World
Ukraine's cultural capital no longer distant from the war
Until the missiles struck within walking distance of the cathedrals and cafes downtown, Ukraine’s cultural capital was a city that could feel distant from the war. The early panic had eased, and the growing response to morning air raid sirens was not to head downstairs but roll over in bed.
But Friday's Russian airstrikes at dawn in Lviv, just outside the international airport, made nearby buildings vibrate and shook any sense of comfort as thick black smoke billowed.
Still, the hours after the airstrikes were absent of the scenes in other Ukrainian cities that have horrified the world: shattered buildings and people fleeing under fire. Lviv was already returning to its centuries-old role as an ever-adapting crossroads.
“In the morning it was scary, but we have to go on,” said Maria Parkhuts, a local restaurant worker. “People are arriving with almost nothing, and from where it's worse.”
The city has been a refuge since the war began nearly a month ago, the last outpost before Poland and host to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians streaming through or staying on. From the other direction come aid and foreign fighters.
Also read: Ukraine confirms strike on missile warehouse
Midstream is a city that, on the surface, carries on amid world heritage churches and coffee kiosks. Food delivery cyclists with backpacks of global brands wobble down the cobblestones. Yellow trams ding through narrow streets lined with the history of one occupation after another, from the Cossacks to the Swedes to the Germans and the Soviet Union.
The threat of another occupation by Russia, after so long a fight to break from its influence, and so close to the rest of Europe, is where the new Lviv emerges now.
“It’s war,” said Maxim Tristan, a 28-year-old soldier, of Friday’s attack. “It only makes us more motivated to fight.”
On a street corner, young men line up outside a weapons shop, passing around a gun sight. Anything’s available if you have cash, one man said, prompting grins from the others. On the same block is a range for target practice, with the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the bull’s-eye. Elsewhere in the city, military veterans train civilians how to shoot.
In a popular city park, a bunker from World War II has been reopened just steps from the playground. Outside an academy for architecture, men are filling sandbags. Some of the city’s churches have wrapped up their statues and covered their stained-glass windows. Others leave their fate to God.
In the military section of the main cemetery are more than a dozen graves too new for marble crosses. The earth is piled with frosted flowers. The ground is marked with boot tracks. Behind the graves is open ground ready for several rows more.
Hours after Friday’s attack in Lviv, activists placed 109 baby strollers in the square at the heart of the city to represent the children killed in the war.
Tattoo artists prick clients with patriotic symbols. A brewery turns to making “Molotov cocktails.” A street poster shows a woman in Ukraine’s yellow and blue colors, jabbing a pistol into the mouth of a kneeling Putin. In the front room of a local business, a young woman sketches a drawing of a dove.
Volunteerism has seized the city. People are opening their homes, and local news outlets report on residents cutting up old clothing to make camouflage netting for checkpoints.
“War is not just people who fight,” said Volodymyr Pekar.
Also read: Ukraine’s leader warns war will cost Russia for generations
The 40-year-old local businessman is behind a drive to dot the countryside around the city with yellow-and-blue billboards with slogans including “God save Ukraine” and “Do not run, defend.” He was uncomfortable with the profane language that emerged early on in war messaging, and he said the more religious villagers were too.
At the same time, Pekar has used crowdfunding to raise money for what he called two of Ukrainian soldiers’ biggest needs: flak jackets and cigarettes.
“After you fight, you need to smoke,” he said.
In the shadow of slogans and bravado are the estimated 200,000 people who have fled to Lviv from harder-hit parts of Ukraine. Embraced by the city’s residents and absorbed into homes and shelters, they look the most nervous of all.
The displaced pick through boxes at aid collection points, scan notices, check their phones. Their presence has led Lviv to pivot from getaway to refuge: Instead of promoting local confectionaries and romantic places, the city’s official tourism website now shares information on bomb shelter locations and radiation alerts.
Promising “warmth for the soul,” locals on Friday launched a distinctly Lviv series of free cultural walks for internally displaced people, with the aim of visiting galleries, the medieval quarter and more.
Just days ago, thousands of newcomers crammed the central train station at the height of the flood of refugees heading west. Now the station’s platforms at times are almost bare, awaiting the millions who continue to roam Ukraine looking for a place of rest or a new purpose.
There was the furniture maker from the bombarded capital, Kyiv, who trained in air defense years ago and was on his way to an army post. Standing alone on the platform with a backpack and sleeping mat, he planned to visit his family in the western Transcarpathia region before heading east again.
Farther down the platform was a young couple, restlessly remaining in Ukraine because the man, 20, is of fighting age and is prohibited from leaving.
“I didn’t travel my country this much. Now I have to,” said the woman, Diana Tkachenko, 21. Their journey began last month in Kyiv on a crowded train and with no idea where they were going.
Their arrival in Lviv was terrible. Fellow travelers pushed and screamed, Tkachenko said. Some were coming from so far east, from Russian-speaking areas, that they didn’t speak Ukrainian.
Their train had pulled into the most Ukrainian of cities. For Tkachenko, it was her first visit to Lviv.
“I walked a lot,” she said. “I tried to enjoy the place. It’s really beautiful. It feels a lot more safe.”
But there were too many people and no place to live, she said. She and her boyfriend decided to head back east, toward Kyiv.
As their train prepared for departure, yet another was arriving.
Afghanistan world's unhappiest country, even before Taliban
Afghanistan is the unhappiest country in the world — even before the Taliban swept to power last August. That's according to a so-called World Happiness report released ahead of the U.N.-designated International Day of Happiness on Sunday.
The annual report ranked Afghanistan as last among 149 countries surveyed, with a happiness rate of just 2.5. Lebanon was the world’s second saddest country, with Botswana, Rwanda and Zimbabwe rounding out the bottom five. Finland ranked first for the fourth year running with a 7.8 score, followed by Denmark and Switzerland, with Iceland and the Netherlands also in the top five.
Researchers ranked the countries after analyzing data over three years. They looked at several categories including gross domestic product per capita, social safety nets, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity of the population, and perceptions of internal and external corruption levels.
Also read: Islamic world unites to aid desperately poor Afghanistan
Afghanistan stacked up poorly in all six categories, a confounding result coming as it does before the Taliban's arrival and despite 20 years of U.S. and international investment. The U.S. alone spent $145 billion on development in Afghanistan since 2002, according to reports by the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan.
Still, there were signs of increasing hopelessness.
Gallup did a polling in 2018 and found few Afghans they surveyed had much hope for the future. In fact the majority said they had no hope for the future.
Years of runaway corruption, increased poverty, lack of jobs, a steady increase in people forced below the poverty line, and erratic development all combined into a crushing malaise, said analyst Nasratullah Haqpal. Most Afghans had high hopes after 2001, when the Taliban were ousted and the U.S.-led coalition declared victory,
“Unfortunately the only focus was on the war, the warlords and the corrupt politicians,” said Haqpal.
Also read: Taliban Govt reaches out to India seeking visas for Afghan students stuck in Afghanistan
“People just became poorer and poorer and more disappointed and more unhappy... that is why these 20 years of investment in Afghanistan collapsed in just 11 days," he said referring to the Taliban's lightning blitz through the country before sweeping into Kabul in mid August.
When Masoud Ahmadi, a carpenter returned to Afghanistan from neighboring Pakistan after the 2001 collapse of the Taliban, his hopes for the future were bright. He dreamed of opening a small furniture-making shop, maybe employing as many as 10 people. Instead, sitting in his dusty 6-foot by 10-foot workshop on Saturday, he said he opens just twice a week for lack of work.
“When the money came to this country the leadership of the government took the money and counted it as their personal money, and the people were not helped to change their life for the better,” said Ahmadi.
The report warns that Afghanistan's numbers might drop even further next year when it measures Afghans' happiness level after the arrival of the Taliban. The economy is currently in free fall as the group struggles to transition from fighting to governing.
Ukraine confirms strike on missile warehouse
A Ukrainian military official has confirmed to a local news outlet that Russian forces carried out a missile strike Friday on a missile and ammunition warehouse in the Delyatyn settlement of the Ivano-Frankivsk region in western Ukraine.
Also read: Ukraine’s leader warns war will cost Russia for generations
Ukraine’s Air Forces spokesman Yurii Ihnat told the Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper Saturday, however, that it is yet to be confirmed whether the missile the Russians used was indeed Kinzhal, the county’s latest hypersonic missile, or some other kind.
Earlier on Saturday, a spokesman of the Russian Defense Ministry, Igor Konashenkov, said the Russian military hit the underground warehouse in Delyatyn on Friday with the hypersonic Kinzhal missile in its first reported combat use. According to Russian officials, the Kinzhal, carried by MiG-31 fighter jets, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) and flies at 10 times the speed of sound.
Also read: Putin appears at big rally as troops press attack in Ukraine
Ukraine’s leader warns war will cost Russia for generations
Ukraine’s president said Russia is trying to starve his country’s cities into submission but warned Saturday that continuing the invasion would exact a toll on Russia for “generations.” The remarks came after Moscow held a mass rally in support of its bogged-down forces.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Kremlin in an overnight video address of deliberately creating “a humanitarian catastrophe ” and appealed again for Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him to prevent more bloodshed.
Noting that the 200,000 people reported to have attended the rally was similar to the number of Russian forces deployed to Ukraine, Zelenskyy said Friday’s event in Moscow illustrated the stakes of the largest ground conflict in Europe since World War II.
“Picture for yourself that in that stadium in Moscow there are 14,000 dead bodies and tens of thousands more injured and maimed,” the Ukrainian leader said, standing outside the presidential office in the capital, Kyiv. “Those are the Russian costs throughout the invasion.”
Putin lavished praised on his country’s military forces during Friday’s flag-waving rally, which took place on the anniversary of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The event included patriotic songs such as “Made in the U.S.S.R.,” with the opening lines “Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, it’s all my country.”
“We have not had unity like this for a long time,” Putin told the cheering crowd.
Taking to the stage where a sign read “For a world without Nazism,” he railed against his foes in Ukraine with a baseless claim that they are “neo-Nazis” and insisted his actions were necessary to prevent “genocide” — an idea flatly rejected by leaders around the globe.
The rally took place as Russia has faced heavier-than-expected losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home. Russian police have detained thousands of antiwar protesters.
Fighting raged on multiple fronts in Ukraine more than three weeks after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion.
The northwest Kyiv suburbs of Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin and Moshchun were under fire on Saturday, the Kyiv regional administration reported. The city of Slavutich, located 165 kilometers (103 miles) north of the capital was “completely isolated,” the administration said.
In the besieged port city of Mariupol, the site of some of the war’s greatest suffering, Ukrainian and Russian forces battled over the Azovstal steel plant, one of the biggest in Europe, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said Saturday.
“One of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed,” Denysenko said in televised remarks.
8 die in India bus accident
At least eight people were killed and 20 others injured after a commuter bus veered off the road and overturned in the southern Indian state of Karnataka on Saturday morning.
The accident occurred in the state's Tumkur district, more than 75 kms from Karnataka capital Bengaluru, when the private bus with 60 people, mostly students, was on its way to Pavagada, police said.
"The bus was travelling at high speed and its driver suddenly lost control of the vehicle, leading to the fatal accident near Pavagada," a senior police officer told the local media.
While four passengers died on the spot, four others succumbed to their injuries on the way to a nearby government hospital, he said. "The 20 injured are being treated at the same hospital," he added.
READ: 9 die in India bus accident
Indian Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu took to Twitter to condole the deaths. "Deeply anguished to hear about the loss of lives in a bus accident in Tumkur, Karnataka. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved families," he wrote.
"A case has been registered at the local police station against the bus driver for rash and negligent driving," the officer said.
Road accidents are very common in India, with one taking place every four minutes. These accidents are often blamed on poor roads, rash driving and scant regard for traffic laws.
Indian government's implementation of stricter traffic laws in recent years have failed to rein in accidents, which claimed over 100,000 lives every year.
Zelenskyy says 9,000 leave besieged Mariupol
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian forces are blockading Ukraine’s largest cities to create a “humanitarian catastrophe” with the aim of persuading Ukrainians to cooperate with them.
He says Russians are preventing supplies from reaching surrounded cities in the center and southeast of the country.
“This is a totally deliberate tactic,” Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation, filmed outside in Kyiv, with the presidential office in the lamplight behind him.
He said more than 9,000 people were able to leave besieged Mariupol in the past day, and in all more than 180,000 people have been able to flee to safety through humanitarian corridors.
He again appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold talks with him directly. “It’s time to meet, time to speak,” he said. “I want to be heard by everyone, especially in Moscow.”
He noted that the 200,000 people Putin gathered in and around a Moscow stadium on Friday for a flag-waving rally was about the same number of Russian troops sent into Ukraine three weeks ago.
Zelenskyy then asked his audience to picture the stadium filled with the thousands of Russians who have been killed, wounded or maimed in the fighting.
The men were the first new arrivals on the space station since the start of the Russian war in Ukraine last month.
Read: India unsure of Russian arms to meet China, Pakistan threats
Video of one of the cosmonauts taken as the capsule prepared to dock with the space station showed him wearing a blue flight suit. It was unclear what, if any, message the yellow uniforms they changed into were intended to send.
Oleg Artemyev was asked about the yellow flight suits when the newly arrived cosmonauts were able to talk to family back on Earth.
He said every crew chooses its own flight suits, so that they are not all the same.
“It became our turn to pick a color. But in fact, we had accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it. So that’s why we had to wear yellow,” he said.
Read: Russian footholds in Mideast, Africa raise threat to NATO
Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov blasted off successfully from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan in their Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft at 8:55 p.m. Friday (11:55 a.m. EDT). They smoothly docked at the station just over three hours later, joining two Russians, four Americans and a German on the orbiting outpost.
Putin appears at big rally as troops press attack in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally at a packed Moscow stadium Friday and lavished praise on his troops fighting in Ukraine, three weeks into the invasion that has led to heavier-than-expected Russian losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home.
Meanwhile, the leader of Russia’s delegation in diplomatic talks with Ukraine said the sides have narrowed their differences. The Ukrainian side said its position remained unchanged.
The invasion has touched off a burst of antiwar protests inside Russia, and the Moscow rally was surrounded by suspicions it was a Kremlin-manufactured display of patriotism. Several Telegram channels critical of the Kremlin reported that students and employees of state institutions in a number of regions were ordered by their superiors to attend rallies and concerts marking the eighth anniversary of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, which was seized from Ukraine. Those reports could not be independently verified.
Elsewhere, Russian troops continued to rain lethal fire on Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kyiv, and pounded an aircraft repair installation on the outskirts of Lviv, close to the Polish border. Ukrainian officials said late Friday that the besieged southern port city of Mariupol lost its access to the Azov Sea, and Russian forces were still trying to storm the city. It was unclear whether they had seized it.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces are blockading the largest cities to create a “humanitarian catastrophe” with the goal of persuading Ukrainians to cooperate. He said the Russians are preventing supplies from reaching surrounded cities in central and southeastern Ukraine.
“This is a totally deliberate tactic,” Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation, which was recorded outside in Kyiv, with the presidential office behind him.
In a rare public appearance by Putin since the start of the war, he praised Russian troops: “Shoulder to shoulder, they help and support each other,” he said. “We have not had unity like this for a long time,” he added to cheers from the crowd.
Moscow police said more than 200,000 people were in and around the Luzhniki stadium. The event included patriotic songs, including a performance of “Made in the U.S.S.R.,” with the opening lines “Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, it’s all my country.”
Seeking to portray the war as just, Putin paraphrased the Bible to say of Russia’s troops: “There is no greater love than giving up one’s soul for one’s friends.”
Taking to the stage where a sign read “For a world without Nazism,” he railed against his foes in Ukraine with a baseless claim that they are “neo-Nazis.” Putin continued to insist his actions were necessary to prevent “genocide” — an idea flatly rejected by leaders around the globe.
Read: India unsure of Russian arms to meet China, Pakistan threats
Video feeds of the event cut out at times but showed a loudly cheering crowd that broke into chants of “Russia!”
Putin’s appearance marked a change from his relative isolation of recent weeks, when he has been shown meeting with world leaders and his staff either at extraordinarily long tables or via videoconference.
In the wake of the invasion, the Kremlin has clamped down harder on dissent and the flow of information, arresting thousands of antiwar protesters, banning sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and instituting tough prison sentences for what is deemed to be false reporting on the war, which Moscow refers to as a “special military operation.”
The OVD-Info rights group that monitors political arrests reported that at least seven independent journalists had been detained ahead of or while covering the anniversary events in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
High above the conflict, three Russian cosmonauts arrived Friday at the International Space Station wearing bright yellow flight suits with blue accents matching the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Video of one of the cosmonauts taken as the capsule prepared to dock with the space station showed him wearing a blue flight suit. It was unclear what, if any, message the yellow uniforms were intended to send.
When cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev was asked about the yellow suits, he said every crew chooses its own suits, and they had a lot of yellow material they needed to use “so that’s why we had to wear yellow.”
Since the war started, many people have used the Ukrainian flag and its colors to show solidarity with the country.
Read: Russian footholds in Mideast, Africa raise threat to NATO
Back in Moscow, Putin stood on stage in a white turtleneck and a blue down jacket and spoke for about five minutes. Some people, including presenters at the event, wore T-shirts or jackets with a “Z” — a symbol seen on Russian tanks and other military vehicles in Ukraine and embraced by supporters of the war.
Putin’s quoting of the Bible and an 18th-century Russian admiral reflected his increasing focus in recent years on history and religion as binding forces in Russia’s post-Soviet society. His branding of his enemies as Nazis evoked what many Russians consider their country’s finest hour, the defense of the motherland from Germany during World War II.
The rally came as Vladimir Medinsky, who led Russian negotiators in several rounds of talks with Ukraine, said that the sides have moved closer to agreement on the issue of Ukraine dropping its bid to join NATO and adopting a neutral status.
“That is the issue where the parties have made their positions maximally close,” Medinsky said in remarks carried by Russian media. He added that the sides are now “halfway” on issues regarding the demilitarization of Ukraine.
Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, characterized the Russian assessment as intended “to provoke tension in the media.” He tweeted: “Our positions are unchanged. Ceasefire, withdrawal of troops & strong security guarantees with concrete formulas.”
Zelenskyy again appealed to Putin to hold talks with him directly. “It’s time to meet, time to speak,” he said. “I want to be heard by everyone, especially in Moscow.”
In other developments, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke for nearly two hours in a bid by the U.S. to deter Beijing from providing military or economic assistance for Russia’s invasion.
Earlier Friday, one person was reported killed in the missile attack near Lviv. Satellite photos showed the strike destroyed a repair hangar and appeared to damage two other buildings. Ukraine said it had shot down two of six missiles in the volley, which came from the Black Sea.
The early morning attack was the closest strike yet to the center of Lviv, which has become a crossroads for people fleeing from other parts of Ukraine and for others entering to deliver aid or join the fight. The war has swelled the city’s population by some 200,000.
Zelenskyy boasted that Ukraine’s defenses have proved much stronger than expected, and Russia “didn’t know what we had for defense or how we prepared to meet the blow.”
But British Chief of Defense Intelligence Lt. Gen. Jim Hockenhull warned that after failing to take major Ukrainian cities, Russian forces are shifting to a “strategy of attrition” that will entail “reckless and indiscriminate use of firepower,” resulting in higher civilian casualties and a worsening humanitarian crisis.
In city after city around Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought safety have been attacked. Rescue workers continued to search for survivors in the ruins of a theater that was being used a shelter when it was blasted by a Russian airstrike Wednesday in Mariupol.
Ludmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, said at least 130 people had survived the theater bombing.
“But according to our data, there are still more than 1,300 people in these basements, in this bomb shelter,” Denisova told Ukrainian television. “We pray that they will all be alive, but so far there is no information about them.”
Satellite images on Friday from Maxar Technologies showed a long line of cars leaving Mariupol as people tried to evacuate, as well as devastation to homes, apartment buildings and stores.
Early morning barrages also hit a residential building in the Podil neighborhood of Kyiv, killing at least one person, according to emergency services, who said 98 people were evacuated from the building. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said 19 were wounded in the shelling.
Ukrainian officials said a fireman was killed when Russian forces shelled an area where firefighters were trying to put out a blaze in the village of Nataevka, in the Zaporizhzhia region.
Two others were killed when strikes hit residential and administrative buildings in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko.
Maj. Gen. Oleksandr Pavlyuk, who is leading the defense of the region around Ukraine’s capital, said his forces are well-positioned to defend the city and vowed: “We will never give up. We will fight until the end. To the last breath and to the last bullet.”
Don’t help Russia’s invasion, Biden tells China’s Xi
Face to face by video, President Joe Biden laid out to Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday the stiff consequences the Chinese would face from the U.S. if they provide military or economic assistance for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
There was no indication he got any assurance in return.
In fact, Xi blamed the U.S. for the crisis and insisted with a Chinese proverb that the next move was up to Biden:
“He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off,” Xi said, according to a Chinese government readout.
More formally after the nearly two-hour conversation, China’s Foreign Ministry deplored “conflict and confrontation” as “not in anyone’s interest,” but assigned no blame to Russia and said nothing of next steps.
At the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki said, “China has to make a decision for themselves, about where they want to stand and how they want the history books to look at them and view their actions.”
She declined to detail possible consequences Biden specified to the Chinese president if his country provides support for the Russian invasion.
But a senior administration official who briefed reporters following the leaders’ call said that Biden pointed to the economic isolation that Russia has faced — including economy-battering sanctions and major Western corporations suspending operations — as he sought to underscore the costs that China might suffer.
Xi urged the U.S. and Russia, which have had limited engagement since the Feb. 24 invasion, to negotiate. He noted China’s donations of humanitarian aid for Ukraine, while accusing the U.S. of provoking Russia and fueling the conflict by shipping arms to the embattled country. He also renewed China’s criticism of sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion, according to State media. As in the past, Xi did not use the terms war or invasion to describe Russia’s actions.
Ahead of the call, Psaki noted Beijing’s “rhetorical support” of Putin and an “absence of denunciation” of Russia’s invasion.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying pushed back, calling the U..S. administration “overbearing” for suggesting China risks falling on the wrong side of history.
The two leaders also discussed the longer-simmering U.S.-China dispute over Taiwan. In a reminder of China’s threat to assert its claim by force, the Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Friday, just hours before the Biden-Xi call. The U.S. is legally obligated to ensure the self-governing island democracy can defend itself and treats threats to it with “grave concern.”
Planning for the leaders’ discussion had been in the works since Biden and Xi held a virtual summit in November, but differences between Washington and Beijing over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s prosecution of his three-week-old war against Ukraine were at the center of Friday’s conversation.
The U.S.-China relationship, long fraught, has only become more strained since the start of Biden’s presidency. Biden has repeatedly criticized China for military provocations against Taiwan, human rights abuses against ethnic minorities and efforts to squelch pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong.
But the relationship may have reached a new low with the Russian invasion.
In the days after Putin deployed Russian forces in Ukraine, Xi’s government tried to distance itself from Russia’s offensive but avoided the criticism many other nations have leveled at Moscow. At other moments, Beijing’s actions have been provocative including amplifying unverified Russian claims that Ukraine ran chemical and biological weapons labs with U.S. support.
Earlier this week, the U.S. informed Asian and European allies that American intelligence had determined that China had signaled to Russia that it would be willing to provide both military support for the campaign in Ukraine and financial backing to help stave off the impact of severe sanctions imposed by the West.
Read: Hundreds feared trapped in Ukraine theater hit by airstrike
The White House says China has been sending mixed messages. There were initial signs that Chinese state-owned banks were pulling back from financing Russian activities, according to a senior Biden administration official who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal analyses. But there have also been public comments by Chinese officials who expressed support for Russia being a strategic partner.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi met in Rome this week for an intense, seven-hour talk about the Russian invasion and other issues.
Read: Rescuers search theater rubble as Russian attacks continue
Ahead of the Rome talks, Sullivan said the U.S. wouldn’t abide China or any other country helping Russia work around economy-jarring sanctions inflicted by the U.S. and other allies in response to the invasion.
Sullivan also said the administration determined China knew that Putin “was planning something” before the invasion of Ukraine, but the Chinese government “may not have understood the full extent” of what Putin had in mind.
Xi and Putin met in early February, weeks before the invasion, with the Russian leader traveling to Beijing for the start of the Winter Olympics. The two leaders issued a 5,000-word statement declaring limitless “friendship.”
Beijing’s leaders would like to be supportive of Russia, but they also recognize how badly the Russian military action is going as an overmatched Ukrainian military has put up stiff resistance, according to a Western official familiar with current intelligence assessments.
The official, who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Beijing is weighing the potential “reputational blowback” of being associated with the Russian camp. The Chinese response to Russia’s request for help is still being formulated, the official said.
Though seen as siding with Russia, China has also reached out to Ukraine, with its ambassador to the country on Monday quoted as saying: “China is a friendly country for the Ukrainian people. As an ambassador, I can responsibly say that China will forever be a good force for Ukraine, both economically and politically.”
“We have seen how great the unity of the Ukrainian people is, and that means its strength,” Fan Xianrong was quoted by Ukraine’s state news service Ukrinform as telling regional authorities in the western city of Lviv, where the Chinese Embassy has relocated to.
State media quoted Xi as saying China-U.S. relations had yet to “emerge from the dilemma created by the previous U.S. administration, but instead encountered more and more challenges,” singling out Taiwan as one area in particular.
“If the Taiwan issue is not handled properly, it will have an undermining impact on the relationship between the two countries,” Xi reportedly told Biden.
Xi, Biden exchanging views on China-U.S. ties, issues of common concern
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday exchanged views with U.S. President Joe Biden at the latter's request on China-U.S. relations and issues of common concern.
Xi stresses joint China-U.S. efforts for world peace, tranquility
China and the United States must not only guide their relations forward along the right track, but also shoulder their share of international responsibilities and work for world peace and tranquility, Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Friday.
Noting the international landscape has experienced new major developments since their first virtual meeting last November, Xi said the prevailing trend of peace and development is facing serious challenges, and the world is neither tranquil nor stable.
"The Ukraine crisis is not something we want to see," Xi said.
The events again show that countries should not come to the point of meeting on the battlefield. Conflict and confrontation are not in anyone's interest, and peace and security are what the international community should treasure the most, he added.
"As permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and the world's two leading economies, we must not only guide the China-U.S. relations forward along the right track, but also shoulder our share of international responsibilities and work for world peace and tranquility," Xi said.
Putin appears at big rally as troops press attack in Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally at a Moscow stadium and praised his country’s troops Friday as they pressed their lethal attacks on Ukrainian cities with shelling and missiles.
“Shoulder to shoulder, they help and support each other,” Putin said in a rare public appearance since the invasion three weeks ago that made Russia an outcast among nations. “We have not had unity like this for a long time,” he added to cheers from the crowd.
Moscow police said more than 200,000 people were in and around the Luzhniki stadium for the celebration marking the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, seized from Ukraine.
The event included well-known singer Oleg Gazmanov singing “Made in the U.S.S.R.,” with the opening lines “Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, it’s all my country.”
Seeking to portray the war as a just one and commend Russia’s troops, Putin paraphrased the Bible to say, “There is no greater love than giving up one’s soul for one’s friends.” And he continued to insist his actions were necessary to prevent “genocide,” a claim flatly denied by leaders around the globe.
Standing on stage in a white turtleneck and a blue down jacket, Putin spoke for about five minutes. Some people, including presenters at the event, wore T-shirts or jackets with a “Z” — a symbol seen on Russian tanks and military vehicles in Ukraine and embraced by supporters of the war.
Read: Russian strikes hit Ukrainian capital and outskirts of Lviv
His quoting of the Bible and a Russian admiral of the 18th century reflected his increasing focus in recent years on history and religion as binding forces in Russia’s post-Soviet society.
Meanwhile, Russian troops continued to pound the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and launched a barrage of missiles on the outskirts of the western city of Lviv.
The early morning attack on Lviv’s edge was the closest strike yet to the center of the city, which has become a crossroads for people fleeing from other parts of Ukraine and for others entering to deliver aid or fight.
In city after city around Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought safety have been attacked. Rescue workers searched for survivors in the ruins of a theater that served as a shelter when it was blasted by a Russian airstrike Wednesday in the besieged southern city of Mariupol.
Ludmyla Denisova, Ukrainain parliament’s human rights commissioner, said at least 130 people had survived the theater bombing.
“But according to our data, there are still more than 1,300 people in these basements, in this bomb shelter,” Denisova told Ukrainian television. “We pray that they will all be alive, but so far there is no information about them.”
At Lviv, black smoke billowed for hours after the explosions, which hit a facility for repairing military aircraft near the city’s international airport, 6 kilometers (4 miles) from the center. One person was wounded, the regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyy, said.
Multiple blasts hit in quick succession around 6 a.m., shaking nearby buildings, witnesses said. The missiles were launched from the Black Sea, but the Ukrainian air force’s western command said it had shot down two of six missile in the volley. A bus repair facility was also damaged, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said.