Russian Invasion of UkraineWhat Happened on Day 101 of the War in Ukraine

The Ukrainians and Russians both claimed to be inflicting decisive losses in the battle for the city of Sievierodonetsk. Russian forces appeared to attack Kyiv on Sunday after weeks of calm there.

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Ukrainian soldiers on Saturday returning to their positions on a frontline near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Follow the latest updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

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Ukrainian soldiers at a frontline position near Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Saturday.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — As Ukrainian troops tried to claw back territory and stave off a blistering Russian assault along the country’s embattled eastern front, the government on Saturday sought also to repel a demand earlier in the day by President Emmanuel Macron of France that Moscow not be humiliated to improve chances of reaching a diplomatic solution.

“We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means,” Mr. Macron, who has sought to position himself as the world’s chief negotiator with the Kremlin, said in an interview with French newspapers. “I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power.”

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, responded with a scathing post on social media.

“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it,” Mr. Kuleba wrote. Instead, he argued, peace and the saving of lives could best be achieved by Russia being “put in its place.”

The exchange comes as the war has settled into what seems increasingly destined to be a slog.

The Ukrainians and Russians both claimed Saturday to be inflicting decisive losses against one another in the battle for Sievierodonetsk, the last major city in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine still under Ukrainian control.

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Smoke rising from Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk after heavy Russian bombardment on Friday.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

But the fighting was not limited to that town. A senior Ukrainian official claimed on Saturday that the country’s troops had reached a milestone in grinding down the Russian invasion force in eastern Ukraine. Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky, posted on the social networking site Telegram that most of a large Russian military unit had been destroyed in heavy fighting over the past weeks.

“Almost the entire 35th All-Russian Army was destroyed,” he wrote.

Mr. Yermak’s claim was supported by commentary from a Russian military blogger cited in a report by the influential Institute for the Study of War. Incompetent Russian commanders had failed to prepare troops for combat in a forested area near the city of Izium, the report said.

The claim of the routing of the Russian unit could not be independently verified.

Ukrainian soldiers interviewed over the past week have described fierce fighting in the forests around Izium, a strategic city that Russia is using as a base for attacks south toward the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Ukrainian forces are also taking heavy losses, 60 to 100 fatalities a day, Mr. Zelensky said recently.

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Ukrainian soldiers atop an armored fighting vehicle in an area near Kramatorsk in the Donbas region on Saturday.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

The British Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russia’s recent use of airstrikes and artillery fire has been a factor in its limited success in Ukraine’s east, a contrast with its largely ineffective air attacks earlier in the war. The Russian reliance on long-range strikes has probably depleted the country’s stock of precision-guided missiles, leading to more use of unguided munitions that can cause substantial civilian casualties, the ministry said.

Also on Saturday, an air-launched cruise missile hit the Odesa region on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Odesa city officials said on Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.

And Russian and Ukrainian officials traded blame for the burning of the main temple of the All Saints hermitage, a 16th-century monastery in eastern Ukraine that is considered one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers.

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The wooden All Saints monastery in Sviatohirsk, in eastern Ukraine, in April.Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The increasing terror from the sky came a day after Ukraine, on occasion of the 100th day of the war, took stock of its successes in holding back and in key places repelling the invasion by Russia, which had sought to quickly conquer the capital, Kyiv, and topple the government. Mr. Zelensky insisted “victory will be ours” and announced that 50 foreign embassies had resumed activities in the capital.

But on the 101st day, Ukraine faced anew the harsh realities on the ground, and increasingly from overhead.

Russia’s airstrikes provided cover to their troops engaged in the bitter fighting in the contested city of Sievierodonetsk.

And Russian troops continued to target the last remaining bridge into Sievierodonetsk to keep Ukraine from moving in reinforcements, food and medicine into a city that has become the main theater of war and the focus of Russia’s war machine. Despite its early and devastating setbacks, Russia has come to occupy a fifth of the country.

The intensity of the Russian attack and frequency of Russian reinforcements to Sievierodonetsk led to predictions that the city would soon fall. But Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk province, who recently had a dour prognosis for the city’s survival, told Ukraine’s national television that Ukrainian troops had retaken 20 percent of the territory they had lost, adding that it was “not realistic” the city would fall in the next two weeks.

As Ukrainian forces try to take back territory in the East, its State Emergency Services of Ukraine has removed 127,393 explosive devices, with the efforts focused mostly on urban areas in the Kyiv, Sumy and Zhytomyr regions that were occupied by Russia early in the war, according to a report by the United Nations Development Program.

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A destroyed school in Bohdanivka, Ukraine, on Saturday. Russian forces had occupied the area in early March, then wrecked buildings as they retreated a month later.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Russia’s retreat from those areas has made them more accessible for clear-up operations, the report said, adding that Ukrainians had covered an area of more than 28,714 square kilometers (more than 11,000 square miles) but that it could take years to clear all of the mines in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have also launched a counteroffensive near the occupied city of Kherson in the country’s south.

But a punishing, costly and tragic military stalemate is increasingly foreseen by experts. Ukraine has been outgunned, but will soon receive long-range M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, commonly known as HIMARS, from the United States. The exchanges of evermore lethal firepower will likely add to the many millions of people who have already been displaced, a death toll of at least 4,000 civilians and a Ukrainian economy already in tatters with roughly $100 billion in losses.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Friday that Russia would continue what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine until “all goals have been attained.”

But one thing Russia had already achieved was international isolation and a solidifying of the Western alliance against it. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, met Friday with Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland in Washington about the country’s application to the military alliance. He has advised allies to be prepared for “the long haul” and warned this week that the conflict had become a “war of attrition.”

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A Ukrainian soldier in a bunker near the frontlines by Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Saturday.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

On Saturday, an American warship, the U.S.S. Kearsarge, was moored in Stockholm, Sweden, with 26 warplanes and 2,400 Marines and sailors aboard, a symbol of the protection that NATO membership would offer Sweden and Finland, both of which are seeking to join.

As the battle lines become more entrenched between Russia and the West, experts predict Russian cyberattacks, global disinformation campaigns and a potential food crisis prompted by a Russian naval blockade. Ukraine is one of the world’s leading exporters of grain and cooking oil, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been accused by Western leaders of trying to leverage its control of those supplies to gain relief from sanctions.

And those sanctions continued to be felt. On Friday, Marriott became the latest multinational to suspend operations in Russia, where it had operated for 25 years. The hotel chain said restrictions set by Western governments made it impossible to keep going.

Ukraine’s fighting has for now preserved its statehood, but what that state would eventually look like is another matter. Russia’s strategy is essentially to pulverize specific areas with seemingly indiscriminate artillery shelling, killing or forcing to flee whoever is there before rolling in to stake the territory for Moscow.

It is a brutal way of waging war that some experts have compared to World War I and Ukrainian officials have called “medieval.” Craters from bombs and artillery shells gouge fields. Farmers collect rocket casings from cluster bombs in their barns.

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Bloodstained body armor at a Ukrainian medic station in Bakhmut on Friday.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kramatorsk, Ukraine and Jason Horowitz from Rome. Cassandra Vinograd and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting from London, Carlotta Gall from Kramatorsk, Helene Cooper in Stockholm and Alexandra E. Petri from New York.

Austin Ramzy
June 4, 2022, 11:58 p.m. ET

Reporting from Hong Kong

Several explosions were heard early Sunday in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, according to the mayor, Vitali Klitschko. The city had been relatively calm in recent weeks after Russian forces ended their effort to capture it, but it still remains under threat of attack from long-range rockets.

Nancy Ramsey
June 4, 2022, 10:18 p.m. ET

Bridget A. Brink, the new American ambassador to Ukraine, said in a Twitter post on Saturday that she joined Ukraine's first lady, Olena Zelenska, in mourning the 261 children who “have been killed in Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine.” Calling the children’s deaths “barbaric and unconscionable,” she added, “we will continue to support Ukraine so it can defend itself and its people.”

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Nancy Ramsey
June 4, 2022, 9:26 p.m. ET

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that with attacks on churches and other sites that Russia was “deliberately and systematically destroying Ukraine’s cultural and historical heritage, as well as social infrastructure, housing, and everything necessary for normal life.” A state that commits such acts, Mr. Zelensky said in his nightly address, “cannot be a member of Unesco and cannot remain at the U.N. as if nothing had happened. The U.N. Charter does not provide any rights for terrorists, and Unesco is not a place for barbarians.”

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Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Victor Mather
June 4, 2022, 8:45 p.m. ET

Ukraine aims to restart soccer leagues on its own soil in August.

Even as the war in their country continues, Ukrainian soccer officials are planning to restart the soccer season in August, hoping that the renewal of games will be a morale boost, according to The Associated Press.

Andriy Pavelko, president of the Ukrainian soccer federation, told The A.P. that the relaunch would include the Ukrainian Premier League as well as lower divisions and women’s soccer.

Pavelko said he had spoken with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine “about how football has a very big power to help people think about the future, because now people, of course, are not in a good mind-set.”

The 2021-22 Ukrainian Premier League season was halted in February after the Russian invasion and was ultimately canceled. In the early days of the war, there was fighting and airstrikes throughout the country, including around the capital, Kyiv. Now that the war has surpassed 100 days, most of the fighting and shelling is taking place in the far eastern regions of the country. Kyiv and other cities have been able to restore some semblance of normalcy.

Players on the men’s national team, meanwhile, have assembled for a World Cup qualifying game in Wales. After beating Scotland on Wednesday, they now face Wales, with the winner advancing to the World Cup in Qatar in November. That deciding match is on Sunday.

Nancy Ramsey
June 4, 2022, 8:27 p.m. ET

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a series of messages on Twitter on Saturday that he was embarking on a trip beginning on Tuesday that will take him from Colorado to Singapore and Bangkok and then to Brussels. When he reaches Brussels, on June 15, he will meet with the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, defense leaders from all over the world, to discuss the crisis in Ukraine. He said he would also be meeting with representatives of NATO to discuss the applications of Finland and Sweden.

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Helene Cooper
June 4, 2022, 8:00 p.m. ET

A U.S. warship arrives in Stockholm for military exercises, and as a warning.

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Watching the U.S.S. Kearsarge arrive in Stockholm on Thursday.Credit...Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

ABOARD U.S.S. KEARSARGE, in the port of Stockholm — If ever there was a potent symbol of how much Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has altered Europe, the sight of this enormous warship, bristling with 26 warplanes and 2,400 Marines and sailors, moored among the pleasure craft and tour boats that ply this port, would certainly be it.

“No one in Stockholm can miss that there is this big American ship here in our city,” said Micael Byden, the supreme commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, standing on the amphibious assault ship’s deck in the shadow of a MV-22 Osprey under a clear sky on Saturday. “There are more capabilities on this ship,” he marveled, “than I could gather in a garrison.”

In this perennially neutral country that is suddenly not so neutral, the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which showed up just two weeks after Sweden and Finland announced their intention to seek membership in NATO, is the promise of what that membership would bring: protection if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia turns his ire toward his Nordic neighbors.

But the ship is also a warning to Sweden and Finland of their own potential obligations should a conflict arise, as Gen. Mark Milley, America’s most senior military commander, made clear during a visit Saturday.

Nancy Ramsey
June 4, 2022, 7:30 p.m. ET

In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky decried the shelling of the Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra, the 16th-century monastery that is one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers. Mr. Zelensky said that worship services were being held in the basement. “The roar of artillery and the ‘arrivals’ of Russian shells are constant in the Lavra,” he said. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, he continued, “is still considered in Moscow to be connected with the Russian Orthodox Church. Even this does not stop the Russian army.” Mr. Zelensky then called on the hierarchy of the church, which has supported the war against Ukraine, to issue a “clear condemnation” of the aggression.

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Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Christopher Clarey
June 4, 2022, 4:48 p.m. ET

Reporting from Roland Garros

Iga Swiatek, the women’s No. 1-ranked player from Poland, won her second French Open title in Paris on Saturday. She gave a tearful, halting speech as she accepted the trophy, offering her support to Ukraine during the Russian invasion. “Stay strong, because the war is still there,” she said. The crowd gave her a lengthy applause. She wore a blue-and-yellow ribbon, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, on her cap throughout the tournament.

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Credit...James Hill for The New York Times

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Valerie Hopkins
June 4, 2022, 2:57 p.m. ET

Russia and Ukraine exchange the bodies of 320 fallen soldiers after talks.

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A train worker opening the door to the refrigerated car storing the bodies of 62 Russian soldiers in Kharkiv, Ukraine, last month.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Ukraine and Russia have exchanged the bodies of 320 fallen soldiers in the Zaporizhzhia region.

The operation took place on Thursday and followed a negotiated agreement between the warring sides to transfer the remains of soldiers on a one-to-one basis, according to a statement released on Saturday by Ukrainian officials.

Previously, Ukrainian officials had said that Russia had been reluctant to discuss repatriating its dead. Ukrainian soldiers have been tasked with recovering the bodies of Russian soldiers and placing them in refrigerated railway cars in several cities, among them Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro.

After the Ukrainian Army successfully counterattacked Russian forces and pushed them further away from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, two soldiers began gathering remains in the area. As residents returned to Kharkiv and surrounding villages, some have found the bodies in their homes or have stumbled across them elsewhere.

The two soldiers running the recovery, who both declined to be identified, said that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for a month or longer before they found them. The pair works to identify the soldiers by their faces, tattoos and belongings. They also take a DNA swab from each corpse to determine whether any soldiers believed to be involved in war crimes are among them.

One of the soldiers on the recovery duty said that identifications were possible about half of the time, with the remainder of the corpses being too deteriorated.

Russia has not released casualty figures for its troops since late March, when it said 1,351 soldiers had died. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that his officials believe that at least 30,000 Russian troops have been killed. Recently a British intelligence assessment put the estimated Russian losses at half that number.

Ukraine, similarly, has not disclosed data on its military casualties, but Mr. Zelensky has said that as many as 100 servicemen might be dying daily in the brutal fighting in the eastern Donbas region. U.S. intelligence agencies estimated in mid-April that between 5,500 to 11,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.

The New York Times
June 4, 2022, 2:03 p.m. ET

Four foreign soldiers were killed fighting for Ukraine, the international legion says.

Four foreign soldiers died in combat while fighting for Ukraine, the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine announced in an online post on Saturday.

The legion offered no details about the circumstances of the deaths. The post also displayed the flags of Germany, Australia, the Netherlands and France.

“We wish to remember and honor our fallen brothers,” the legion said in a Facebook post. “They chose to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

On Friday, the French foreign ministry confirmed news reports that a French citizen had been killed in combat in Ukraine. Dutch media reported on the death of a citizen in early May, while Australia’s government in late May confirmed that an Australian man had been killed in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government has declined to say how many foreign volunteer fighters there are in the country, but there are believed to be several thousand. Most of the volunteers are fighting with groups other than the International Legion, which has recently become more selective in recruiting members, taking only those with combat experience.

In early May, Ukrainian officials confirmed an American, a Briton and a Dane had been killed fighting with the International Legion.

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Nicole Tung
June 4, 2022, 1:53 p.m. ET

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

The family of Roman Tkachenko, 21, grieving over his body at a cemetery in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Saturday. At least five soldiers were laid to rest on Saturday morning at Lisove Cemetery, on the eastern side of Kyiv, and Ukrainian soldiers carried out a funeral procession for Tkachenko and two other soldiers — Daniil Evtushenko, 19, and Yuriy Segiev, 49 — killed during an artillery strike in the Kharkiv region on May 31. Ukrainian flags flapped in the wind as the three coffins were brought to a section reserved for soldiers who have been killed in combat since 2014.

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Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
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Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Alan Yuhas
June 4, 2022, 1:30 p.m. ET

Ukraine rebuffs Macron’s call to ‘not humiliate Russia.’

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President Emmanuel Macron of France, right, meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow in February, weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Credit...Sputnik/via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ukraine’s government on Saturday reacted angrily to President Emmanuel Macron of France’s statement that Moscow must not be humiliated in order to improve chances of reaching a diplomatic solution.

In an interview with regional French newspapers, Mr. Macron said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had made a “historic mistake” and was isolated, but should be allowed to save face.

“We must not humiliate Russia, so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means,” Mr. Macron, who has tried to position himself as the world’s chief negotiator with the Kremlin, said in the interview, published late Friday. “I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power.”

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, responded with a scathing post on social media.

“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it,” Mr. Kuleba wrote. Instead, he argued, lives would be saved and peace restored if nations focused “on how to put Russia in its place.”

For months, Mr. Macron has waged a diplomatic campaign to jump-start cease-fire or peace talks between Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. As other leaders have distanced themselves from Mr. Putin since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Macron has spoken to him repeatedly by phone and has flown to meet him in Moscow.

He has also spoken with Mr. Zelensky, but while he has expressed Europe’s commitment to send military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, he also ruled out seeing Ukraine join the European Union in the near future.

Mr. Macron’s remarks to the French newspapers, published late Friday, echoed similar comments he made in May, when he said neither side should be humiliated or excluded as Germany was in the aftermath of World War I.

Delegations from Ukraine and Russia met for peace talks in Istanbul early in the war, but those efforts stalled weeks ago and show little hope of restarting as the fighting has turned into a slow and artillery-focused war of attrition.

Alexandra E. PetriCassandra Vinograd
June 4, 2022, 12:36 p.m. ET

Alexandra E. Petri and

Ukraine has cleared more than 127,000 explosives since Russia invaded, the U.N. says.

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A Ukrainian demining specialist clearing anti-tank mines north of Kyiv, Ukraine, in May.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Ukraine has cleared more than 127,000 explosive devices from its territory since Russia invaded in late February, according to a United Nations report.

The report, issued by the United Nations Development Program, said that the retreat of Russian forces from areas in and around Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the northeast of the country, had “offered space for considerable explosive ordnance clear-up operations.”

Most of the efforts to remove unexploded mines, rockets, bombs and artillery shells undertaken by Ukraine’s State Emergency Services have been focused on urban areas in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Zhytomyr regions, according to the report which was issued on Wednesday. It added that the emergency service had covered an area of more than 28,714 square kilometers (more than 11,000 square miles).

The United Nations has said that it could take years to clear all of the mines in Ukraine. Antipersonnel land mines often kill and maim civilians long after hostilities have ended. Ukraine is one of the 164 nations that signed a 1997 treaty banning their use. The United States and Russia have refused to join it.

The United Nations estimates that more than 12 million Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country on Feb. 24. They’ve had to “move across a landscape littered with unexploded rockets, bombs, and land mines,” according to the HALO Trust, a British American charity that clears land mines and other explosive remnants of war to help countries recover after conflicts.

Ukrainian officials have been warning residents of the dangers of explosives since reports emerged that retreating Russian forces left buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs across large parts of the country.

According to Human Rights Watch, Russian forces also have used a new type of antipersonnel mine in the eastern Kharkiv region equipped with sensors that can detect people walking nearby. When the mine senses a person, it launches a small warhead that is lethal up to 50 feet away.

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Matthew Mpoke Bigg
June 4, 2022, 10:53 a.m. ET

Russia increases its use of air power to support its fight in the Donbas region, an intelligence report says.

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A jet, most likely Russian, fired flares over Ukrainian frontline positions in May.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Russia has increased its use of air power in support of artillery and ground troops who are fighting to expand their territory in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, including in the city of Sievierodonetsk, a British intelligence report said on Saturday.

Ukrainian forces moved heavy guns and howitzers toward the front line in Sievierodonetsk on Friday, pouring men and armor into the fight in an apparent refusal to pull back from a city that Russia has pounded with missile fire for weeks. A Russian defense ministry statement on Saturday said that Ukrainian forces were retreating from the city, a position that Ukrainian officials have denied. The regional Ukrainian military administrator had said overnight that Ukrainian troops had managed to push back Russian forces by 20 percent.

President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces have made the heavily industrial Donbas region, which borders Russia, the focus of his military campaign after Russian forces failed to seize the capital Kyiv, early in the conflict.

That came in part because of Moscow’s inability to destroy Ukraine’s air defense systems.

In the war’s second phase, however, Russia has deployed air power to support guided and unguided missile strikes in what the British intelligence report on Sunday called its “creeping advance.”

“The combined use of air and artillery strikes has been a key factor in Russia’s recent tactical successes in the region,” the report said. It noted that the increased use of unguided munitions has “almost certainly” caused civilian casualties.

Sievierodonetsk is in the Luhansk region of the Donbas. The head of the Ukrainian military administration there, Serhiy Haidai, said Saturday that a mother and child were killed in the past day’s fighting, the latest casualties in a battle from which the vast majority of the city’s population has fled. Mr. Haidai did not offer details on how they were killed.

Though the Donbas, where it has held territory since 2014, is Russia’s strategic priority, the front line stretches hundreds of miles from the Russian border north of the country’s second largest city, Kharkiv, to the city of Mykolaiv on the Black Sea. That distance and the expanse of the fighting is putting pressure on Ukraine’s government, whose forces risk being stretched thin.

Russian forces poured “intense fire” on Ukrainian positions in villages north of the city of Kharkiv, the Ukrainian defense ministry said on Saturday.

Further south, in Donetsk Province — which together with Luhansk makes up the Donbas — Russian forces shelled three villages near the city of Sloviansk and attempted an assault on another, the defense ministry said.

And a cruise missile, fired from a plane by Russian forces, hit the Odesa region on the Black Sea coast early Saturday morning, Odesa city officials said on Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.

Cassandra Vinograd
June 4, 2022, 10:17 a.m. ET

Fire engulfs wooden temple at a revered monastery in eastern Ukraine.

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The Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra, a major Orthodox Christian monastery near the town of Svyatogorsk in eastern Ukraine, in December.Credit...Andriy Andriyenko/Associated Press

A fire engulfed the main temple of the wooden All Saints hermitage at a revered 16th-century monastery in eastern Ukraine on Saturday, Russian and Ukrainian officials said, trading blame for who was responsible.

The Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra, also transliterated Sviatohirsk Lavra, is seen as one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers. Before the war, it drew thousands of pilgrims a year. But the monastery has been damaged by fighting since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.

An official with Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, Anton Gerashchenko, posted photos and video on Twitter of the All Saints hermitage in flames on Saturday. His hashtag — #RussianWarCrimes — made clear whom he blamed for the fire. Mr. Gerashchenko had warned on Friday that the site was being shelled by Russian forces.

Later in the day, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russian artillery had struck the monastery and destroyed the hermitage. It was not the first time the Kremlin had tried to destroy the site, he said.

“It was first destroyed during the Soviet era,” Mr. Zelensky said in a statement. “Later it was rebuilt. And now the Russian army set it on fire.”

Shelling killed four people at the monastery earlier this week, Mr. Zelensky said, stressing that the monastery had no military significance but had served as a shelter for some 300 individuals fleeing the fighting.

But Russia’s defense ministry on Saturday accused withdrawing “Ukrainian nationalists” of setting fire to the wooden building with “incendiary munitions.” It said in a statement that Russian forces were not carrying out combat operations in the area and had not shelled the historical site.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church said it did not have information on any casualties.

The Svyatogorsk Lavra is built into a high bank of the Seversky Donets River in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which is at the heart of a fierce battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces for control of the Donbas. Donetsk and the neighboring province of Luhansk make up the Donbas.

Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting.

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Carlotta GallFinbarr O’Reilly
June 4, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

Carlotta Gall and

A farmer holds on, a fraying lifeline for a besieged corner of Ukraine.

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“My nerves are cracking,” said Oleksandr Chaplik, a farmer who has kept his corner of Ukraine linked to the outside world.

SIVERSK DISTRICT, Ukraine — One of the few civilians still driving on a road leading toward the battle front, Oleksandr Chaplik skidded to a stop and leaned out the car window to swap information with a villager.

He was taking supplies back to his village, one of a handful still in Ukrainian hands that lie in the path of the Russian advance.

“We are surrounded on all sides,” said Mr. Chaplik, 55, a dairy and livestock farmer. “It is the second month without light, without water, without gas, without communication, without the internet, without news. Basically, horror.”

“But people need to eat,” he said. “I am a businessman. So I am doing my job.”

Mr. Chaplik owns about 75 acres of land near the city of Sievierodonetsk, where Russian and Ukrainian troops have been battling for control in heavy street fighting in recent days. The countryside around his farm is under almost constant bombardment by Russian forces trying to encircle the easternmost Ukrainian forces and lay siege to Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.

The roar of multiple rocket launcher systems being fired south of the farm rattled the windows and doors of his home. “Don’t worry, those are Ukrainian,” he said as he gave a tour of his farm. “Here, thank God, the guys are holding firm.”

BELARUS

RUSSIA

Kyiv

Lviv

UKRAINE

Sievierodonetsk

Lysychansk

Dnipro

MOLDOVA

ROMANIA

Sea of

Azov

CRIMEA

100 mileS

By The New York Times

But the war has come dangerously close. Craters from bombs and artillery shells scar his fields. Leaning against the wall of one of his barns stood the casings of a dozen rockets that Mr. Chaplik had collected from around the farm. The rockets delivered cluster bombs, he said, which still littered his hayfields.

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Some of the Russian cluster munitions Mr. Chaplik has found on his farm, in an area surrounded on three sides by Russian forces and where fierce battles are raging.
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“We are surrounded on all sides,” Mr. Chaplik said.

“They want to be eating grass,” he said as he walked down the stalls of his 35 dairy cows. “But I cannot let the cows loose on this grass because of these bombs, and I am scared they will fall in the bomb craters.”

Mr. Chaplik is a fraying connection to the world for his increasingly isolated village, which he asked not be named so it would not suffer retribution from Russian troops. At considerable risk to himself, he provides vital supplies and information, and keeps producing food as best he can.

Many other farmers have left the area but he said he could not. “I can’t leave the people,” he said. “If I leave, I will not be able to return to the village, I will not be able to look people in the eye.”

But as the war has crept closer, he has had to shrink his business while trying to keep the farm producing and workers fed and paid. With utilities cut off, he runs the milk machines on generators, but can only operate his refrigerators for 12 hours a day.

“We used to make nearly 100 different milk products,” he said. “I have a two-years-old Parmesan cheese. I made unique products that no one else was making, sour cream, cream, mozzarella, burrata.”

But without electricity he has had to cut down on production. There was a shortage of containers, he added. He removed two cheeses with moldy rinds from a fridge. “They are no good,” he said.

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A crater from a shell near a Ukrainian armoured column in a tree line near the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, where fierce battles are currently raging, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, this week.
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Fields burn after being hit by defensive flares fired by Russian aircraft in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, on Friday.

He has moved his food production operations to several different parts of the country, placing part of his dairy production in the nearby market town of Bakhmut, where he already has an organic meat and dairy shop, and relocating his meat production plants to the relatively safe cities of Dnipro and Lviv.

His family has moved, too. His wife is a teacher and two of his children are university students, so they needed to go somewhere with the internet to be able to keep working, he said. They were calling him daily, pleading with him to join them, but he said he still had work to do.

His work force has contracted, as many villagers left with their families for safer parts of the country. “I have fields and machines and diesel but I do not have the workers,” he said. But he pulled together the 10 workers who remained, so they now live and eat together.

Two teenage girls were mucking out the cow stalls. “They are the daughters of my workers. They are children, but I have no workers,” he said.

A pensioner, Lyudmila, 68, has stepped in to run his shop in the village.

“Did you get cucumbers?” she called out, as Mr. Chaplik unloaded bottled water and fresh vegetables from his van.

“Without him we would be lost,” she said. Villagers could not travel to the market, and prices there were much higher anyway, she said.

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Mr. Chaplik risks driving to a nearby town to keep his shop in his village supplied.
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Without electricity for refrigeration, some of his finest cheeses and other goods have spoiled.

But the strain shows on Mr. Chaplik’s face. He looks like he has not slept in days. He complained of toothache and a twitch around his eye. One of the hardest things, he said, was fielding the panicked telephone calls from relatives trying to reach the villagers who have remained behind. The cellphone service in the village has been knocked out but they know that Mr. Chaplik drives into town every day to the market, where cell service continues, and they bombard him with calls.

“My nerves are cracking,” he said, as he declined another phone call. “I am working 14 to 15 hours a day. Physically I am tired.”

So now he is arranging for his son to bring in a mobile antenna, so the villagers can be in touch with their relatives.

He sees more problems on the horizon. The war has disrupted farming and food production to such an extent that people in eastern Ukraine could go hungry in coming months, he warned.

The potatoes are already planted, which will provide food for the villagers, he said, but meat and milk will become scarce.

“If I do not prepare feed for my cows they will die this winter,” he said. “I cannot cut the hay because of the cluster bombs in the fields and I need 12,000 bales of hay and I do not have the workers.”

And as he follows the progress of the war, and the steady advance of Russian troops, he said it was likely that they would seize control of the village and he would lose the farm that he built up over more than 20 years.

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Neighbors of Mr. Chaplik in their garden.
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A farmer shepherds cattle near the farm of Mr. Chaplik.

Separatist forces backed by Russia seized the area in 2014 but were pushed back after a few months. But this time he said he did not expect President Vladimir V. Putin to stop. The Russian leader wants to seize a swath of the country from the city of Kharkiv in the northeast to Odessa in the southwest, he said.

“He will not calm down,” he said. “He will fight for a year, two, three, until he reaches his goal.”

Mr. Chaplik has been slaughtering his pigs, so only one remains, slumbering in his pen. The newborn calves will have to be slaughtered too, he said. “It’s a shame.”

If the Russians came, he added, he would have to leave his guard dogs, six German shepherds. “I could not bear to put them down,” he said. “I will let them loose.”

If the shells came too close, he would take his workers and leave, he said. “I will start anew,” he said. “Give me a little piece of land, in Ukraine, in the United States, wherever. I can build a great business again.”

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As it gets harder to feed his animals, Mr. Chaplik has been slaughtering them instead.
Victoria Kim
June 4, 2022, 3:47 a.m. ET

Reporting from Seoul

An air-launched cruise missile hit the Odesa region on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast early Saturday morning, Odesa city officials said on Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.

Victoria Kim
June 4, 2022, 3:46 a.m. ET

Reporting from Seoul

Russia’s recent use of airstrikes and artillery fire has been a factor in its limited success in Ukraine’s east, a contrast with its largely ineffective air attacks earlier in the war, the British Defense Ministry said. The Russian reliance on deep strikes has probably depleted the country’s stock of precision-guided missiles, leading to more use of unguided munitions that can cause substantial civilian casualties, the ministry said.

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Matthew Mpoke BiggVictoria Kim
June 4, 2022, 1:29 a.m. ET

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

Fighting in Ukraine on Saturday stretched along a front line in the east that runs for hundreds of miles, piling pressure on the government in Kyiv as its forces confront Russian attacks in multiple locations and international leaders increasingly warn of a war with no clear end in sight.

Street-by-street battles raged in the contested city of Sievierodonetsk, the last major pocket of Ukrainian control in the province of Luhansk in the eastern Donbas region, where Russia’s onslaught is focused. As control has shifted back and forth, a local official who earlier reported that Russian forces had taken most of the city said that Kyiv’s forces managed to claw back a small part of it.

Ukraine has been battling to hang on in Sievierodonetsk, underscoring the government’s determination to resist Russia’s onslaught until the arrival of heavier weapons from the West that could potentially help turn the war in its favor.

On Friday, Ukrainian troops were moving heavy guns and howitzers along the roads toward the front line, pouring men and armor into the fight as Russian artillery targeted Ukrainian guns.

Russia has increasingly turned to airstrikes, both with guided and unguided missiles, in the Donbas to support its “creeping advance,” according to the British Defense Ministry. The combination of Russia’s recent use of airstrikes and artillery fire has been a factor in its small gains in Ukraine’s east. Earlier in the war, by contrast, its use of air power was restricted by its failure to destroy Ukraine’s air defense systems around the capital, Kyiv.

As the war logged its 101st day, the length of the front was a sign of the grinding battles likely to lie ahead. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, warned this past week that the conflict had become a “war of attrition” and advised allies to be prepared for “the long haul.”

In other developments:

  • President Emmanuel Macron of France said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia must not be “humiliated” if there was to be hope for diplomacy to end the war. His remarks drew a scathing rebuke from Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba.

  • A fire engulfed the wooden All Saints hermitage at a revered 16th-century monastery in eastern Ukraine, with Russian and Ukrainian officials trading blame for who was responsible. The Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra is seen as one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers.

  • An air-launched cruise missile hit the Odesa region, on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, early Saturday morning, Odesa city officials said on Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.

  • Marriott said it was suspending operations in Russia after determining that restrictions set by Western governments would make it impossible for the company to operate or franchise hotels there. Marriott, which said it had been operating in Russia for 25 years, joins a long list of multinational companies pulling out of the country amid sanctions.

  • Ukraine has cleared more than 127,000 explosive devices from its territory since Russia invaded in late February, according to a United Nations report.

Victoria Kim
June 3, 2022, 10:51 p.m. ET

Reporting from Seoul

Ukrainian troops engaging in a block-by-block fight for the city of Sievierodonetsk, the last major pocket of Ukrainian control in Luhansk Province, have managed to push back Russian forces by 20 percent, the regional military administrator, Serhiy Haidai, said in a television interview. He had previously said that most of the industrial city had been taken over by the Russians.

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Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
Alexandra Petri
June 3, 2022, 10:31 p.m. ET

According to a report by the United Nations Development Program, the State Emergency Services of Ukraine have removed 127,393 explosive devices, with the efforts focused mostly on urban areas in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Zhytomyr regions. Russia’s retreat from those areas has made them more accessible for clear-up operations, the report said.

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Alexandra Petri
June 3, 2022, 9:55 p.m. ET

In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine also used the 100th day of war as a way of focusing on how numbers have come to define the war: the number of those killed or wounded, or the number of attacks launched against the country. Particularly haunting is the number of children who have been killed in the war, which Mr. Zelensky said was 261 as of Friday morning, a number that could not be independently identified. “For what?" Mr. Zelensky asked. “There are no words that can answer this question.”

Alexandra Petri
June 3, 2022, 9:20 p.m. ET

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, said in a Twitter message that he had met with Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland while the two officials were in Washington on Friday and discussed Finland’s application to NATO. Mr. Stoltenberg also said he had a “constructive phone call” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey about Mr. Erdogan's concerns with Sweden and Finland joining NATO.

William P. Davis
June 3, 2022, 8:58 p.m. ET

Marriott said it was suspending operations in Russia because it had determined that restrictions set by Western governments “will make it impossible for Marriott to continue to operate or franchise hotels” there. Marriott, which said it had been operating in Russia for 25 years, joins a long list of multinational firms pulling out of the country amid increasingly severe sanctions aimed at isolating the country’s economy.

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Credit...Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters
Alexandra Petri
June 3, 2022, 8:36 p.m. ET

Two Reuters journalists were injured and their driver was killed after an attack on their vehicle near the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk, which has been rocked by fierce fighting in recent days as Russian forces have encircled the city. Reuters reported that Alexander Ermochenko, a photographer, and Pavel Klimov, a cameraman, were treated at a hospital.

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Farnaz Fassihi
June 3, 2022, 8:01 p.m. ET

Reporting from New York

António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, marked the 100th day of war in Ukraine by calling for a halt to violence, access for humanitarian aid and protection and evacuation of civilians. “Resolving this conflict will require negotiations and dialogue. The sooner the parties engage in good-faith diplomatic efforts to end this war, the better for the sake of Ukraine, Russia and the world,” said Mr. Guterres in a statement on Friday. He said the U.N. stands ready to help in those efforts.

Mitch Smith
June 3, 2022, 7:00 p.m. ET

Zelensky tells U.S. mayors to end their sister-city ties with Russia.

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CreditCredit...Office of the President of Ukraine/The Associated Press

RENO, Nev. — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called out several American cities for having sister cities in Russia during a video address to the United States Conference of Mayors meeting on Friday.

Mr. Zelensky, who spoke to the gathering of mayors just after Vice President Kamala Harris, criticized Chicago; Jacksonville, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; San Diego and San Jose, Calif., for maintaining sister-city ties in Russia. He said those relationships should be severed.

“What do those ties give to you? Probably nothing,” Mr. Zelensky said. “But they allow Russia to say that it is not isolated.”

Chicago announced earlier this year that it was suspending, but not permanently ending, its sister-city relationship with Moscow, which had been in place since 1997. Local outlets in San Jose reported earlier this year that city leaders decided to maintain a sister-city relationship with Ekaterinburg, Russia. As of Friday, websites for the sister-city programs in Portland, San Diego and Jacksonville continued to list Russian partners.

Many American municipalities have sister-city relationships in several countries. Though the partnerships can include business and political exchanges, the relationships are largely symbolic and are sometimes administered by local nonprofit organizations.

But Mr. Zelensky, who spoke to the mayors 100 days after Russia invaded his country, said it was wrong to give Russia even the smallest bit of added credibility.

“Don’t make any excuses; don’t maintain relations with Russia,” said Mr. Zelensky, whose speech received applause from the mayors and city employees who had gathered in Reno, Nev. “And please don’t let those who became murderers call your cities their sister cities.”

Officials in Portland referred to a statement from Sister Cities International urging cities not to sever ties with their Russian partners. Officials in the other American cities that Mr. Zelensky named did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Alexandra Petri
June 3, 2022, 6:51 p.m. ET

The nightly address from President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday was an impassioned one, reflecting on how 100 days of war has dramatically altered the country’s vocabulary, redefining or introducing new words, terms and phrases into Ukrainians’ everyday language. "One hundred days -- one hundred words," he said, as he listed the words as a way to look back at more than three months of war. Justice, heroes, reconstruction, security and liberation are among the words guiding the country forward and giving it hope, Mr. Zelensky said, including what he referred to as the three most important words underpinning their fight: “peace, victory, Ukraine.”

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During his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine reflected on the war by listing words associated with the fight against Russia.
Alexandra Petri
June 3, 2022, 7:22 p.m. ET

Mr. Zelensky added that he hopes many words that have become common in Ukraine will one day be relegated to the past. Words such as filtration, deportation and torture. But he also used the milestone to offer inspiration. “When we hear the word ‘Patron,’ we remember the most famous sapper of Ukraine,” he said, referring to the bomb-sniffing dog he awarded with state honors last month.

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Credit...Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

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Elian Peltier
June 3, 2022, 5:30 p.m. ET

Russian and African leaders meet, one needing allies, the other grain.

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A storage facility for grain on the outskirts of Lviv, Ukraine. African countries are heavily dependent on grain from Russia and Ukraine.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

DAKAR, Senegal — A meeting on Friday between the head of the African Union and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia highlighted the acute needs each one hopes the other can fill: Africa needs food, and the Kremlin needs allies.

Russia’s blockade of Ukraine, ordinarily a major exporter of grain, has worsened food crises in Africa and the Middle East, and the African Union chief, President Macky Sall of Senegal, said the grain should be freed up.

“Our countries, although they are far from the theater, are victims of this crisis on an economic level,” Mr. Sall said at a joint news conference with Mr. Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

At the same time, Mr. Sall told Mr. Putin, whom he called his “dear friend Vladimir,” that Western sanctions on Russia had compounded Africa’s lack of access to grain — an argument Moscow has been making. Mr. Sall explicitly called for the lifting of restrictions on exports of Russian wheat and fertilizer.

Mr. Sall’s comments were something of a diplomatic victory for Mr. Putin. European leaders have accused the Russian president of creating a global food crisis by blocking wheat exports and seizing Ukrainian grain, all the while trying to blame shortages on sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union.

Global food stocks were already low before the invasion, and the war has made the shortfall worse. African countries import more than 40 percent of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. The United Nations says food prices worldwide are 23 percent higher than a year ago, reflecting the tight supply.

The United States and its allies have condemned the invasion of Ukraine and have cut most economic ties to Russia, leaving Moscow with fewer diplomatic and trading partners.

But Russia has longstanding ties to many African countries, some dating to its Soviet-era support for liberation struggles against colonial rulers. Mr. Putin has cultivated those relations and has so far mitigated criticism from most African countries.

Mr. Putin gathered African leaders in Sochi in 2019 and has positioned the continent as key to Russia’s interests, while France and the United States have withdrawn from involvement in some conflicts there.

With little investment, Russia has made itself a central player on the continent, becoming Africa’s largest supplier of arms, propping up authoritarian leaders and portraying itself as being on the side of African countries in their fight for more independence from the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia.

“Those friends and allies Russia needs, it can find them on the African continent, so it wants to keep such relations tight,” said Pauline Bax, an expert on Africa with the International Crisis Group.

Still, such efforts have paid off. Russia has managed to mute criticism of its invasion of Ukraine among leaders in Africa but also in Asia and Latin America.

In April, the United Nations General Assembly voted 93 to 24 to exclude Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council. But most African nations either voted against the measure, abstained or simply did not cast a vote, including countries usually aligned with the views of Western countries, like Senegal, a regional peace broker.

Gilles Yabi, the director of the Wathi research group in Dakar, said the vote created some surprise outside Africa, revealing a perception in the United States and Europe that African countries would not act independently in the crisis.

“The ramifications of the conflict for Africa are economic,” Mr. Yabi said. “It’s legitimate that African countries look at the war according to their interests.”

Appearing with Mr. Putin on Friday, Mr. Sall claimed, erroneously, that “despite enormous pressure, the majority of African countries have avoided to condemn Russia in this situation.” At least 30 of Africa’s 54 countries have condemned the invasion in some fashion, though generally without the vehemence seen in Washington or European capitals.

Paul Stronski, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has studied Russia’s relations with Africa, said the United States and Europe liked to think that Russia has been isolated since it invaded Ukraine.

“Macky Sall’s visit on behalf of the African Union, the votes at the U.N., show that Russia might be isolated from America, Europe, Taiwan and Japan, but necessarily not from the rest of the world,” he said.

The African Union has vowed to remain in a neutral position in the conflict, and Mr. Sall has tried to cast himself as a potential mediator. Yet in practice, some analysts say, the African Union has showed deference to Russia.

That was evident when, after his talks with Mr. Putin, Mr. Sall was scheduled to fly back to Africa on Friday without meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

In addition, Mr. Zelensky has asked for months to address the African Union, and even though Mr. Sall said this week that the Ukrainian leader could soon address the organization in a videoconference, no date has been announced.

Joseph Siegle, the director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, an arm of the Pentagon’s National Defense University, noted that Mr. Putin has tried to portray his invasion of Ukraine as an ideological battle against the West. That message has resonated across Africa, he said.

Mr. Putin has even used the looming grain shortage to cast the United States and its allies in bad light, he said. “He is twisting the narrative to suggest that the sanctions are causing the pain and price inflation for food across the globe, rather than acknowledging that the entire food crisis related to the conflict is his making,” Mr. Siegle said.

Nicole Tung
June 3, 2022, 4:55 p.m. ET

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Electrical workers installing a new electricity pole near the village of Kukhari, about 58 miles northwest of Kyiv. Homes in smaller villages that were occupied by Russian forces and then retaken have received aid much more slowly than big towns. Without support from the government or organizations, a resident clears debris at his mother’s house, which was destroyed by Russian strikes.

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Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
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Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Carlotta GallMatthew Mpoke Bigg
June 3, 2022, 3:30 p.m. ET

The skies around Sievierodonetsk are heavy with smoke as Ukraine battles Russia for the eastern city.

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Ukrainian forces fired a salvo of rockets toward Russian positions near Sievierodonetsk on Thursday. Ukraine has managed to hold on to the city so far, although Russian forces have advanced into the heart of the city.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

SIVERSK, Ukraine — The skies around Sievierodonetsk were heavy with smoke on Friday, with artillery fire and explosions sounding on and off throughout the day as Russian and Ukrainian forces traded blows in a fierce battle for the eastern city.

Ukrainian troops were moving heavy guns and howitzers along the roads toward the frontline, pouring men and armor into the fight as Russian artillery targeted Ukrainian guns.

Russian rockets pummeled an area near Sievierodonetsk late Friday afternoon, landing with multiple heavy explosions that were audible from a nearby village. Grad missiles streaked through the sky from Ukrainian-held territory toward Russian positions.

Russian forces have been edging ever closer to seizing Sievierodonetsk and taking total control of the Luhansk region, part of the broader area known as Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. Capturing the industrial Donbas region could give Mr. Putin a victory to herald to the Russian people.

But Ukraine on Friday was battling to hang on in Sievierodonetsk, underscoring the government’s determination to resist Russia’s onslaught until the arrival of heavier weapons from the West that could potentially help turn the war in its favor.

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Smoke and dirt hung in the air as military vehicles moved around the frontline, with explosions pockmarking the landscape around them.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

The head of the Ukrainian military administration in the region, Serhiy Haidai, said Friday that at least one person had been killed in Sievierodonetsk and that the battle was ongoing in the heart of the city. He said that Russian forces maintained their grip on a highway that had acted as a conduit both for people seeking to flee the city as well as for incoming supplies.

That highway runs southwest from Sievierodonetsk across the Seversky Donets River, through the adjoining city of Lysychansk and on to the city of Bakmut in Donetsk province.

Russian artillery has targeted the road, as well as several towns and villages along the route, part of Moscow’s bid to tighten its grip on Luhansk, a province where it already holds almost all of the land. Russia has massed its forces in Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in the Donbas region after failing to seize the capital, Kyiv, early in the conflict.

A British intelligence report said on Friday that Russian forces were “achieving tactical success” in Luhansk and had momentum, noting that they should be able to take full control of the province in the next two weeks. Mr. Haidai has disputed that analysis.

The United States, Britain and Germany all said this week they would supply Ukraine with missile systems that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky had sought to offset Russia’s advantage in long-range artillery. But it is not clear when those weapons will arrive or how a possible new Ukrainian counteroffensive in the coming weeks will take shape.

Until then, Ukrainian attempts to slow Moscow’s progress in the Donbas could deplete Russia of both personnel and arms.

“Russian forces continued to make incremental, grinding, and costly progress in eastern Ukraine,” said a report by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. Local residents and Ukrainian officials in the area of Sievierodonetsk said Friday that Ukrainian forces were still holding their own — even pushing back some Russian forces.

One Ukrainian reporter for Radio Liberty traveled in with the Ukrainian army across the last standing bridge into the city. Two Reuters journalists were wounded and their driver was killed after their vehicle, which had been provided by Russia-backed forces, came under fire while heading to Sievierodonetsk on a Russian-held part of road, according to the news agency.

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Ivor Prickett
June 3, 2022, 3:02 p.m. ET

Reporting from Bakhmut, Ukraine

Amidst stretchers, camouflage netting and bloodstained medical gear, Ukrainian soldiers were examined by medical personnel at a makeshift aid station in Bakhmut, only a few miles west of the Donetsk and Luhansk regional border, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

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Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
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Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Andrew Higgins
June 3, 2022, 2:15 p.m. ET

Belarus leader seeks to trade sanctions relief for an outlet for Ukrainian grain.

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President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus during an interview in Minsk, Belarus last month.Credit...Markus Schreiber/Associated Press

Seeking to leverage a global food crisis to get relief from international sanctions, the president of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, said on Friday that Ukrainian grain could travel by rail through his country to ports on the Baltic Sea, but only if Belarus is allowed to use the same ports to export its own goods.

Mr. Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Moscow, made the offer in a telephone conversation with the secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, according to Belta, the Belarusian state news agency.

Russia has blockaded Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea, which were previously the main export route for Ukrainian grain and oilseeds. The war has left around 25 million tons of grain stranded in silos and at risk of rotting away unless it is moved soon.

U.N. officials have warned the blockade will cause rising prices and severe food shortages, particularly in Africa, where famines are possible. Moscow has said it would consider letting grain shipments through the Black Sea in return for the lifting of Western sanctions. Ukraine’s allies have been seeking alternative overland routes.

Belarus controls the railway lines that offer the most direct, cheapest and fastest route for large volumes of grain to be shipped out of Ukraine to the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda and other Baltic ports.

But getting access to those rail lines has been complicated because Belarus is allied with Russia in the current conflict. Belarus was a staging ground for Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, and Mr. Lukashenko has expressed fury at Western sanctions on what had been his country’s biggest export earner, potash fertilizer.

Belarus, which is landlocked, exported nearly all its potash through the port at Klaipeda until Feb. 1, when Lithuania halted the traffic, severing a vital economic artery for Mr. Lukashenko.

Mr. Lukashenko’s offer to Mr. Guterres seems to be a gambit to restore that lifeline. Ukraine is desperate to start shipping trapped grain before this year’s harvest adds tens of millions more tons, and Kyiv has been relatively open to a deal with Mr. Lukashenko. Other countries, including Lithuania, however, are strongly opposed to cutting Belarus any slack.

Belta reported that the U.N. chief had “asked for a short pause of a few days to talk with the leadership of the countries concerned.”

Anton Troianovski
June 3, 2022, 1:43 p.m. ET

President Vladimir V. Putin claimed Russia would not attack Ukraine if it removed mines from the port of Odesa to allow ships carrying grain to leave. Ukraine had mined the port to prevent Russian warships from entering. “We will not use the demining situation to carry out some kind of attack from the sea,” Putin said on Russian state television.

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Constant Méheut
June 3, 2022, 11:48 a.m. ET

Reporting from Paris

France’s foreign ministry announced that a French national had “been fatally wounded in the fighting in Ukraine,” confirming a report from the French radio station Europe 1 that a French man who had joined pro-Ukrainian units of foreign fighters had died in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine. Hundreds of foreign volunteers have joined the so-called International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine, which was created at the beginning of the war against Russia.

Christopher F. Schuetze
June 3, 2022, 10:48 a.m. ET

Reporting from Berlin

German lawmakers from all major parties have approved a 100 billion euro fund to upgrade the troubled German military, easily reaching the two-thirds majority needed to add the funding law to the country’s constitution. Chancellor Olaf Scholz had first announced the fund in February, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Cassandra Vinograd
June 3, 2022, 9:16 a.m. ET

The International Committee of the Red Cross said that 100 days of war in Ukraine have caused destruction that “defies comprehension.” “It would be hard to exaggerate the toll that the international armed conflict in Ukraine has had on civilians over the last 100 days,” it said in a statement. “Homes, schools and hospitals have been destroyed and civilians have suffered the horrors of conflict, with lives lost and families torn apart.”

Elian Peltier
June 3, 2022, 7:22 a.m. ET

The head of the African Union, Senegalese President Macky Sall, urged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in a joint news conference to consider the impact of the Ukraine war on African economies. “Our countries, even if they are far from the theater,” Mr. Sall said, “are victims of this crisis.”

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Matina Stevis-Gridneff
June 3, 2022, 5:50 a.m. ET

Reporting from Brussels

The European Parliament has banned lobbyists for Russian companies from its premises, its president Roberta Metsola said in a tweet. Lobbyists registered in the E.U. as representing Russian interests are still permitted in the European Commission and the European Council, the other two key E.U. institutions.

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