Ukraine
Ukraine war may lead to rethinking of US defense of Europe
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and his push to upend the broader security order in Europe may lead to a historic shift in American thinking about defense of the continent. Depending on how far Putin goes, this could mean a buildup of U.S. military power in Europe not seen since the Cold War.
The prospect of a bigger U.S. military footprint in Europe is a remarkable turnaround from just two years ago.
In 2020, President Donald Trump ordered thousands of American troops out of Germany as part of his argument that Europeans were undeserving allies. Just days after taking office, President Joe Biden stopped the withdrawal before it could start, and his administration has stressed NATO’s importance even as Biden identifies China as the main long-term threat to U.S. security.
Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Read: Russia keeps up attacks in Ukraine as two sides hold talks
“We are in a new era of sustained confrontation with Russia,” says Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia and former deputy secretary-general of NATO. He argues that the United States, in cooperation with NATO allies, will need to establish a more muscular stance to deal with a more threatening Russia. That is especially so in Eastern Europe, where Russia’s proximity poses a problem for the three Baltic nations that are former Soviet states.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was flying to Europe on Tuesday for his second recent round of Ukraine consultations at NATO headquarters in Brussels. He also will travel to two Eastern European NATO countries — Slovakia, which borders Ukraine, and Bulgaria, which does not. After a NATO meeting last month, Austin visited two other allies on the eastern flank — Poland and Lithuania.
In just the past two months, the U.S. presence in Europe has jumped from about 80,000 troops to about 100,000, which is nearly as many as were there in 1997 when the United States and its NATO allies began an expansion of the alliance that Putin says threatens Russia and must be reversed. By comparison, in 1991, the year the Soviet Union dissolved, the United States had 305,000 troops in Europe, including 224,000 in Germany alone, according to Pentagon records. The number then dropped steadily, reaching 101,000 in 2005 and about 64,000 as recently as 2020.
This year’s U.S. troop additions are billed as temporary, but there’s no certainty how long they’ll stay. They include an armored brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, totaling about 4,000 soldiers, to Germany, and a similar-size infantry brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, to Poland. Numerous Army headquarters units also have been sent to Poland and Germany. Austin also sent F-35A fighter jets to NATO’s eastern flank and Apache attack helicopters to the Baltic states.
A recent Pentagon review of its worldwide military presence concluded that troop levels and positions in Europe were about right. But in testimony before a House committee several days after Putin invaded Ukraine, Mara Karlin, a senior Pentagon official who oversaw the 2021 review, said that conclusion will have to be reconsidered.
The Pentagon must “ensure that we’ve got deterrence of Russia and that we can absolutely 150% say that NATO is safe and secure,” not just in light of Russia’s invasion but for the longer term, she said March 1.
Putin’s war in Ukraine has prompted a rethinking of regional defense needs not just by Washington but also some European allies, including Germany, which last month broke with a longstanding policy of not exporting weapons to conflict zones by sending anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to Ukraine. Germany also committed to a much bigger defense budget.
“A new reality,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared.
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Putin has not only demanded that Ukraine disavow its ambition to join NATO but also insisted the alliance withdraw its forces from NATO’s eastern flank — demands the U.S. and NATO reject as counter to the fundamental rights of nations to decide their foreign relations for themselves and of NATO’s basic commitment to provide security for all members equally.
If Russia were to take control of the entirety of Ukraine, it would be on the border of additional NATO countries, including Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. Poland and Lithuania already share a land border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, headquarters of the Baltic Fleet of the Russian Navy. There is concern that Putin could decide to make a play for control of that 60-mile-long land corridor, known as the Suwalki Gap, that connects Kaliningrad to Belarus.
Vershbow, the former deputy NATO secretary-general who is now a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, recommends that the U.S. and NATO move beyond their current reliance on light, battalion-size battle groups in Eastern Europe to instead deploy heavier, larger and permanent forces there.
Such a transition on NATO’s eastern flank is just the sort of thing Putin says is a threat to Russia and says he will no longer tolerate. He has demanded a return to the arrangements that existed in 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed.
In that document, Moscow acknowledged that NATO would go ahead with plans to invite Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join the alliance. Notably, the document also said that “in the foreseeable security environment,” NATO would forgo “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new members.”
Does that foreclose the option of a U.S. troop buildup in Eastern Europe? No, says a new report by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. It argues that the restrictions on NATO’s military presence in Eastern Europe as described in the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act are irrelevant in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We are in new, dangerous territory — a period of sustained tensions, military moves and countermoves, and major intermittent military crises in the Euro-Atlantic area that will ebb and flow for at least the remainder of the 2020s, if not longer,” the report says.
Russia keeps up attacks in Ukraine as two sides hold talks
Russia and Ukraine kept a fragile diplomatic path open with a new round of talks Monday even as Moscow's forces pounded away at Kyiv and other cities across the country in a punishing bombardment that the Red Cross said has created “nothing short of a nightmare” for civilians.
Meanwhile, a convoy of 160 civilian cars left the encircled port city of Mariupol along a designated humanitarian route, the city council reported, in a rare glimmer of hope a week and a half into the lethal siege that has pulverized homes and other buildings and left people desperate for food, water, heat and medicine.
The latest negotiations, which were held via video conference, were the fourth round involving higher-level officials from the two countries and the first in a week. The talks ended without a breakthrough after several hours, with an aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying the negotiators took “a technical pause” and planned to meet again Tuesday.
The two sides had expressed some optimism in the past few days. Mykhailo Podolyak, the aide to Zelenskyy, said over the weekend that Russia was “listening carefully to our proposals.” He tweeted Monday that the negotiators would discuss “peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops & security guarantees.”
Previous discussions, held in person in Belarus, produced no lasting humanitarian routes or agreements to end the fighting.
Also read: Ukraine, Russia resume talks as fighting nears Kyiv
Overall, nearly all of the Russian offensives remained stalled on Monday after making little progress over the weekend, according to a senior U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon's assessment. Russian troops were still about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the center of Kyiv, the official said.
The official said that Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces have launched more than 900 missiles but that Ukraine's airspace is still contested, with Russia not achieving total air superiority.
Overnight, air raid alerts sounded in cities and towns around the country, from near the Russian border in the east to the Carpathian Mountains in the west, and fighting continued on the outskirts of Kyiv. Ukrainian officials said Russian forces shelled several suburbs of the capital.
Ukrainian authorities said two people were killed when the Russians struck an airplane factory in Kyiv, sparking a large fire. The Antonov factory is Ukraine’s largest aircraft manufacturing plant and is best known for producing many of the world’s biggest cargo planes.
Russian artillery fire also hit a nine-story apartment building in the northern Obolonskyi district of the city, killing two more people, authorities said. Firefighters worked to rescue survivors, painstakingly carrying an injured woman on a stretcher away from the blackened and smoking building.
And a Russian airstrike near a Ukrainian checkpoint caused extensive damage to a downtown Kyiv neighborhood, killing one person, Ukraine's emergency agency said.
Kateryna Lot said she was in her apartment as her child did homework when they heard a loud explosion and ran to take shelter.
“The child became hysterical. Our windows and the balcony were shattered. Part of the floor fell down,” she said. “It was very, very scary.”
A town councilor for Brovary, east of Kyiv, was killed in fighting there, officials said. Shells also fell on the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, which have seen some of the worst fighting in Russia’s stalled attempt to take the capital, local authorities said.
Airstrikes were reported across the country, including the southern city of Mykolaiv, and the northern city of Chernihiv, where heat was knocked out to most of the town. Explosions also reverberated overnight around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson.
Nine people were killed in a rocket attack on a TV tower in the western village of Antopol, according to the region's governor.
Also read: Talks to resume as Russia pressures Ukrainian capital Kyiv
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, firefighters doused the smoldering remains of a four-story residential building. It was unclear whether there were casualties.
In the southern city of Mariupol, where the war has produced some of the greatest suffering, the city council didn’t say how many people were in the convoy of cars headed westward for the city of Zaporizhzhia. But it said a cease-fire along the route appeared to be holding.
Previous attempts to evacuate civilians and deliver humanitarian aid to the city of 430,000 were thwarted by continuing fighting.
Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the war has become “nothing short of a nightmare" for those living in besieged cities, and he pleaded for safe passage for civilians to leave and humanitarian aid to be brought in through the front lines.
"The situation cannot, cannot continue like this,” he said. “History is watching what is happening in Mariupol and other cities."
A pregnant woman who became a symbol of Ukraine’s suffering when she was photographed being carried from a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol last week has died along with her baby, the Associated Press has learned.
Mariupol residents including Natalia Koldash rushed to shelter inside a building Sunday as an unidentified plane passed overhead.
“We have no information at all,” Koldash said. “We know nothing. It looks like we are living in a deep forest."
Associated Press video showed debris from a damaged residential building and another building that a young man named Dima described as an elementary school.
“There was no military at this school,” he said. “It’s unclear why it was hit.”
The Russian military said 20 civilians in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine were killed by a ballistic missile launched by Ukrainian forces. The claim could not be independently verified.
The U.N. has recorded at least 596 civilian deaths since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, though it believes the true toll is much higher. Millions more have fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million crossing into Poland and other neighboring countries in what the U.N. has called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
“All day crying from the pain of having to part with loved ones, with my husband, my parents,” 33-year-old refugee Alexandra Beltuygova said in the Polish border town of Przemysl after fleeing the industrial Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
“I understand that we may not see them. I wish this war would end,” she said.
Russia’s military is bigger and better equipped than Ukraine’s, but its troops have faced stiffer-than-expected resistance, bolstered by arms supplied by the West. The U.S. said Russia asked China for military equipment to use in Ukraine — a claim the Kremlin denied.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “Russia has its own potential to continue the operation" and that it was "unfolding in accordance with the plan and will be completed on time and in full.”
Russia has denied intending to occupy Ukraine, but Peskov said it “does not rule out the possibility of taking full control of large settlements that are now practically surrounded.”
The war expanded Sunday when Russian missiles pounded a military training base in western Ukraine, close to the Polish border, that previously served as a crucial hub for cooperation between Ukraine and NATO.
The attack killed 35 people, Ukrainian officials said, and raised fears that NATO could be drawn into direct conflict with Russia.
The senior U.S. defense official aid that the base was not being used at the time as a shipment site for U.S. military supplies to Ukraine.
Ukraine, Russia resume talks as fighting nears Kyiv
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators held a new round of talks on Monday, even as Russia's military forces kept up their punishing campaign to capture Ukraine's capital with fighting and artillery fire in Kyiv's suburbs.
After an airstrike on a military base near the Polish border brought the war dangerously close to NATO's doorstep, the talks raised hopes for progress in evacuating civilians from besieged Ukrainian cities and getting emergency supplies to areas without enough food, water and medicine.
“Everyone is waiting for news. We will definitely report in the evening,” Ukrainian President President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a new video address.
The negotiations taking place by video conference are the fourth round involving higher-level officials from the two countries and the first held in a week. The previous discussions took place in person in Belarus, and did not produce breakthroughs to end the fighting in Ukraine or lasting agreements on humanitarian routes.
“Communication is being held, yet it’s hard,” Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted along with a photo of the two sides meeting by video link. Earlier, Podolyak said the negotiators would discuss “peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops & security guarantees.”
Air raid alerts sounded in cities and towns all around the country overnight, from near the Russian border in the east to the Carpathian Mountains in the west, as fighting continued on the outskirts of Kyiv. Ukrainian officials said Russian forces shelled several suburbs of the capital, a major political and strategic target for their invasion.
Ukrainian authorities said two people died and seven were injured after Russian forces struck an airplane factory in Kyiv, sparking a large fire. The Antonov factory is Ukraine’s largest aircraft manufacturing plant and is best known for producing many of the world’s biggest cargo planes.
Russian artillery fire also hit a nine-story apartment building in the northern Obolonskyi district of the city, killing two more people, authorities said. Firefighters worked to rescue survivors, painstakingly carrying an injured woman on a stretcher away from the blackened and still smoking building.
READ: Talks to resume as Russia pressures Ukrainian capital Kyiv
A town councilor for Brovary, east of Kyiv, was killed in fighting there, officials said. Shells also fell on the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, which have seen some of the worst fighting in Russia’s stalled attempt to take the capital, local officials said.
Airstrikes were reported across the country, including the southern city of Mykolaiv, and the northern city of Chernihiv, where heat was knocked out to most of the town. Explosions also rang out overnight around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, firefighters doused the remains of a four-story residential building on a street of apartments and shops. Ukrainian emergency services said a strike hit the building, leaving smoldering piles of wood and metal. It was unclear whether there were casualties.
The surrounded southern city of Mariupol, where the war has produced some of the greatest human suffering, remained cut off despite earlier talks on creating aid or evacuation convoys.
“The city is encircled and civilians today cannot make it out,” said Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross. He said the situation for besieged civilians was “nothing short of a nightmare.”
A pregnant woman who became a symbol of Ukraine’s suffering when she was photographed being carried from a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol has died along with her baby, the Associated Press has learned. Images of the woman being rushed to an ambulance on a stretcher had circled the world, epitomizing the horror of an attack on humanity’s most innocent.
Ukraine announced plans for new humanitarian aid and evacuation corridors on Monday, although ongoing shelling caused similar efforts to fail in the last week, including on Sunday.
The U.N. has recorded at least 596 civilian deaths since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, though it believes the true toll is much higher. Millions more people have fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million crossing into Poland and other neighboring countries in what the U.N. refugee agency has called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Since launching its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has waged a multi-pronged attack. Russia’s military is bigger and better equipped than Ukraine’s, but its troops have faced stiffer than expected resistance, bolstered by Western weapons support that has frustrated Russian President Vladimir Putin.
With their advance slowed in several areas, they have bombarded several cities with unrelenting shelling, hitting two dozen medical facilities and a large number of apartment buildings.
The war expanded Sunday when Russian missiles pounded a military training base in western Ukraine that previously served as a crucial hub for cooperation between Ukraine and NATO.
The attack killed 35 people, Ukrainian officials said, and the base’s proximity to the borders of Poland and other NATO members raised concerns that the Western military alliance could be drawn into the the largest land conflict in Europe since World War II.
Speaking Sunday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it a “black day” and again urged NATO leaders to establish a no-fly zone over his country, a move the West has rejected for fear of starting a direct confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
READ: Russian airstrike escalates offensive in western Ukraine
“If you do not close our sky, it is only a matter of time before Russian missiles fall on your territory. NATO territory. On the homes of citizens of NATO countries,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukraine said Moscow's troops nevertheless failed to make major advances between Sunday and Monday. The Russian Defense Ministry gave a different assessment, saying its forces had advanced 11 kilometers (7 miles) and reached five towns north of Mariupol, whose capture could help Russia establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Russia's latest attack on its ex-Soviet neighbor has shaken the post-Cold War security order, with unpredictable and dangerous consequences.
The U.S. says Russia asked China for military equipment to use in Ukraine after the West imposed severe economic sanctions to hobble the Russian economy and the invasion met stronger-than-expected Ukrainian resistance.
The request heightened tensions about the ongoing war ahead of a Monday meeting in Rome between top aides for the U.S. and Chinese governments. U.S. President Joe Biden is sending his national security adviser to Rome to meet with a Chinese official over worries that Beijing is amplifying Russian disinformation and may help Mosc ow evade Western economic sanctions.
In his talks with senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi, Sullivan will be looking for limits in what Beijing will do for Moscow.
Russia's cruise-missile strike on the military base in western Ukraine also has international significance. The International Center for Peacekeeping and Security near Yavoriv has long been used to train Ukrainian soldiers, often with instructors from the United States and other NATO members. In addition to the 35 deaths, 134 people were wounded in the attack, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.
The base is less than 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the Polish border and has hosted NATO training drills, making it a potent symbol of Russia’s longstanding fears that the expansion of the 30-member Western military alliance to include former Soviet states threatens its security — something NATO denies.
NATO said Sunday that it currently does not have any personnel in Ukraine, though the United States has increased the number of U.S. troops deployed to NATO member Poland, Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said the West would respond if Russia’s strikes travel outside Ukraine and hit any NATO members, even accidentally.
Ina Padi, a 40-year-old Ukrainian who crossed the border with her family, was taking shelter at a fire station in Wielkie Oczy, Poland, when she was awakened by blasts Sunday morning from across the border that shook her windows.
“I understood in that moment, even if we are free of it, (the war) is still coming after us,” she said.
US view of Putin: Angry, frustrated, likely to escalate war
More than two weeks into a war he expected to dominate in two days, Vladimir Putin is projecting anger, frustration at his military’s failures and a willingness to cause even more violence and destruction in Ukraine, in the assessment of U.S. intelligence officials.
Officials in recent days have publicly said they’re worried the Russian president will escalate the conflict to try to break Ukraine’s resistance. Russia still holds overwhelming military advantages and can bombard the country for weeks more. And while the rest of the world reacts to horrific images of the war he started, Putin remains insulated from domestic pressure by what CIA Director William Burns called a “propaganda bubble.”
Putin’s mindset — as tough as it is to determine from afar — is critical for the West to understand as it provides more military aid to Ukraine and also prevent Putin from directly taking on NATO countries or possibly reaching for the nuclear button. Intelligence officials over two days of testimony before Congress last week openly voiced concerns about what Putin might do. And those concerns increasingly shape discussions about what U.S. policymakers are willing to do for Ukraine.
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Over two decades, Putin has achieved total dominance of Russia’s government and security services, ruling with a tiny inner circle, marginalizing dissent, and jailing or killing his opposition. He has long criticized the breakup of the Soviet Union, dismissed Ukraine’s claims to sovereignty, and mused about nuclear war ending with Russians as “martyrs.” Burns told lawmakers that he believed Putin was “stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years.”
Putin had expected to seize Kyiv in two days, Burns said. Instead, his military has failed to take control of major cities and lost several thousand soldiers already. The West has imposed sanctions and other measures that have crippled the Russian economy and diminished living standards for oligarchs and ordinary citizens alike. Much of the foreign currency Russia had accumulated as a bulwark against sanctions is now frozen in banks abroad.
Burns is a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow who has met with Putin many times. He told lawmakers in response to a question about the Russian president’s mental state that he did not believe Putin was crazy.
“I think Putin is angry and frustrated right now,” he said. “He’s likely to double down and try to grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.”
Russia’s recent unsupported claims that the U.S. is helping Ukraine develop chemical or biological weapons suggest that Putin may himself be prepared to deploy those weapons in a “false flag” operation, Burns said.
There’s no apparent path to ending the war. It is nearly inconceivable that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has won admiration around the world for leading his country’s resistance, would suddenly recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea or support granting new autonomy to Russian-friendly parts of eastern Ukraine. And even if he captures Kyiv and deposes Zelenskyy, Putin would have to account for an insurgency supported by the West in a country of more than 40 million.
“He has no sustainable political end-game in the face of what is going to continue to be fierce resistance from Ukrainians,” Burns said.
Avril Haines, President Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence, said Putin “perceives this as a war he cannot afford to lose. But what he might be willing to accept as a victory may change over time given the significant costs he is incurring.”
Intelligence analysts think Putin’s recent raising of Russia’s nuclear alert level was “probably intended to deter the West from providing additional support to Ukraine,” she said.
The White House’s concern about escalation has at times frustrated both Democrats and Republicans. After initially signaling support, the Biden administration declined in recent days to support a Polish plan to donate Soviet-era warplanes to Ukraine that would have required the U.S. to participate in the transfer. The administration previously delayed sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and would not send Stinger air-defense missiles to Ukraine before changing course.
Questioned on Thursday, Haines said Putin might see the plane transfer as a bigger deal than the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons already going to Ukraine. Haines did not disclose whether the U.S. had intelligence to support that finding.
Read: Russian footholds in Mideast, Africa raise threat to NATO
U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said the Biden administration had been “always a step or two late” out of fear of triggering Putin. He urged the White House to agree quickly to the transfer of planes.
“I think it comes off as quibbling,” Quigley said. “If anyone thinks that Putin is going to distinguish and differentiate — ‘Oh, well, they’re taking off from Poland’ — he sees all of this as escalatory.”
Meanwhile, as the violence worsens and more Russians die, the West is also watching for any sign of holes forming in Putin’s “propaganda bubble.” One independent Russian political analyst, Kirill Rogov, posted on his Telegram account that the war is “lost” and an “epic failure.”
“The mistake was the notion that the West was unwilling to resist aggression, that it was lethargic, greedy and divided,” Rogov wrote. “The idea that the Russian economy is self-sufficient and secure was a mistake. The mistake was the idea of the quality of the Russian army. And the main mistake was the idea that Ukraine is a failed state, and Ukrainians are not a nation.
“Four mistakes in making one decision is a lot,” he said.
Before the invasion, polling conducted by the Levada Center, Russia’s top independent opinion research firm, found that 60% of respondents consider the U.S. and NATO the “initiators” of conflict in eastern Ukraine. Just 3% answered Russia. The polling was in January and February, and the Levada Center has not published new polling since the war began.
Outsiders hope ordinary Russians will respond to the sharp decline in their living standards and find honest portrayals of the war through relatives and online, including by using VPN software to bypass Kremlin blocks on social media. Russian state television continues to air false or unsupported allegations about the U.S. and Ukrainian governments and push a narrative that Russia can’t afford to lose the war.
“Otherwise, it will lead to the death of Russia itself,” said Vladimir Solovyov, host of a prime-time talk show on state TV channel Russia 1, on his daily radio show last week.
Hadisur’s body won’t reach Dhaka today as flights suspended in Istanbul
The body of Md Hadisur Rahman , who was killed in a rocket attack on a Bangladeshi vessel stranded at a Ukraine port, will not reach Dhaka on Sunday as flights in Istanbul have been suspended due snow storm.
The body of Hadisur was scheduled to reach Dhaka on Sunday from Romania via Istanbul but the flight carrying the body failed to take off timely due to heavy snow storm in Istanbul, said President of Bangladesh Merchant Marine Officers Association (BMMOA) Captain Enam Chowdhury.
However, the body will arrive within two or three days if the weather improves, he said.
Earlier on Wednesday, the 28 surviving crew members of the Bangladeshi ship 'Banglar Samriddhi', who were stranded in war-torn Ukraine, arrived in Dhaka.
They went from Ukraine to Moldova to reach Bucharest, from where they flew to Dhaka.
READ: Hadisur’s body to reach Bangladesh on March 13-14: Shahriar
The Bangladesh Shipping Corporation (BSC) ship had been stranded at Olvia port in Ukraine since February 23, following Russia's invasion of its eastern European neighbour.
Hadisur, third engineer of the ship, was killed in a rocket attack on the vessel on March 3. The ship had since then been declared abandoned.
READ: Hadisur’s body kept in Ukraine, 5 youths still in detention centre: FM
Hadisur’s body was preserved in a bunker near Ukraine as the procedure to bring back Hadisur’s body was being delayed due to the worsening situation in Ukraine.
Russians strike near Kyiv, block aid convoy; port city reels
Russian forces pounded the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol on Saturday, shelling its downtown as residents hid in an iconic mosque and elsewhere to avoid the explosions. Fighting also raged in the outskirts of the capital, Kyiv, as Russia kept up its bombardment of other cities throughout the country.
Mariupol has endured some of Ukraine’s worst punishment since Russia invaded. Unceasing barrages have thwarted repeated attempts to bring food, water and medicine into the city of 430,000 and to evacuate its trapped civilians. More than 1,500 people have died in Mariupol during the siege, according to the mayor's office, and the shelling has even interrupted efforts to bury the dead in mass graves.
Talks aimed at reaching a cease-fire again failed Saturday, and while the U.S. announced plans to provide another $200 million to Ukraine for weapons, a senior Russian diplomat warned that Moscow could attack foreign shipments of military equipment.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of employing “a new stage of terror” with the alleged detention of a mayor from a city west of Mariupol.
Russian soldiers pillaged a humanitarian convoy that was trying to reach Mariupol and blocked another, a Ukrainian official said. Ukraine’s military said Russian forces captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, tightening their siege of the strategic port. Taking Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
“They are bombing it (Mariupol) 24 hours a day, launching missiles. It is hatred. They kill children,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during a video address. Satellite images released Saturday by the company Maxar showed fires in parts of the city and extensive damage to apartments, homes and other infrastructure.
An Associated Press journalist in Mariupol witnessed tanks firing on a nine-story apartment building and was with a group of hospital workers who came under sniper fire on Friday. A worker shot in the hip survived, but conditions in the hospital were deteriorating: Electricity was reserved for operating tables, and people with nowhere else to go lined the hallways.
Among them was Anastasiya Erashova, who wept and trembled as she held a sleeping child. Shelling had just killed her other child as well as her brother’s child, Erashova said, her scalp crusted with blood.
READ: Russian footholds in Mideast, Africa raise threat to NATO
“No one was able to save them,” she said.
In Irpin, a suburb about 12 miles (20 kilometers) northwest of central Kyiv, bodies lay out in the open Saturday on streets and in a park.
“When I woke up in the morning, everything was covered in smoke, everything was dark. We don’t know who is shooting and where,” resident Serhy Protsenko said as he walked through his neighborhood. Explosions sounded in the distance. “We don’t have any radio or information.”
Zelenskyy encouraged his people to keep up their resistance.
“We do not have the right to let up our defense, no matter how difficult it may be,” he said. Later Saturday, Zelenskyy reported that 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had died since the Russian invasion began Feb. 24.
Zelenskyy again deplored NATO’s refusal to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine and said Ukraine has sought ways to procure air defense assets, though he didn't elaborate. U.S. President Joe Biden announced another $200 million in aid to Ukraine, with an additional $13 billion included in a bill that has passed the House and should pass the Senate within days. NATO has said that imposing a no-fly zone could lead to a wider war with Russia.
The Ukrainian president also accused Russia of detaining the mayor of Melitopol, a city 192 kilometers (119 miles) west of Mariupol. The Ukrainian leader called on Russian forces to heed calls from demonstrators in the occupied city for the mayor's release.
In multiple areas around Kyiv, artillery barrages sent residents scurrying for shelter as air raid sirens wailed. Britain's Defense Ministry said Russian forces that had been massed north of the capital had edged to within 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the city center and spread out, likely to support an attempted encirclement.
A convoy of hundreds of people fleeing Peremoha, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Kyiv, were forced to turn back under shelling by Russian forces that killed seven people, including a child, Ukraine's defense ministry said Saturday. Moscow has said it would establish humanitarian corridors out of conflict zones, but Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of disrupting those paths and firing on civilians.
Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said just nine of 14 agreed-upon corridors were open on Saturday, and that about 13,000 people had used them to evacuate around the country.
Ukraine's military and volunteer forces have been preparing for an all-out assault on the capital. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Thursday that about 2 million people, half the metropolitan area's inhabitants, had left and that “every street, every house … is being fortified.”
Zelenskyy said Saturday that Russia would need to carpet-bomb Kyiv and kill its residents to take the city.
READ: Russia strikes near Ukraine’s capital; mosque reported hit
“They will come here only if they kill us all,” he said. “If that is their goal, let them come.”
French and German leaders spoke Saturday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a failed attempt to reach a cease-fire. According to the Kremlin, Putin laid out terms for ending the war. For ending hostilities, Moscow has demanded that Ukraine drop its bid to join NATO and adopt a neutral status; acknowledge the Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014; recognize the independence of separatist regions in the country’s east; and agree to demilitarize.
Zelenskyy told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Saturday that he would be open to meeting Putin in Jerusalem to discuss an end to the war, but that there would first have to be a cease-fire. Bennett recently met in Moscow with Putin, who has ignored previous offers of talks from Zelenskyy.
In Mariupol, the Ukrainian government said Saturday that the Sultan Suleiman Mosque was hit, but an unverified Instagram post by a man claiming to be the mosque association’s president said the building was spared when a bomb fell about 750 yards (700 meters) away.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey said 86 Turkish nationals, including 34 children, were among the people who had sought safety in the mosque.
With the port's electricity, gas and water supplies knocked out, aid workers and Ukrainian authorities described an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. Aid group Doctors Without Borders said Mariupol residents are dying from a lack of medication and are draining heating pipes for drinking water.
Russian forces have hit at least two dozen hospitals and medical facilities, according to the World Health Organization.
The Russian invaders appear to have struggled far more than expected against determined Ukrainian fighters. Still, Russia's stronger military threatens to grind down Ukrainian forces.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned on Saturday that his country could attack foreign shipments of military equipment to Ukraine. He said sending equipment is "an action that makes those convoys legitimate targets."
Thousands of soldiers on both sides are believed to have been killed along with many civilians, including at least 79 Ukrainian children, its government says. At least 2.5 million people have fled the country, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
One is Elena Yurchuk, a nurse from the northern city of Chernihiv. She was in a Romanian train station Saturday with her teenage son, Nikita, unsure whether their home was still standing.
“We have nowhere to go back to,” said Yurchuk, 44, a widow who hopes to find work in Germany. “Nothing left.”
Russia-Ukraine war: Key things to know about the conflict
A relentless assault on the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol continued Saturday, as Russian forces shelled the city's downtown, including an area around a mosque that was sheltering more than 80 people — some children.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow has warned the United States that Moscow could attack convoys carrying military equipment to Ukraine, calling them "legitimate targets.” U.S. President Joe Biden announced additional aid to Ukraine of up to $200 million for weapons, military services, education and training.
Russian units fanned out to prepare for an assault on Ukraine's capital of Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia would need to carpet-bomb Kyiv and kill its residents to take the city.
Now in its third week, the war has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee Ukraine.
READ: Russian footholds in Mideast, Africa raise threat to NATO
Here are some key things to know about the conflict:
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN BESIEGED MARIUPOL?
Russian shelling of this Ukrainian port city of 430,000 has been relentless, and the mayor's office says more than 1,500 have died since the siege began. Russian forces hammered the city's downtown on Saturday as residents hid.
The Ukrainian government said a mosque where people sought shelter in the city's center was shelled. However, an unverified Instagram post by a man claiming to be the mosque association’s president said the mosque itself wasn't hit, but a bomb fell about 750 yards (700 meters) away. The Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey said 86 Turkish nationals, including 34 children, were among those who had sought safety in the mosque.
Repeated attempts to bring food to Mariupol and evacuate civilians have been canceled due to ongoing Russian fire. The unceasing shelling has even interrupted efforts to bury the dead in mass graves.
On Saturday, a Ukrainian official said Russian soldiers blocked a humanitarian convoy headed for Mariupol and stole from another. Doctors Without Borders said some residents are dying for lack of medication, with the city without drinking water or medicine for over a week now. The aid group says people are resorting to boiling water from the ground or extracted from heating pipes.
Ukraine’s military said Russian forces captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts. Taking Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea would be strategic for Russian President Vladimir Putin, as it could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
WHAT HAS THE AP DIRECTLY WITNESSED OR CONFIRMED?
An Associated Press journalist witnessed tanks firing on a 9-story apartment block in Mariupol and was with a group of medical workers who came under sniper fire on Friday. Conditions at a local hospital there were deteriorating, electricity was reserved for operating tables and the hallways were lined with people with nowhere else to go.
Anastasiya Erashova wept and trembled as she held a sleeping child. Shelling had just killed her other child as well as her brother’s child. “No one was able to save them," she said.
In Irpin, on the northwest outskirts of Kyiv, bodies laid in the open in a park and on a street Saturday. Serhy Protsenko walked his neighborhood as explosions sounded.
“When I woke up in the morning, everything was covered in smoke, everything was dark. We don’t know who is shooting and where,” he said. “We don’t have any radio or information.”
READ: Russia strikes near Ukraine’s capital; mosque reported hit
Some residents huddled in a pitch-dark basement for shelter, unsure where they could go and how they would get food if they left. Others were on the move, toting luggage across planks to get over a waterway where a bridge had been damaged. Armed men carried one older man on a stretcher.
Sergiy Stakhovsky, a recently retired professional tennis player from Ukraine, has left his wife and three young children at home in Hungary and is back in Ukraine, serving with the territorial defense, a branch of the Ukraine armed forces.
Stakhovsky said in a video interview with The Associated Press that he would never have imagined he would be in his home city with a gun in his hands.
“The first couple of days (it's) surreal, you don't believe it is actually happening," he said. "The next thing you know you know you get used to it and you're just trying to find a way of helping your country to actually survive.”
He earned more than $5 million in prize money in tennis and upset Roger Federer at Wimbledon in 2013. Stakhovsky’s last match came in Australian Open qualifying in January.
WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING ON THE GROUND IN UKRAINE?
In the northeast, Russian forces were blockading Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, even as efforts have been made to create new humanitarian corridors around it and other urban centers.
Ukraine’s emergency services reported that the bodies of five people were pulled from an apartment building that was struck by shelling in Kharkiv, including two women, a man and two children.
In multiple areas around Kyiv, heavy artillery fire sent residents scurrying for shelter as air raid sirens wailed. An ammunition depot outside the city was shelled overnight, sending billowing black smoke into the sky, according to video provided by emergency workers.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said Russian ground forces that had been north of Kyiv for most of the war had edged to within 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the city center and spread out, likely to support an attempted encirclement.
THE MOST VULNERABLE
Ukraine's chief prosecutor’s office says at least 79 children have been killed since the invasion began on Feb. 24. At least 2.5 million people have fled the country, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
About 60 child cancer patients from Ukraine boarded a medical train Saturday in Medyka, Poland, bound for hospitals in Warsaw and elsewhere. Medical workers carried some of the children in their arms, on stretchers and pushed them in wheelchairs at the train station near the Ukrainian border.
Dominik Daszuta, an anesthesiologist from Warsaw Hospital, said the train has transported 120 children with cancer so far.
Ukraine’s defense ministry said Saturday that Russian forces shelled a convoy of refugees fleeing Peremoha, a village about 20 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Kyiv, killing seven people including a child.
The seven were among hundreds of people who tried to flee Peremoha. An unknown number of people were wounded, the report added.
Moscow has said it would establish humanitarian corridors out of conflict zones, but Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of disrupting those paths and firing on civilians.
Elena Yurchuk, a nurse from the northern city of Chernihiv, was in a Romanian train station Saturday with her teenage son, Nikita, doubting that their home was still standing. Her hometown has been heavily shelled.
“We have nowhere to go back to. Nothing left,” said Yurchuk, 44, who hopes to find work in Germany.
WHAT ARE PUTIN, ZELENSKYY AND OTHER WORLD LEADERS SAYING?
Putin participated in a 90-minute phone call Saturday with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Macron's office said the call was “very frank and also difficult.”
The Kremlin said Putin laid out his demands for ending the war, including Ukraine’s demilitarization. Moscow has also demanded that Ukraine drop its bid to join NATO, adopt a neutral status and acknowledge Russian sovereignty over Crimea, among other things. Putin also threatened to seize the assets of U.S. and Western companies that have announced plans to leave Russia.
Zelenskyy again deplored NATO’s refusal to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine. He said Ukraine has sought ways to procure air defense assets, though he didn’t elaborate.
Zelenskyy also told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that he would be open to meeting Putin in Jerusalem to discuss an end to the war, but that first there would have to be a cease-fire. Putin has ignored Zelenskyy's previous offers to talk.
What the EU is doing to help Ukraine refugees
In the two weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, around 2.5 million people have fled — the great majority of them to European Union countries. More than half have entered Poland while hundreds of thousands more are seeking refuge, mostly in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked war has been met with an outpouring of goodwill in Europe. The EU has launched an emergency protection system offering shelter, access to jobs, medical treatment and education to those who fled the assault.
The protection system streamlines entry procedures. It was established in 2001, in response to the fallout from the wars in former Yugoslavia and Kosovo in the 1990s, when thousands were forced from their homes. It has never been used before, despite the arrival of well over 1 million people in Europe in 2015, many fleeing conflict in Syria.
The “Temporary Protection Directive” sets out minimum standards across the EU’s 27 countries for helping those in need. Member nations can provide more favorable conditions if they want. It also eases procedures for countries to transfer refugees between them if those people agree to move.
The following is a short guide to the new rules, what they mean for Ukrainians seeking shelter in Europe and for those who might want to help them.
Read: Zelenskyy says 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers killed
WHO IS ELIGIBLE?
The decision applies to all Ukrainian nationals who have been displaced from Ukraine on or after Feb. 24, 2022 “as a result of the military invasion by Russian armed forces that began on that date.”
It also applies to their family members — spouses, unmarried partners in stable relationships and children — or to people who were already refugees inside Ukraine before the war. It excludes those who were living in Ukraine short-term, like foreign students.
HOW LONG CAN REFUGEES FROM UKRAINE STAY?
Ukrainian nationals are allowed to travel visa-free in Europe and so can move around once they are admitted for a 90-day period.
This means they can choose the EU country that would like to stay in and apply for temporary protection there. It’s particularly good for those who want to stay with relatives already in Europe.
That period of protection would apply for one year, initially. Unless it ends, the stay could be extended in six-month periods for a further year. If Ukraine remains unsafe, the EU’s executive branch, the European Commission, could extend the protection system for one more year, making a maximum of a three-year stay possible under certain circumstances.
Member states should try to help people return voluntarily when their stay is over. In some cases, they could help set up exploratory visits to help people work out whether it’s safe to go home. People can also apply for asylum in the EU at any time during their stay.
WHAT ARE PEOPLE ENTITLED TO?
Some countries are already providing free rail and bus travel, and other benefits to people fleeing Ukraine.
Some are lodged in reception centers or with willing European families. But under this system, European governments should ensure that people have access to accommodation or help to get housing.
Read: Ukraine claims another Russian general killed
They should receive social welfare benefits and possibly medical care. Countries should allow people to apply for jobs or become self-employed workers. Adult education, training in a trade or workplace experience should also be possible. People under 18 should be given access to schools.
Children traveling alone would be placed with adult relatives, foster families, reception facilities adapted to receiving minors, or with the adults they fled Ukraine with. Any visas should be provided free of cost.
Ukraine claims another Russian general killed
A Ukrainian official says that another Russian general has been killed in fighting.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, said Saturday that Russian Maj. Gen. Andrei Kolesnikov was killed in action during the fighting over Mariupol. He would be the third Russian general to die in the war, according to Ukrainian officials.
Also read: Ukraine says Russia shelled mosque in besieged Mariupol
Kolesnikov’s death wasn’t confirmed by the Russian military, which has kept a tight lid on information about its losses.
Previously, unofficial Russian sources confirmed the death of one Russian general.
The death of Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky, the commanding general of the Russian 7th Airborne Division, was confirmed by his colleague and the officers’ association in southern Russia. The death of another general, Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov, wasn’t confirmed by any Russian sources.
Also read: Russia-Ukraine war: Key things to know about the conflict
Ukraine says Russia shelled mosque in besieged Mariupol
The Ukrainian government says Russia’s military has shelled a mosque sheltering more than 80 people in the besieged city of Mariupol.
Also read: Ukraine says shelling damaged cancer hospital
A government statement issued Saturday did not have any immediate reports of casualties. The Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey reported earlier that a group of 86 Turkish nationals, including 34 children, were among those seeking refuge from an ongoing Russian attack on the encircled port city.
Also read: Russia-Ukraine war: Key things to know about the conflict
An embassy spokeswoman cited information from the city’s mayor. She noted that it was difficult to communicate with anyone in Mariupol.