Kyiv May 26, 11:46 p.m.
Moscow May 26, 11:46 p.m.
Washington …
Kyiv May 26, 11:46 p.m. Moscow May 26, 11:46 p.m. Washington May 26, 4:46 p.m. Some Western leaders are suggesting a territorial compromise between Ukraine and Russia, which Ukraine opposes. Russia shells central Kharkiv, leaving many dead and wounded, and Putin moves to raise the minimum wage and sweeten military benefits. Anton Troianovski
How does this end? As the war rages on in Ukraine’s east, in an expanding crucible of devastation and human tragedy, the global conversation is increasingly focusing on how the fighting could end and how to define victory — and for whom. Potential answers to that question have come from Ukrainian officials, some of whom have pledged to keep fighting until all of their country is liberated from Russian troops, and from Eastern European leaders, who have dismissed the idea of a negotiated end to the war as dangerous. Other voices in the West, led by President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, are suggesting that some kind of territorial compromise between Ukraine and Russia is needed to end the fighting more quickly. Henry Kissinger, the 98-year-old former secretary of state, laid out that position bluntly in a video appearance in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday, saying that Ukraine would have to cede territory in exchange for peace. He argued that Ukraine should agree to “a return to the status quo ante,” a restoration of Ukraine’s borders as they were before the war began in February. That would mean giving up the Crimean peninsula that Russia seized in 2014 and parts of the eastern Ukrainian region known as the Donbas. That idea has drawn fierce criticism from many Ukrainians, including from President Volodymyr Zelensky, who on Thursday compared Mr. Kissinger’s proposal to Western Europe’s appeasement of Nazi Germany in the Munich Agreement of 1938. But Mr. Zelensky has also said that he hoped to end the war at the negotiating table after re-establishing Ukrainian control up to the Feb. 24 boundaries. He has insisted that his troops will keep fighting at least until they are able to retake the swaths of southern and eastern Ukraine that Russia has captured in the last three months. The status of the territory that Russia held before Feb. 24, he said in a television interview last week, ought to be hammered out at the negotiating table. Trying to retake it by force, he warned, could cost tens of thousands of lives.
“I believe that reaching the line that was before Feb. 24 without unnecessary losses would be a victory for our state today,” he said. “The war is very complicated, and victory will be very complicated. It will be bloody, it will definitely come in battle, but the ending will definitely come in diplomacy.”
Some Ukrainian officials have said their country should fight until all of its territory, including the Crimean peninsula, is liberated from Russian occupation. Central and Eastern European leaders have supported that goal, with Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins of Latvia declaring this week that “the only solution to this war is Ukraine’s victory and Russia’s defeat.”
Looming over the debate is the biggest unknown: whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would be willing to accept anything other than total capitulation by Ukrainian forces. Mr. Putin has been studiously vague in public. He insisted at the start of the war that Russia did not plan to “occupy Ukrainian territory,” but he has also slandered Mr. Zelensky’s government as controlled by “Nazis” who pose an existential threat to Russia itself.
“We are not chasing deadlines,” Mr. Putin’s chief security adviser, Nikolai P. Patrushev, said in a Russian newspaper interview published Tuesday. He indicated that Mr. Putin was not in a mood for compromise: “Nazism must either be 100 percent eradicated, or it will rear its head in a few years, and in an even uglier form.”
But some analysts have suggested that rhetoric, like an early unsuccessful attempt to take Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, may be overreach aimed at providing a fallback negotiating position of a more realistic goal: taking parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, including the Donbas region on the Russian border and the Kherson region next to Crimea and the Black Sea. Russian occupation authorities in eastern and southern Ukraine have signaled that the Kremlin plans to take long-term control of captured land. For now, despite all the proposals for how to end the war, there are no peace talks to bring it about. Talks between Russia and Ukraine ground to a halt after a seeming breakthrough in late March, with both sides hardening their stances as they sought to make military gains. On Thursday, the West’s latest initiative to stop the fighting appeared to run aground: a peace plan proposed by Italy that reportedly would give Crimea and the Donbas wide autonomy, but have them remain part of Ukraine. Russia rejected the idea.
“Serious politicians who want to achieve results and not promote themselves in front of their electorate don’t propose things like that,” Russia’s foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov said. In other developments:
Russia’s central bank cut interest rates again on Thursday, the latest in a raft of measures by Moscow aimed at stabilizing an economy buffeted by Western sanctions and four months of fighting in Ukraine. President Vladimir V. Putin promised to increase the minimum wage and military benefits, a rare acknowledgment of the costs of the war, even as he insisted that Russia’s economy was weathering the asset freezes and departures of foreign companies that have followed his invasion of Ukraine. The war’s economic toll in Russia is becoming unmistakable: Prices of consumer goods are soaring. Basic items, from paper to buttons, are in short supply. Sales in the lucrative energy sector are projected to fall this year as European customers begin to pivot away from Russian oil. On the battlefield, Russia’s ambitions are narrowing to three cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. With the depletion of troops and equipment, some analysts expect the battle to be Russia’s last major offensive of the war. Alan Rappeport
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that the Biden administration expects that Russia will default on its bond payments to U.S. investors now that the Treasury Department allowed a sanctions exemption to lapse that had let Russia to make those payments. A Russian default would have minimal impact on the U.S. and global economies, she said, but it would be “an enduring sign of their status as a pariah in the global financial system.”
Erika Solomon
Ukraine’s minister of agriculture warned that by midsummer the world would start to feel the squeeze to food supplies and rising grain prices caused by Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian sea exports. Global food distribution networks, still recovering from the shocks of the pandemic, are now facing a new crisis as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — the two countries that together supplied over a quarter of the world’s wheat.
“Countries right now still have some reserves, and they are still under the general hope that somehow, this will work itself out,” the minister, Mykola Solskyi, said in an interview with The New York Times.
“But when they see in July or August that they are running out of grain, and that the prices are extremely high, then the world will start to show a lot of emotions. There will be problems because of it.”
Fears of a global food crisis are intensifying amid concerns that President Vladimir V. Putin is using food as a potent new weapon in the conflict. Russian forces, in addition to bombarding and seizing large swathes of Ukraine’s fertile farmland, have taken over some ports and blockaded the remaining sea routes on the Black Sea used for exporting most of Ukraine’s wheat, barley, corn, sunflower seeds and rapeseed oils. U.N. monitored talks are attempting to reach a deal for sea exports, he said. But he rejected a proposal floated on Wednesday by Russia’s deputy foreign minister to open sea routes in exchange for lifting some sanctions on Russia.
“The limitations of exporting grain out of Ukraine is a world problem — it’s not just a Ukrainian problem,” he said. “And that’s why we think that any demands about lifting the sanctions are wrong.”
Asked how likely Mr. Solskyi thought a deal was, he said: “On a scale of one to 10? I give it five.”
European and Ukrainian officials have been scrambling to bring the country’s harvests to global markets via trucks, railroads, river barges and other alternative routes. But these options are complicated. Exporting by land out of western Ukraine means passing through border crossings that require trucks to wait in line for days. The other option, transport by rail, requires adapting train cars to tracks of different widths, a major logistical headache. According to the country’s main agricultural lobby, land routes working at optimal capacity could only bring out 3 million tons per month — about two-thirds of what the country normally exports.
“It’s impossible to solve the problem completely without the sea,” Mr. Solskyi said. Ukrainian farmers say Russian forces have also stolen large quantities of their stored grain. The minister warned international traders against buying stolen Ukrainian grain, saying Kyiv would seek to sanction those who profited from stolen grain. Kyiv was closely watching ships passing through the Black Sea and the Bosporus, he said, and was collecting information from grain traders of movements of stolen crops.
“At the very least we will ask for sanctions on traders who engage in this,” he said. Ivan Nechepurenko
Russian forces have captured Lyman, a major Ukrainian railway hub in the Donetsk region, according to Russian news reports. A Ukrainian official, Oleksei Arestovych, an adviser to the president’s chief of staff, said that while the report had yet to be confirmed, the attack on the city showed that “the Russian army has improved its tactical skills and operational management.”
Valerie Hopkins
KHARKIV, Ukraine — Russia shelled the northeastern city of Kharkiv on Thursday, killing eight people and wounding more than a dozen others after almost two weeks of relative quiet in Ukraine’s second largest city. Several neighborhoods “came under fire from rocket-propelled grenade launchers and artillery,” the regional governor, Oleh Synehubov, said. Another person was killed and another wounded in the nearby town of Dergachi. Among the dead was a father and his 5-month-old baby who had been walking down the street at the time of the attack, the head of Ukraine’s national police wrote on Facebook. The baby’s mother was badly injured. In mid-May, Ukrainian forces said they had pushed Russian troops beyond striking distance of Kharkiv, which is 25 miles from the Russian border, and there were signs the city was slowly coming back to life. People sheltering in the subway system were told to return home or find alternate shelter, and on Tuesday its subway cars returned to their usual role of transporting people. The strikes on Thursday disabused many Kharkiv residents of their fragile sense of calm. At the site of one of the strikes, near the 23rd of August metro stop in the Shevchenkivskyi district, a subway employee, Viktoriya Konyevets, used a rag and an old bucket to clean up blood on the stairs at the entrance to the subway.
“Today was my first day back at work after three months sheltering at home,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”
A crowd of people had gathered outside the station after the strike to examine the damage.
“Many people returned to Kharkiv thinking they were safe,” said a 28-year-old man in a bulletproof vest who gave his name only as Ilya. “But now they don’t feel that way anymore. I saw four families in my apartment building packing up their cars to leave.”
Suddenly, there was another blast in the distance, and the group hurried back into the subway station to seek shelter. Across the street, behind a massive World War II memorial commemorating a conflict in which soldiers from Kharkiv fought alongside Russians in the Soviet army, another explosion had knocked over several trees and wounded at least one person. Oleh Shabelnikov, who lives nearby with his elderly mother, came out to assess the damage.
“Today is just a nightmare,” he said, turning away and choking back tears. His father died in mid-March from a stroke, a death he attributed to the war.
“How am I to continue living?” asked Mr. Shabelnikov, 47, who worked in construction before the war. “I am running out of money. How will I eat? How will I feed my mother?”
Matthew Mpoke Bigg
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine issued a stinging rebuke to suggestions that Ukraine should cede territory to make peace with Russia, focusing most of his ire on comments by the former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and criticizing some in the western news media, including The New York Times. His comments, made overnight, reflected a debate among some world leaders and military strategists as to whether Ukraine’s military objective should be to win back territory seized by Russia since its invasion began on Feb. 24, to cut its losses in the face of a nuclear-armed Russia, or to push to reclaim land held by Russia since 2014. Mr. Zelensky vehemently dismissed the idea of ceding any of Ukraine’s territory, suggesting that such a move would be comparable to the 1938 Munich Agreement, which is widely viewed as having appeased Nazi Germany while failing to prevent World War II.
“Mr. Kissinger emerges from the deep past and says that a piece of Ukraine should be given to Russia so that there is no alienation of Russia from Europe,” Mr. Zelensky said, referring to comments Mr. Kissinger made Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It seems that Mr. Kissinger’s calendar is not 2022 but 1938, and he thought he was talking to an audience not in Davos but in Munich.”
Mr. Kissinger, 98, said that the failure to restart negotiations with Russia and the further alienation of the Kremlin would have dire long-term consequences for stability in Europe.
“Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante,” he said, apparently referring to a restoration of Ukraine’s borders before the Russian invasion in February. Pursuing the war beyond that point would create “a new war against Russia itself,” he said. Mr. Zelensky also criticized similar arguments made in some Western media, singling out a Times editorial published on May 19. The editorial, arguing that “an all-out war with Russia” was not in America’s interest, said it was not “realistic” for Ukraine to seek to regain all the territory it has lost since 2014, adding that Ukrainian leaders “will have to make the painful territorial decisions that any compromise will demand.”
The editorial is the position of The Times’ editorial board, which is separate from the newsroom. Mr. Zelensky took issue with the argument.
“Perhaps The New York Times in 1938 also wrote something similar,” he said, again referring to the Munich Agreement. “But now, let me remind you, it is 2022,” he added. “And behind all these geopolitical speculations of those who advise Ukraine to give away something to Russia, great geopoliticians are always unwilling to see ordinary people.”
However, Mr. Zelensky has also said that trying to regain all of Ukrainian territory by force would be unacceptably costly, and Ukrainian negotiators have said that the country was willing to discuss territorial claims. Valerie Hopkins
Shelling killed seven people and injured 17 others in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, according to Oleh Synyehubov, the head of the regional military administration. Five neighborhoods “came under fire from rocket-propelled grenade launchers and artillery,” Synyehubov said. One person was also killed and another injured in the nearby town of Dergachi. Elisabetta Povoledo
Italy has stripped Prime Minister Mikhail V. Mishustin of Russia and three other Russian citizens of a top civilian honor, saying they were no longer worthy of it. The Order of the Star of Italy was created in 2011 to recognize those who have promoted “friendly and cooperative relations between Italy and other countries,” according to the Italian president’s website. The Foreign Ministry recommends the commendations to the president, who has final approval. Mr. Mishustin and Russia’s industry and trade minister, Denis Manturov, were given the second-highest title of honor, Knight of the Grand Cross, in 2020, while Mr. Manturov’s deputy, Victor Leonidovich Evtukhov, and Andrey Kostin, chairman of VTB Bank, received the lower title of commander in 2021. This month, Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, revoked the titles, saying the honorees were “unworthy.”
On Feb. 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio announced that Italy would review all the commendations it has bestowed upon Russian citizens likely to face sanctions. The names of the first four individuals to be stripped of their honors were made public on Thursday. For the past two years, Italy’s Radical Party has kept a list of Russians that they believe should never have been honored in the first place. Among them are Kremlin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov; Igor Sechin, a confidant of President Vladimir V. Putin who runs the oil giant Rosneft; and Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-born tycoon and ally of Mr. Putin. On Friday, Massimiliano Iervolino, the secretary of the Italian Radicals, posted a statement on his Facebook page saying that the presidential decree was “very positive news.” But, the statement noted, “there are still 26 honors” that had been granted to Russians that should be revoked. Edward Wong
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken warned that China’s “defense” of Russia’s war in Ukraine “should raise alarm bells,” saying in a speech that “this is a charged moment for the world” in which diplomacy is “vital.
