Russian warship sinks; Mariupol faces key battles

Fifty days ago, on Feb. 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the start of a military assault on neighboring Ukraine. Russian artillery and airstrikes pummeled Ukrainian cities, and the Kremlin’s troops swept across the border, triggering a mass exodus that has become Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II.

Harrowing images of death and torture, including the discovery of mass graves in a town under recent occupation by Russia, sent shock waves around the globe. Putin was labeled a war criminal, and several Western leaders have accused Russia of carrying out a “genocide.”

The fallout from Putin’s invasion also has repercussions far beyond Ukraine. It has forced nations to rethink neutrality and refugee policy, and it threatens to destabilize the global economy. Here is how the world has changed in the past 50 days.

Two Republicans, Sen. Steve Daines (Mont.) and Rep. Victoria Spartz (Ind.), visited Kyiv on Thursday, becoming the first U.S. lawmakers to travel to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion.

Daines and Spartz, who is the first and only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, were invited by the Ukrainian government and arrived in the capital on the war’s 50th day, a show of support as the battle enters a new phase. The lawmakers met with Ukrainian officials and journeyed to Bucha, the suburb northwest of Kyiv where images of bodies buried in mass graves have drawn international outrage.

On his visit, Daines said he saw “indisputable evidence of Putin’s war crimes everywhere,” citing “images of shallow mass graves filled with civilians, women and children.” And he repeated his call to the Biden administration to send more aid and weapons, including fighter jets, to Ukraine.

“America and the world need to know about Putin’s atrocities against the innocent people of Ukraine now, not after time has passed and the aftermath of evil and bloodshed have been cleaned up,” Daines said in a statement released by his office. “The sooner we can provide Ukraine with the lethal aid they need to win this war, the sooner we will end the war crimes.”

Mariupol — once a thriving port city of 450,000, now obliterated by shelling — will probably become the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the coming week, analysts predict.

Mariupol came under siege weeks ago, after occupying forces failed to seize Kyiv, turning their attention east and south. Now, the coming takeover of Mariupol signifies a “beginning of the probably more intense phase of the battle of Donbas,” said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. The southern port citywould bridge the easternmost region of Ukraine and Russian-seized Crimea, allowing Russia to consolidate its gains, surround Ukrainian forces on the border of the eastern Donbas region and take control of the Sea of Azov coast.

“Mariupol is both a steppingstone to the encirclement strategy and part of the end game,” Charap said.

As Russia aims to solidify its grasp on the Donbas region, with its two separatist enclaves, capturing Mariupol would be a boon to the military’s morale.

Mariupol’s weeks-long siege may also be a harbinger for other Ukrainian cities as Russian forces approach, warn military analysts, including J.D. Williams, a senior defense policy researcher at Rand Corp.

Ukrainians have used the cities to their advantage, forcing Russians to engage in arduous urban warfare, Williams said. But the siege warfare tactic — starving a city of hundreds of thousands — has a grave human toll.

“That Mariupol held out as long as it did I think is a blueprint both for the Ukrainians in terms of how to defend but also the cost on Russia going forward,” he said.

The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet sank after an attack from Ukrainian forces triggered a “significant explosion” as the vessel floated off the coast of Ukraine, U.S. officials said Thursday, with Moscow offering a competing claim about the cause of the destruction.

Russia’s Defense Ministry acknowledged the sinking but said its missile cruiser — the Moskva — had been damaged after a fire. Earlier that day, the hobbled warship was moving under its own power, heading to the Crimean port city of Sevastopol for repairs, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said. The episode buoys the morale of Ukrainian forces, who have repelled the Russian invasion for 50 days and are girding for a new phase of fierce fighting in the country’s east.

Experts and analysts said Ukraine’s claim of a successful strike was more credible than the explanations emerging from Moscow. But regardless of the cause, the ship’s loss is a major, if symbolic, setback for Russia, said Artyom Lukin, an international relations professor at the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia.

NEW YORK — A Russian official loyal to President Vladimir Putin has been charged, along with two of his staffers, in an alleged effort to turn an American citizen into an unregistered Russian agent during a five-year campaign that involved attempts to build support for revoking Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Babakov, who serves in the Russian legislature, was indicted in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan — as was his chief of staff, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Vorobev, and Mikhail Alekseyevich Plisyuk, another staffer — for conspiring to have a U.S. citizen act as a foreign agent in the United States without proper registration, among other charges, according to a statement by federal prosecutors.

The case was made public as the Justice Department pushes to enforce U.S. sanctions and other penalties imposed on Russia and some of its wealthy citizens.

In February 2017, the trio submitted false visa applications claiming to want to travel to the U.S. for vacation, when really they were going to try to have off-the-grid meetings with U.S. politicians, prosecutors allege. The group “sought to co-opt U.S. and European politicians” and tried to use them to “influence public opinion in their favor,” said the 44-page indictment.

The defendants, who have not been apprehended, also tried to tempt a member of Congress with a paid trip to Crimea, prosecutors said. The member of Congress, who was not named in the indictment, did not accept the offer.

“Today’s indictment demonstrates that Russia’s illegitimate actions against Ukraine extend beyond the battlefield,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in the statement announcing the case.

The governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region says most people living in larger cities there have now left ahead of a looming Russian offensive.

Pavlo Kyrylenko said on a Ukrainian broadcast Thursday that those who remain “do not want to leave.”

“Only when there is a full escalation do many try to find ways to evacuate,” he said.

Donetsk is located in the contested Donbas region, where Russian troops are expected to intensify attacks in the days and weeks ahead.

Kyrylenko advised residents to leave now, telling them that “evacuating under shelling and air raids is much more difficult” and that it is still possible to leave.

“We will not force them,” he said. “But we are employing all efforts to convince people to leave.”

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshcuk said another 2,557 people evacuated through humanitarian corridors on Thursday, but that “the cease-fire on the part of the occupying forces was again not respected.”

Evacuations through humanitarian corridors have been fraught with complications throughout the war, underscoring the dangers to civilians even in areas meant to provide safety.

Zachary Nelson contributed to this report.

Two children injured last week when Russian forces bombed a train station in Kramatorsk have died, raising the death toll from the attack to 59, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Thursday. Seven of those killed in the April 8 airstrike were children, the ministry said.

“A bloody children’s toy will be sent by [Ukraine’s national police] to the U.N. as proof of this barbaric crime,” the ministry said in a post on Twitter, including an image of a blood-soaked toy horse apparently left at the scene.

Hundreds of people had gathered to catch a morning train out of the station in eastern Ukraine last week when a missile struck the station. In addition to the dozens killed, nearly 100 people were injured, regional officials said at the time.

Washington Post reporters who arrived at the train station roughly 15 minutes after the attack counted at least 20 dead, including children. A large piece of a missile had landed about 100 yards from the building entrance. On one side, the words “for the children” were written in Russian.

Ukraine has continued to call attention to what it says are atrocities and war crimes by Russian forces who have appeared to target civilians via airstrikes.

In his first public speech as director of the CIA, William J. Burns on Thursday called the killings of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha “crimes” and said Russia had “inflicted massive material and reputational damage on itself” following the invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin seven weeks ago.

Burns, who engaged with Putin as U.S. ambassador to Russia, gave a blistering indictment of the Russian leader and harked back to earlier Russian atrocities.

“I have no doubt about the cruel pain and damage that Putin can continue to inflict on Ukraine, or the raw brutality with which Russian force is being applied,” Burns said during prepared remarks at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “The crimes in Bucha are horrific. The scenes of devastation in Mariupol and Kharkiv are sadly reminiscent of the images I saw in Grozny, in Chechnya, as a young diplomat in the winter of 1994-95: Forty square blocks in the center of the city flattened by Russian shelling and bombing, leaving thousands of civilian deaths.”