NATO signs accession protocols for Finland and Sweden as Ukraine faces shelling in east

Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the eastern Ukrainian Donetsk province, urged the region’s residents — numbering more than 350,000 — to flee as shelling continued and military analysts warned of a focused Russian effort there.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory in neighboring Luhansk province on Monday, a day after Ukrainian troops withdrew from the province’s last holdout city. Donetsk province, also part of Donbas region whose capture has been a Kremlin target since its focus shifted east, is bracing itself.

“The destiny of the whole country will be decided by the Donetsk region,” Kyrylenko told the Associated Press in Ukraine. He described shelling as “very chaotic” and lacking a “specific target.”

He said a central market in Slaviansk, as well as an area in Bakhmut including a school and other buildings, had recently come under Russian shelling.

“I call on everyone: evacuate!” he tweeted Tuesday, showing photos of the Slovyansk market in flames.

“To them civilians are just a target. Shelling will be repeated. Anyone who stays in Bakhmut is risking his own lives,” he wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

More than 12 million Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes, according to the United Nations.

The war in Ukraine has given the relatively unsexy field of international law a moment in the spotlight. An unprecedented global effort to probe and prosecute war crimes is underway, with local and international investigators fanning out across the war-ravaged country to gather evidence of Russian atrocities — even as the fighting grinds on.

The focus on war crimes has also renewed interest in questions about the strengths and limitations of international law in constraining aggression and imposing accountability.

Three Russian soldiers have already been convicted in Ukrainian courts. Money and resources have poured in to help Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova investigate the nearly 20,000 alleged breaches of the laws of war her team has registered. The International Criminal Court, which opened its own probe in March, sent its largest field deployment to Ukraine. An infusion of funding followed. And the United States dispatched Attorney General Merrick Garland to Ukraine, where he announced the creation of the Justice Department’s War Crimes Accountability Team, to be helmed by U.S. “Nazi hunter” Eli Rosenbaum.

Russia could impose a complete ban on cargo transit through the Baltic countries in retaliation for Lithuania’s recent round of restrictions linked to European Union sanctions, the governor of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad said Tuesday.

“The last variant [of countermeasures] I voiced is a complete ban on imports and exports of any goods via the Baltics,” governor Anton Alikhanov said on Russia 24, a state-owned television network. “Thus, we prohibit the movement of goods toward the Baltics across Russia, with the exception of Kaliningrad.”

In June, Lithuania restricted the transit of steel, ferrous metals and other sanctioned goods to Kaliningrad, as E.U. sanctions took effect. The country said it was acting under guidelines set by the European Commission.

Kaliningrad, the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Sea Fleet, is between Lithuania and Poland, which are both in the E.U. and NATO. It gets much of its supplies via Lithuania and Belarus.

Moscow says that the Lithuanian transit restrictions breached international agreements and threatened the country with countermeasures.

Alikhanov added that his latest proposal would be “an extreme, serious reciprocal measure.”

Russia threatens Lithuania for enforcing E.U. sanctions on Kaliningrad

The Moscow-installed authorities in the occupied areas of southeastern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region said Tuesday that they have reached an agreement to sell grain abroad — mainly to countries in the Middle East, Reuters reported. The region will get 300 rail cars to speed up grain supply from Russia this week in addition to deliveries by trucks.

According to Russian state news agency Tass, a contract has been set up to supply 150,000 metric tons of grain to Iran. Other countries that will benefit from this deal are Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Moscow has been accused of stealing grain from occupied territories in southern Ukraine. On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 60 million metric tons of grain could be blocked from reaching consumers in the fall.

More than 2 million metric tons of grain are being harvested in the area, Yevgeniy Balitsky, military head of the Russian-occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia, said on Telegram.

After the “relatively rapid capture of Lysychansk” by Russian forces over the weekend, Russia continues to make “substantive progress” in its bid to seize control of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, according to a daily update from Britain’s Defense Ministry.

Unlike in earlier phases of the war, Russia appears to have “achieved reasonably effective co-ordination” between groupings of its armed forces under military leaders, it said Tuesday.

However, the intelligence update added that Ukrainian forces have probably withdrawn in good shape and in line with existing plans. “There is a realistic possibility that Ukrainian forces will now be able to fall back to a more readily defendable, straightened front line,” it said.

It predicted that further battles for Donbas would be characterized by “slow rates of advance” by Russian forces and the mass use of artillery “levelling towns and cities in the process.”

Russia fired missiles at a market and residential area in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, damaging several houses and destroying one. At least two people were killed and seven injured, officials said. Two people were taken to the hospital as firefighters rushed to put out the flames.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, called the strikes an act of “sheer terrorism.” In a Facebook post, he wrote that “Russians are deliberately targeting places where civilians congregate.”

Photos and videos from the scene show part of the ground-level market in flames. It’s unclear how many people were in the area at the time or what type of munitions were used.

Tuesday marks the eighth anniversary of Ukraine recapturing Slovyansk from Russian proxy forces of the self-proclaimed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic.

Russia is inching closer to securing complete control over the eastern Luhansk region and is setting its sights on Slovyansk as a gateway to capturing the rest of the Donetsk region. Luhansk and Donetsk make up Ukraine’s industrial heartland of Donbas.

Yum Brands, the Louisville-based conglomerate behind KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, is a step closer to fully extricating itself from Russia.

On Tuesday, more than four months after Russia invaded Ukraine, the company announced it had transferred ownership of all its Pizza Hut franchises to an unnamed local operator, who plans to rebrand those locations with a “non-Yum” concept. Yum Brands also said it is in the “advanced stages” of transferring ownership of its KFC restaurants in Russia. It suspended all new investments there on March 7.

“This builds on the Company’s prior actions to suspend operations of all company-owned restaurants, halt all investment and restaurant development efforts, and redirect any profits from Russia operations to humanitarian efforts,” reads an unsigned statement on the Yum Brands website.

When the sale of the KFC franchises is complete, the company “intends to fully exit from Russia,” according to the statement.

Like some of its peers, Yum Brands’ full exit from the country is complicated by the fact that the vast majority of its 53,000 global restaurants are owned and operated by franchisees. There were about 1,000 KFCs and 50 Pizza Huts in Russia before operations were suspended, according to a company news release.

On Tuesday, Russia’s lower house of parliament approved legislation that would force businesses to produce whatever the government wants, at a price and time frame set by it.

The legislation, among two measures that cleared the State Duma, is expected to pass swiftly through both houses of Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament before being signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has struggled to sustain personnel and equipment, with Western countries imposing broad sanctions and supplying Ukraine with weapons.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said it was necessary to “optimize” the work of the military-industrial complex and related enterprises. He said the legislation would allow Russia to mobilize its economy to support what Moscow calls its “special military operation” against Ukraine.

“This does not mean that any enterprise — small, medium-size businesses, any other — will be forcibly involved in the implementation of state defense order measures,” he said, noting that they would not affect companies not producing goods for the military. “There is no need for this.”

One of the two bills said the state could impose “special economic measures” during military operations, requiring firms to supply goods and services to the military. The second bill would give the government authority to alter the working hours of businesses supplying the goods — employees may be asked to work at night, on weekends and on holidays — with the possibility of no annual leave.

Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma, said discussions on the measures would continue behind closed doors on Wednesday.