Ukraine has not confirmed Moscow’s claim that it has full control of the sprawling complex in the port city. The tenacity of Ukrainian forces there has become a symbol of the country’s broader resistance.
Kyiv May 21, 11:01 a.m. Moscow May 21, 11:01 a.m. Washington May 21, 4:01 a.m. Ukraine has not confirmed Moscow’s claim that it has full control of the sprawling complex in the port city. The tenacity of Ukrainian forces there has become a symbol of the country’s broader resistance. Lauren McCarthy
With the war in Ukraine entering its fourth month, Russia on Friday claimed its hardest won target to date — full control of the Azovstal steel complex — and pressed its assaults in the far eastern quarter of the country. At the same time, the toll exacted by Russia’s stumbling, extended military campaign on its fighting power grew more evident as Russian lawmakers moved to extend military recruitment to those over 40. Russia portrayed the move as a bid to attract recruits with professional degrees and skills, but analysts saw a signal of military depletion. In Ukraine’s east, Russian forces repelled from Kharkiv were digging in north of the city. Other forces were concentrated around the cities of Izium and Sievierodonetsk, and might, experts said, be seeking to lay the foundations for a broader assault. To the south, if Moscow’s assertion of a definitive victory at the Azovstal complex is confirmed, Russian forces fully control a broad swath of port access and land transit. Confirmation of Russia’s claim of Azovstal would represent an end to one of the bloodiest battles of the war, but not to the threats facing the hundreds of Ukrainians fighters who surrendered there. They are now in Russian custody, awaiting a possible Russian Supreme Court ruling as early as next week on whether the unit many of them served in, the Azov regiment, would be designated a terrorist organization. In other developments:
Finland’s natural gas imports from Russia have been cut off, a spokeswoman for the Finnish state energy provider said on Saturday. The company, Gasum, did not comply with Moscow’s demand to make payments in rubles instead of euros. The White House has directed an aide to bring a physical copy of legislation authorizing emergency assistance for Ukraine to South Korea so that it can be signed by President Biden during his five-day diplomatic trip to the region, an administration official said. The $40 billion package of military and humanitarian aid was passed by Congress this week. The Group of 7 economic powers agreed to provide nearly $20 billion to support Ukraine’s economy over the coming months to help keep the country’s government running. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the BBC that her alarm over looming food shortages around the world being caused by Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports had reached “the 10 level” on a scale of one to 10. The men’s and women’s tennis tours are penalizing Wimbledon over a ban on Russian and Belarusian players. The punishment effectively turns one of the biggest tennis tournaments in the world into an exhibition event. Turkey will keep talking to European leaders but still objects to Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO bids, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday. And later that evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said in a statement that he had urged Mr. Erdogan in a phone call to work with those countries and NATO to address concerns ahead of a summit in Madrid next month. Mike Ives
Finland’s natural gas imports from Russia have been cut off, a spokeswoman for the Finnish state energy provider said on Saturday. The company, Gasum, did not comply with Moscow’s demand to make payments in rubles instead of euros. Gasum, which supplies about 60 percent of Finland’s domestic market, has said that it would supply customers through other sources and that it does not expect disruptions. Zolan Kanno-Youngs
The White House has directed an aide to bring a physical copy of legislation authorizing emergency assistance for Ukraine to South Korea so that it can be signed by President Biden during his five-day diplomatic trip to the region, an administration official said. The aide planned to take a commercial flight, the official said. The $40 billion package of military and humanitarian aid was passed by Congress this week. Neil MacFarquhar
The Kremlin has long orchestrated Russia’s court system as an instrument for oppression and propaganda, using a veneer of legality to silence critics and to impose its version of events. Last December, for example, Russia’s Supreme Court liquidated the country’s most prominent human rights group, Memorial, ruling that its work chronicling Stalin-era brutality had distorted the Soviet Union’s historical image. Months earlier, a Moscow court had condemned the political and anti-corruption organizations founded by Aleksei A. Navalny as “extremist,” eventually sentencing the opposition leader to nine years in prison. In 2020, Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine, received a 16-year sentence on espionage charges in a case widely seen as Russia grabbing a hostage. “Sham Trial!” Mr. Whelan, who remains incarcerated, wrote on a piece of paper that he held up in court. The common thread in all these cases, analysts and opposition figures say, is that the verdict was stage-managed to deliver to President Vladimir V. Putin a coveted goal, like diminishing an opponent or buttressing a propaganda point. Now, with nearly 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers from the besieged steel plant in Mariupol in Russian custody, the prospect of so-called show trials has emerged again. The fighters have been leaving the plant this week after maintaining the last line of defense in Mariupol, at a Soviet-era steel facility. The Ukrainian government said it had negotiated a deal for the fighters’ exchange, but Moscow has not confirmed this. At the same time, some Russian officials have pushed to label one group of the soldiers — members of the Azov battalion — as terrorists, and to try them on war crimes charges. The Russian position has raised the prospect that it is laying the groundwork for high-profile trials of the fighters that would advance its narrative of the war.
“Every single case which Putin or his allies would like to manipulate will be manipulated,” said Ilya Novikov, a former Moscow lawyer who relocated to Kyiv three years ago. “You should not start by asking what are the charges, you should start by asking what is the outcome.”
Paolo Pellegrin and Nicholas Casey
In March and April, the photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin made a 4,000-mile journey through war-torn Ukraine with the writer James Verini for an article about Kharkiv, the city on the country’s eastern flank that has been devastated by Russian shelling. The stops along the way were grim. A shopping mall in a suburb of Kyiv, destroyed. A mother comforting a daughter with a bullet wound in a hospital. Mass graves in the town Bucha. Less than a year ago, Pellegrin and Verini had traveled to Ukraine to tell the story of the long-running conflict in the country’s eastern separatist regions. But Russia’s invasion in February scrambled the map. There was a crisis now on the Polish border, where Pellegrin documented scenes of the chaotic crossing station in Medyka as thousands of families fled. From there, he took a circuitous route through the country’s highways, now threaded with checkpoints, passing through Lviv, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Kyiv and Kharkiv. In Kharkiv, the men found a ghost town, where monuments and churches kept watch over empty streets. “Those who had stayed behind were either in basements and subway stations,” Pellegrin said, “or in areas that they thought were less affected, even though everything was affected.”
Russia’s strategy of targeting civilians was something Pellegrin had not witnessed on that scale in past conflicts he covered in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. “Lines are often blurred in conflict areas — in Ukraine it felt even more so. There was this sense here that everything could have been hit,” he said. “It was indiscriminate.”
Lauren McCarthy
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey agreed in a phone call on Friday evening to seek to unlock vital supply routes for Ukrainian grain stocks, as food prices rise across the globe. Turkey objects to Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO bids, but, according to a British government statement, Mr. Johnson encouraged Mr. Erdogan to work with those countries and NATO to address concerns before a summit in Madrid next month. Ivan Nechepurenko and James C. McKinley Jr. The Russian Defense Ministry said Friday that its forces had seized full control of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where Ukrainian forces’ monthslong holdout became a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance to the invasion. The statement, which would signal the end of the most protracted and bloody siege of the war, could not be immediately verified. Senior Ukrainian officials reached late Friday said they were not able to confirm the Russian claim. Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov of Russia’s Defense Ministry said that the plant had been “completely liberated.” He also said that the commander of the Azov regiment, a Ukrainian unit with roots as a far-right militia, had been captured and taken away from the plant in an armored car. Moscow has used the Azov regiment’s presence among the military units defending Mariupol to give a veneer of truth to President Vladimir V. Putin’s false claim that he invaded Ukraine to root out “Nazi” groups. Earlier on Friday, the Azov commander, Denis Prokopenko, issued a video statement noting that the Ukrainian military’s command had ordered them to surrender and urging proper burials for the fighters who had died at the plant. That order was given on Tuesday. General Konashenkov said that 2,439 Ukrainian soldiers, including members of the Azov regiment and other military units, had laid down their arms and surrendered. The last 500 or so surrendered on Friday, he said. Full Russian control of the steel complex would mean the end of one of the bloodiest and protracted battles of the war. Mariupol’s defenders fought for months while Russian bombardments reduced the seaside port city to rubble, killing thousands of civilians, according to local authorities. Slowly, Ukraine’s forces were forced back, until they controlled only the sprawling steel complex and the bunkers beneath it. Negotiations brokered by the International Committee for the Red Cross and the United Nations led recently to the release of hundreds of civilians who were trapped there with the fighters. The fighters held out, despite having no hope of reinforcement or rescue. They vowed to make a last stand, and officials in Kyiv said their resistance had derailed Russia’s war plans. One presidential adviser compared them to the Spartan defenders of the ancient world who gave their lives to hold back the Persians at Thermopylae. Then on Tuesday, Ukraine’s commanders ordered the fighters to lay down their arms, saying there had been secret negotiations with Russia aimed at saving them.
