Russia-Ukraine War Live Updates: Tensions Surge Around ... - The New York Times

Russia-Ukraine War Live Updates: Tensions Surge Around Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant - The New York Times
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant seen after the Dnipro River’s water levels were affected by the destruction of the Nova Khakokva Dam.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times

Russia and Ukraine accused each other on Wednesday of plotting an explosion at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southern Ukraine, further raising tensions over one of the war’s main flash points, even as analysts said the immediate risk of serious harm to the facility appeared low.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, citing the country’s intelligence service, said that Russian troops who seized the plant in March of last year have placed objects that look like explosives on the roof of several of its power units, possibly with the intent of simulating an attack and blaming it on Ukraine. He didn’t elaborate and the claim could not be independently confirmed, but Ukrainian officials have been increasingly ratcheting up warning of nuclear sabotage.

“The only source of danger to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is Russia and no one else,” Mr. Zelensky said in an overnight speech, adding that he had spoken by telephone with President Emmanuel Macron of France about his concerns. Hanna Malyar, a Ukrainian deputy defense minister, accused Russia on Wednesday of “escalating the situation” at the plant.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that Ukraine planned to sabotage the plant and that Russia had taken measures to counteract the threat. He described the situation as “quite tense.” He cited no evidence for the claim and provided no details.

The plant, the largest in Europe and the first to be occupied by foreign troops, has been the focus of global concern. The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has repeatedly warned of the chances of disaster, including sounding alarms last month over an “extremely fragile” security situation, amid shelling around the plant and other security issues.

Biden administration officials said last week that they did not believe a threat was imminent but that they were watching “very, very closely.”

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Ukrainian emergency rescue teams, wearing suits to protect against radiation, participated in a nuclear disaster drill in Zaporizhzhia last month.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

The Ukrainian and Russian warnings have intensified in recent weeks after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam downstream of the plant last month.

Moscow blamed Ukraine for the blast at the dam, but a New York Times analysis found that evidence suggested that Russia had blown up the dam itself. The dam’s destruction killed dozens, partly drained the reservoir next to the power plant and flooded the Dnipro River basin.

“Unfortunately, there was no timely and large-scale response to the terrorist attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant and this may incite the Kremlin to commit new evil,” Mr. Zelensky said.

Russia, which has illegally annexed the Zaporizhzhia region, has attempted to impose management control on the plant, which it now considers state property, using its state nuclear company.

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Russian soldiers outside of the plant last month.Credit...Olga Maltseva/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The International Atomic Energy Agency has stationed inspectors at the plant. In a statement this week it did not report an increased level of threat.

The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, noted the heightened rhetoric at the plant, which it said could be part of preparations for a Russian false flag attack of some kind, but also added that “provocative Russian statements” were likely part of an “information operation meant to accuse Ukraine of irresponsibility” at the plant and distract Ukrainian forces from the ongoing counteroffensive.

“Russia remains unlikely to generate a radiological incident at the ZNPP at this time,” it said in a report, adding that the plant’s “reactors were constructed to withstand considerable damage.”

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s military launched an overnight strike on the Russian-occupied city of Makiivka, setting off a huge blast and conflicting claims over what had been hit.

Both Ukrainian and Russian officials indicated that the attack in Makiivka was significant, but they differed on descriptions of the target. The attack came months after an assault by Kyiv’s forces on the city caused one of the largest losses of life for Moscow’s troops in a single incident since the full-scale invasion.

Video of a massive fireball lighting up the night sky in Makiivka, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, started circulating on social media late Tuesday. Ukraine’s military shared the video in a post on the Telegram messaging app, saying that a “Russian base” in Makiivka had “ceased to exist” thanks to Kyiv’s forces.

The claim could not be independently verified, and there was no immediate response from Russia’s Ministry of Defense. Videos geolocated by The New York Times confirmed that an explosion occurred on the outskirts of Makiivka. The initial explosion ignited multiple secondary explosions and flares before setting off a massive blast, suggesting the site may have been an arms depot.

Pro-Russian officials in Makiivka accused Ukraine on Wednesday morning of using Western-supplied long-range rockets and artillery to attack civilians. One man was killed and 41 civilians were wounded, the state-owned Russian news agency Tass reported, citing Igor Kimakovsky, an adviser to the local pro-Kremlin administration. Mr. Kimakovsky said that HIMARS rockets and artillery had hit “peaceful” districts of the city, according to Tass. Those claims could also not be independently verified.

Makiivka has symbolic resonance in the 17-month-long war: A Ukrainian strike on a barracks there killed dozens of Russian soldiers on New Year’s Day, in an attack that prompted criticism of the Russian military among some prominent supporters of Moscow’s war effort and subsequent claims of retaliatory strikes from Russia’s Ministry of Defense.

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A building hit by a Ukrainian rocket in Makiivka in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region in January. The Russian defense ministry said the facility was housing dozens of Russian soldiers.Credit...Associated Press

At the time, Russian authorities blamed troops in Makiivka for exposing their location by using cellphones, enabling a strike by Ukrainian forces equipped with long-range weaponry from Western allies.

Adjacent to the city of Donetsk, Makiivka lies only about 10 miles from Ukrainian-held Avdiivka to the northwest — well within the roughly 50-mile range of the HIMARS rockets the United States has sent to Ukraine.

The HIMARS system is most effective against stationary targets that can be identified in advance and pinpointed, such as ammunition dumps, infrastructure or troop concentrations.

Anatoly Kurmanaev and Malachy Browne contributed reporting.
Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of Sweden is scheduled to visit the White House on Wednesday.Credit...Geert Vanden Wijngaert/Associated Press

The prime minister of Sweden will meet with President Biden on Wednesday, beginning a week of diplomacy by the two leaders to persuade opponents to allow the Nordic nation to join NATO.

Objections from Turkey and Hungary have delayed Sweden’s bid. Finland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization this year after overcoming similar objections from Turkey. The White House meeting will take place a week before a NATO summit in Lithuania, which Mr. Biden plans to attend. He is scheduled to visit Britain and Finland on the same trip.

Mr. Biden and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson of Sweden will discuss their stance that Sweden should join NATO quickly, as well as their commitment to supporting Ukraine, according to a White House statement.

Sweden has applied to join NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Work on the campaign will continue on Thursday in Brussels, where the secretary general of the alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, has scheduled a meeting with senior officials from Sweden, Finland and Turkey, according to The Associated Press.

High-level talks held last month in Turkey yielded no apparent progress toward approving Sweden’s application. At the time, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said his position would not change unless Sweden took a tougher stance on pro-Kurdish protests in its capital, Stockholm.

If Sweden were to join NATO, it would be a serious rebuke to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Putin has long fought the expansion of the alliance, but his invasion of Ukraine is fueling it instead.
Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, the chief rabbi of Ukraine, poses for a portrait in his office at the Brodsky Synagogue in Kyiv last month.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

KYIV, Ukraine — It was a striking image: a bearded rabbi with a flak jacket over his tallit, hitting the ground to take cover as shells boomed around him.

Video footage of the moment Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman came under fire while on a humanitarian mission to flooded southern Ukraine on June 8 has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on Twitter. It put a fresh spotlight on the chief rabbi of Ukraine, whose renown predates both that moment and his humanitarian efforts since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“People recognize me,” the rabbi said, eyes twinkling, from his office in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on a recent afternoon.

Rabbi Azman, 57, sprang into action when Russia invaded in February 2022, working to help evacuate Jewish Ukrainians and recording appeals for help and a halt to the war. The bed that is still set up in his office at Kyiv’s Brodsky synagogue is a testament to the intensity of those early days, he said. The rabbi initially worked even through Shabbat, the traditional day of rest, and started filming video messages that went far and wide.

— Chief Rabbi Of Ukraine Moshe Azman (@RabbiUkraine) June 8, 2023

His role as chief rabbi has particular resonance in a war that President Vladimir V. Putin has falsely claimed is about “denazifying” Ukraine, a country whose current president is Jewish and whose Jewish community has historically suffered persecution.

Born in Leningrad, the rabbi emigrated to Israel in the 1980s to escape the former Soviet Union. After marrying a Ukrainian woman, he came to Ukraine in the early 1990s to help children affected by the Chernobyl disaster and later led the rehabilitation of Kyiv’s main synagogue.

When Russian-backed fighters launched a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, Rabbi Azman helped evacuate civilians from the fighting. He later set up a village on the outskirts of Kyiv that he named Anatevka — like the fictional shtetl in the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” — for displaced Jewish families.

The rabbi’s work earned him national honors. Photographs of him shaking hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and other notable people cover a wall in his office.

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Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, rear right, watches as Valentyna, 82, is resettled into her new room at the Anatevka Jewish Refugee Community.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

But some of his prominent connections have at times cast a shadow over his work.

He was a vocal supporter of Donald J. Trump and has a longstanding relationship with Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose attempts to persuade Ukraine’s government to launch investigations that he believed would benefit Mr. Trump were key to the impeachment inquiry against the former president. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — associates of Mr. Giuliani who were convicted on campaign finance violations — were at one point board members for the rabbi’s U.S.-based Friends of Anatevka charity.

When asked about the saga, Rabbi Azman becomes animated, insisting he has no interest in politics.

“I don’t vote in America,” he said, adding: “I work for Ukraine.”

The rabbi emphasized that he’s simply a “quiet guy” trying to reach a wide audience to support his humanitarian efforts, which he says have cost millions. He considers his work less a calling than “obligation,” one that took him to Kherson to help with the flood response and to draw attention to the devastation.

Although he no longer works on Shabbat, the rabbi maintains a packed schedule and posts frequent social media updates about his aid efforts and Russian atrocities. On a recent afternoon, he greeted an evacuee brought by ambulance to Anatevka.

Many people ask why he remains in Ukraine despite the dangers, he said.

“I thank God that he put me in the right time and the right place that I can save people, help people, 24/7,” he said.
The main venue of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization council of foreign ministers’ meeting, in Goa, India, in May.Credit...Manish Swarup/Associated Press

In his first appearance at an international forum since he faced a mercenary uprising nearly two weeks ago, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia projected domestic stability and international solidarity with China, India and other powers unaligned with the United States and Europe.

Speaking on Tuesday at a virtual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an economic and security forum founded by China and Russia in 2001, Mr. Putin thanked the member states for their backing following the brief insurrection, which he claimed had no popular support in Russia.

“United by the deep responsibility for the fate of the motherland, Russian political circles and all of society showed a united front against the attempted armed mutiny,” Mr. Putin said. He also sought to cast the summit as a sign of international support for his invasion of Ukraine.

For Mr. Putin, the summit offered an opportunity to demonstrate strength in the aftermath of the uprising by the Wagner mercenary group, the most dramatic challenge to his more than two decades in power. But it was also a test of an organization that he helped to found, as rising tensions between the two other major member states, China and India, threaten to expose cracks in the multilateral forum.

While India has maintained stable ties with Russia, mostly economic, after refusing to condemn the invasion of Ukraine, its relations with China have worsened over border disputes and India’s membership in a security-focused coalition with the United States called the Quad. Beijing views the Quad as a tool to contain China.

A high-profile visit to Washington last month by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has intensified Chinese suspicions that India is drawing closer to the United States to blunt China.

Neither Mr. Modi nor China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, addressed those tensions in their prepared remarks at the summit. Instead, Mr. Xi reiterated long-held grievances against the United States by calling for an end to “hegemonism” and “power politics.” His remarks echoed Mr. Putin’s calls for a new “multipolar” world.

Mr. Modi lauded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as “an important platform” for peace and prosperity, but implored the grouping of nations to condemn countries that “use terrorism as an instrument of their policy.” The remark was a thinly veiled reference to another member state, Pakistan, which India accuses of sponsoring militants in the disputed Kashmir region.

India, which joined the forum in 2017 and has historically maintained a policy of nonalignment, views it as a way to balance its ties with Western nations and its relationships with China and Russia.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization — which also includes the four Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — was established to counter Western influence in a swath of the globe stretching from China to the Middle East. Iran is expected to join the grouping later this year, and Belarus, a close Russian ally and an observer state in the forum, could follow shortly afterward.
President Xi Jinping of China speaking via video conference during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting on Tuesday.Credit...Tingshu Wang/Reuters

As Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine continues to reshape geopolitics, the virtual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Tuesday offered the leaders of China, India and Russia a chance to further their foreign policy objectives.

Here’s a brief guide to the relationships between the three countries and the distinct agenda each leader brought to the meeting:

What does Moscow stand to gain?

The meeting gave President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a chance to project stability and authority, 10 days after the end of a mutiny that briefly threatened his power.

The support of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who paid a state visit to Moscow in March, has proved pivotal for Mr. Putin, allowing him to argue that Russia has resisted attempts by NATO countries to isolate him and is supported by a network of sympathetic states. On Tuesday, Mr. Putin called for a “multipolar world” in an apparent reference to the role of these countries as a bulwark against Washington.

China has reaffirmed its support for Mr. Putin and analysts say the relationship is likely to remain strong — but it could also cause Beijing to consider how its own geopolitical, economic and territorial interests would be affected if Mr. Putin were to fall from power, and thus to find ways to hedge that support.

Moscow has relied for revenue on exports of crude oil sold at discounted prices to India and China, since the United States and other countries, notably in Europe, imposed sanctions because of the invasion of Ukraine.

What are China’s strategic concerns?

China has made a long-term bet on Mr. Putin as a partner in challenging a global order that is dominated by the United States. Tuesday’s summit helped to cement that partnership, if only in an incremental sense.

In his speech, Mr. Xi referred indirectly to grievances against the United States by calling for an end to “hegemonism” and “power politics.”

But he did not refer to suspicions in Beijing that India, whose prime minister Narendra Modi paid a state visit to Washington last month, could be moving closer to the United States in a bid to blunt China’s strength.

India is also a member of a security-focused coalition with the United States called the Quad, which also includes Australia and Japan. Beijing views the Quad as a tool to contain China and relations between India and China have been strained by a border dispute.

And what are India’s goals?

For Mr. Modi, the summit was a forum to balance out India’s ties with the United States and other Western allies as it exercises a policy of nonalignment. While Mr. Modi traveled to Washington last month, he has met Mr. Xi at least 18 times, including before he became India’s leader in 2014. Analysts say he is interested in the similarity between China’s one-party rule and his own brand of leadership, in which he maintains a grip on power within a democracy by wielding, in part, a deep understanding of India’s grass roots.

Mr. Xi and Mr. Modi are bound by an economic interest as Mr. Modi looks to Beijing for answers on the question of how to advance India’s economy. Although the populations of the two nations are on par, China’s economy is roughly five times the size of India’s in part because China began to open its economy to market forces and pursue land reform and export-led growth a decade earlier than India.

India, which has deep defense ties with Russia, has not condemned Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, even while it expands its relationships with the United States and countries in Europe that strongly back the government in Kyiv.

India has also positioned itself as a champion of some of the world’s poorer nations, arguing that Western sanctions on Russia are hurting developing countries the most.