President Biden is set to travel to Europe next week to huddle with top U.S. allies over their ongoing response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House said Tuesday as Russian forces intensified their bombardment of Ukrainian cities and the leaders of three NATO nations made a perilous visit to Kyiv.
The prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled by train to the besieged Ukrainian capital to show their solidarity with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy just hours after a wave of intense, pre-dawn shelling by Russian forces rocked the city as the invasion entered its 20th day.
U.S. military officials say the dynamic of the conflict has changed little in recent days. Russia was able to shell military and civilian targets at will, but its ground forces made only minor advances against an unexpectedly tough Ukrainian resistance. That resistance has garnered growing international support for Ukraine and put pressure on Mr. Biden and other Western leaders to do more to help Kyiv defend the country.
“It is here, in war-torn Kyiv, that history is being made. It is here that freedom fights against the world of tyranny. It is here that the future of us all hangs in the balance,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in a sobering message on Twitter. The Eastern Europeans were the first NATO leaders to travel to the Ukrainian capital since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion to begin on Feb. 24.
Russian and Ukrainian officials held another round of direct talks, but no progress toward a major cease-fire was announced. Russia’s foreign minister said Ukraine must “demilitarize,” even as Russian military forces edged closer to the outskirts of Kyiv.
Fighting paused briefly around a humanitarian corridor in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Civilians in 2,000 cars successfully fled in what was believed to be the biggest evacuation yet from the besieged seaport. Officials have said more than 2,300 people were killed in Mariupol.
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The Red Cross said it was working to evacuate people from the northeastern town of Sumy near the Russian border in about 70 buses.
In the country’s east, Russian forces launched more than 60 strikes overnight on Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, said regional administration chief Oleh Sinehubov. The strikes hit the city’s historical center, including the main marketplace.
Nearly 700 civilians in Ukraine have been confirmed killed, but United Nations officials said the real figure is probably much higher. The number of Ukrainian refugees flooding into Poland and other neighboring states was nearing 3 million.
The Ukrainian leader, who will deliver a virtual address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, again appealed to the U.S. and its NATO allies for greater help, including a “no-fly zone” over Ukrainian airspace. The Biden administration and NATO leaders say such a move would be too provocative to Russia.
“How many more cruise missiles need to fall on our cities?” Mr. Zelenskyy asked in an impassioned televised address to Canada’s parliament Tuesday. He noted that 97 children had been killed. While expressing gratitude for Canadian and Western support, Mr. Zelenskyy said, “Unfortunately, this did not bring an end to the war. Kharkiv [and] Mariupol are not protected like your cities are protected.”
In reported comments Tuesday to the leaders of the British Joint Expeditionary Force, Mr. Zelenskyy appeared to concede one point the Kremlin has been insisting upon: that Ukraine will never join the NATO military alliance. Ukrainian officials previously conceded that NATO membership was many years down the line but refused to rule it out altogether.
“We have heard for years that the doors were open, but we also heard that we could not join. It’s a truth, and it must be recognized,” he said in a video clip, according to Ukrainian news outlet Trukha. “Our people understand this, and we are beginning to count on our own strength.”
Capital in peril
Ukrainian officials said the situation around Kyiv was growing increasingly dire. Russian artillery barrages, they said, had slammed into four multistory buildings in the capital and killed dozens of people. The shelling ignited a huge fire in a 15-story apartment building and spurred a frantic rescue effort.
Shock waves from one explosion damaged the entry to a downtown subway station used as a bomb shelter. City authorities tweeted an image of the blown-out facade and said trains would no longer stop at the station.
The Associated Press reported that other strikes had targeted a western district of Kyiv, disrupting a relative calm that returned after an initial advance by Russian forces was stopped in the early days of the war.
Two more journalists, both employed by Fox News, were killed Tuesday. Irish cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova died in an attack that left Fox reporter Benjamin Hall seriously wounded. The deaths came two days after American documentary filmmaker Brent Renaud, in Ukraine on assignment for Time’s film unit, was killed in Irpin.
Western European military officials warned that Mr. Putin might be moving toward staging bogus “referendum” votes to install puppet mayors in several Ukrainian cities.
Russia may stage such a “referendum” in the Ukrainian city of Kherson to legitimize it as a “breakaway republic,” according to an intelligence assessment published by the British Ministry of Defense. Such a move would give Kherson similar status as Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea — Ukrainian territories that Russia annexed or took effective control of via proxy forces in 2014.
British officials noted protests Monday in Kherson. Russian forces fired warning shots in an attempt to disperse them. Public demonstrations also were held in the Russian-occupied cities of Melitopol and Berdyansk.
Russia installed its own mayor in Melitopol after the abduction of its real mayor on Friday. Authorities said the mayor of Dniprorudne reportedly had been abducted, too. “Russia is likely to make further attempts to subvert Ukrainian democracy as it attempts to consolidate political control of Ukraine,” the British assessment warned.
Anxiety mounted among leaders of Western Europe over the prospect of a spiraling conflict with Russia.
Mr. Morawiecki, the Polish prime minister, posted photos of himself and his Czech and Slovenian counterparts studying a map of Ukraine in the wood-paneled room of a building in an undisclosed location of Kyiv.
The leaders said they made the trip to show solidarity in the face of Russia’s invasion. Although the European Union officials said it was not sanctioned by other members of the 27-nation bloc, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala tweeted that the “aim of the visit is to express the European Union’s unequivocal support for Ukraine and its freedom and independence.”
Defense Department officials said Russia’s vaunted military could not overcome stiff Ukrainian resistance and the Kremlin’s miscalculations of the war.
A 40-mile-long Russian resupply convoy heading toward Kyiv has had no success in reaching Ukraine’s capital city, a senior Pentagon official told reporters in a background briefing. “It is still stuck,” the official said. A senior Ukrainian official told reporters that he expects the Russian offensive to bog down and pull out within weeks owing to the inability to bring in fresh supplies or trained troops.
“Russian forces are still on the outside of Kharkiv, where, as before, they face stiff Ukrainian resistance,” the official said. “Chernihiv remains isolated, but we still assess that Ukrainians are working to keep a line of communication open.”
Extraordinary summit
U.S. officials said Mr. Biden will hold face-to-face meetings with several European counterparts on March 24 while attending an extraordinary NATO summit in Brussels. The president also will attend a scheduled European Council summit, where officials say discussions are underway toward increasing sanctions on Russia and expanding the European Union’s humanitarian response to the invasion.
Mr. Biden’s “goal is to meet in person face-to-face with his European counterparts and talk about, assess where we are at this point in the conflict in the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. We’ve been incredibly aligned to date,” said White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “That doesn’t happen by accident. The president is a big believer in face-to-face diplomacy. So it’s an opportunity to do exactly that.”
Mr. Biden signed a bill Tuesday to provide $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as part of $1.5 trillion in federal spending to fund the government through September.
The administration announced a fresh slate of economic sanctions targeting Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, his wife, Halina, and 11 Russian officials, including deputy Russian defense ministers and a judge accused of “gross human rights abuses.”
The Treasury Department’s sanctions expand on actions against Mr. Lukashenko, who allowed Russian troops into his country as they prepared the attack on Kyiv. Russia is also launching missiles from Belarusian territory, treating wounded soldiers in Belarusian hospitals and using Belarusian morgues for those killed in fighting.
The State Department announced visa restrictions on 38 current and former Russian government officials suspected of suppressing dissent in Russia.
Despite the increased diplomatic and sanctions pressure, Democrats and Republicans showed growing division over how Washington should respond to the Ukraine crisis.
U.S. lawmakers are likely to put on a show of unity Wednesday while Mr. Zelenskyy addresses them via videoconference.
Republicans have grown increasingly vocal over what they say is the administration’s unwillingness to confront Mr. Putin.
Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, slammed Mr. Biden in an op-ed published Tuesday by Fox News. He said the president is responding with “timidity and half measures” to Mr. Putin’s aggressive military actions.
In the initial days of the invasion, some Republicans projected unity and directed their sharpest attacks at Mr. Putin, not Mr. Biden.
Mr. Cotton’s column took particular issue with the administration’s nixing last week of Poland’s offer to send fighter jets to Ukraine through a U.S. air base in Germany.
The Pentagon said the move could spark a confrontation between NATO and Russia, something Mr. Biden has consistently ruled out.
Mr. Cotton said the president bowed in the face of “hollow threats” from Moscow.
“Biden’s fighter fiasco is only the latest example of his timidity in the face of Russian aggression,” he wrote. “At every step, Joe Biden has allowed America’s response to be dictated from Moscow out of a fanciful fear of provocation. The wages of Biden’s weakness are Russian tanks rolling through Eastern Europe.”
The White House has become increasingly defensive about its response to Russia. Ms. Psaki insisted Monday that Mr. Biden has forcefully countered Russian aggression without drawing the U.S. into a third world war.
“I would say at this moment in time, we have hardly been sitting on the sidelines,” she said. “We have been leading this effort around the world to respond to every step and every escalatory step that President Putin and the Russians are taking.”
• Mike Glenn contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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