Russian Invasion of UkraineWhat Happened on Day 55 of the War in Ukraine

Despite the Kremlin’s new methodical approach focusing on eastern Ukraine, the Russian military still faces some of the same problems that hampered it after the war began.

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Debris littered a playground in front of a heavily damaged apartment building in Horenka, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, Ukraine.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

Follow our live news updates on the Russia-Ukraine war.

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Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

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The body of a victim of shelling lay in a street on Tuesday in Kharkiv, Ukraine.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

KHARKIV, Ukraine — Russia plunged into a new chapter of the Ukraine war on Tuesday, intent on capturing the eastern part of the country and crushing Ukrainian defenses without the same blunders that badly damaged Russian forces in the conflict’s initial weeks.

“Another phase of this operation is starting now,” Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia said, as the Russian Defense Ministry announced that its missile and artillery forces had struck hundreds of Ukrainian military targets overnight.

The strikes mainly hit the eastern region known as Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland, where pro-Moscow separatists have battled Ukrainian forces since Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014.

The Donbas has now become the stated territorial objective of Russia’s redeployed invasion force along a front that stretches roughly 300 miles, from an area near the northern city of Kharkiv to the besieged southern port of Mariupol, where die-hard Ukrainian defenders ensconced in a sprawling steel plant have repeatedly defied Russian demands to surrender.

Ukraine’s military said that its forces had repulsed seven different Russian thrusts along the front on Tuesday, destroying 10 tanks and 18 armored units in the battles. The claims of both militaries could not be independently verified.

Despite Russian warnings, Ukraine’s Western supporters, led by the United States, are now rushing to send longer-range weapons including howitzers, antiaircraft systems, anti-ship missiles, armed drones and even tanks — arms that American officials said were designed to thwart the Russian offensive.

Western military experts said the offensive promised to be much more methodical than the blitz-like operation the Kremlin launched Feb. 24 to subjugate Ukraine, which was marked by rapid and ultimately unsuccessful advances of tanks and helicopter assaults deep inside the former Soviet republic.

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Cars passing through the war-ravaged Kyiv suburb of Horenka on Tuesday.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

That miscalculation was compounded by flawed logistics, poor soldier morale, an unexpectedly tenacious Ukrainian resistance and Western-supplied weapons used to devastating effect on Russian armored vehicles, upending Russia’s hopes for a quick victory and forcing its military to retreat and regroup.

Now, instead of lightning attacks from the Russian front lines, Moscow’s forces, focusing on taking the Donbas, have increased their long-range artillery barrages and sent small detachments of troops to probe Ukrainian defenders, many entrenched in earthworks established during the Moscow-backed insurgency in the eastern region that began eight years ago.

The Pentagon estimated that Russia now has about 75 battalion tactical groups in Ukraine, each with roughly 1,000 troops. It also has tens of thousands more troops in reserve north of Ukraine who are being resupplied and readied to join the fight, U.S. officials said.

But the underlying weaknesses in Russia’s invasion force that have been exposed so far in the conflict have not necessarily gone away, military analysts said. And even with a more deliberate and cautious approach by Russia and its bigger, more powerful army, they said, the outcome in Ukraine remains unclear at best.

Some American military specialists said the Russian reinforcements pouring in — including Russian mercenaries, conscripts and regular troops pulled from the country’s far east and Georgia — are deficient. They have not trained together and their combat readiness is low, officials said.

Moreover, it will take time to regroup and redeploy the battered units that retreated from the north. Some will be replenished and sent back to the fight. But others are so spent that their remaining pieces will be patched together into one new unit with commanders hoping for the best in battle.

As these Russian forces push west to seize more territory, they will extend their supply lines and could confront the same logistics shortfalls that bedeviled them before.

“The vehicles are still poorly maintained, troop morale will remain low,” said Maj. Gen. Michael S. Repass, a former commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in Europe who has been involved with Ukrainian defense matters since 2016.

“The outcome hinges on who can reconstitute effective forces faster than the other,” General Repass said. “Fresh faces from elsewhere in Russia aren’t going to be much use as replacements unless they are combat ready when they show up.”

Russia’s battlefield mistakes have cost Moscow dearly so far. The number of Russian military losses in the war so far remains unknown, though Western intelligence agencies estimate 7,000 to 10,000 killed and 20,000 to 30,000 wounded. Thousands more have been captured or are missing.

Outgunned and outnumbered, Ukraine has also had steep military losses, though the government has declined to offer specific figures even to American officials. U.S. intelligence agencies estimate 5,500 to 11,000 killed and more than 18,000 wounded, but the wide range indicates the uncertainty in the figures.

Punctuated by Russia’s indiscriminate aerial bombardments, the invasion has left thousands of civilians dead or wounded, caused Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, deeply isolated Russia economically because of Western sanctions and turned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia into a pariah who has been described as a war criminal in the United States and Europe.

While there have not yet been any large offensives in the Donbas region, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a statement Tuesday that Russian forces were laying the groundwork for a future push: more surface-to-air missile systems have been shuttled to the front to protect important positions and more artillery positions have appeared.

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Lera Bronitskaya 23, right, embracing her younger sister, Sveta, 19, on Tuesday as they wait to evacuate from the Dnipro train station to Lviv, and on to Poland.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

At this point in the war, it is clear that long-range weapons that can fire beyond sight of their targets, such as howitzers and multiple launch rocket systems, have proven important when holding and taking territory.

So far, Russia’s new campaign in the Donbas appears to rely heavily on those weapons, as does Ukraine’s defense.

Strikes across Ukraine over the last several days had signaled a new escalation: In Kharkiv, for instance, Russian artillery slammed into a frequently shelled residential area on Tuesday, killing at least three people. That strike followed days of blistering rocket and artillery attacks into what had been relatively unscathed parts of the city, Ukraine’s second largest.

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Rogachov Vladimir Petrovich at the scene of one of the areas bombed Tuesday in the Saltivka neighborhood of Kharkiv, Ukraine.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Other urban centers like Zaporizhzhia in southern-central Ukraine, Lviv in the far west and Kyiv, the capital in the north, were hit with cruise missiles and artillery fire as Russian forces prepared ground troops for their thrust in the Donbas.

The Donbas battle, on wide-open terrain, will look significantly different from the urban warfare around Kyiv, where the Russian military tried and failed to advance.

This does not mean that Ukraine no longer needs the anti-tank and air-defense systems that have been so effective so far, military analysts said. In addition, the Ukrainians will need powerful arms to enable a counteroffensive of their own.

The $800 million military aid package to Ukraine that President Biden announced last week for the first time included more sophisticated artillery weaponry as well as 200 armored personnel carriers. In a conference call with allies on Tuesday, Mr. Biden promised more artillery for Ukraine’s forces.

“If deployed in significant numbers, these types of weapons can keep the Russian forces under withering attack, stalling their offensive momentum and potentially dislodging them from dug-in positions,” Lt. Col. Tyson Wetzel of the Air Force and Col. J.B. Barranco of the Marine Corps, wrote in an Atlantic Council analysis last week.

“This phase of the conflict will be distinct from phase one, with a greater focus on offensives against dug-in combatants as opposed to Ukrainian defense against a large attacking force,” Colonels Wetzel and Barranco wrote. “The campaign is likely to become a bloody war of attrition with limited territorial gains on either side.”

Capturing the besieged city of Mariupol is a key part of the Russian campaign. The fall of the city, which has come to symbolize the death and devastation wrought by the invasion, would allow Russia to complete a land bridge between Russian-held territory and the Crimean peninsula.

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A heavily damaged apartment block on Tuesday in the Kyiv suburb of Horenka.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

A sprawling Soviet-era steel factory in Mariupol, which its designers have said was built to withstand a nuclear attack, has been sheltering thousands of soldiers and civilians and is the last Ukrainian redoubt there.

Russian commanders said Tuesday they were beginning their final assault on the factory, the Azovstal steel plant, after the defenders had rejected ultimatums to surrender. A Ukrainian officer in Mariupol, Maj. Sergiy Volyna, wrote on a Telegram channel that “we are ready to fight to the last drop of blood.”

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Damaged and burned vehicles on Monday in Mariupol, Ukraine.Credit...Alexei Alexandrov/Associated Press

Thomas Gibbons-Neff reported from Kharkiv, Michael Schwirtz from Dnipro, Ukraine, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Reporting was contributed byNatalia Yermak and Tyler Hicks from Kharkiv. Katie Rogers from Washington and Rick Gladstone from New York.

Victoria Kim
April 20, 2022, 2:52 a.m. ET

Communication with the Chernobyl plant has been restored, atomic agency says.

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Russian troops controlled the defunct Chernobyl plant for five weeks before withdrawing at the end of March, as part of their broad withdrawal from northern and central Ukraine.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Ukraine’s nuclear regulators have restored direct communications with the defunct Chernobyl plant, more than a month after contact was lost during Russia’s occupation of the site, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Tuesday in a statement.

The country’s regulatory agency said on March 10 that it had lost all communication with the plant, raising concerns about safety at the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster, where radioactive waste material requires constant management.

The I.A.E.A. said in early March that remote data transmission from safeguards monitoring systems at Chernobyl had also gone offline, after the site lost power. Electricity was restored after four days, but the agency’s director general has said its automated radiation sensors in Chernobyl have remained inoperable for more than a month.

The agency will send experts to the site later this month to repair monitoring systems, deliver equipment and assess the safety and security situation there, according to the statement.

Regulators had been receiving information indirectly through off-site management, but the restoration of direct phone contact is an important step toward restoring normal operation at the plant and ensuring safety, the international nuclear watchdog said.

“This was clearly not a sustainable situation, and it is very good news that the regulator can now contact the plant directly when it needs to,” said Rafael Mariano Grossi, the agency’s director general.

Russian troops controlled the site for five weeks before withdrawing at the end of March, as part of their broad withdrawal from northern and central Ukraine. In an apparent disregard for safety, Russian forces traversed the grounds and dug trenches and bunkers, exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation, staff members at the site said in interviews.

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Anushka Patil
April 19, 2022, 11:48 p.m. ET

Russian forces are still stumbling, British intelligence officials said.

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A burned out building in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Tuesday. Ukrainian defenders are still holding out at a steel plant in the city.Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

Russian forces are still faltering in the country’s war against Ukraine as they shift focus to the eastern Donbas region, the British Defense Ministry said Tuesday.

Russia’s progress was being hampered by the same “environmental, logistical and technical challenges that have beset them so far,” the ministry said on Twitter, referencing Russian forces’ chaotic and failed early efforts.

The resilience of Ukrainian forces was also a factor, the ministry said, reporting that Ukraine had fended off several attempted advances from Russian troops, and that Russia had increased shelling in the region.

The Russian offensive is expected to take on a more methodical approach as it narrows its focus to Donbas and regroups from its logistical failures and morale crises at the start of the war.

Still, the British Defense Ministry pointed to the enduring Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol as a sign of Russia’s “continued failure to achieve their aims as quickly as they would like,” despite indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The city’s remaining defenders have captured global attention and refused to surrender as they fight Russian forces around a steel plant sheltering thousands of civilians.

Yu Young Jin
April 19, 2022, 10:34 p.m. ET

Reporting from Seoul

South Korea sent about 20 tons of supplies to Ukraine on Tuesday, including ventilators, first-aid kits and defibrillators, according to its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Farnaz Fassihi
April 19, 2022, 9:13 p.m. ET

Russia rejects calls for a cease-fire to enable evacuations, saying Ukraine only wants time to arm.

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Dmitry Polyanskiy, a deputy Russian ambassador to the United Nations, rejected calls for a cease-fire in Ukraine at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Russia rejected calls for a cease-fire to allow for civilian evacuations in Ukraine on Tuesday, saying that requests to pause the fighting were not sincere and would only provide time to arm Ukrainian fighters.

The rejection, delivered at a United Nations Security Council meeting on Ukraine, came just hours after the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, called for a four-day cease-fire to allow for evacuations in battle zones and safe corridors to bring in food and medicine.

Civilians, including children, remain trapped in the eastern Ukraine region of Donbas, where Russia has begun a new and more fierce offensive, as well as in the devastated port city of Mariupol, where Ukrainian defenders are making a last stand from the bunkers of a steel complex.

Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, told the Security Council that calls for his country to establish humanitarian cease-fires were “insincere, and in practice they merely point to an aspiration to provide Kyiv nationalists breathing room to regroup and receive more drones, more antitank missiles and more MANPADS.” He was referring to man-portable air-defense systems, which are essentially highly mobile surface-to-air missiles.

Earlier, Mr. Guterres had said that more than 12 million people in Ukraine now needed humanitarian assistance but that the number was expected to rise to 15.7 million, or about 40 percent of all Ukrainians remaining in the country. Millions have fled abroad, and many others are internally displaced.

Even China, which has not condemned Russia and has abstained from votes on resolutions against it, said it supported a humanitarian cease-fire and called on Russia and Ukraine to move toward that goal.

The reality gap between Russia and the majority of Security Council members and U.N. officials remained on display. Two U.N. officials and diplomats representing Eastern European countries hosting millions of Ukrainian refugees laid out the challenges of the situation, which Russia dismissed, saying that Ukraine had been plagued by migration of its citizens for years.

Some statements from U.N. officials and diplomats on Tuesday spoke to growing frustration at their inability to broker a cease-fire, mediate a peace deal or convince Russia to end its aggression.

“Colleagues, it appears that these meetings do not affect much either the security situation on the front line or the humanitarian situation in Ukraine,” Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, said.

Russia, as a permanent member of the Security Council, has veto power and has used it twice on resolutions focused on Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February. But even diplomatic attempts spearheaded by the U.N.’s top humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, who had traveled to Russia and Ukraine last week, failed.

“So while we will continue our job to deliver aid, we need this council to do its job too,” said Kelly Clements, deputy high commissioner for U.N.’s refugee agency. “We therefore call on all of you in this council again — and yes, we are aware of the deep divisions — to put aside your differences and find a way to end this horrific and senseless war.”

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The New York Times
April 19, 2022, 9:01 p.m. ET

Residents of Mariupol set up a makeshift market for food and basic goods, as well as a charging station for mobile phones using a generator. The southern Ukrainian port city, under siege for weeks, has been cut off from water, electricity and gas supplies.

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Brent McDonald
April 19, 2022, 6:34 p.m. ET

A Ukrainian fighter speaks from inside the besieged Azovstal steel complex in Mariupol.

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Smoke was visible from the Azovstal steel plant on Monday, as Russian forces continued their attempt to take the entirety of the besieged city of Mariupol.Credit...Alexei Alexandrov/Associated Press

The bombardment of the giant steel plant in Mariupol began on Tuesday at about four o’clock in the afternoon, Mikhail Vershinin said — a heavy barrage of airstrikes and mortar rounds, as well as naval artillery fire from ships in the Sea of Azov.

“From all this one can hide only in a shelter underground,” said Mr. Vershinin, one of an unknown number of Ukrainian fighters hunkered down beneath the plant, the last major holdouts against Russia’s full capture of the city. “But nevertheless, there is still food and water. Not great amounts, but it is there.”

In peacetime, Mr. Vershinin, 48, was the head of the Donetsk Regional Patrol Police, but since the Russian invasion, he is one of the Ukrainians fighting to defend Mariupol, the site of perhaps the worst devastation of the war.

He spoke by audio message from the sprawling Azovstal metallurgical complex, a Soviet-era plant built to withstand nuclear war that has become a fortress for the last defenders. Among those holed up in the plant’s underground bunkers are many soldiers with the Azov Battalion, a highly skilled and controversial unit whose far-right and white supremacist elements have given fuel to the Kremlin’s false claims that Russia’s invasion is merely intended to root out Nazis.

On Monday, the Azov Battalion released images of women and children among the more than 1,000 civilians also sheltering inside the steel complex.

“I am at Azovstal together with everyone else,” Mr. Vershinin said. “Azov is here, as well as marine infantry, marine and land border patrol, national guard, regular police officers, and regular volunteers.”

“The situation is indeed critical,” he said. “Around 90 percent of the city has been destroyed.”

“Waging war in the barbarian way that Russia is gives them a certain advantage in urban warfare,” he said. “A tank just drives down a street and by firing, destroys every building in its path on either side of itself. And then infantry enters. It is very hard to fight against this.”

Mr. Vershinin said that the Azovstal complex was chosen as a position of last defense for its strategic importance and powerful Soviet-era bomb shelters.

He said his wife and children were away from Mariupol and that many of the women and children inside the plant were family members of fighters.

Mr. Vershinin said that hundreds of civilians were sheltering in a different part of the factory, away from the fighters.

“The civilians are separate,” he said. “We cannot be together with the civilians because that would put them at risk.”

Finbarr O'Reilly
April 19, 2022, 6:25 p.m. ET

Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine

In the western city of Lviv, shelters for internally displaced people have held Ukrainians from all over the country since the start of the war. At one of the shelters, Julia Haver has been staying with her 9-year-old son Artem, who has autism. Artem sometimes shakes her awake asking if she is dead.

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Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

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Katie Rogers
April 19, 2022, 5:39 p.m. ET

Reporting from Washington

President Biden will announce a new military aid package for Ukraine in the coming days, according to a person who was briefed on his plans. The aid amount will be on par with the $800 million package of weapons and artillery that was announced last week, that person said.

Richard Pérez-Peña
April 19, 2022, 5:34 p.m. ET

In his latest video address, President Zelensky of Ukraine said, “If we had access to all the weapons we need, which our partners have and which are comparable to the weapons used by the Russian Federation, we would have already ended this war.” His comments came as NATO countries vowed to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine to fight Russia, but not the full range Zelensky has requested.

Anushka Patil
April 19, 2022, 5:08 p.m. ET

Russia’s progress in Ukraine continues to be hampered by the same “environmental, logistical and technical challenges that have beset them so far,” the British Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. It reported that Russian shelling in Donbas has increased, and that Ukrainians had fended off several attempted advances.

David Guttenfelder
April 19, 2022, 5:00 p.m. ET

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Volunteers from Kyiv headed to the suburb of Irpin on Tuesday to clean up debris from weeks of war. About 10 people were living in the apartment block where the volunteers worked. The residents were a mix of people who held had remained there through the occupation and others who had returned after the Russian withdrawal.

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Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
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Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

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Anushka Patil
April 19, 2022, 4:56 p.m. ET

Two employees of a Kharkiv zoo, who had stayed in the city to care for the animals during heavy shelling, were shot dead by Russian soldiers, according to a video posted by the Feldman Ecopark zoo. The employees had been missing since March and their bodies were found barricaded in a room.

April 19, 2022, 4:33 p.m. ET

The U.S. races to arm Ukraine with heavier, more advanced weaponry.

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Ukrainian service members unpacking Javelin anti-tank missiles in Kyiv in February. The missiles were part of the U.S. military support package.Credit...Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

BRUSSELS — The race is on.

As columns of Russian troops began pouring into Ukraine nearly two months ago, the United States and its allies started supplying Kyiv with weapons and equipment for what many expected to be a short war: sniper rifles, helmets, medical kits, encrypted communications, lots of bullets and the portable, shoulder-held Stinger and Javelin missiles that quickly became icons of the conflict.

Defying the odds, Ukraine held on to its capital and pushed Russia from the north. Now, as the Kremlin switches gears and begins a concerted effort to capture eastern Ukraine, Washington and its allies are pivoting as well, scrambling to supply Ukraine with bigger and more advanced weapons to defend itself in a grinding war.

The West is focused on sending longer-range weapons like howitzers, antiaircraft systems, anti-ship missiles, armed drones, armored trucks, personnel carriers and even tanks — the type of arms that President Biden said were tailored to stop “the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine.”

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Military volunteers loading magazines with ammunition in February at a weapons storage facility in Fastiv, Ukraine.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

“The steady supply of weapons” has helped “ensure that Putin failed in his initial war aims to conquer and control Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said last week. “We cannot rest now.”

Then, after a video call with allies on Tuesday, Mr. Biden told reporters that the United States would send more artillery to Ukraine. He is expected to announce a new military aid package for Ukraine in the coming days, according to a person briefed on his plans. The aid amount will be on par with the $800 million package of weapons and artillery that was announced last week, the person said.

But the strategy comes with a notable risk: antagonizing Russia so much that it ignites a wider, international conflict.

Russia recently sent a formal warning to the United States, saying that Western deliveries of the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine could bring “unpredictable consequences.”

American officials say the warning shows that the weapons being sent are making a big difference on the battlefield. So, for Washington at least, concerns about supplying arms that Russia might consider “escalatory” have ebbed — as has the initial worry that Ukraine will use longer-range weapons, like jet fighters, to attack Moscow itself and set off a bigger war.

Officials in Washington are now grappling with how much intelligence to give the Ukrainians about bases inside Russia, given that the Ukrainians have already made small helicopter raids on Russian fuel depots. The White House has also held back on supplying some weapons that could strike Russian forces across the border, like rocket artillery, ground attack planes and medium range drones.

Some argue the Americans are being too cautious.

“Seven weeks ago, they were arguing over whether to give Stinger missiles — how silly does that seem now?” said retired Lt. Gen. Frederick B. Hodges, the former top U.S. Army commander in Europe. “We have been deterred out of an exaggerated fear of what possibly could happen.”

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A Ukrainian soldier looking at the remnants of a Russian T90 tank last month, that was said to have been destroyed using an American-made Javelin missile, at a frontline position in the northern region of Kyiv.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Anxiety about provoking a wider war persists among some NATO allies, most visibly in Germany, which worries that supplying Marder infantry-fighting vehicles, considered one of the world’s best armored vehicles, could be perceived by Russia as making Berlin and NATO parties to the war.

Robert Habeck, an influential minister in Germany’s new government, has said that supplying tanks would be an escalation and should be a matter of consensus within NATO and the European Union. “Heavy weapons are synonymous with tanks, and all NATO countries have so far ruled this out to not become targets themselves,” he said.

But these are sovereign — not alliance — decisions, and Washington and numerous allies are shipping such weapons anyway, concentrating on supplying Soviet-era weapons that the Ukrainians know how to use, along with Western arms the Ukrainians can absorb fairly easily.

Russia is striking Ukraine with abandon, complicating the flow of these newer weapons from Ukraine’s western borders with Poland, Romania and Slovakia to the battle in the east. That presents another risk: that Russian attacks could also stray across the Ukrainian border and hit NATO countries, “every inch” of which Mr. Biden has vowed to defend militarily.

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A bomb-damaged bridge across the Irpin River on Sunday, in Bucha, Ukraine.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

How this logistical race goes could well shape the outcome of the war.

Russian forces, having suffered an embarrassing retreat from northern Ukraine and the suburbs of the capital, Kyiv, are repositioning for what the Kremlin and Ukrainian officials call a pivotal offensive to take eastern Ukraine.

Unlike many of the earlier battles, this one is expected to feature more tank battles on open ground, more long-range artillery and more weaponized drones.

The Western effort is both sprawling and expensive, with as many as 30 countries, not all of them members of NATO. The push now is to get countries with Soviet-era tanks, artillery and perhaps even fighter planes to provide them to Ukraine, with the promise that the United States will replenish them with more modern, Western-made arms in return. There is an especially acute need for Soviet-bloc standard 152-millimeter howitzer shells, since NATO uses a different, 155-millimeter shell.

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Members of the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, firing a howitzer at a position in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine last month.Credit...Stanislav Yurchenko/Reuters

The United States has also agreed to provide some 155-millimeter howitzers, along with 40,000 matching rounds, while trying to buy Soviet-standard ammunition from countries that use it, including nations outside of Europe, like Afghanistan and even India, a longstanding buyer of Russian arms.

But that is not enough, General Hodges argued. “We are still not thinking big,” he said. “We are still not thinking in terms of Ukraine winning.”

Unlike the early part of the war, when many countries seemed to compete to announce what they were providing Ukraine, the current race is being run largely in secret.

Much of the coordination, including how to get matériel into Ukraine, is being handled through the United States European Command, or Eucom, based in Stuttgart, Germany, and through a blandly named International Donors Coordination Center set up with the British.

The command said that it established a “control center” to coordinate weapons and humanitarian assistance “from around the world” for Ukraine in early March. But it declined to discuss the details.

The Pentagon gave a hint, saying that the State Department had authorized transfers to Ukraine of American-provided defensive equipment from more than 14 countries this year.

But nations are trying not to advertise to Moscow exactly what is being provided. France says it has supplied 100 million euros of military equipment to Ukraine, without specifying what it has sent. Some countries have no desire to goad the Russian bear.

A clear example was the confusion over reports that Poland had supplied more than 100 Soviet-era T-72 and T-55 tanks to Ukraine. Poland refuses to confirm any such shipment.

Not all nations are being coy. The Czech government says it has supplied Ukraine with T-72 tanks and BMP-1 armored vehicles, while the Slovak government has made a big show of supplying a Soviet-era S-300 antiaircraft missile system.

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Ukrainians pulling an abandoned Russian tank from a field on Friday near the village of Lypivka, west of Kyiv.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

As for Germany, part of the problem is that its own supply of working armor is so low that it has little to spare. Beyond that, learning to operate a modern British, American or German tank can take up to six months, while Ukrainian fighters would have little difficulty operating familiar Soviet-era armor.

“We don’t really have time to get a lot of heavy American armor into Ukraine, and there isn’t time to train the Ukrainian military,” said Robert M. Gates, former U.S. defense secretary. “But there is a lot of former Soviet military equipment still in the arsenals of the East European states.”

The United States, he said, “ought to be ransacking the arsenals” of former Warsaw Pact countries for armor and antiaircraft systems, “with a promise from the U.S. to backfill over time with our equipment to our NATO allies.”

That is exactly what the United States is racing to do, Pentagon officials said, describing their own efforts to persuade the Slovaks to provide the S-300 missile system to Ukraine. On March 9, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III began speaking with their defense minister, Jaroslav Nad, and has agreed to send in Patriot batteries to replace it.

Similar conversations are taking place with other allies that have Soviet-era weapons and ammunition, the officials said. The Americans say they are also speaking several times a day with their Ukrainian counterparts about what Ukraine wants and needs, and what Western countries think they can best provide.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine delivering a virtual address to Congress last month in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center Congressional Auditorium.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, repeatedly expresses gratitude for the aid but wants more, sooner. He admitted to being fed up with listing the same set of requirements over and over again to different national interlocutors, telling The Atlantic in Kyiv: “When some leaders ask me what weapons I need, I need a moment to calm myself, because I already told them the week before. It’s Groundhog Day. I feel like Bill Murray.”

There are also supply issues with Western weapons, like the older Stinger antiaircraft missile or the Javelin anti-tank missile.

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Armed Ukrainian troops in a residential neighborhood of Kyiv last month.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

The Pentagon has urged manufacturers to ramp up production. So far, some 7,000 Javelins have been given to Ukraine, about a third of the total American inventory, which will probably take three or four years to replace, wrote Mark F. Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Last week, the Pentagon met with leaders of eight large military contractors, like Raytheon Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation, to discuss how to overcome any supply problems — both to replenish American weapons stocks that have been drawn down to help Ukraine and to keep Kyiv in the fight. The two companies together make the Javelin, and Raytheon makes the Stinger.

The United States alone has spent or allocated some $2.6 billion worth of such matériel since the war began on Feb. 24, and the European Union has provided 1.5 billion euros, or $1.6 billion. But there is no prospect of American or NATO troops going to the aid of Ukraine, officials say. The West is providing the weapons and intelligence — and cheerleading from behind.

The known list of what has been provided already is long, and there is little doubt that supplies from NATO countries — and the training of Ukrainian forces after Russia seized Crimea in 2014, not to mention Ukraine’s tenacity and adaptability — have surprised the Russians, badly damaged their morale and extended the war.

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Ukrainian soldiers and foreign fighters conducting an operation late last month in Irpin.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

In the months leading up to the war and afterward, the United States and its allies have sent Ukraine 25,000 antiaircraft weapons and 60,000 anti-tank weapons, including 10,000 provided by Washington, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress last week.

The United States has also provided more than 50 million rounds of ammunition, 7,000 small arms, 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets, and night-vision goggles, encrypted radios, armored trucks and personnel carriers, largely drawn from pre-positioned U.S. military stockpiles, much of it in Europe, according to the latest public list from the Pentagon.

Since the invasion, the Pentagon has cranked up its vast logistical and transportation network. Within four to six days after the White House approves a transfer of weapons from American military stockpiles, the Pentagon has been able to load the matériel onto cargo planes and fly it to about half a dozen staging bases in countries near Ukraine, chiefly Poland and Romania.

From there, American officials say, the weapons and equipment are loaded onto hundreds of trucks and shipped into western Ukraine using a variety of overland routes. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said it takes about 24 to 48 hours for the weapons to make their way from the staging areas into the hands of Ukrainian troops.

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Empty containers of German anti-tank weapons at a military base last month in Kyiv.Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

“Eight to 10 flights a day are coming into the region, not just from the United States, but from other nations as well,” Mr. Kirby said. “That stuff isn’t sitting around.”

Despite repeated threats to do so, the Russians have rarely tried to stop this flow of Western matériel into Ukraine. Pentagon officials say the Russians have been busy fighting in other parts of the country and fear Ukraine’s air defenses. “That flow still continues,” Mr. Kirby said.

Britain, which has been more public about its contributions in the post-Brexit period, has supplied about $588 million of matériel, including anti-tank and anti-ship missiles and long-range artillery.

Training the Ukrainians on new equipment in the middle of a war is a challenge, though. About a dozen Ukrainian soldiers were already training in the United States, and the Pentagon has taught them to use modern armed drones, like the 700 or so Switchblade drones that Washington is now providing.

Military officials call the weapon, which is carried in a backpack, the “kamikaze drone,” because it can be flown directly at a tank or a group of troops and is destroyed when it hits the target and explodes.

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A Ukrainian fighter operating a drone last month in Irpin. Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Bigger armed drones, like American-made Predators or Reapers, would be difficult for Ukrainians to fly and would be easily destroyed by Russian fighter planes. But Pentagon officials said the small, portable kamikaze drones could prove more cost-effective and elusive against Russian armored convoys.

After the White House announced the latest $800 million tranche of weapons for Ukraine last week, Mr. Kirby said that American soldiers would train Ukrainian forces in neighboring countries to use some of the newer, more sophisticated equipment Washington is providing, like radar systems, as well as the 155-millimeter howitzers and 11 Mi-17 helicopters.

“We’re aware of the clock, and we know time is not our friend,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Jack Ewing from New York, John Ismay and Katie Rogers from Washington and Erika Solomon from Berlin.

Katie Rogers
April 19, 2022, 3:40 p.m. ET

Reporting from Washington

In President Biden's call on Tuesday with allied leaders, they discussed providing more ammunition and other security assistance to Ukraine, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters. An adviser to President Emmanuel Macron of France said they discussed how to provide security guarantees to Ukraine after the war, even though it is not a NATO member.

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Michael Schwirtz
April 19, 2022, 2:50 p.m. ET

People flee Dnipro, once an island of calm, as the horrors of war approach.

DNIPRO, Ukraine — For weeks the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro was a relatively calm oasis where life continued more or less as in peacetime, even as fighting raged in neighboring regions to the north, east and south.

But with word that Russian forces have launched a new offensive and plenty of evidence of the misery that accompanies such fighting, many residents of Dnipro have decided to leave.

Residents flocked to the train station in the city center on Tuesday, lugging suitcases and carriers holding small dogs, cats and at least one Guinea pig. Most said they were frightened that a war that has caused so much death and destruction since Russia first invaded on Feb. 24 could now reach their doorstep. Already, they said, rocket attacks had hit targets in the city outskirts and neighboring towns, rattling glass and shaking nerves.

“When you hear them from afar it’s not very frightening, but when you wake up from the vibrations it really scares you,” said Angelina Deyeva, 27, who was heading for Poland with three other women in her family, while the men stayed behind to continue working. “I didn’t think I would be leaving, but it has become too frightening.”

Since the beginning of the war, the mayor of Dnipro, Boris Filatov, has suggested repeatedly that women, children and the elderly leave the city given the dangers. In recent days he has urged residents to heed that advice.

Russian forces were more likely to attack the city since the sinking of their flagship by Ukrainian missiles in the Black Sea, he said.

“I think that after the bombing of the cruiser Moskva, they’ve lost control,” Mr. Filatov said in an appearance on local television last Friday. “They will continue to fire more rockets and so if there is a possibility it would be better to move to a safer place.”

Several people at the train station on Tuesday said they had heard the mayor’s advice and were taking it to heart.

One young couple, Anastasiya Shapovalova and Ivan Andreev, who work in television, said they were traveling west to the Polish border with their 8-month-old daughter, Kira. They were fearful, they said, that the same atrocities committed against civilians in places like Bucha outside Kyiv could occur in Dnipro.

“We have heard about the victories of our army and we are extremely proud of them, but we are very worried about our child,” Ms. Shapovalova said. “We stayed here for 55 days of this war and then we decided to leave our country.”

Mr. Andreev will accompany Ms. Shapovalova and their daughter only as far as the border. As a man of fighting age, he is not allowed to leave the country. Then he will return to Dnipro.

“Occupation is not an option for me or my child,” Ms. Shapovalova said.

Matthew Mpoke Bigg
April 19, 2022, 2:34 p.m. ET

The U.N. chief calls for a ‘humanitarian pause’ in Ukraine to mark Easter in the Orthodox church.

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Residents of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha attended Saint Andrews Church during Orthodox Palm Sunday on Sunday. Credit...Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

The United Nations Secretary General António Guterres called on Monday for a four-day humanitarian pause in the war in Ukraine to mark Easter in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but he acknowledged that previous attempts to secure a cease-fire had failed.

More than 12 million people in Ukraine need assistance and more than a third of those are in the eastern cities of Mariupol, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk, Mr. Guterres said.

“We anticipate that this figure will increase to 15.7 million. That is about 40 percent of all Ukrainians still left in the country,” he said in a statement. In the past seven weeks around 2.5 million people have received assistance, he added, many of whom are in the east of the country.

The pause he proposed, beginning on Thursday, would allow safe passage for civilians to leave conflict areas and allow aid to be delivered to people who are desperately in need. It would be organized in coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mr. Guterres said.

“Humanitarian needs are dire,” he said. “People do not have food, water, supplies to treat the sick or wounded or simply to live day-to-day.”

But previous attempts at organizing evacuations and delivery of aid have been thwarted, and have at times turned deadly.

Russia signaled a new phase in the war on Tuesday, declaring that its offensive for control over Ukraine’s industrial heartland was underway. Ukrainian officials said they were mounting a spirited defense.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, which has branches in both Russia and Ukraine, is divided over Russia’s invasion. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has supported President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and has cast the war as a holy struggle to protect the country from what he called Western scourges like gay pride parades.

The Orthodox head of Kyiv and All Ukraine said in a sermon on Sunday that the country’s “enemies from the north” had turned the Russian Orthodox Church into an instrument of “lies, enslavement, murder and all other evil.”

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David Guttenfelder
April 19, 2022, 2:10 p.m. ET

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Kyiv police officers and special forces combed through the suburb of Horenka, going house to house, checking on returning residents, offering information about unexploded ordnance and checking positions that Russian forces had taken up in Ukrainian homes during the occupation.

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Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
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Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Melissa Eddy
April 19, 2022, 2:05 p.m. ET

Henkel, a German manufacturer, reverses course and exits Russia.

BERLIN — Henkel, a German maker of household cleaning and hair care products, will stop its business in Russia because of the war in Ukraine, the company said on Tuesday.

The move was a reversal for Henkel, the Düsseldorf-based producer of Persil laundry detergent and the Schwarzkopf line of hair care products, which has 2,500 employees in Russia. After Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, setting off sanctions and causing an exodus of many Western firms, Henkel was one of several German firms that decided to remain.

As recently as April 4, the company’s chief executive, Carsten Knobel, defended the decision to maintain minimal operations in Russia in a speech to shareholders. “Stopping our Russian business would have far-reaching consequences,” he said.

But the firm will now sever those ties.

“Recent developments and consideration of different aspects” prompted the change, Wulf Klüppelholz, a spokesman for the company, said. “They included the development of the war, the news out of Ukraine, the current business environment, developments in international sanctions and feedback from our customers, partners or employees,” he said.

The employees in Russia will continue to be paid while business is being wound down, he said. But the company declined to comment on what the overall financial impact of the move would be, and did not specify how long the process would take.

Several other German companies that are still doing business in Russia have been the targets of negative social media campaigns and calls for boycotts. They include the Metro supermarket chain and the Ritter Sport chocolate brand. Ritter Sport said it would donate all proceeds earned in Russia to help people fleeing Ukraine.

Among other German companies, Deutsche Telekom, a network operator, initially kept its operations running in Russia, where it had employed some 2,000 people, but after several weeks decided to stop the business. The Obi home improvement chain closed its 27 stores in Russia in March, and transferred them last week to an unnamed investor.

John Ismay
April 19, 2022, 1:45 p.m. ET

Over the past 24 hours Russia has added two additional battalion tactical groups into the Donbas region of Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said in a briefing to reporters, bringing the total number to 78. The official said that Russia still has about 75 percent of the soldiers and weapons from the pre-invasion force it assembled outside of Ukraine.

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April 19, 2022, 1:42 p.m. ET

Despair in Mariupol’s last stronghold: ‘They’re bombing us with everything’

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Smoke rose over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol on Monday. The plant, where Ukrainian defenders are holding out, is a four-square-mile complex with a network of underground spaces. Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

DNIPRO, Ukraine — Under incessant fire from the air and with Russian troops closing in, a group of Ukrainian soldiers holed up in the besieged city of Mariupol issued a message of despair on Tuesday evening, expressing hope that their own forces would come to their rescue and demanding that the world do something to stop the Kremlin’s vicious war.

“We’re surrounded; they’re bombing us with everything they can,” said a Ukrainian soldier who gave his name as Gasim. “Our only plan is for the blockade to be broken by our forces so that we can get out of here.”

Gasim and his comrades reached out to a reporter near midnight as Russian forces continued their bombardment of a sprawling Soviet-era steel mill with underground bunkers that is sheltering thousands of soldiers and civilians.

While Gasim and the others would not confirm that they were in the mill, the Azovstal steel plant, officials said that this was where the last Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol had taken refuge as Russia’s battle to take full control of the city appeared to be entering its final stages.

The soldiers spoke by video chat on WhatsApp, offering a rare glimpse of a battlefield that has transfixed the world. The men often spoke over one another, the light of the phone occasionally bringing their faces into focus in the otherwise pitch-black darkness. They seemed unaware of the attention their fight had attracted and refused to divulge basic details about the number of troops and their locations that the Ukrainian authorities had already described.

The holdouts in the underground fortress represent the last stand of a strategic city that has endured a relentless siege by Russian forces. The remaining defenders’ ordeal has captured global attention as they have held off the enemy for weeks, in what has been likened to a Ukrainian Alamo.

With ammunition and supplies sparse, the men who were interviewed said they were carrying on the fight and refusing to acquiesce to the Kremlin’s demand’s for capitulation. But they acknowledged that they were running out of time and increasingly found it difficult to leave the protection of their shelter because of the heavy bombing.

“We are putting up a difficult fight with the enemy, protecting our country and our people and our culture, our right to self-determination,” another soldier who gave his name as Kostya said, even as he acknowledged they had little to fight with.

“As we’re talking to you, they’re firing on us from the air, dropping bombs,” Gasim said. “Tell America to help us.”

After about 15 minutes, the video cut out and further attempts to reach the men were unsuccessful.

The interviews came as Russian forces bombarded the plant with a heavy barrage of airstrikes and mortar rounds, as well as naval artillery fire from ships on the Sea of Azov.

The Azovstal plant where the men are likely sheltered makes for a formidable fortress, an immense industrial complex of thick concrete and walls, steel doors and reinforced underground warrens. Yan Gagin, who identified himself as a Russian adviser in the Donetsk People’s Republic, a self-declared government in eastern Ukraine backed by the Kremlin, said in a broadcast report that the steel factory was designed to withstand a nuclear war.

“It is basically a city under a city,” he said, conceding that the Russian campaign to seize the plant had been significantly hampered by the sophisticated network of passages, rooms and communication systems connecting the basement levels of the plant.

Livoberezhnyi

District

Intense fighting on

Tahanrozka Street

Fire

MARIUPOL

Azovstal

steel plant

M14

highway

N

Russian

control

Kyiv

UKRAINE

Mariupol

Russian

advance

MARIUPOL

Livoberezhnyi

District

Azovstal

steel plant

Satellite image

angle of view

Port

SEA OF AZOV

3 miles

Livoberezhnyi

District

Intense fighting

on Tahanrozka

Street

Fire

MARIUPOL

Azovstal

steel plant

M14

highway

N

Russian

control

Kyiv

UKRAINE

Russian

advance

Mariupol

MARIUPOL

Livoberezhnyi

District

Azovstal

steel plant

Satellite image

angle of view

Port

SEA OF AZOV

3 miles

Livoberezhnyi

District

Intense fighting on

Tahanrozka Street

Fire

MARIUPOL

Azovstal

steel plant

M14

highway

N

Russian

control

Kyiv

UKRAINE

Mariupol

Russian

advance

MARIUPOL

Livoberezhnyi

District

Azovstal

steel plant

Satellite image

angle of view

Port

SEA OF AZOV

3 miles

Sources: Satellite image taken April 9 by Maxar Technologies. Russian troop positions from Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project. Note: Russian-controlled areas represent territory that Russian forces are able to operate freely in, without immediate risk of Ukrainian counterattacks, as assessed by the Institute for the Study of War on April 18. Areas of Russian advances indicate where Russian troops were seen.

By Scott Reinhard

Frederick W. Kagan, director of the Critical Threats project at the American Enterprise Institute, said, “I assume the Russians are going to throw everything they have at this, to eliminate this pocket,” but he added that doing so could cost them dearly. “You’d be surprised at how well people can survive big bombs in a facility like that,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Metinvest, the company that owns the mill, said that the bunkers beneath it were used as shelters by steelworkers in 2014, when Russian-backed separatists tried to seize Mariupol.

“Ever since the first invasion, we’ve kept the bunkers in good order and supplied with food and water,” said Galina Yatsura, who heads international communications for Metinvest, adding that the shelters can house up to 4,000 people and are stocked with enough food and water to last three weeks.

Two employees who stayed at the plant in the early days of the siege said that more than 2,000 civilians had been staying there, many of them family members of employees.

Russia’s Defense Ministry called a cease-fire for Wednesday in the area of the plant to allow civilians to leave, the Russian state news media reported. However, previous attempts to suspend fighting have fallen through.

The plant stretches across four square miles, a complex of buildings, smokestacks, blast furnaces and stacks of coiled and plate steel, and it has its own port facilities on the Sea of Azov.

One of the largest metal mills in Europe, it produced about 4.3 million tons of steel annually before the Russian invasion, according to Metinvest, a steel and mining conglomerate owned by Ukraine’s richest man, the billionaire Rinat Akhmetov.

The network of underground passages and rooms, which is now pivotal to the survival of the holed-up soldiers and civilians, was originally built to transport equipment between buildings, according to Metinvest. There was no planned military use for the tunnels before the war, the company said.

The steel mill has been under heavy bombardment, a Ukrainian commander, Lt. Col. Denys Prokopenko, said Monday in a video recorded at the factory. “They use free-fall bombs, rockets, bunker-buster bombs, all varieties of artillery, both ground and naval for indiscriminate attacks,” he said.

The Russians are trying to establish uncontested control of territory linking the separatist-held regions of Donbas, in southeastern Ukraine, to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014. The holdouts in Mariupol are the last substantial obstacle left in the region.

Russian forces have had the city, a major port, under siege since last month, bombarding much of it to rubble and slowly tightening their grip.

The fight over the Azovstal steel plant recalls one of the great struggles of the Second World War, the battle for the Stalingrad Tractor Factory as Nazi Germany’s forces attempted to capture that city. Thousands of German and Soviet soldiers died there, as did many civilians, before the Soviets ultimately prevailed.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Mr. Kagan said. “Anytime you’re dealing with a sprawling, heavy industrial complex, it’s going to make a good fighting position for defenders.”

Ukraine’s intelligence service wrote in a statement on Monday that the Russians were preparing to use three-ton bombs on the plant in an effort to raze it completely. Moscow is “not deterred by the fact that civilians have taken refuge in the plant,” the service said in a statement.

The plant was first established by the Soviet Union in the 1930s and rebuilt following World War II. It is a labyrinth of rail systems, workshops, blast furnaces and warehouses, with many of the buildings made of thick concrete and designed to withstand high temperatures.

If Russia succeeds in flattening the complex’s buildings, it is not clear how many people hunkered underground might survive. Eventually, though, they would run out of provisions, and the Ukrainians have warned repeatedly that the Russians might use chemical weapons to force them out or kill them.

In the confusion of the siege, it was difficult to get a clear picture of what was happening inside the factory. But according to Ms. Yatsura, a number of employees remain there. They had stayed after the invasion began to prepare the complex’s bomb shelters and eliminate hazardous materials.

Clearing the plant could hold particular symbolic value for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has justified his invasion with the false claim that Ukraine is run by Nazis, and that he is rooting them out. The plant’s defenders include members of the Azov Battalion, a force that does include far-right soldiers, some of them foreign, including white supremacists and people who have been described as fascists.

Capturing the Azovstal plant would also give the Russians better access to the region’s railway system and seaport.

How long the Ukrainian defenders can stave off the Russian invaders there will depend in large part on how many people are inside and how well sustained they are. Pyotr Andryushchenko, an aide to Mayor Vadym Boychenko of Mariupol, said the Ukrainian Army had arranged two operations over the past two weeks to take food to the plant; he did not say how that was accomplished. But the situation will probably grow more dire, he said, as Russian troops have blocked anyone, including civilians, from entering or leaving the city.

“These people, many wanted to avoid being displaced or deported, so they found protection with our troops, in the basement of the plant,” said Mr. Andryushchenko, who, like the mayor, left the city weeks ago.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that its forces had completely surrounded the steel plant, and that the Ukrainian forces holding out “forbade negotiations about surrendering,” citing an intercepted radio transmission.

Miriam Jordan
April 19, 2022, 1:24 p.m. ET

Under an anti-trafficking law, Ukrainian children are separated from caregivers at the southern U.S. border.

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Iryna Merezhko and her husband, Vadym Merezhko, must send a reunification packet to a case manager in order for their nephew to be released from U.S. authorities after crossing the border. For 10 days they did not know where he was.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — After Iryna Merezhko persuaded her sister in Ukraine that her young nephew should join her in Los Angeles to wait out the war, she traveled halfway around the globe to pick him up. “I told him it would be a California vacation,” she recalled. “We would go to Disneyland, Universal Studios, the beach.”

The boy, Ivan Yereshov, 14, made it with her to Tijuana, Mexico, early this month, joining thousands of Ukrainians waiting at the border for permission to enter the United States.

To be on the safe side, Ms. Merezhko carried a notarized power of attorney attesting that Ivan had been handed over into his aunt’s care. But an officer informed them that Ivan could not enter with his aunt — because she was not his parent. “They told us we would be separated for one or two days,” recalled Ms. Merezhko, who said she embraced Ivan as his initial enthusiasm dissolved into dismay.

Ten days went by before she would learn his whereabouts.

Dozens of Ukrainian children have been separated from relatives, friends or older siblings with whom they have traveled to the southern border under a law designed to prevent migrant children from being trafficked. In effect since 2008, the law requires U.S. border authorities to place “unaccompanied minors” in government shelters, where they must remain until their guardians have been screened and approved.

The brunt of the law has been felt by Central American children, the largest group of minors to reach the border in recent years and who are often fleeing gang violence. But those children typically are aware of the policy and know that they will be taken into temporary custody. For Ukrainian children, the separation from their caretakers has been an unexpected, shocking twist in their escape from a war zone.

The separations are different from those in 2018, when the Trump administration intentionally removed children from migrant parents to discourage border crossings; the punitive measure also resulted in children being sent to government shelters.

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Ms. Merezhko shows a photo of her nephew, Ivan Yereshov, 14, that she took while they were staying at the refugee camp for Ukrainians in Tijuana, Mexico.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

“Imagine — some of these children’s parents died or are fighting; they’re traumatized from the war and the journey,” said Erika Pinheiro, a lawyer with Al Otro Lado, a migrant support group that works with asylum seekers in Tijuana, a border city that is opposite San Diego. “Then they get separated from family, without understanding why, and sent to a shelter where staff don’t speak their language.”

Ms. Pinheiro acknowledged that it was vital to protect children from potential traffickers, but she said that more careful screenings at the border could alleviate the need for traumatic separations. “There are people out there who don’t have the children’s best interest at heart,” she said. “There are also lots of extended family who should be legitimately processed.”

U.S. authorities have not released figures on how many Ukrainian children have been separated from caregivers, but volunteers working with the refugees said they have counted at least 50. Up to 20 children have lately been arriving daily in Tijuana with someone other than a parent, they said. Often these children have a father who could not leave the country because men must support the war effort and a mother who could not travel. Their parents entrusted someone else to ferry them to the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the anti-trafficking law defines any child who is not with a parent or legal guardian as “unaccompanied,” and requires that the child be transferred to a government shelter for care and custody, and be screened for signs of human trafficking.

“Any potential guardian must, by law, be vetted prior to reunification to protect against trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable children.”

Migrant advocates concede there is a risk of children becoming vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation amid the chaos of war, but say U.S. authorities are enforcing the law inconsistently, sowing confusion and heartache. Sometimes a child traveling with an adult sibling has been removed to a shelter, but not always. Many children have been separated from aunts, grandparents or friends; others have been released to continue on with them.

Last month, Molly Surazhsky of Brooklyn, the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, escorted Liza Krasulia, 17, whose mother is a close family friend, from where she had escaped the war in Poland to the southern border.

Ms. Surazhsky said she had consulted an immigration lawyer in New York who had said that she did not foresee any problems. They carried a notarized letter from the parent giving Ms. Surazhsky authority to care for Liza.

But on March 30 at the border, officials told them that they would have to hold the girl for up to two days. “They said, ‘She will be treated better than we are,’” Ms. Surazhksy recalled.

Liza was shocked and began to sob.

“I told her, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere without you.’”

After checking into a hotel in San Diego, Ms. Surazhsky got a call from Liza, who by then was even more distraught. Officers had confiscated her phone, baggage, book — and shoelaces. She was sharing a cell at the border with 25 women and children from Ukraine, Russia and other countries, all trying to sleep on the floor with only flimsy foil blankets to cover them.

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Molly Surazhsky, left, and Liza Krasulia in Mexico City.Credit...

A few days passed before Ms. Surazhsky learned that Liza had been transferred to a migrant children’s shelter in the Bronx.

She submitted 40 pages of paperwork and fingerprints, and waited for approval to officially sponsor her.

On Monday, she was informed that Liza would be released from the shelter the following day, three weeks after they had crossed the border.

“While I understand the necessity of vetting caretakers, there has to be a better way for the government to do this without inflicting more trauma on the children,” said Ms. Surazhsky, a textile artist. “They are making kids feel like prisoners.”

Casey Revkin, a co-founder of the nonprofit Each Step Home, which helps migrant families navigate the reunification process, said that for years Central American children have been unnecessarily removed at the border from grandparents, adopted parents and siblings.

“The government could send social workers to the border to verify the familial relationship and avoid the trauma of separating these children, who have gone through so much, from their caregivers,” Ms. Revkin said.

Ms. Pinheiro pointed out that during the Afghan evacuation, the U.S. government issued a directive that instructed authorities to allow children to remain with “nonparental caregivers” with whom they had entered the country, rather than be transferred to shelters.

The government shelters where the children are being taken are operated by a separate federal agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency said in a statement that its role was not to make “immigration determinations.”

“Our job is to provide them with care and protection while they’re in our temporary custody,” the statement said.

In the case of Ms. Merezhko, who has lived in the United States since 2014, the family had made a decision to try to get Ivan to safety in Los Angeles as quickly as possible, without waiting for the United States to begin issuing permission for refugees to fly directly. Entering through Mexico, which does not require visas for Ukrainians, has been a stopgap measure for an estimated 5,000 Ukrainians since the war began in February.

Ms. Merezhko spent about $7,000 to purchase airline tickets, took a leave from her job as a pharmacy technician and set out to retrieve the boy. They rendezvoused in western Ukraine, after he had managed to board an evacuation train out of the besieged city of Kharkiv, where the family lived.

“I thought I was doing the right thing because it was the only way to save the child, to bring him to a safe place,” she said.

From Madrid, they boarded a flight to Monterrey, Mexico, and connected on April 6 to Tijuana. They slept in a tent erected outside a gym that was already overflowing with Ukrainians waiting to report to the border checkpoint for processing.

When it was their turn two days later, Ms. Merezhko said, Customs and Border Protection officers carefully studied the documents and notarized letter from Ivan’s mother stating that her sister had been granted full responsibility for him.

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The Merezhko family is still waiting to be reunited with Ivan. They have been told it could take 20 to 30 days for him to be released.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

An officer told them that they would have to be separated — for just one or two days.

“Everything will be OK,” Ms. Merezhko assured Ivan.

The following day, her phone rang, and an officer put Ivan on the line. “Mama, Mama, is that you?” he asked, thinking it would be his mother in Ukraine.

His aunt’s heart sank. In the 60-second exchange, all that he was allotted, the boy said he was still at the border. The officer told Ms. Merezhko to expect another call soon.

Days went by, no call came and her anxiety mounted.

Ms. Merezhko learned that Ivan was now probably at a government shelter, and she found the number of a hotline for families trying to locate children.

An attendant confirmed that Ivan was in the system, and told his aunt that she would be contacted by a case manager in a few days.

“I got no information about how he is, where he is,” Ms. Merezhkho recalled.

Days passed.

She called the hotline again, and an operator urged her to be patient: It could take 20 to 30 days before Ivan was released, she said, and that process had not even started.

During an anguished call, Ms. Merezhko’s sister, Kateryna, told her that she now regretted sending away her only child. “At least we would know where he was if he had stayed with us,” she told her.

Over the weekend, with the help of Ms. Revkin, from the nonprofit, Ms. Merezhko filled out 25 pages of forms to which she attached green cards, marriage certificates, birth certificates and pay stubs for her and her husband. Yet she had nowhere to send the file.

Finally, on Monday, Ms. Merezhko’s husband, Vadym, got a call from Ivan, who said he was at a shelter in California. A case worker said they could send the documents. But there still was no word on when Ivan would be released.

“Good news today,” Ms. Merezhko said. “But I am a little bit worried about how long it will be.”

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Tyler HicksDimitry Yatsenko
April 19, 2022, 12:27 p.m. ET

Tyler Hicks and

Another artillery barrage strikes a hard-hit Kharkiv neighborhood, killing three civilians.

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A resident of the Saltivka neighborhood of Kharkiv walked past a civilian killed in a Russian strike on Tuesday.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
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Rogachov Vladimir Petrovich sat outside his apartment building while firefighters attempted to subdue a blaze caused by the strike.
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Emergency workers recovered the body of a man killed by a Russian strike on a residential area of Saltivka on Tuesday.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

KHARKIV, Ukraine—A Russian artillery strike in eastern Kharkiv killed at least three people on Tuesday, the latest in a series of attacks that have killed multiple civilians in what was once Ukraine’s second-largest city.

A series of blasts and a plume of rising smoke signaled that Kharkiv’s Saltivka neighborhood had been shelled once more. Saltivka has been one of the hardest-hit residential areas in the city since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

A storage facility in the neighborhood was in flames, and Ukrainian firefighters were working to contain the fire.

Rogachov Vladimir Petrovich, a local resident, wearing a dark plaid shirt, said he was in his apartment at the time of the shelling. He clenched his hands and paced in front of the burning building as white smoke rose into the air.

Around the corner, on a road that intersects apartment buildings, a lone older man wearing a black leather jacket and blue pants lay lifeless, facedown on the road. Local residents walked past, showing little emotion.

Just across the road, a woman was dead next to a park bench, face down, her arms reaching in front of her. The apartment building behind her was damaged, its windows shattered. An ambulance eventually arrived and carried her body away.

One resident was seen leaving this building with a rolling bag of belongings. Despite the obvious danger in this area, many residents have been determined to stay, only leaving when the threat of death became too close to ignore.

Marc Santora
April 19, 2022, 11:22 a.m. ET

Ukraine and its allies say sanctions could slow the Russian war machine.

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Soldiers loaded ammunition into a Russian military vehicle near the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol last week.Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

Ukraine and its allies are hoping that Russia’s war machine will suffer under the weight of Western sanctions that the country’s central bank chief warns are only beginning to be felt.

Russia still has a vastly more powerful arsenal at its disposal than Ukraine and remains dominant in the air and on the sea, but President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an overnight address Monday that producing new artillery, aircraft, helicopters and warships would be a “daunting task” for Russia under sanctions.

The Pentagon, while cautious in discussing Moscow’s military industrial complex, said sanctions have already had an impact on President Vladimir V. Putin’s ability to restock and resupply his arsenal, especially the high-tech components Russian forces need for precision-guided munitions.

“They have concerns about how fast and how much they can ramp up their own domestic production of defense articles, and the sanctions are having an affect on their ability to do that,” a senior U.S. defense department official told reporters on Monday.

Russia is redirecting its focus to seizing control over the industrial heartland of Ukraine in the east. Military analysts have said they will have advantages as battles move to wide open terrain where Ukrainian forces could be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Russian artillery pieces, tanks, attack helicopters and troops.

Wally Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury, told an economic conference on Monday that continuing U.S. sanctions aim directly at Moscow’s ability to produce weapons, targeting areas like aerospace and electronics, in an effort to stop its ability to resupply.

“The next phase of our work will be to take apart Russia’s war machine, piece by piece, by disrupting their military industrial complex and its supply chains,” he said.

It remains to be seen how quickly sanctions will have a broader impact and if Russia can turn to other nations for help. Mr. Adeyemo said that the U.S. expects China to abide by the sanctions since “China’s business with the rest of the world is far greater than its business with Russia.”

Elvira Nabiullina, the chairwoman of the Russian central bank, on Monday told lawmakers that while sanctions’ impact had largely been on the financial markets, they “will now begin to increasingly affect the real sectors of the economy.” She said “practically every product” manufactured in Russia relies on imported components.

At the same time, the Ukrainians are asking for more weapons — particularly long-range artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems — in the battle for the east. The first shipments of the latest round of U.S. military assistance, including heavier weapons systems, started arriving in Ukraine over the weekend.

The recently approved $800 million in security assistance includes 155-millimeter howitzers, 40,000 artillery rounds, armored personnel vehicles and other weapons.

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Niki Kitsantonis
April 19, 2022, 11:02 a.m. ET

Greece seizes a Russian-owned oil tanker, citing E.U. sanctions.

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The Russian-flagged oil tanker Pegas at a port in Turkey in January.Credit...Yoruk Isik/Reuters

ATHENS — Greek authorities have seized a Russian-owned oil tanker in the Aegean Sea, in line with European Union sanctions imposed against Russia over the war in Ukraine, a spokesman for the Greek coast guard said on Tuesday.

The Russian-flagged Pegas, a 249-meter oil tanker with 19 Russian crew members aboard, was seized on April 15 after encountering engine problems and is now anchored off Karystos, on the southern coast of the island of Evia, the spokesman, Nikolaos Alexiou, said.

The seizure did not relate to the cargo of crude oil but to the ship itself, which belongs to a Russian bank on the E.U. sanctions list, he said, but did not disclose the name of the bank.

Since the European Union introduced a wide range of sanctions against Russia over the war, Greek authorities have frozen the bank accounts and other assets of Russians in Greece.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff
April 19, 2022, 10:58 a.m. ET

Reporting from Brussels

The Netherlands will send more heavy military materiel, including armored vehicles, to Ukraine, Mark Rutte, the prime minister, tweeted. The Dutch government has been a top European supplier of weapons to Ukraine from the early stages of the Russian invasion, but had in recent weeks stopped disclosing details of the materiel it is supplying.

Jane Arraf
April 19, 2022, 10:21 a.m. ET

Ukraine’s war efforts gain an unlikely source of funding: memes.

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T-shirts and stickers featuring the Virgin Mary holding an antitank missile are being sold to help fund Ukrainian aid organizations.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

LVIV, Ukraine — Christian Borys was at home in Toronto in February trying to find a way to help Ukrainians threatened by war when he decided to print some stickers from an internet meme: the Virgin Mary hoisting an antitank missile.

Mr. Borys, who had worked for the e-commerce platform Shopify before turning to journalism, said he created a website in half an hour, hoping to raise money to send to a charity for Ukrainian orphans. That night, he made 88 Canadian dollars in sales. By the time he added T-shirts at the end of February, the threat of war had turned into a full-scale invasion, and he said sales grew to 170,000 Canadian dollars a day — most coming from the United States.

“The internet speaks in memes and it just became this crazy, viral sensation,” he said. “I think it’s because people were looking for a symbol of support, a way to support Ukraine, because they saw the whole injustice of everything.”

Images such as Ukrainian tractors towing away a disabled Russian tank and helicopter, although unverified, have not only helped fight Russian disinformation, but also helped support Ukrainian charities and even the Ukrainian military.

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Christian Borys with some of the T-shirts and stickers sold by his company.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

The merchandise sales they have generated in the United States and elsewhere are surprising given that many people buying the T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs and chocolate bars would never have thought about the Eastern European country before the conflict.

Mr. Borys’s site, Saint Javelin, has raised so far almost $1.5 million to assist the Ukrainian charity Help Us Help, which has branched into multiple services, and to provide protective equipment for journalists covering the war, he said.

“I think it’s unprecedented,” said Peter Dickinson, editor of the UkraineAlert service at the Atlantic Council, speaking about the internet-generated support. “We’ve got to bear in mind that this is a technological thing as well, that we’re at the point where the tools are in place.”

When Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the invasion received far less attention in the West. This time, President Biden’s warning in mid-February that Russia was days away from invading Ukraine brought thousands of journalists rushing in, and the news dominated the headlines.

“Russia had been very successful in the past about putting out all sorts of information about Ukraine because nobody really knew much about Ukraine,” Mr. Dickinson said. “It was like a blank slate.”

That quickly changed starting in February when Ukraine was seen as the clear underdog against a much more powerful invader. Crowdfunding efforts sprung up — raising millions of dollars for the Ukrainian military, including through cryptocurrency — when European allies at first would not send more arms to the country to avoid inflaming the fighting.

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Natalia Taldykin, 36, trying on a T-shirt by Aviatsiya Halychyny in Lviv, Ukraine, on Friday.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Now the overwhelming public image of Ukraine, boosted by memes and merchandise, is of a plucky country that, against all odds, is turning the tide of war.

“This is about the spirit of our fight and our struggle,” said Taras Maselko, marketing director for the clothing company Aviatsiya Halychyny, which sells T-shirts under a category called “Fight Like Ukrainians.” Mr. Maselko said 20 percent of the orders came from outside Ukraine.

“You know if you are wearing a T-shirt, if you are reading something on social media, it brings you to the reality of what is going on in Ukraine,” he said.

The clothing brand’s biggest seller is a T-shirt with the now-famous, vulgar response that Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island, an outpost in the Black Sea, gave to a Russian warship that had ordered him and his unit to surrender.

The response is a rallying call, with all its vulgarity, put up on billboards in Ukraine and chanted by children and their parents at protests outside the country.

This week, Ukraine’s postal service unveiled a stamp depicting a Ukrainian navy special forces operator with his middle finger raised at the warship. It plans to launch a website to sell the stamps, coffee cups and other merchandise.

The Russian warship, called the Moskva, sank on Thursday after Ukraine fired Neptune missiles at it, according to U.S. officials. The Russian government denied that it was attacked and said that it was disabled when a fire broke out.

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Stamps released by the Ukrainian postal service showing a Ukrainian navy special forces operator with his middle finger raised at Moskva, the Russian missile cruiser, which recently sank.Credit...Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

The head of the Ukrainian post office called the stamp “a symbol of courage and indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian people in the fight against Russia.”

The post office is printing one million stamps and selling them at face value, the equivalent of less than $1 each, its director, Igor Smelyansky, said in an interview.

He said some people reselling the stamps for much more had pledged to donate the proceeds to the Ukrainian army. But Mr. Smelyansky, who is Ukrainian American, said the opportunity to demoralize Russia was priceless.

“As the postal service we are always happy when the addressee gets the message,” he said.

Humor amid adversity runs deep in Ukrainian culture. Before being elected president three years ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky was a comedian. A famous Russian painting depicts the Zaporozhian Cossacks, in what is now Ukraine, laughing uproariously as they draft a profanity-laced letter to the 17th-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire who demanded that they submit to him.

In the current wartime, shops in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv sell chocolate bars with images of Mr. Zelensky. Another has the president’s adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, depicted as a television sitcom character saying, “Everything will be fine.”

Aviatsiya Halychyny, the clothing company, continues to produce the T-shirts in Lviv. Profits from the T-shirt line are being sent to the Ukrainian Air Force, with about $70,000 raised so far, according to Mr. Maselko.

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A worker produced T-shirts for Aviatsiya Halychyny in Lviv last week.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Three weeks ago, Mr. Borys, a Canadian of Ukrainian Polish origin, turned Saint Javelin from an all-volunteer effort to a full-time staff of four to keep up with demand.

His website has branched out from the Virgin Mary to other saints: Saint Carl Gustaf wears a gas mask, while “Saint Olha, the Warrior Queen of Kyiv” wears a crown and hoists a bazooka over her camouflaged shoulders.

“People on Instagram demand we make things basically,” Mr. Borys said. “We get messages from people in Spain who say, ‘Hey, we just shipped the C-90,’ a shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenade launcher,” he said. “And they’ll say, ‘Hey we want a saint for Spain’ or a saint specific to that type of system.”

The Virgin Mary, dressed in blue and gold robes and holding a Javelin, is an image adapted from a painting by the American artist Chris Shaw. Mr. Shaw based that painting on an earlier work in 2012 with the Madonna holding a Kalashnikov rifle.

Mr. Borys acknowledges that some people may find the image blasphemous.

“People definitely get offended but the vast, vast majority of people see what it actually stands for,” he said. “Religious symbolism has been used in war for hundreds of years. To say it’s blasphemous is not understanding the reality of war and how people look for symbols of support.”

A correction was made on 
April 18, 2022

An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the clothing company Aviatsiya Halychyny had relocated production to Lviv. It has always had production in Lviv. It also misstated the proportion of foreign orders. Foreign orders constitute 20 percent sales; they are not six times more than domestic orders.

How we handle corrections

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Matina Stevis-Gridneff
April 19, 2022, 10:21 a.m. ET

Reporting from Brussels

The European Union’s leader says the bloc is preparing an embargo on Russian oil imports.

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Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, confirmed the bloc is preparing the details of an embargo on Russian oil.Credit...Alexey Malgavko/Reuters

BRUSSELS — The president of the European Commission has confirmed publicly that the bloc is working on the details of an embargo on Russian oil imports as Moscow began a major offensive to seize eastern and southern Ukraine.

The president, Ursula von der Leyen, told a German newspaper in a weekend interview that European Union officials were hammering out how the measure would be implemented with an eye toward minimizing the damage to Europe’s economy.

The commission, the bloc’s executive branch, has been doing the technical work behind sanctions since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February.

But until now, an embargo on Russian oil was seen as too financially costly for several E.U. members, particularly the bloc’s de facto leader, Germany, which gets more than a third of its oil from Russia.

European Union officials have been wrestling with finding ways to implement the embargo without wreaking havoc on the economies of Germany and other members, officials and diplomats told the Times last week.

“We are currently developing smart mechanisms so that oil can also be included in the next sanctions step,” said Ms. von der Leyen in the interview with Bild am Sonntag.

“What shouldn’t happen is that Putin charges even higher prices in other markets for supplies that would otherwise go to the E.U.,” Ms. von der Leyen added, echoing an argument advanced by Germany against rushing into a total and immediate oil embargo.

Officials and diplomats have said that one key way to phase in an embargo on Russian oil imports would be to differentiate between oil products, as well as between oil imported by sea and oil brought in by pipeline.

Earlier this month the European Union banned Russian coal for the first time — with a four-month transition period to wind down ongoing orders. Diplomats say the European Union is now likely to adopt a similarly phased ban of Russian oil to give Germany, in particular, time to arrange alternative suppliers.

The measure would have to be approved by the bloc’s 27 members and the negotiations to win passage are expected to be difficult. Officials have said an embargo is not likely to be considered until after the final round of the French elections on April 24 for fear that a sudden rise in gasoline prices might affect the outcome.

Ms. von der Leyen, who is German, said that the current sanctions imposed by the bloc were working, noting that E.U. exports to Russia have fallen by 70 percent. “With this war, Putin is also destroying his own country and the future of its people,” Ms. von der Leyen said.

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