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

Europe is highly dependent on Russian energy supplies, and in the past the E.U has equivocated over such a drastic move because of fears of economic turmoil that could follow. There is also worry over President Vladimir V. Putin’s longstanding tactic of wielding Russian energy as a geopolitical weapon.

As the E.U. was considering how to ratchet up the costs of war for Mr. Putin, Russia said its flagship in its Black Sea fleet had been “seriously damaged,” and its crew was forced to abandon it, a symbolic blow to Russian forces that could also have strategic consequences for the war. The event quickly became caught up in the conflict’s parallel information war, with Ukraine claiming to have struck the vessel, Moskva, with Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles and Russia saying that an onboard fire had caused the damage.

Although analysts said the possible loss of the ship would not alter the course of the war, 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 Russian naval attacks. It would also be the first successful Ukrainian attack on a major Russian warship at sea rather than at port.

Here are other major developments:

• Senator Steve Daines of Montana and Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana traveled to Kyiv and sites of rights abuses in the city’s suburbs, becoming the first American officials to turn up since the start of the war. The United States is also considering whether to send a high-level official to Kyiv in the coming days.

• Russia is continuing to target southern Ukraine, where it hopes to complete a “land bridge” to connect Crimea to its forces in the east. The main remaining obstacle to that goal is the besieged southern city of Mariupol.

• Dmitri A. Medvedev, Russia’s former prime minister, said Moscow would be forced to “seriously strengthen” its defenses in the Baltics if Finland and Sweden joined NATO, as the two countries are considering.

• Moscow said on Thursday that Ukrainian helicopters had launched strikes against a Russian town near the Ukrainian border, the latest in a series of reported attacks that has prompted Russian threats of retaliation.

• Ukrainian officials say that departing Russian soldiers have laced large swaths of the country with buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs.

“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.

It was important, he said, for American elected officials to show solidarity.

Mr. Daines and Ms. Spartz, both Republicans, were invited by the Ukrainian government, with just over a day’s notice. Mr. Daines had broken off from a visit to Eastern Europe to make the trip. Ms. Spartz, who last year became the first Ukrainian-born lawmaker to serve in Congress, had planned an unofficial visit to Ukraine and later joined Mr. Daines for the trip supported by the Ukrainian government.

Once in Kyiv, where they arrived by train from western Ukraine, the pair traveled by car escorted by the police on a route through stark scenes of destruction, blown-up Russian tanks and rubble, where rescuers were still searching for bodies. The two also observed an exhumation from a communal grave in Bucha, a town northwest of Kyiv where hundreds of bodies were found on the streets after Russian forces retreated.

The horror in Bucha — where some victims’ hands were bound and some had been shot in the head, in a sign of extrajudicial killings — has become emblematic of the war’s toll and a new touchstone of rights abuse in wartime in Europe. Several European delegations have also visited the site.

The two Republican lawmakers arrived as the Biden administration is considering sending a high-level official to Kyiv in the days ahead as a sign of support, according to a person familiar with the internal discussions.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both made high-profile visits over the past month to countries neighboring Ukraine, and other top American officials have made similar visits, some coming close to the border. But no American official had publicly visited Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion in late February, and the United States has evacuated all diplomats.

Both Mr. Daines and Ms. Spartz said they were urging the United States to return diplomats to Ukraine as some European states have done now that Kyiv, the capital, is no longer under imminent threat of attack by Russia.

“I hope that our visit will encourage more American officials and leaders to come, to stand with the people of Ukraine,” Mr. Daines said, while Ms. Spartz said it was “important to show our support, to show we care.”

Standing in the rubble of the collapsed building, where Ukrainian officials have said that at least 21 people died, Mr. Daines found a child’s toy — a wooden car — and looked into apartments that had been peeled open by the explosion, revealing kitchen cabinets still hanging on a wall.

In Bucha, the two watched the Ukrainian authorities remove three bodies from the tan clay soil of a churchyard where a communal grave was being excavated.

Mr. Daines described what he had seen as “indisputable evidence of war crimes.”

“It’s everywhere,” he said. “We’ve been driving for miles and miles and miles, seeing death and destruction caused by Vladimir Putin in this evil invasion.”

Anton Herashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, said he had arranged the visit in the hope that more American lawmakers would follow, get a first-hand sense of the stakes in the war, and vote to provide additional weapons to Ukraine.

Both Ms. Spartz and Mr. Daines said they supported bipartisan efforts in Congress to spur the Biden administration to deliver weapons to the Ukrainian Army more swiftly.

“I think we should be providing the lethal aid that they need to win this war,” Mr. Daines said. “The humanitarian crisis will not end until the war ends. And the war will not end until the Ukrainians win.”

Image

The governor of the Odesa region along the Black Sea, Maxim Marchenko, said on Telegram that the country’s forces had struck the ship with anti-ship Neptune missiles. The senior Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe an active military engagement, said that it was the first time the Ukrainian-developed Neptune missile had been used in the war.

There was no independent visual confirmation of the vessel’s status, and the statement about the Neptune could not be independently verified.

Whatever the cause of the ship’s possible demise, it was a potent symbolic victory for the Ukrainian military, an embarrassment for Moscow and — if a Neptune was used — a demonstration of the power that new weapons could have in shaping the war. It would be the first successful Ukrainian attack on a major Russian warship at sea rather than at port.

Ships from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet have been offshore since the start of the war, periodically launching rocket or missile attacks against targets inside Ukraine. The fleet has cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, removing a key economic lifeline.

The potential loss of the Moskva provides a morale boost to Ukrainian forces, but it is unlikely to change the course of the war. Russian forces are on the verge of taking the strategic port city of Mariupol, which would pave the way for the creation of a “land bridge” between Russian territory and the occupied Crimean Peninsula.

The Moskva, with a crew of almost 700, is the pride of the Russian naval fleet in the Black Sea. It was originally built in the Soviet era in the Ukrainian port of Mykolaiv — the city where Ukrainian forces last month mounted a spirited defense that stopped the Russian advance toward Odesa.

The Ukrainians have long had the ability to strike Russian ships parked near their territorial waters, but the Neptune gives the nation’s territorial defense forces far greater range. The missile, which is based on the Soviet AS-20 “Kayak” anti-ship missile and is similar to the U.S.-built Harpoon missile, can reach targets as far as 200 miles offshore.

As the Russian Navy positioned its fleet in menacing fashion on the Black Sea in the weeks before the war, Ukraine raced to prepare defenses and its military described the Neptune as a vital weapon being added to its arsenal.

It is unclear how many Neptune missiles Ukraine’s Navy has. But if it was a Neptune that hit the Moskva, it would be a demonstration of the weapon’s effectiveness. The Ukrainians have called on the West to deliver sophisticated anti-ship weapons since the war began.

The Pentagon estimates that the Russian Navy has “a couple of dozen ships” in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and Ukraine has had a hard time countering Russia’s naval dominance.

Image

In March, Ukraine’s military said it had destroyed a Russian ship at the southern Ukrainian port of Berdiansk, which is under Russian occupation, and videos and photos reviewed by The New York Times confirmed at the time that a Russian ship was on fire at the port.

Lt. Cmdr. Jason Lancaster, a U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, said the threat posed by missiles like the Neptune “changes operational behavior” of an opponent.

Writing for the Center for International Maritime Security this month, he said that “these behavioral changes limit Russia’s ability to utilize their fleet to their advantage,” and that “the added stress of sudden combat increases fatigue and can lead to mistakes.”

The flagship vessel entered service in the early 1980s, was renamed the Moskva in 1996 and was partially refitted in 2020, according to the Russian news media. It was an integral part of the Russian advance in this war.

It was also the vessel that Ukrainian troops famously told off as it approached a Ukrainian garrison on Snake Island on the Black Sea.

According to an audio exchange made public in late February, a Russian officer told the Ukrainians to surrender. “This is a Russian military warship,” the officer said. “I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed.”

A Ukrainian soldier offered a simple, if obscene, refusal, using words that have become a rallying cry around Ukraine.

Image

In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee.

Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin.

Thousands of other Russian tech workers fled to Armenia in the weeks after the invasion. Thousands more flew to Georgia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries that accept Russian citizens without visas.

By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country’s economy.

The exodus will fundamentally change the Russian tech industry, according to interviews with more than two dozen people who are part of the tightknit community of Russian tech workers around the world, including many who left the country in recent weeks. An industry once seen as a rising force in the Russian economy is losing vast swaths of its workers. It is losing many of the bright young minds building companies for the future.

“Most Russian tech workers are part of the global market. Either they work for global companies or they are tech entrepreneurs trying to build new companies for the global market,” Mr. Siniushin said through an interpreter from his office in Riga. “So they are leaving the country.”

The recent exodus reverses 10 to 15 years of momentum in the Russian tech industry, said Konstantin Sonin, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, who immigrated from Russia to the United States. “It is now like the ‘90s, when whomever was able to move moved out of the country,” he said.

Tech is a small part of the Russian economy compared with the energy and metals industries, but it has been growing rapidly. The loss of many young, educated, forward-looking people could have economic ramifications for years to come, economists said.

In its first official report on the war’s impact, the U.N. said the war in Ukraine was having “alarming cascading effects” on a global economy already “battered” by the pandemic and climate change.

The report said that up to 1.7 billion people — a third of whom are already living in poverty — now face food, energy and finance disruptions. With energy prices rising as much as 50 percent for natural gas in recent months, and with inflation growing and development stalled, many countries risk defaulting on their debts, according to the report.

“These are countries where people struggle to afford healthy diets, where imports are essential to satisfy the food and energy needs of their populations, where debt burdens and tightening resources limit government’s ability to cope with the vagaries of global financial conditions,” the report said.

It said that 107 countries had severe exposure to at least one the three dimensions of the crisis, and that of those nations, 69 had severe exposure to all three dimensions.

Ukraine and Russia provide about 30 percent of the world’s wheat and barley, according to the report.

The war has sent commodity prices to record highs — with food prices 34 percent higher than this time last year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and crude oil prices up by around 60 percent.

“Vulnerable populations in developing countries are particularly exposed to these price swings,” the report said, adding that “the rise in food prices threatens knock-on effects of social unrest.”

But the report said that swift action, coupled with political will and existing resources, could soften the blow — recommending that countries not hoard food supplies, and that they offer help to small farmers, keep freight costs stable and lift restrictions on exports, among other things.

The report called on governments to make strategic fuel reserves available to the global market and reduce the use of wheat for fuel.

Hours later, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said that ammunition had exploded on the ship, a missile cruiser called the Moskva, as a result of “a fire,” according to the state news agency Tass. The agency reported that the crew had evacuated from the ship and that the cause of the fire was under investigation.

Neither account could be independently confirmed. If Mr. Marchenko’s claims are correct, the damage to the warship would mark a notable military triumph for Ukraine — the formidable Moskva is the flagship vessel of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The ship, which is more than 600 feet long, first entered service in the early 1980s with the Soviet Navy and carries 16 Vulkan missile launchers with a strike range of more than 400 miles, Russian news agencies have reported. It was deployed off the coast of Syria in 2015 to provide air defenses and patrolled the coast of Georgia during a conflict with Russia in 2008.

Ukraine has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed Russian warships since the start of the war, but its reports have not always been independently verified.

In March, Ukraine’s military said it had destroyed a Russian ship at the port of Berdiansk, under Russian occupation in southern Ukraine, and videos and photos reviewed by The New York Times confirmed that a Russian ship was on fire at the port.

It is highly unlikely that Mr. Biden or Ms. Harris would go to Kyiv, according to the person familiar with the deliberations. The security requirements for the president or vice president in a war zone are enormous and would require a huge number of American personnel and equipment to make the trip.

But it is possible that another official — perhaps a cabinet secretary or senior member of the military — could make the trip safely with a smaller security entourage.

Top officials — including some world leaders — from other nations have made official visits to the Ukrainian capital since the war began. Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Britain, made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday. The presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia visited Kyiv on Wednesday.

A possible visit by a senior U.S. official, which was earlier reported by Politico, would be intended as another show of solidarity with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. But it would also be a high-risk mission, putting Americans in harm’s way and potentially risking a direct confrontation with Russian forces that Mr. Biden has repeatedly vowed to avoid.

No decision has been made, and the administration is unlikely to announce a visit in advance, given concerns about security. Previous visits by senior American officials to other war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, were typically not announced until after the official had arrived in the country — and sometimes not even until after the official had left.

Image

As ordinary Ukrainians emerge from basements and bunkers into the ruins of their hometowns, many are being confronted with a new horror: thousands of mines and unexploded bombs left behind by retreating Russian troops.

Residents and authorities say that departing Russian soldiers have laced large swaths of the country with buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs — some hidden as booby traps inside homes. The explosives now must be found and neutralized before residents can resume a semblance of normal life.

Some of the explosives have been attached to washing machines, doorways, car windows, and other places where they can kill or injure civilians returning to their homes, according to residents and Ukrainian officials. Some were even hidden under hospital stretchers and corpses.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine this week called his country “one of the most contaminated by mines in the world,” and said that authorities were working to clear thousands in the areas from which Russian armies had retreated in recent weeks. He accused Russian soldiers of leaving the explosives in their wake “to kill or maim as many of our people as possible.”

He said that the tactic was a war crime and that Russian soldiers must have been acting on instructions from top officials, adding: “Without the appropriate orders, they would not have done it.”

Human Rights Watch and The New York Times have reported that Russian forces in Ukraine appear to be using advanced land mines in the eastern city of Kharkiv. Several local officials have also said that bomb squads in their districts have found explosive devices left behind in homes.

Anti-personnel mines, which are designed to kill people, are banned by an international treaty signed by nearly every country in the world, including Ukraine; Russia and the United States have declined to join.

Ukraine’s emergency services agency has deployed a small army of about 550 mine specialists to clear the areas recently occupied by Russian forces. The teams have been working to remove about 6,000 explosives per day, and since the start of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, they have found more than 54,000 explosive devices, the agency reported on Tuesday.

“Wherever the occupiers stayed overnight, they would set up tripwires,” Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, said during a televised interview on Sunday. “Explosives have been found under helmets, attached to doors, in the washing machine, and in cars.”

The placement of explosives in Ukrainian homes could not be independently verified.

Mr. Naumenko, who was killed on April 4, worked as a driver in the village of Hoholiv, about 40 miles outside of Kyiv. But his talent lay in repairing cars. After Russian forces retreated from a nearby village, neighbors found an abandoned vehicle and turned it over to him.

His wife learned of his death the next day in Poland, where she had fled with their 7-year-old son and her mother at the start of the war. She returned to their village as soon as she got the news. “What was left was the car, with the door still open and a pool of blood,” Ms. Naumenko, 28, said, “and a big emptiness.”

Her account was confirmed through photos and by the Kyiv regional police, who posted a report about the incident on their Facebook page, cautioning returning residents to “not touch objects and things that are not previously tested by experts.”

Other local officials are urging residents to call emergency services before entering their homes.

Retreating armies often bury land mines in order to slow the advance of enemy armies. But experts say Russian forces have a well-earned reputation for booby-trapping areas they have vacated in order to kill and maim returning civilians.

Human Rights Watch has documented Russia’s use of antipersonnel mines in more than 30 countries where Moscow’s forces were involved, including conflicts in Syria and Libya. In Palmyra, during the Syrian war, booby traps surfaced after the Russians vacated the town.

“Leaving behind little presents for the civilians when they return — like hand grenades, trip wires, unexploded shells, pressure plates — it’s in the Russian military tradition to do that,” said Mark Hiznay, the senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again,” he said.

Mr. Hiznay said “putting a land mine in someone’s freezer” was a tactic that has no utility other than to terrorize civilians. Ukraine will be dealing with the consequences of land mines “one civilian leg at a time,” he added, explaining that it can often take years, and possibly decades, to clear all the ordnance.

“The presence of these devices denies civilians their terrain and forces them to make hard choices: take the sheep out to graze or risk stepping on a mine in the pasture,” he said.