Putin admits sanctions have hurt Russia’s oil and gas sector.

It would also give a lift to Ukrainian hopes, while demonstrating the defenders’ homegrown technological capacity and exposing an embarrassing weakness in the Russian navy’s antimissile defenses.

Moscow also faces the possible loss of European markets in fossil fuels, which are providing billions of dollars a month to support its war effort. The European Union has long resisted calls to reduce its energy dependency on Russia, but officials revealed on Thursday that an oil embargo is in the works and is likely to be adopted in the coming weeks.

That comes on top of a previously announced ban on imports of Russian coal. Taken together, the steps are bound to raise fuel and electricity prices in Europe, potentially disrupting the economy and provoking a political backlash.

Ukraine continues to brace for a Russian offensive in the eastern Donbas region — where Moscow has said it will focus its war efforts after its failure to capture the capital, Kyiv — while Russian forces squeeze the shrinking pocket of resistance in the ruined southern port of Mariupol. The devastation rained there has offered a dire warning of what may befall other cities in the event of a prolonged Russian siege, prompting a mass exodus of civilians from the Donbas.

Image

Its international isolation deepening, the Kremlin reacted ominously to the growing indications that Finland and Sweden would join the NATO alliance in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On Thursday, the government warned that any such expansion of NATO would prompt an increased Russian military presence, including nuclear weapons, in the region.

The C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, warned on Thursday of the possibility that Mr. Putin, facing a debacle in Ukraine, might use a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon, though he stressed that he had seen no “practical evidence” that such a step was pending. It was the first time he discussed publicly a concern that has been much debated in the White House.

“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Mr. Burns said, in answering questions after a speech in Atlanta.

Prominent voices in Russian state media have made increasingly incendiary statements recently, calling for more brutality in battles that have already sparked calls for war-crimes investigations of the Russian forces.

Much remained unclear about Russia’s setback in the western Black Sea, where a blast on Thursday morning — Wednesday night in the United States — and subsequent fire forced many of the Moskva’s roughly 500 crew members to abandon ship. There was no word on casualties. Ukraine said it had struck the vessel with two Neptune missiles and sunk it.

Russia’s Defense Ministry initially said its sailors had managed to put out the fire and the Moskva, commissioned in 1983, remained afloat. But hours later, it said, the ship sank while being towed to port in a storm.

Western defense officials said they could not be sure what caused the explosion aboard the 12,000-ton ship. Three American officials briefed on the incident said all indications were that it had been hit by missiles. The officials cautioned that early battlefield reports can sometimes change, but expressed deep skepticism over the Russian account of an accidental fire.

Ukraine has been stressing the need for coastal defense weapons, and the U.S. announced this week that it would send more of them. Pentagon officials said that other Russian ships had moved farther from the Ukrainian shoreline, lending credence to the claim of missile strikes.

“It’s going to have an impact on their naval capabilities, certainly in the near term,” but the long-term picture is unclear, said the Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, a former Navy rear admiral.

Until now, Russian ships have been able to fire missiles at will against coastal cities. They have blockaded Ukraine’s south coast and threatened an amphibious landing in the southwestern region. The presence of an effective Ukrainian anti-ship weapon — Ukraine says the Neptune has a range of about 190 miles — could change those calculations, though Ukraine’s commercial shipping is unlikely to resume anytime soon.

Current and former American naval commanders said a successful missile attack would represent a shocking lack of Russian combat readiness.

“This is not supposed to happen to a modern warship,” said Adm. James G. Foggo III, a former commander of the United States Sixth Fleet, whose area of operations includes Europe. “If this was a Neptune missile strike, it’s indicative of complacency and lack of an effective integrated air and missile defense capability.”

Ukraine has endured most of the suffering in the war that began on Feb. 24, with untold thousands of casualties, widespread destruction and millions of people displaced, but the blowback on Russia has also been severe. Moscow’s vaunted military has often seemed hapless, absorbing unexpectedly heavy losses of men and equipment, while unprecedented sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies have shaken the Russian economy.

President Vladimir V. Putin acknowledged some of that cost on Thursday in a videoconference with top government officials and oil and gas executives, referring to “the disruption of export logistics” in that industry and “setbacks in payments for Russian energy exports.”

Image

Fossil fuels are Russia’s biggest export product, a huge part of the Russian economy that employs millions of people and supplies the government with much of the revenue needed to support its war-making machinery.

Now E.U. officials and European diplomats say the bloc is moving toward barring oil imports from Russia, a ban that would be phased in over months to allow countries to arrange alternative supplies. They said European leaders will not make a final decision until after April 24, when France will hold its presidential runoff; a rise in fuel prices could hurt the prospects of President Emmanuel Macron and boost his right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen, who has praised Mr. Putin.

The government of Germany, the most influential country in the European Union, has been particularly reluctant to cut off Russian fuel, which would come at a steep cost and could lead to shortages. But pressure from allies and mounting evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine have, step by step, overcome that resistance. Germany refused to allow the virtually completed, $10 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to go into service, supported the coal ban and now appears to be on board with an oil embargo.

Image

The shifting stance of the neutral Scandinavian states is another unintended consequence for Mr. Putin. In waging a war that he said was intended to keep Ukraine out of NATO — a distant prospect at best — he may have succeeded in driving two countries that had been steadfastly nonaligned for generations into the arms of the alliance.

Dmitri A. Medvedev, a senior Russian security official, said on Thursday that if Sweden and Finland joined NATO, there would be “no more talk of a nuclear-free Baltics” region. Moscow would be compelled to “seriously strengthen” its air and ground forces in the area, said Mr. Medvedev, a former president and prime minister, and could deploy nuclear-armed warships “at arm’s length” from Finnish and Swedish shores.

Vladimir Solovyov, a television host who is considered a leading voice of Kremlin propaganda, said on Wednesday that Russia should destroy all Ukrainian infrastructure, including basic utilities.

Russia “must bring these terrorists to their senses in the cruelest way,” he said on his show on the state-owned Russia-1 channel. “We need to talk differently with terrorists,” he added. “There shouldn’t be any illusions that they can win.”

Russia has forced independent news outlets to shut down or leave the country, and has criminalized disputing the Kremlin’s account of the war. Yet Margarita Simonyan, the head of the state-owned RT news organization, said earlier this week that the government should restrict information even more.

No major power can exist “without having information under its control,” she said, adding, “we are all waiting for this.”

Matina Stevis-Gridneff reported from Brussels, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Reporting was contributed by Ivan Nechepurenko and Anton Troianovski from Istanbul, Michael Schwirtz from London, and Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes from Washington.

Mr. Medvedchuk was under house arrest and awaiting trial for treason when Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. He went into hiding early in the war and was detained earlier this week. His net worth was reported as $620 million in 2021.

According to the State Bureau of Investigation, items seized from Mr. Medvedchuk included “26 cars, 30 plots of land, 23 houses, 32 apartments 17 parking spaces and a motor yacht,” in addition to capital shares belonging to Mr. Medvedchuk and his wife, Oksana Marchenko. Another of his yachts and additional real estate assets were seized earlier in the month.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has offered to trade Mr. Medvedchuk for Ukrainian prisoners of war. The Kremlin declined the offer, and distanced itself from the situation.

“He had no backstage relationship with Russia,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, said of Mr. Medvedchuk on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

It is unclear if Mr. Medvedchuk will stand trial for the charges he faced before the conflict began.

The train that delayed Mr. Csoma’s drive home was not only unusually long but also signaled a singular escalation in Western efforts to help Ukraine defend itself. It carried an air defense system made up of 48 surface-to-air missiles, four launchers and radars to guide the rockets to their targets, which in Ukraine means Russian warplanes and missiles.

Image

As President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia vows to fight the war to its “full completion” and his forces regroup for an expected push in Ukraine’s east, NATO countries, including the United States, are scrambling to keep the weapons flowing and bulk up the country’s defenses.

Bolstering Ukraine’s long-range air defense capabilities is seen as especially critical. Ukraine already had its own S-300 and other air defense systems, but some of these have been destroyed, leaving Russia with a large degree of freedom to hit Ukrainian targets from the air with warplanes and cruise missiles.

Increasingly desperate to reverse this imbalance, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has repeatedly pleaded with NATO to “close the sky over Ukraine” by imposing a no-fly zone. But NATO has been unwilling to send its own warplanes into Ukraine.

Instead, the United States offered Slovakia, a fellow NATO member, a substitute battery of American-made Patriot missiles if it would “donate” its aging S-300 system to Ukraine.

Given the enormous security requirements for the president or vice president in a war zone, it is unlikely that either Mr. Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris would travel to the barricaded Ukrainian capital, U.S. officials say. But another top official, such as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, might more easily make the symbolic trip.

Spokesmen for both Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin on Thursday said they had no travel plans to announce. At a daily press briefing, however, the State Department spokesman, Ned Price, noted that Mr. Blinken speaks several times a week to his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba. Mr. Price also noted that the men have met in person twice since Russia invaded Ukraine: last week at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels and at the Ukraine-Poland border last month.

The Russian retreat from the Kyiv area and recent visits to the capital by European leaders, including a surprise weekend trip by the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, have prompted discussions about sending a senior American there to demonstrate U.S. support.

Such a trip would involve challenging logistics. British media reported that Mr. Johnson traveled by a combination of car, train, helicopter and military plane.

Mr. Price also said that U.S. diplomats who were evacuated from Ukraine in February remain across the border in Poland. He said the United States was “constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the safety and the security situation” in Ukraine and hoped to restore a diplomatic presence there “as soon as it would be safe and practical to have U.S. diplomats on the ground there.”

There is a saying in the high Arctic that if your snowmobile breaks down, no one asks for your nationality before helping to repair it. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has echoed at the top of the world, threatening longstanding personal and professional relationships, cultural interactions and even friendly sports rivalries.

The Svalbard tourist board has called for a boycott of Russian state-owned businesses in the coal mining settlement of Barentsburg. Mr. Gushchin, until now considered an inclusive, moderating figure, has surprised and angered many with comments concerning the Russian invasion and an accusation that Norwegian news media provide mostly “fake news.”

Timofey Rogozhin, the former top Russian tourist official in Barentsburg, who left his job last year, now spends considerable time on Telegram, countering Russian propaganda about the invasion. Calling himself a dissident, he describes atrocities committed in Ukrainian towns as “not mistakes but crimes.”

“Svalbard is a place where people from all different countries have managed to get along peacefully,” said Elizabeth Bourne, an American who is director of the Spitsbergen Artists Center in Longyearbyen, the primarily Norwegian transportation, commerce, research and university hub of Svalbard. “This situation is in danger of putting an end to that. I think that would be a tragedy.”

Longyearbyen is about 30 miles northeast of Barentsburg and is inhabited by roughly 2,500 residents from 50 nations. Cultural exchanges involving singing and dancing, and sports exchanges involving games like chess and basketball have been ongoing between Barentsburg and Longyearbyen since the Soviet era.

Their longevity is made more remarkable by the lack of a road between the towns. Travel must be done by snowmobile, boat or helicopter.

“Maybe people of Longyearbyen wouldn’t like to see me, but they still like to see people of Barentsburg,” Mr. Gushchin said.

A 1920 treaty gave Norway sovereignty over Svalbard. But other nations that signed the treaty, including the Soviet Union/Russia, have been granted equal rights to conduct such commercial activities as mining, scientific research and tourism.

The Russian consulate in Barentsburg overlooks the Green Fjord and a kind of outdoor museum of the Soviet past: a bust of Lenin, a Cyrillic sign proclaiming “Communism is our goal,” refurbished Stalinist apartment blocks and smokestacks that belch sulfurous coal at the local power plant.

Image

Once, more than 1,000 people lived here. Now there are only about 370, two-thirds of them Ukrainian, Mr. Gushchin said. Most miners are from the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, which has close ties to Russia. It is the area where fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists began in 2014. Others from the region work in tourism and other service jobs.

A number of Russians and Ukrainians approached by a New York Times reporter on Wednesday refused to discuss politics. But Natalia Maksimishina, a Russian tour guide, criticized Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, referring to possible war crimes committed by Russian forces and saying, “I hope to see him next in The Hague.”

Barentsburg is essentially operated by Trust Arktikugol, a Russian state-run mining enterprise. The boycott called for by the Svalbard tourist board recommends that money not be spent in the town’s hotel, Red Bear pub and brewery, restaurants or souvenir shop.

Barentsburg seemed mostly empty on Wednesday, except for clots of tourists arriving on a small ship. Before the pandemic, tourism brought in more money than coal, Mr. Gushchin said. Now, he added, Trust Arktikugol loses “big money” weekly. Many tourists who do visit bring their own food and leave quickly, he said.

Critics of the boycott say it hurts the Russian government less than local people in Barentsburg, most of them Ukrainian. Credit cards issued by Russian banks don’t work in the Norwegian financial system amid international sanctions. Flights are difficult to schedule.

In a light moment during an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Gushchin lamented that his band’s solo guitarist had moved away. “When you have only a bass player and a drummer, it resembles more like punk, not rock,” he said.

In a more serious moment, Mr. Gushchin put logs on a fire in the consulate’s reception area, but did not attempt to thaw the sudden chill between him and many on Svalbard.

He stood by debunked remarks he made in English in early April to Nettavisen, a Norwegian online newspaper. He told the outlet that buildings in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol had been destroyed not by Russian projectiles but by a Ukrainian battalion with Nazi sympathies. And that a pregnant woman photographed outside of a besieged hospital was not a patient.

Asked by Nettavisen whether he felt obliged to make such remarks in his official capacity, Mr. Gushchin said they also reflected his opinion. Otherwise, he said, he would have to resign his post immediately. On Wednesday, Mr. Gushchin said, “I saw that it really touched feelings of many Norwegians, but I told them what I think.”

His remarks to Nettavisen were jarring to many, who found them sharply contrasting with Mr. Gushchin’s position as a subdeacon in the Russian Orthodox Church. Last August, he helped perform the liturgy at Svalbard Church in Longyearbyen, a parish of the Church of Norway. Siv Limstrand, the Lutheran pastor at Svalbard Church, said she had previously considered Mr. Gushchin to be “very friendly, easygoing, nonformal, extending communication and cooperation.”

“People get disappointed, but he is a state official,” Ms. Limstrand said. “We can’t really expect something different from him. But a little more diplomacy, I think, could have been within reach.”

Image

Having arrived in Barentsburg in November 2018, Mr. Gushchin awaits his successor, saying he and his wife are eager to return to Moscow to see their 22-year-old daughter and his 82-year-old mother. Perhaps, many who know him on Svalbard say privately, that is why he dares not contradict Mr. Putin.

Clearly, Mr. Gushchin is sensitive to optics. On Wednesday, he declined to be photographed standing beside a taxidermied polar bear in the consulate, saying it would convey a misleading symbol of Russian aggression.

He also said he would not attend a planned cultural exchange in Longyearbyen on May 21 so as “not to provoke anybody.”

“There are a lot of Russian and Ukrainian compatriots and also Norwegians who won’t be very happy if I take part,” Mr. Gushchin said.

When he took the posting on Svalbard, Mr. Gushchin said, he considered it a “dream” job, one that has been “a big adventure.” But he also said he is ready to return to Russia.

With a sigh, then a laugh, he said he hoped the invasion of Ukraine did not become “something more ugly and global.” If World War III breaks out “and we’re stuck here,” he said with gallows humor, “it will be difficult to go home.”

Image

“In stormy sea conditions, the ship sank,” the Defense Ministry said in a short statement, according to Russian news agencies.

The loss of one of the Russian Navy’s largest and most powerful ships, named after the Russian capital, was a major setback for the Kremlin and a victory for Ukraine as the 50-day-old war appeared to be entering a new phase. Russia has massed troops in the country’s east and appears to be poised for a new offensive there after withdrawing from the north and the region around the capital, Kyiv.

Ukrainian officials had said their forces hit the ship with missiles, but Moscow acknowledged only the fire and the detonation of ammunition. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said earlier on Thursday that President Vladimir V. Putin had been briefed on the situation.

The ship could carry 16 long-range cruise missiles and typically had a crew of about 500 sailors. It was also outfitted with modern air defense systems, making its loss — if Ukraine did indeed strike the ship — an embarrassment for Russia’s military, which has invested billions of dollars into modernizing its weaponry.

If the loss of the ship stemmed from an accidental fire, as the Defense Ministry suggested, the episode would become one of the most striking examples of the miscues and poor discipline that appear to have plagued Russia’s invasion from the start.

The Russian Defense Ministry did not acknowledge any casualties, asserting in its statement that the ship’s crew had been evacuated to “ships of the Black Sea fleet that were in the area.” There was no independent confirmation of that claim.

On Tuesday, the head of Odesa’s military forces, Maxim Marchenko, said on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had struck the ship with anti-ship Neptune missiles.

Although military analysts said the loss of the ship was not likely to alter the course of the war, it was likely to offer a morale boost for Ukrainian forces. In addition, an attack by the Neptune missile systems, if confirmed, would be a significant sign of Ukraine’s military capability and could serve as a deterrent to other Russian naval attacks.

Though Moscow has not confirmed the ship was hit by missiles, a half dozen other Russian ships in the Black Sea moved farther away from the Ukrainian coast on Thursday, a senior U.S. defense official said on Thursday, lending credence to the claim.

For its part, Ukraine seized the opportunity to mock the invader.

“Russian warship, what are you sinking?” the government wrote on Twitter.

In announcing the move, which would freeze assets estimated to be worth up to £10 billion, or roughly $13 million, the U.K. government said it amounted to “the largest asset freeze action in U.K. history.”

“We are tightening the ratchet on Putin’s war machine and targeting the circle of people closest to the Kremlin,” said Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary. “We will keep going with sanctions until Putin fails in Ukraine. Nothing and no one is off the table.”

The new measures also include a travel ban on Mr. Davidovich.

Mr. Tenenbaum is listed as a director on Chelsea Football Club’s website. The British announcement states that Mr. Tenenbaum took control of Ervington Investments Ltd., an investment company tied to Mr. Abramovich, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Mr. Davidovich then took over the company from Mr. Tenenbaum in March, according to the announcement.

The club declined to comment on the new sanctions.

European countries have been stepping up sanctions against Russia in recent days, and are also considering a larger ban on Russian oil imports, a step they have been reluctant to take because of the potential for a wider impact on the global economy.

Earlier in the week, authorities in Jersey, a British territory, froze $7 billion in assets believed to be tied to Mr. Abramovich.

The French government published a list this week of dozens of properties, many of them on the French Riviera, that it said it would be freezing as part of its sanctions on Russia. While the owners of the assets can still access the properties, they are forbidden to sell or rent them.

In Germany, authorities recently announced the seizure of the superyacht Dilbar after determining that it was tied to Alisher Usmanov, a Russian oligarch, according to The Associated Press. The United States previously targeted Mr. Usmanov in a batch of sanctions announced last month that designated the superyacht as blocked property, estimating its value to be between $600 and $735 million and noting that it was one of the world’s biggest superyachts, outfitted with two helipads and an indoor pool.

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.

“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Mr. Burns said. “We don’t.”

Mr. Burns’s comments came in response to a question from retired Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, after a speech Mr. Burns delivered at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Both President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have acknowledged that the White House has been debating sending a high-level official to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in a show of support for the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain recently took a secret trip into the capital by train.

Mr. Sullivan said that the White House had briefly considered having Mr. Biden go to Ukraine, but as soon as it became clear “what kind of footprint that would require, what kind of assets that would take from the Ukrainians as well as the U.S.” to keep the president safe, the idea was rejected.

When pressed about reports that Mr. Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin might go to Kyiv, Mr. Sullivan declined to discuss it. Mr. Biden told reporters no decision had been made to send an envoy.

Mr. Sullivan also said that in coming days the United States would announce a crackdown on countries and companies violating Western sanctions imposed on Moscow since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

Moody’s said that Russia still has until May 4, when the grace period ends, to make the payments in dollars and avoid a default on two bonds that are maturing in 2022 and 2042. The payment terms of the original bond contracts required dollars and did not include a provision to allow for another currency.

“Moody’s view is that investors did not obtain the foreign-currency contractual promise on the payment due date,” the ratings agency said.

Earlier this week, S&P Global placed Russia under a “selective default” rating after the Russian government said last week that it had repaid about $650 million of dollar-denominated debt in rubles.

Russia has said that any default would be “artificial” because its foreign-currency reserves have been immobilized by the sanctions and argued that payments in rubles should be a suitable alternative.

“As we have said many times, the most urgent problem here is the disruption of export logistics,” he said.

The European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc, has long resisted a ban on Russian oil because of its huge costs for European economies, in particular Germany’s, and its potential to jolt European politics and increase energy prices.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred a growing consensus among the bloc’s officials and ambassadors that Europe should no longer be financing the Kremlin through energy purchases and that it should reduce dependence on Russian energy by expanding alternative sources of supply.

A defiant Mr. Putin told Russian officials that the attempt by western countries to replace Russian energy sources would reverberate in the global economy and could be “extremely painful” for those seeking to sideline Russian suppliers.

Moreover, he said, there is a dearth of available natural gas on the global market. He predicted that Europe’s turn to energy deliveries from other countries, in particular the United States, would undermine European living standards and competitiveness and result in higher energy costs for consumers.

“There is no reasonable alternative to Russian gas in Europe,” he said.

While it is possible for countries in Western Europe to find alternative energy supplies, Mr. Putin said, it would take time.

Rising gasoline prices, driven in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have led President Biden to embrace oil, though he came into office on a promise to tackle the planet’s climate crisis.

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden traveled to Iowa to announce that the Environmental Protection Agency would temporarily lift regulations prohibiting the summertime use of an ethanol-gasoline blend that contributes to smog during the warmer months. Mr. Biden said his administration was going to waive the regulation to lower the price of gasoline for many Americans.

Alluding to such moves, Mr. Putin observed that Western countries appeared to be increasingly ready to abandon their green agendas and to continue their reliance on fossil fuels with a high carbon footprint. He suggested that Russia was being used as a pretext for the United States and its allies to roll back policies aimed at encouraging green energy that had proven to have a high economic cost.

“Now they have a wonderful excuse to cover up their own miscalculations and blame everything on Russia,” he said.

Image

Image

But he said that the fire aboard the Russian ship was continuing and remained “extensive.” And while Moscow has denied the ship was struck by a missile, the U.S. official said that several of Russia’s other ships that were in the Black Sea had now moved farther away from the Ukrainian coast.

Analysts said that such a move would likely display nerves from Russian captains lest their own ships come under fire.

When the first photos and videos of the slaughter in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb, began emerging on April 3, Russian propagandists quickly responded by saying that the bodies in the streets were those of actors.

“They call this evidence,” said a news host on Channel One. “This is yet another fake. The footage is staged.”

On Telegram, an app with broadcasting capabilities, channels devoted to supposed “fakes” pump out the same message, falsely claiming, for example, that a closer look at a video of bodies strewn across Yablonska Street in Bucha shows one of the corpses raising an arm and another one standing up.

One of the most popular news programs in the country, “60 Minutes” on the channel Russia-1, uses the English word fake liberally, stamping it on screenshots of articles published by the Western news media and on videos and photos from Ukraine.

“There is no evidence of victims, but the West doesn’t need the truth,” the show’s host, Olga Skabeyeva, declared in one episode. As she spoke, huge screens in the studio behind her projected a video showing corpses in Bucha, with “fake” written in red in one corner.

On Channel One, an entire program devoted to exposing “fakes” is hosted by Alexander Smol, who also hosts the Russian equivalent of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

In each episode of “AntiFake,” Mr. Smol convenes three experts in history, military tactics, social media or data — usually men — to pick over the details of social media posts or articles about the war in Ukraine published in Western publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC and The Associated Press.

Mr. Smol and his guests have argued that the scenes in Bucha must have been staged. There is not enough blood, they say. The bodies are positioned in different ways in photos, they claim.

They have not limited their campaign to Bucha.

In a recent episode, Mr. Smol broadcast a video of doctors trying unsuccessfully to revive a 6-year-old girl who was rushed to a hospital in Mariupol after a catastrophic shelling. The video was first released in late February by The A.P. and circulated on Ukrainian television and Western news media sites.

As the video of the dying girl was played over and over — the word “fake” stamped across it — the men on Mr. Smol’s show said it had been shot from too many angles and in too smooth a manner to be real. And they said a camera operator would not be allowed into an emergency room.

Mr. Smol and others on his program have also echoed the state narrative that Ukrainian forces were behind the attacks on the hospital complex in Mariupol — a strike that killed a pregnant woman and wounded staff and maternity ward patients — and the train station in Kramatorsk, which left at least 50 people dead.

And if it were a Ukrainian cruise missile that hit the ship, as seems credible, that displays almost more incompetence and carelessness, given that the Moskva was equipped with a sophisticated, three-layer defense against a missile strike.

However it happened, so much damage to such an important ship is a deep embarrassment to the Russian Navy and will do much to boost Ukrainian morale as a bigger fight looms in the Donbas. It will also make it harder for Russia to resupply its forces from the sea or to provide artillery cover for them, the official said.

Located on the Sea of Azov between the Russian-held Donbas region in the east and Crimea in the south, Mariupol is strategically important for the next phase of the war. If the city falls under Russian control, it would help Russia in its military aim of linking those regions as it continues to mass forces for a large-scale assault.

Russian and Ukrainian officials on Wednesday confirmed that Russia’s forces had taken the Ilyich metal plant, in the northern part of Mariupol, after making significant advances in the center of the city in recent days.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said that more than 1,000 Ukrainian marines in the 36th brigade had “voluntarily put the weapons and surrendered” at the plant, in a video statement on Wednesday. Earlier in the week, marines from the 36th brigade had warned that they were likely approaching their “last battle” as they were running low on ammunition.

Ukrainian officials conceded Wednesday that some forces had laid down their weapons after Russian troops encircled one of Ukraine’s remaining strongholds in the city but they denied reports of a mass surrender.

“One thousand people is a lie,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said in a televised interview on Wednesday.

He said that some troops had come under “artillery and airstrikes” resulting in many “lost and taken prisoner.” But he said others had managed to escape and had joined forces with Ukrainian troops holding the Azovstal steel plant farther south, nearer to the coast.

The battle for Mariupol started in early March, and Russian bombardments have left bodies strewn about city streets and have unleashed a horrific humanitarian crisis for those who remain.

The city’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, has estimated that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, though officials say it has been impossible do an accurate count of civilian casualties or to survey the full extent of the destruction. On Wednesday, the mayor said that 120,000 people were left in the city, surviving with power outages and limited access to food and water.

Mariupol’s City Council said in a statement on Wednesday that Russian forces continue to “purposefully create a humanitarian catastrophe” by intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure and prohibiting humanitarian aid to reach the city.

“Even residents using their private transport are barred from leaving for the second day in a row,” the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said Tuesday on Telegram.

But E.U. officials and diplomats say the union is now moving toward adopting a phased-in ban designed to give Germany and other countries time to arrange alternative suppliers. The union took a similar approach earlier this month when it banned Russian coal, providing for a four-month transition period.

The oil embargo would not be put up for negotiation among the E.U. member states until after the final round of the French elections, on April 24, to ensure that the impact on gas prices does not help the right-wing populist candidate Marine Le Pen and hurt president Emmanuel Macron’s chances of re-election, officials said.

The timeline is as important as the details of the ban, and is indicative of the brinkmanship required to convince all 27 E.U. countries to agree to take the previously unthinkable step, as Russia prepares its renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine.

But officials and diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with the news media, said there was a growing sense that the measure would be taken even in the absence of more revelations like the atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine.

“The Commission and E.U. members have smartly shied away from defining red lines that would trigger a sanctions response since Russia attacked Ukraine,” said Emre Peker, a director at the Eurasia Group consultancy.

“I expect the E.U. will shy away from defining triggers,” he added, “as continued escalation by Russia in eastern Ukraine and revelations from Bucha and elsewhere continue to drive momentum behind a hardening European stance. Any other major catastrophes that unfold will just add more impetus to the E.U. response.”

The European Union, which has taken five rounds of increasingly severe financial sanctions against Russia since the invasion began Feb. 24, is under tremendous pressure by allies to stop lining the Kremlin’s coffers through oil purchases. So far they have kept gas imports from Russia off the table, because they remain too critical to important European economies, Germany’s in particular.

The latest reported incident occurred in Klimovo, a sleepy Russian town about six miles northwest of the Ukrainian border, the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement. Two low-flying Ukrainian helicopters fired on least six residential buildings, injuring seven people, the statement said.

Over the past week, Russia has repeatedly accused Ukraine of conducting attacks and preparing acts of sabotage on Russian soil. On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that if the attacks continue, it would retaliate by striking Ukrainian command points, including in Kyiv.

In recent weeks, Russian officials have also accused Ukraine of attacking a border village in the Belgorod region, an airstrike against a major fuel depot in the region and the bombardment of a railway bridge leading to Ukraine.