Evacuation of Ukrainian soldiers underway at Mariupol steel plant

Ukrainian troops have forced a Russian withdrawal in the northeastern city of Kharkiv and advanced as far as the Russian border, the local governor said Monday. In many areas in the east the situation is fluid, with Ukrainian and Russian forces capturing and recapturing territory.

Here are updates from key battlegrounds:

Kharkiv: Russian troops are trying to hold the border after withdrawing from areas around Ukraine’s second-largest city. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said this activity is different from previous Russian withdrawals from around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy earlier in the war when they pulled all the way back into Russian territory. In this case, they “may seek to retain positions in Ukraine” — and keep up the battery of artillery strikes — to prevent Ukrainian forces from getting within striking range of the Russian city of Belgorod, a key supply hub for Russia’s military.

Donbas: Despite a mostly stalled offensive in the eastern Donbas region, Russian forces have made modest gains amid heavy fighting in the Donetsk oblast, the Pentagon said Monday.

Odessa: Russian airstrikes hit tourist infrastructure and buildings in the Odessa region, its military administration said Monday.

Mariupol: An evacuation of at least some Ukrainian soldiers from an encircled steel plant in this Russian-controlled city appeared to be underway Monday. The number of Ukrainian troops to be evacuated was not immediately clear — nor was their fate. Mass graves have been discovered to the west of the shattered southern port city, officials said. Ukraine’s military command said late Monday that it would end combat operations in Mariupol and focus on the evacuations.

Alex Horton, Reis Thebault and Hannah Dormido contributed to this report.

The Senate voted 81-to-11 on Monday evening to advance a bill that would secure nearly $40 billion in additional military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

The chamber invoked cloture, capping further debate on the bill and setting up a final vote that will likely be scheduled for later this week. Both Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have stressed the importance of securing the aid this week, given that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that the remaining funds the U.S. has sent Ukraine will run out by Thursday.

Eighty-one Democrats and Republicans voted in favor of advancing the measure. Eleven Republicans, including Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and John Boozman (Ark.), voted against it.

President Biden had expected the measure to land on his desk last week, but the Senate’s move to quickly advance the bill was delayed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who demanded that a provision be added establishing an inspector general to oversee the disbursement of the funds. While Schumer and McConnell told Paul he could have a vote on the addition, Paul wanted the amendment added to the bill, which means the measure would have gone back to the House, further delaying the process.

On the Senate floor Monday, Schumer alluded to the Paul impasse, accusing him of “needlessly” delaying the help for the people of Ukraine.

“I urge him to drop his opposition so we can reach an agreement to get this package passed through the Senate as soon as we can,” Schumer said.

The Senate, he said, has a “moral obligation” to pass the assistance quickly.

While Paul could further delay advancing the bill this week, he will not be able to block final passage of the legislation, as he made clear in a tweet Friday.

“They’ll eventually pass the spending without me, as they always do, but at the very least they need to include oversight,” he wrote.

Ukraine has launched a delicate, multilateral effort to evacuate its last remaining soldiers from the ruined Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced late Monday, saying that “Ukraine needs Ukrainian heroes alive.”

Ukrainian officials have been coordinating the complex operation with the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and they reached a cease-fire agreement with the Russian military, which said it would allow the fighters to be transported from the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works facility to Russian-held territory.

“We hope that we will be able to save the lives of our guys,” Zelensky said in a video address. “Among them are the seriously wounded, they are being provided with medical aid. … To bring the boys home, the work continues, and this work needs delicacy. And time.”

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Anna Malyar, said 53 seriously wounded soldiers were taken to a hospital in the town of Novoazovsk, less than 30 miles east of Mariupol. Another 211 were transported to another Russian-backed village, she said, and Moscow and Kyiv will broker a prisoner swap to secure their release. Malyar said officials were still working to rescue the remaining soldiers, though it is unclear how many are still inside. Ukrainian authorities said last week there were nearly 1,000 holdout fighters in the plant.

Earlier Monday, the military unit posted a statement acknowledging the move, saying that, “In order to save lives, the entire Mariupol garrison is implementing the approved decision of the Supreme Military Command and hopes for the support of the Ukrainian people.”

The battle for Mariupol has been one of the war’s bloodiest and most high-profile. Russia laid waste to the strategically important southeastern port city, which had a fast-growing preinvasion population of about 450,000. Early on, Moscow’s forces surrounded Mariupol, cut it off from water and electricity and bombed it ceaselessly, reducing much of the city to rubble.

Losing Mariupol is a significant setback for Ukraine, but its military leaders said troops there kept the Russians at bay long enough to buy crucial time for Ukrainian forces fighting elsewhere.

“We got the critically needed time to build reserves, regroup forces and get help from partners,” Ukraine’s military command said in a Monday update.

“Mariupol defenders are heroes of our time,” the command wrote. “They are forever in history.”

A retired Russian colonel told state media on Monday that the invasion of Ukraine is not going the way Russia is portraying it, and that the global isolation facing the country is more daunting than Russian leaders are letting on.

“After all, the main deficiency of our military-political position is that, in a way, we are in full geopolitical isolation, and that, however much we would hate to admit this, virtually the entire world is against us,” Mikhail Khodaryonok said, according to a video translated by the BBC’s Francis Scarr. “And it’s that situation that we need to get out of.”

When asked about the current state of the war, Khodaryonok, who has given frank assessments of the war on Russian airwaves in recent days, urged viewers to be cautious about any information put out by Russia on how Ukrainian forces “are allegedly on the verge of some kind of crisis in morale and so on.”

“All of that, to put it mildly, is false,” he said.

Khodaryonok referenced how the U.S. Congress is poised to approve nearly $40 billion in additional military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, and what that could look like for Russia if Ukraine potentially employs a force of “a million armed Ukrainian soldiers.”

“We need to take that into account in our own operational and strategic calculations, that the situation in this regard for us will frankly get worse,” he said on state TV.

As state media host Olga Skabeyeva pushed back on Khodaryonok and said that the Ukrainian forces are “not such a great contingent,” the retired colonel replied that the will of Ukraine mattered more than whether they are “professional” soldiers.

“The thing is that the level of any army’s professionalism is determined not by the number of those recruited for professional service but by the level of the personnel’s training, and its morale and readiness to shed blood for the homeland,” he said.

Then, as Skabeyeva attempted to equate Ukrainian forces’ “desire to die” to professionalism, Khodaryonok shot down the state media host’s assertion, saying “it’s a component of an army’s high combat readiness.”

“The main thing in our [military] business, it’s always to maintain a sense of military-political realism,” he said. “If you go beyond it, then sooner or later the reality of history will hit you so hard that you’ll regret it.”

Ukraine and Japan have signed an agreement on a $100 million loan intended to support Ukraine’s most vulnerable population, including those who’ve been displaced during the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance announced Monday.

The loan, which the ministry said was for 30 years and included a grace period of 10 years, is aimed to provide “budgetary support for the stabilization of the situation in Ukraine, in particular, the provision of priority social, and humanitarian expenditures, health care, support for internally displaced persons, and other priority expenditures,” according to a statement.

Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergii Marchenko said that he and the president of Japan’s International Cooperation Agency, Akihiko Tanaka, signed the loan agreement Monday in hope of supporting “the most unprotected population of Ukraine” in the aftermath of the invasion.

“The concessional loan of 13 billion yen, which is the first part of the agreed financial assistance between Ukraine and Japan, will be directed to the state budget to finance priority expenses. First of all, to support the most unprotected population of Ukraine,” Marchenko said in the statement.

An evacuation of at least some Ukrainian soldiers from the encircled Azovstal steel plant in Russian-controlled Mariupol appeared to be underway Monday, signaling the start of a new and perhaps final phase of one of the war’s bloodiest and most high-profile battles.

The Ukrainian military unit whose fighters were the last holdouts in the southeastern port city posted a statement on Telegram saying that, “In order to save lives, the entire Mariupol garrison is implementing the approved decision of the Supreme Military Command and hopes for the support of the Ukrainian people.”

The number of Ukrainian troops to be evacuated was not immediately clear — nor was their fate.

The announcement came the same day as Russia’s defense ministry said it had agreed to a cease-fire and a so-called humanitarian corridor that would allow wounded fighters trapped in Azovstal Iron and Steel Works to be transported to a hospital in the Russian-held town of Novoazovsk, less than 30 miles east of Mariupol.

A commander of the Ukrainian battalion, the Azov Regiment, said, without elaborating, that “there are no completely safe plans or operations in the war.”

“The main thing is to understand whether all the risks have been calculated, whether plan B has been worked out, whether you have given yourself completely to this plan, which must combine the fulfillment of the task and the maximum preservation of life and health of personnel,” the commander, Denys Prokopenko, said in a video that accompanied his unit’s statement.

Reuters journalists saw “about a dozen buses” leaving Azovstal on Monday, the outlet reported, but could not determine how many people were aboard.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was expected to address his country on Monday evening to deliver an update on the situation at the steel plant.

Members of the European Union were unable to unanimously agree on banning Russian oil on Monday, with the bloc’s foreign policy chief saying “unhappily” that it was not possible just yet to get an unanimous vote.

Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s high representative for foreign policy, told reporters in Brussels that Hungary continues to hold up an unanimous vote on a proposal to ban all imports of Russian crude and refined fuels. Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said last week that the country would only vote on such a proposal if the E.U. develops solutions for the issues the Russian oil ban would cause for the Hungarian economy.

Borrell, who told Politico he was unsure how long it would take for the E.U. to deliver a unanimous vote on the sixth sanctions package against Russia, said at a news conference that the bloc was still facing “the same difficulties about unanimity on the oil ban.”

“It was not even in the agenda to try to get an agreement today, because we knew it was not possible,” Borrell said. “But we had a very constructive discussion about the reasons why some member states are reluctant — not only about oil ban but other elements of the sanctions package.”

ROMAZZINO, Italy — Even among the billionaires who flock to this vacation enclave, the Russian oligarchs stood out.

They bought up the choicest villas along the coast, building de facto empires shielded behind clipped hedges and surveillance cameras. They were known among real estate agents for always wanting armed guards. One mining and metals tycoon, Alisher Usmanov, would announce his presence every summer with the arrival of one of the world’s largest yachts, which he would park in the turquoise bay, shuttling between the vessel and his villas, flying in guests on helicopters.

“It was like having an oligarch state right here in Sardinia,” said Mauro Pili, a journalist who was once this island’s governor.

That state has now been dismantled.