and recruiters have launched registration drives across Syria to gather names of men who want to go, according to Mr. Alahmad and a recruiter in southern Syria who is signing men up. The recruiter spoke on condition of anonymity, like others in this article, for fear of repercussions from the Syrian government.

Recruiters often collect payment for registration, and scams are rife.

The recruiter in southern Syria said he started his work after a scammer who had promised him a job in Libya took his money and abandoned him near the city of Latakia in northwest Syria with no way to return home.

He said he had signed up multiple groups to go to Libya, and recently got word that the Russians want as many as 16,000 Syrians to fight in Ukraine. Applicants must be between 20 and 45 years old and weigh between 110 and 200 pounds, he said, adding that those with military experience get priority and that all recruits must be vetted by the Syrian security services.

He and his partner charge applicants about $7 to apply and earn $25 for each one who is accepted, he said. The lack of other work and a currency collapse that has made basic items like bread and cooking gas exorbitantly expensive in Syria have driven up interest in Ukraine, with the promise of earning $1,000-$2,000 a month.

While some other recruiters play up the benefits and minimize the dangers, he said he makes the danger clear.

“Some people are selling it to them as if they’re going to heaven,” he said. “You are not going to heaven.”

The roughly 300 soldiers already in Russia are from the 25th Division of the Syrian Army, known as the Tiger Forces, which are seen as elite and work closely with Russian officers. The Russians have offered them $1,200 a month for six months with a $3,000 bonus when they return to Syria, said the Syrian government ally.

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Their families are promised $2,800, plus $600 a month for one year, if their loved ones are killed in combat, he said, adding that in Syria, those soldiers earn about $100 a month, while soldiers from less elite units earn less than $50 per month.

A commander of a militia made up of fighters from Syria and neighboring countries that received Russian support during the Syrian war said his group had sent another contingent of 85 men to Russia. They included Lebanese, Iraqis and Syrians, he said, adding that more were on the way.

“The Russians helped us when needed it, and now it’s time to give back part of what they offered us,” the commander said.

A Syrian man who returned recently from fighting in Libya said he had gone solely for the money, but would never do it again.

Once he was in Libya, where he guarded oil and other facilities, his three-month contract was extended to six, and his salary was cut from $1,000 to $800 a month, he said. His food, water and lodging were supposed to be covered, but he said he slept in a tent with other men, ate mostly rice and bread and had to buy drinking water.

He was happy to make it home and used his earnings to clear his debts and open a cigarette shop, he said. But his activities had left a social stain that could hurt his marriage prospects, he said.

He tells anyone who will listen not to go to Ukraine.

“People who go there will die,” he said.

Raja Abdulrahim contributed reporting from Jerusalem.