Ukraine Steps Up Evacuation Calls as Russia Attacks in Northeast

Only 1,400 people out of 11,000 have left the Kupiansk area since regional authorities issued evacuation orders this month, Ukrainian officials say.

A resident of Kupiansk dies in Russian shelling, Ukraine says.

The fighting around Kupiansk poses strategic dilemmas for both Russia and Ukraine.

Prigozhin is buried in a private cemetery in St. Petersburg, his press service says.

The White House press secretary draws a closer link to the Kremlin in Prigozhin’s death.

The Pentagon announces $250 million more in military hardware and ammunition for Ukraine.

A Russian court rejects release for an ultranationalist military blogger, Igor Girkin.

The Vatican tries to clarify the pope’s remarks on Russia.

Ukrainian officials said that a 45-year-old resident of Kupiansk died under Russian artillery shelling on Tuesday morning, as attacks on the eastern city mounted and the authorities stepped up calls for civilians to evacuate.

Since early this month, more than 1,400 people, including 343 children, have been evacuated from frontline areas near Kupiansk, according to Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the regional military administration. The city is in Russia’s cross hairs as it goes on the offensive in the north of eastern Ukraine, even as its forces are defending other parts of the front line.

“We continue to work on the evacuation of the civilian population from dangerous regions of the Kupiansk district,” Mr. Syniehubov said in a post on the Telegram messaging app on Monday.

But the figures Mr. Syniehubov announced fall far short of the 11,000 people the authorities said this month that they planned to relocate when they announced a mandatory evacuation order from the Kupiansk district, which was home to about 60,000 people before the war.

The city of Kupiansk, only 25 miles from the Russian border, fell to Moscow’s forces at the beginning of the full-scale invasion last year and remained under occupation for six months. Ukrainian forces retook it in a lightning counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region last September.

But since then, Russian forces have constantly pounded the area with artillery, making it practically impossible to go back to everyday life. In recent weeks, as Russian forces have pushed to retake some of the lands in the region they lost last fall, they have made some small gains around Kupiansk.

The situation has led a top Ukrainian military commander to call for more reinforcements in the area.

RUSSIA

Kyiv

Kharkiv

Kupiansk

Dnipro R.

UKRAINE

Volgograd

Sea of Azov

CRIMEA

100 mileS

By The New York Times

The local authorities had already been calling for civilians to evacuate Kupiansk and nearby settlements earlier this year. The calls grew louder as Russian forces advanced in the area, but some residents — many of whom are older and in poor health — have been reluctant to leave, saying they fear economic insecurity.

“I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m evacuated,” said Oleksandr Shapoval, 63, who lives in an area in western Kupiansk that has been relatively spared by the shelling. “Here, we have a small house, we have a small vegetable garden. We have something here.”

Mr. Shapoval, speaking by telephone, said that he suffered from heart problems and high blood pressure. The shelling has intensified in recent weeks, and “the Russians are coming,” he said. But he added that he thought the city would hold and that he was staying to help the Ukrainian troops by cooking for them and doing their laundry.

“I don’t think that Kupiansk will surrender,” Mr. Shapoval said.

Mr. Syniehubov, the local official, said the Kupiansk resident who died on Tuesday morning was killed while working as a security guard in a meat processing plant that had been damaged in artillery shelling.

Farther south, in the eastern Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday that five people died in Russian strikes.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration, said in a Telegram post that a dozen villages and towns in the area had been under fire, adding that four people were wounded in the attacks. He posted several pictures that showed destroyed houses and the ceiling of a house pierced by what appeared to be the skeleton of a cluster rocket, a weapon that opens in midair to dispense bomblets over a large area. The images could not be independently verified.

The prosecutor’s office of the Donetsk region said on Telegram that Russian forces had most likely used cluster munitions in their attack. Both Russia and Ukraine have used the controversial weapons, which are known to cause indiscriminate harm to civilians.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting.

— Constant Méheut

The fighting around Kupiansk, in the north of eastern Ukraine, has renewed questions for both Russia and Ukraine about where to send reinforcements along a front line that is hundreds of miles long.

As Russia makes small gains in the area, Kupiansk has found itself in the cross hairs of the fighting. The city is under constant shelling and Russian troops are now only a few miles to its north.

“The Russians seem to be making some progress,” Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, acknowledged during a news conference on Monday.

Russian forces seized the city at the outset of the war, using it as a logistical center, before the Ukrainian military recaptured it last September. Losing it again would be a major blow for Ukraine, which has spread troops and firepower all along the front line in an attempt to hold onto its land. Last week, Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top general in the east, called for more reinforcements in the Kupiansk area.

But that approach has come under criticism from Western officials who say that Ukraine should concentrate its troops on the southern front in order to achieve the main goal of its ongoing counteroffensive: to cut off Russian supply lines in the south by driving a wedge through the so-called land bridge between Russia and the occupied Crimean Peninsula.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has dismissed the criticism, saying that Ukrainian forces would not be shifted away from places like Kupiansk.

Britain’s Ministry of Defense last week said that “there is a realistic possibility Russia will increase the intensity of its offensive efforts” on the front near Kupiansk and a city to its south, Lyman, in the next two months.

But it remains unclear whether Russian forces would want to take the whole of Kupiansk, which would mean then trying to hold a city on the banks of a major river and with limited supply lines. That situation would be similar to what Russia’s forces faced last year in the southern city of Kherson, from which they eventually retreated.

Instead, Russian troops could try to advance to the river, the Oskil, which runs north and south, and use it as a natural barrier against further Ukrainian attacks.

Meanwhile, Russia has to hold off a Ukrainian push in the south. Ukraine’s military said Monday that its forces had retaken the village of Robotyne, pushing through Russia’s initial lines of defense — a tactical gain that could give Ukrainian troops an opening for a larger breakthrough on the southern front.

Recent reports from military analysts have suggested that Russia’s military might be moving forces from the east to the south to reinforce its defenses there, which could ease the pressure on Kupiansk.

— Constant Méheut

Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary chief who died in a plane crash last week, has been buried in a private ceremony in St. Petersburg, his press service said on Tuesday, ending days of speculation over how he would be laid to rest.

The announcement on the Telegram messaging app came as a surprise. Hours earlier, the Kremlin said it had no information about Mr. Prigozhin’s funeral except that President Vladimir V. Putin would not attend.

Mr. Prigozhin’s funeral “took place in a private format,” his press service said. “Those wishing to say goodbye can visit the Porokhovskoye cemetery” in St. Petersburg.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Porokhovskoye cemetery was being heavily guarded by Russian police, riot police, and national guardsmen, who did not allow people to enter, suggesting the lengths the state has gone to to keep the public mourning for Mr. Prigozhin at a minimum.

Details about Mr. Prigozhin’s funeral, including the date and whether members of the public would be allowed to attend, were unclear for days. Rumors had swirled about ceremonies at other cemeteries, though Porokhovskoye had not been mentioned, and police had cordoned off some of them and set up metal detectors at the Serafimovsky Cemetery, where Mr. Putin’s parents are buried.

The secrecy reflected the sensitivities surrounding Mr. Prigozhin, a longtime ally of Mr. Putin who launched a failed mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership in June. He was killed along with nine others, including top leaders of his Wagner private military company, in the crash of a private jet northwest of Moscow last Wednesday.

Mr. Prigozhin had received the Hero of Russia designation, one of the Russian military’s top honors, which generally accords special burials, including an honor guard and a military band.

The confusion was in line with the murky details about the crash. Its cause remains unclear, but U.S. and Western officials believe it was prompted by an explosion on board. Many Western officials have said they think it is likely that Mr. Putin may have played a role in having Mr. Prigozhin killed as retribution for the mercenary chief’s short-lived mutiny in June.

After the crash, Russian authorities released the plane’s flight manifest, showing the names of the 10 people who were supposed to be on board, and said that all aboard had been killed. That left room for days of speculation about whether Mr. Prigozhin was really on the plane.

The deaths were not officially confirmed until Sunday, when Russian investigators said that genetic testing showed that the victims of the crash matched the names on the manifest.

Wagner’s logistics chief, Valery Chekalov, who was also on the plane, was buried Tuesday morning in Northern Cemetery in St. Petersburg, in a ceremony that was not publicized in advance. Several hundred people came to pay their respects.

Some analysts speculated that the Russian authorities were seeking to avoid a public outpouring of support for Mr. Prigozhin and his top lieutenants.

“It seems that the authorities, as expected, want to avoid a spontaneous rally in memory of the top leadership of Wagner and to do so, have imposed a fog around the burial place,” Farida Rustamova, an independent journalist, wrote on the Telegram messaging app.

Valeriya Safronova, Nanna Heitmann and Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.

— Valerie Hopkins reporting from St. Petersburg, Russia

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said on Tuesday that it was “very clear” what had happened to Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary chief who died in a plane crash last week, citing the Kremlin’s “long history of killing its opponents.”

During a White House news briefing on Tuesday, hours after Mr. Prigozhin’s burial in a cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia, she recapped how Mr. Prigozhin had led his Wagner mercenaries in a short-lived mutiny in June before making a deal to relocate to Belarus.

“Now two months after he struck that deal, he’s been killed,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “So it’s, you know, it’s pretty evident what happened here.”

Mr. Jean-Pierre’s comments appeared to be the Biden administration’s strongest suggestion yet that the Kremlin played a role in the crash that killed Mr. Prigozhin last Wednesday, while stopping short of making a direct accusation.

On the day of the crash, President Biden was asked if he thought Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, was behind it. “There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind,” Mr. Biden answered. “But I don’t know enough to know the answer.”

In the days since, U.S. and Western officials have said they believe the crash was caused by an explosion on board. Russian officials say investigations are underway.

Many Western officials have said they think it is likely that Mr. Putin played a role in Mr. Prigozhin’s death as retribution for his June mutiny. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, has called such suggestions “an absolute lie.”

On Tuesday, when asked when the Biden administration would release a formal assessment of the plane crash, Ms. Jean-Pierre instead referred to “what Mr. Putin tends to do.”

“It’s very clear what happened here,” she said, without providing additional details.

The Russian authorities have tightly controlled information about the crash, and did not directly confirm Mr. Prigozhin’s death for days. While the flight manifest was released on the day of the crash, and the authorities said all on board had been killed, there was no confirmation that he had been on board until Sunday, when officials said DNA testing had shown matches with all the names on the manifest.

— Jesus Jiménez and Zolan Kanno-Youngs

The Pentagon will provide up to $250 million in military aid to Ukraine as part of a new package of weapons and equipment announced on Tuesday that will include AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles for air defense.

The package is the 45th such tranche to be drawn from the Defense Department’s existing stockpile of weapons and equipment since August 2021. The inventory of matériel to be provided to Kyiv in this round, according to a Defense Department statement emailed to reporters, also includes ammunition and other equipment, the likes of which the U.S. has sent in large quantities: guided rockets for HIMARS launchers, 155-millimeter artillery shells, Javelin anti-tank missiles, air-to-ground rockets, Humvee trucks and three million rounds of small arms ammunition.

“The U.S. will continue to work with its allies and partners to provide Ukraine with the capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements,” Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters at a news briefing on Tuesday afternoon.

In order to assist Ukrainian soldiers in breaching Russian minefields as part of their counteroffensive, the Defense Department will also send mine-clearing equipment and demolition munitions that could be used to blast through Russian lines.

The most notable element of the package is the AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, which are heat-seeking air-to-air weapons that can be fired from NASAMS, or National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, launchers on the ground. Built as a joint product of Norway and the American defense firm Raytheon, NASAMS uses the kinds of missiles built for NATO warplanes and repurposes them for ground-based air defense systems. The U.S. military uses them for the aerial defense of Washington.

A Navy report called the Sidewinder “one of the oldest, least expensive, and most successful missiles in the U.S. weapons inventory” and noted that more than 40 nations have adopted the weapon for their militaries. It is smaller and lighter in weight than the AIM-7 Sparrow missiles that the Pentagon have previously sent to Kyiv for use in NASAMS launchers.

According to a U.S. Air Force fact sheet, the specific model of Sidewinder that will be sent to Ukraine first arrived in the Pentagon’s arsenal in 1983.

This newest drawdown of matériel does not contain any 155-mm artillery cluster weapons, Ms. Singh said. The White House’s decision in July to provide those shells, each of which contain 72 small anti-tank and anti-personnel grenades, was condemned by many human rights organizations. Shells of this type have been banned by more than 100 countries because of the risk they pose to civilians during and after their use, since the grenades’ failure rate of 14 percent or more produces many duds that can produce de facto minefields. Neither the United States nor Russia nor Ukraine has signed the treaty prohibiting their stockpiling or use.

The United States has provided at least $23.8 billion in military hardware from Pentagon stockpiles during the Biden administration, and has also sent approximately $19.7 billion in financing for Ukraine to purchase goods directly from the American defense industry. The United States has also committed more than $2.6 billion to Ukraine in humanitarian aid, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the State Department’s ShareAmerica platform.

In May, with the Biden administration under intensifying pressure to explain how it intended to continue supporting Ukraine militarily without asking Congress for more appropriations, the Pentagon recalculated the value of the matériel it had sent to Ukraine, freeing up at least $3 billion in additional funds for Kyiv. The two aid packages the Pentagon has announced since, including Tuesday’s, have been smaller than most of the previous tranches.

“We’re confident that we will have enough money to meet Ukraine’s need through the fiscal year,” Ms. Singh said, noting that the department has requested supplemental funding from Congress.

— John Ismay Reporting from Washington

A Russian court ruled that an ultranationalist blogger who has criticized the Russian Army’s leadership of the war in Ukraine must remain in jail until he faces trial on charges of “extremist activities.”

The blogger, Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, was arrested in July and will remain in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison until Sept. 18, Russian media reported.

Before his arrest, Mr. Girkin had called for a wider mobilization and a purge of those who oppose the war. In a post on the Telegram messaging app published days before he was detained, Mr. Girkin referred to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, as “nothingness.”

His arrest last month followed a brief rebellion by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s Wagner fighters and signaled that the Kremlin may have lost tolerance for some pro-war military bloggers who had been increasingly critical of the Russian Army. It also appeared to spark a short-lived bout of infighting among the milblogger community.

In March 2014, Mr. Girkin helped Russia illegally annex Crimea and then led-pro-Russian separatist militias in eastern Ukraine. He was appointed defense minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a separatist entity that claimed the territory of the Donetsk region of Ukraine.

After Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, killing all 298 people aboard, Mr. Girkin was dismissed from his role in Donetsk and gradually sidelined in Russian politics for his extremist views. Last year, a Dutch court found Mr. Girkin and two others guilty of murder in the downing of the passenger jet. Mr. Girkin has denied responsibility.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Girkin returned to public prominence as a pro-war commentator.

— Valeriya Safronova

Pope Francis did not intend to “glorify imperialistic logic” in off-the-cuff remarks last week about expansionist 18th-century Russian rulers, the Vatican said on Tuesday, seeking to calm an outcry over comments that some critics said were too close to President Vladimir V. Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine.

In a video speech to young Russian Catholics on Friday, “The Pope intended to encourage the youth to preserve and promote all that is positive in the great Russian cultural and spiritual legacy,” the Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said in a statement. “Surely not to glorify imperialistic logic and government personalities.”

At the conclusion of his speech, in which Francis encouraged young Catholic Russians to build bridges between generations and spread seeds of reconciliation, he invoked the legacy of the “Great Russia of saints, rulers, Great Russia of Peter I, Catherine II, that empire — great, enlightened, of great culture and great humanity.”

Those comments appeared to deviate from his prepared remarks, which were released in a Vatican bulletin that did not mention the extemporaneous references to the two former Russian tsars, who invaded parts of Ukraine in the 18th centuries.

Those comments were immediately criticized in Ukraine and in other former Soviet countries. Mr. Putin, who compared himself to Peter the Great in a speech last year, has mentioned the idea of rebuilding the Russian empire in connection with the war in Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union until its collapse three decades ago.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, Oleg Nikolenko, wrote on Facebook that it was “very unfortunate that Russian grand-state ideas, which, in fact, are the cause of Russia’s chronic aggression, knowingly or unknowingly, come from the Pope’s mouth.”

The leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, also expressed “pain” and “disappointment” over the pope’s remarks, which he said contradicted Francis’ doctrine of peace.

In the early months of the war set off by the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the pope was criticized for not taking a strong enough stance against Russia, apparently following a standard strategy of the Holy See to avoid alienating any warring side before possible peace negotiations. But as the war has continued, Francis has reversed course and called Ukrainians “martyrs” in a “morally unjust” war.

— Gaia Pianigiani

Paul Whelan, an American imprisoned in Russia, appeared in a video released on Monday by a Kremlin-backed news network, giving his family a chance to see him for the first time in three years.

Mr. Whelan, a former Marine serving a 16-year sentence on what U.S. officials say are bogus espionage charges, has been largely out of sight since he was convicted by a Russian court in June 2020, although he has been visited by Western diplomats.

In the video posted by RT — a state-owned English-language network previously known as Russia Today — Mr. Whelan is seen in several settings, including eating in a cafeteria. He appeared to be in good health and declined an interviewer’s request to ask him questions.

In an email to supporters, Mr. Whelan’s twin brother, David, said that Monday “was the first time I’ve seen what he really looks like since June 2020.”

“So thank you, Russia Today, because although your reporting is the worst sort of propaganda and you are the mouthpiece for war criminals, at least I could see what Paul looks like after all of these years,” he wrote.

David Whelan said the video was recorded in May. He added that his brother previously informed their parents that prison officials had punished him for his refusal to participate in the interview, including by taking some of his clothing.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said at a news briefing on Tuesday that “it was reassuring to see that he remains — and this is to use his brother’s words — ‘unbowed.’”

“Paul continues to show tremendous courage,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said. “That does not change that his circumstance are truly unacceptable, and we will continue to be very clear about that. Russia should release him immediately.”

President Biden has said he is working to secure the release of Mr. Whelan. The State Department tried for months to include him in the deal that freed the W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner, who was arrested in a Russian airport shortly before the invasion of Ukraine and later pleaded guilty to drug charges.

Ms. Griner was released in December in exchange for Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death.”

Aside from diplomatic visits, communication by Mr. Whelan, a corporate security executive, has been limited to phone calls and a phone interview that he did with CNN in May.

Mr. Whelan, 53, and Evan Gershkovich — an American reporter from The Wall Street Journal arrested in March, also on espionage charges — have been designated by the United States as “wrongfully detained,” which means they are essentially considered political hostages.

David Whelan said in an interview in April that he would “be happy for the U.S. government to make whatever concessions they can to bring Paul home.”

— Jesus Jiménez

New survey data shows that children in Ukraine are experiencing a “widespread learning loss” during Russia’s invasion, UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, said on Tuesday.

The educational problems underscore the widespread social damage to Ukraine caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion 18 months ago, adding to the emotional and mental toll on young Ukrainians. Over the course of the war, some schools have been bombed and others converted into shelters.

The United Nations’ human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine said in June that more than 530 children had been killed and 1,047 wounded since the conflict began, figures that are likely to be an undercount. Russia and its proxy forces in Ukraine have also moved some children to camps in Russian-occupied areas or to Russia itself, sometimes for adoption.

The long period of turmoil has left teachers and school administrators struggling to figure out how to provide classes for the millions of children that remain in Ukraine, many of them displaced from their homes, and for those who have left the country, a number that some estimates put at around two million.

Up to 57 percent of Ukrainian teachers have reported a deterioration in their students’ language abilities, as well as lower math and foreign language skills, UNICEF said.

Regina De Dominicis, the agency’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement that “inside Ukraine, attacks on schools have continued unabated, leaving children deeply distressed and without safe spaces to learn.”

“Not only has this left Ukraine’s children struggling to progress in their education,” she said, “but they are also struggling to retain what they learned when their schools were fully functioning.”

The most recent enrollment data for Ukrainian schools found that about a third of primary- and secondary-age children were learning in person, while another third were taking a mix of in-person and online classes. The final third were attending classes only online, according to the agency.

About two-thirds of younger children in Ukraine were not attending preschool, and in frontline areas, about 75 percent of parents said they were not sending their children to preschool, it said.

Ukrainian children who left the country are also likely to face challenges finding access to classes, it added. More than half of Ukrainian refugee children across seven host countries are not enrolled in national education systems, some of which are already overstretched, the agency said, noting that they face language barriers and difficulty in accessing schools.

UNICEF said it was working with officials and partners in Ukraine and those countries to increase access to quality schooling, including providing alternate modes of learning and equipping teachers and school employees with the skills needed to “integrate all vulnerable children in classrooms” and to provide “language classes and mental health and psychosocial support.”

— Jesus Jiménez

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an interview on Sunday that his country could hold elections in 2024, but that it would only be possible with significant help from the West with funding and logistics.

Any elections — which are not permitted under martial law — would be complicated by Russia’s full-scale invasion and other factors, such as challenges of making ballots available to members of the military and Ukrainian citizens forced to live abroad.

“We need every vote,” Mr. Zelensky said in the interview with Natalia Moseychuk, a Ukrainian journalist. “We won’t be able to say for ourselves that this was a very democratic election. We need a legitimate choice. We need this choice to be made by society, so that it does not divide our people.”

Mr. Zelensky said that he discussed the possibility of having elections next year with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during his visit to Ukraine last week. Mr. Zelensky said in the interview that he told Mr. Graham that he would not divert funds from the war toward hosting elections.

“But if you give me this financial support, if the parliamentarians realize that we need to do this, then let’s quickly change the legislation,” Mr. Zelensky said he told Mr. Graham, referring to a need to change martial law to hold elections. “And, most importantly, let’s take risks together.”

Had Russia not invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine would have proceeded with scheduled parliamentary elections in October, followed by a presidential election in March 2024.

Mr. Graham said in a statement on Monday that he was “very pleased to hear that President Zelensky has opened the door to elections in Ukraine in 2024.”

“I cannot think of a better symbol for Ukraine than to hold free and fair elections during the course of a war,” Mr. Graham said. “Elections would not only be seen as an act of defiance against the Russian invasion, but an embrace of democracy and freedom.”

Mr. Graham said in the statement that elections would be an “investment for the stability of Europe” and that he encouraged allies of Ukraine to contribute funds and technical help.

Still, Mr. Zelensky said that holding elections would be a logistical challenge given the number of Ukrainians, both citizens and members of the military, who have left the country since the invasion began.

“How will the military be able to vote?” Mr. Zelensky said. “Show me the infrastructure. No one has shown it yet. How will people abroad be able to vote? No one has shown me.”

Mr. Zelensky won election in 2019 by a landslide, with more than 73 percent of the vote, and has increased his domestic and international exposure during the war.

— Jesus Jiménez