Ukraine Live Updates: Russian Forces Pull Back After Struggling to Take Ukraine’s Capital
"Ukraine Live Updates: Biden Caps 3 Days of Diplomacy With Rebuke of Putin"
Current time in: Kyiv March 27, 10:37 p.m. Moscow March 27, 10:37 p.m. Washington March 27, 3:37 p.m.
Live Updated March 27, 2022, 3:19 p.m. ET 17 minutes ago
Ukraine’s military said Russian troops were regrouping in the north, though they continued to shell towns around Kyiv and have encircled the city of Chernihiv, stranding thousands of civilians.
Ukrainian soldiers inside a destroyed government building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Sunday. Aris Messinis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Marc Santora
Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that they were increasingly confident in their ability to fend off ground assaults on the capital, Kyiv, but warned that a frustrated Russia may aim to split the country.
As the fighting entered its second month, the war has devolved into an unpredictable patchwork of contested spaces where even the smallest gains come at a shockingly high cost.
Ukrainian forces have gone on the offensive in areas where the Russian lines are stretched the thinnest. Having suffered heavy losses, a large formation of Russian soldiers has fallen back to regroup in an area around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukrainian officials said.
Yet around the capital, Russian forces continued to shell towns and cities, including Bucha and Irpin, where they were working to set up fortified positions, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.
Elsewhere, Ukraine’s military — which has prevented the Russians from encircling the eastern city of Kharkiv — claimed on Sunday that its soldiers had won back two villages on the outskirts of the city.
Ukrainian military’s intelligence chief said that while President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did not have the troops to “swallow” the country, he may try and divide it by consolidating territory in parts of Ukraine.
“There is a reason to believe that he is considering the Korean scenario for Ukraine,” Brig. Gen. Kirill Budanov said in a statement to the Ukrainian press service. “In other words, he will try to impose a distribution line between the non-occupied and occupied regions of our country.”
Russian forces have focused on combating Ukrainian counter offensives and holding gains in the east and south, where the city of Kherson — a critical stronghold bordering Crimea — is now bitterly contested. In other cities, the Russians have continued a brutal campaign aimed at forcing civilians to capitulate or flee.
Those who have remained in the ruined landscapes of cities like Mariupol, Sumy and Chernihiv — collectively home to more than two million people before the war — are now confined to bomb shelters and basements with dwindling supplies of food and water.
Along the eastern front, which stretches more than 600 miles from Chernihiv in the north to the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, the fighting is as intense as the destruction is vast.
Russian forces have now encircled Chernihiv, about 100 miles from Kyiv, according to the city’s mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko. Tens of thousands are now stranded, facing a fate similar to those struggling to survive in Mariupol.
In other developments:
* President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine again turned up the pressure for more weapons to keep up a fight that he said was being waged for the security of all of Europe. “What is the price of this security? This is very specific,” he said. “These are planes for Ukraine. These are tanks for our state. This is antimissile defense. This is anti-ship weaponry.”
* Residents of Lviv woke on Sunday and began surveying the damage from an overnight barrage of missile attacks, fearing that the city in western Ukraine might no longer be a haven from the worst of the fighting with Russia.
* American officials scrambled to clarify President Biden’s remark in Warsaw that Russia’s president “cannot remain in power.” The comment drew a mixed reaction in Europe.
* The making of President Vladimir V. Putin: The 22-year arc of the exercise of power is a study in audacity.
* Residents of Mariupol are desperately trying to escape a city under siege. Here is a look the harrowing journey to safety.
* Tensions flared in another former Soviet region as Azerbaijani forces launched drone strikes against the army of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but claims independence and is closely allied with Armenia.
Jesus Jimenez - March 27, 2022, 2:52 p.m. ET 45 minutes ago
An estimated $63 billion in Ukrainian infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed as of March 24, Ukraine's Parliament said in a Twitter post on Sunday. The losses include more than 4,400 residential buildings, 138 health care facilities, eight civilian airports and 378 education institutions. The cost was calculated by the Kyiv School of Economics.
Ivan Nechepurenko March 27, 2022, 1:30 p.m. ET 2 hours ago
Russian news organizations on Sunday published a long interview with President Volodymyr Zelensky, the first he has given to Russian journalists since the start of the war. Russia’s communications watchdog responded by ordering the outlets not to share or broadcast the interview, without giving a reason for the ban.
March 27, 2022, 1:21 p.m. ET 2 hours ago
Emily Cochrane, Chris Cameron and Lara Jakes
American officials scrambled to clarify Biden’s suggestion that Putin ‘cannot remain in power.’
'No Mercy': Mariupol Bombing Compared to Nazi War Crimes
22 Mar 2022 Associated Press | By Vanessa Gera and Srdjan Nedeljkovic "The Kremlin condemned President Biden’s comments, and the White House said he was not calling for regime change. Missiles hit the city of Lviv and thousands were still stranded in Mariupol. " MEDYKA, Poland — The president of Poland compared Russia’s attacks on Ukraine to Nazi forces during World War II, saying Tuesday that besieged Mariupol looks like Warsaw in 1944 after the Germans bombed houses and killed civilians “with no mercy at all.”
President Andrzej Duda, who will host President Joe Biden later this week in a Warsaw rebuilt from the ashes of that war, spoke as traumatized people bearing witness to the horrors inflicted on Ukraine by Russian forces continued to flee. They arrived by the thousands in Poland and other neighboring nations.
The United Nations refugee agency announced a staggering milestone Tuesday: More than 3.5 million refugees have now left the country.
Among them was Viktoria Totsen, a 39-year-old from Mariupol who entered Poland as part of an exodus that has become Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II.
She described how the bombing by Russian planes had become incessant, prompting her to flee with her two daughters.
“During the last five days the planes were flying over us every five seconds and dropped bombs everywhere,” she said.
During a visit to Bulgaria, Duda compared the Russian shelling of schools, hospitals and other civilian targets, to the atrocities committed by German forces during their occupation of Poland during World War II.
“My countrymen, Poles, are looking today at Mariupol and are saying, ‘God’ — they say it with tears in their eyes — ‘Mariupol looks like Warsaw did in 1944 when Nazis, Hitler’s Germans, were brutally bombing houses, killing people, killing civilians with no mercy at all,’” Duda said.
“Today the Russian army is behaving in exactly the same way. Russian leaders are behaving in exactly the same way, like Hitler, like the German SS, like the German pilots of the fascist army during World War II.”
In the Polish border town of Przemysl, a refugee from Mykolaiv, 45-year-old Natalia Shabadash, described a rocket explosion just 500 meters (yards) from her home.
“It was very scary, that’s why we decided to leave our home,” she said, explaining that her husband, like many Ukrainian men, remained in the country.
The UNHCR reported Tuesday that 3.53 million people have left Ukraine, with Poland taking in the lion’s share — more than 2.1 million — followed by Romania with more than 540,000 and Moldova with more than 367,000. Slovakia and Hungary have also welcomed refugees.
The International Organization for Migration estimates that nearly 6.5 million people are also internally displaced within Ukraine, suggesting that some, if not most, might flee abroad if the war continues.
Many of those who cross into Poland choose to remain, but it is impossible to know the exact number. Poland’s Border Guard agency registers them on entry from Ukraine, but not if they move across the open borders of the European Union to Germany, France, Italy or any of the other countries where Ukrainians are heading.
It’s clear, however, that many opt to stay in Poland, close to their homeland in hopes of returning after the war and drawn by the linguistic and cultural similarities in the fellow Slavic nation. Large numbers of Ukrainians in recent days have registered their children in Polish schools or applied for a national ID number that will give them access to health care and other social services.
Shabadash, who fled Mykolaiv, said she was treated very well in Poland and felt “so grateful to the Polish people,” but intended to to go France.
Meanwhile, groups of orphans and sick children from Ukraine are also arriving, sometimes in transit.
In Warsaw, dozens of Ukrainian orphans and their caretakers who are headed to refuge in the U.K. were stuck Tuesday due to missing paperwork from Ukraine.
The nearly 50 youngsters from orphanages in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro were due to fly to London on Monday before traveling on to Scotland. But they were forced to wait in a hotel until the bureaucratic holdup could be dealt with.
Their journey was organized by a Scottish charity, Dnipro Kids, which was set up in 2005 by supporters of Hibernian Football Club in the Scottish capital, Edinburgh
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