Aid helps Ukraine achieve ‘outweighed gains.’

As the war drags on, Ukraine has managed to hold off Russian gains for the past month thanks in large part to continued support from the U.S. and European allies, and help on the ground from partisans.

Ukraine has been able to stem Russian advances recently and force Russia to sustain heavy losses, with up to 500 Russian troops killed or injured every day, according to some estimates.

John Spencer, a retired Army officer and chair of urban warfare studies for the Madison Policy Forum research institute, said that while Ukraine has lost tactical ground in some regions, its troops have succeeded in weakening Russia’s military.

“They have also made Russians expend resources that they can’t replenish,” Mr. Spencer said. “You don’t want to say they’re winning the war because there’s so much fighting to be done, but from really every measure you think about, especially geopolitically and militarily, they’re achieving outweighed gains.”

Ukraine was bolstered again on Thursday when the defense ministers of 26 countries, including Britain and Denmark, pledged about $1.55 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Ben Wallace, Britain’s defense minister, said the aid would include additional multiple-launch rocket systems and long-range missiles.

“We are not getting tired,” Mr. Wallace said of his country’s continued support for Ukraine.

Morten Bodskov, Denmark’s defense minister, said his country would not just help with weapons, but that it would also assist in training service members. Mr. Bodskov said that Denmark’s position on supporting Ukraine is “unwavering.”

Before the aid was announced, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the 26 countries and said that the weapons sent to Ukraine should be of “such air power and such a range that Russia would be forced to finally think about a peaceful solution.”

The aid, which Mr. Zelensky has called for repeatedly since the war began, added to another package from the United States that was announced earlier this week. The Pentagon said on Monday that it would send more ammunition in a new shipment of up to $1 billion worth of weapons and supplies. With that, the United States will have sent more than $9 billion in aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded the country on Feb. 24.

Mr. Spencer said that maintaining such continued support from Western countries has taken “as much fighting as actually fighting Russian forces, as far as showing the world that they’re fighting a just war.”

“They’ve achieved history by rallying one of the greatest gatherings of democracies,” Mr. Spencer said.

Support for the country has not only come in the form of aid packages, but also through help on the ground in the form of partisans, resistance fighters who aid the Ukrainian military on Russian-occupied territory.

At least five fighter bombers and three multi-role jets were “almost certainly destroyed or seriously damaged” this week in blasts at an air base in Crimea, according to a British military intelligence report on Friday. The explosions were all the more galling for Russia, because Crimea — which Moscow annexed in 2014 — has largely escaped fighting since February and the base was far from any recognizable front line.

One senior Ukrainian official said the attacks were carried out with the help of partisans, but the government has not taken responsibility for the attack. Mr. Zelensky, in an address after the blasts, criticized officials for releasing any details about the attacks, adding that now was “definitely not the time for vanity and loud statements.”

“The less concrete details you give about our defense plans, the better it will be for the implementation of those defense plans,” he said.

A Russian attack on the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine early Friday left two civilians dead, 13 others injured, and damaged dozens of homes, according to Ukrainian officials.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional military leader in eastern Donetsk Province, confirmed the attack in social media posts and shared a video of the damage caused by 11 Russian rocket strikes. The video showed several homes that had sustained roof damage, and windows in some houses appeared to have been blown out. Law enforcement officials and rescuers were working in the area, Mr. Kyrylenko said.

“The Russians cynically and coldbloodedly turned the private sector of the city into ruins,” Mr. Kyrylenko said on social media posts.

The war in Ukraine is mainly being fought on two fronts. The eastern front has been focused on the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. Kramatorsk is in Donetsk Province and remains under Ukrainian control. Mr. Kyrylenko’s counterpart in Luhansk said that Ukrainian forces had repelled a Russian advance near settlements still under his forces’ control on Friday.

The attacks in Kramatorsk on Friday will add to a civilian death toll in Ukraine that has grown to more than 5,400 people since Russia invaded the country in February, according to the latest updates from the Office of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Since the war began, more than 7,400 civilians have been injured in Ukraine, including hundreds of children, according to the U.N.

HANOVER, Germany — Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, has filed a lawsuit against the country’s Parliament over its decision to cut funding for his post-chancellery perks because of his ties to Russia amid Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, his lawyer said Friday, according to DPA, the German wire service.

Since the invasion began, Mr. Schröder has declined to sever all of his ties to Russian oil and has held on to his friendship with Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. The former chancellor, who was in office from 1998 to 2005, has traveled to Moscow at least twice in recent months and suggested last week that he would be ideally placed to help in peace negotiations because of his relationship with Mr. Putin.

In an interview with the newsmagazine Stern and the television channel RTL/ntv, Mr. Schröder asked whether distancing himself from Mr. Putin would do any good. “Maybe I can be useful again,” he said of any prospective talks to end the war.

Mr. Schröder has given up his post on the board of Rosneft, the Russian energy company, and said he would not accept a position on the control board of Gazprom, the state-owned energy giant. But he remains chairman of the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, a pipeline that is majority owned by Gazprom and sharply reduced the flow of Russian gas to Germany in recent weeks.

Mr. Schröder also served as the leader of the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2, a second pipeline, until the German government stopped its certification because of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“I don’t do mea culpa,” Mr. Schröder told The New York Times in April.

The next month, the German Parliament’s finance committee decided to cut financing for the ex-chancellor’s staff, an annual expense of about 400,000 euros, or $412,000. The current chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has been trying to distance himself from Mr. Schröder, a fellow member of the Social Democratic Party.

Mr. Schröder’s lawsuit was filed with the Berlin state prosecutor, his lawyer told DPA on Friday. It was unclear on what grounds he was filing the lawsuit, and Parliament said on Friday that it had not yet seen it.

On Monday, his local chapter of the Social Democratic Party, which the former chancellor has been a member of for almost five decades, decided not to expel him. There had been more than a dozen official requests from local chapters to remove him from the party.

BELGRADE, Serbia — Serbia’s strongman leader, Aleksandar Vucic, is fed up with being reviled as a “little Putin” intent on aggression against his country’s fragile neighbors in the Balkans.

For starters, Mr. Vucic noted wryly in an interview in the library of the presidential palace this month, “I am almost two meters tall.” That makes him about 6-foot-5. (Vladimir V. Putin is an estimated 5-foot-7 at most, though the Russian president’s exact height, a sensitive topic for the Kremlin, is a secret.)

Behind Mr. Vucic’s levity over physical stature, however, lurks a serious question that torments the Balkans and preoccupies Western diplomats.

Is Russia, mired in a brutal war in Ukraine, using Serbia to stir division in Europe and provoke renewed conflict in the former Yugoslavia to distract NATO from the battle raging to the east?

Those fears flared last week when an esoteric dispute over license plates between Serbia, which is bound to Russia by history, religion and deep hostility toward NATO, and the formerly Serbian province of Kosovo led to unruly protests, roadblocks and gunfire — setting off alarm bells in the Atlantic alliance.

The unrest in Kosovo, and strains in nearby Bosnia and Herzegovina caused by Milorad Dodik, the belligerent, Moscow-backed leader of the ethnic Serb enclave there, and by hard-line Croat nationalists have led to warnings that Russia is trying to stoke tensions, stilled but never really resolved, from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

“Russia calculates that the more time the West spends sweating in the Balkans, the less time it will spend sweating in Russia’s backyard,” said Vuk Vuksanovic, a researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy.

“But there are limits on what Russia can do,” Mr. Vuksanovic added. “It needs local elites, and these don’t want to be sacrificed for Russian interests.”

America’s ambassador to Serbia, Christopher R. Hill, a veteran diplomatic troubleshooter whose recent appointment signaled Washington’s heightened anxiety over the Balkans, said that Russia, offering only “economic blackmail” and “chaos throughout the region,” had found few takers.

“Despite Russia’s influence on Serbia’s energy sector and despite its pervasive disinformation efforts here, Serbs have decided that their future is with Europe and the West,” Mr. Hill said.