KYIV, Ukraine — As Russian forces pressed ahead Tuesday in their drive to seize the strategic southern port of Mariupol and encircle Ukrainian defenders in the country’s east, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the nearly 7-week-old war could be entering a “new stage of terror” for his embattled country, and again accused Russia of war crimes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, said there was “no doubt” Moscow would achieve its aims in Ukraine, and defended as a “noble” cause an invasion denounced by much of the world as horrific. Blaming Ukraine, he said peace talks were stymied.
Western and Ukrainian military officials are trying to ascertain whether Russia had or intended to use chemical weapons in a final bid to subdue Mariupol. A Russian-backed separatist leader, who had earlier threatened their use, denied Tuesday that such munitions had been deployed.
After failing to capture the capital, Kyiv, Russia is now attempting to regroup and redeploy its forces in preparation for an all-out assault in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, the country’s military said in its latest operational report. It also said Ukraine had thwarted half a dozen Russian attacks in the previous 24 hours in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
In devastated outlying areas of Kyiv that endured a month-long Russian occupation, investigators and Ukrainian troops moved ahead with the bleak and dangerous task of recovering the bodies of civilians and clearing away ordnance left behind in houses and garden sheds, in buildings and on streets, some even rigged on corpses.
In an overnight video address, Zelenskyy excoriated Russian troops for trying to inflict new carnage even after their departure.
Once-placid suburbs and satellite towns near the capital were now filled with “shells that did not explode, mines, tripwire mines,” the Ukrainian leader said, adding that the Russian forces “consciously did everything to make the return to these areas after de-occupation as dangerous as possible.”
Russia has denied committing atrocities against civilians, but the clean-up crews continued to gather additional evidence of horrific abuses. A senior U.N. official, Sima Bahous, told the Security Council on Monday that “brutality” against civilians must also be independently investigated, including emerging evidence of execution-style killings and rapes.
With Russian forces moving into place for a wide-ranging offensive in the east, Ukrainian officials redoubled pleas on Tuesday for civilians to flee while they are still able. On the Telegram messaging app, Luhansk’s regional governor, Serhiy Gaidai, implored people to use five agreed-on humanitarian corridors to leave the area rather than “burn in your sleep” from Russian shelling.
In Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, defenders were continuing to “heroically hold” their positions, the Ukrainian army’s general staff wrote Tuesday on Telegram, a day after a besieged marine unit in the city posted on Facebook that it was running low on ammunition and that the situation was dire.
Capturing Mariupol would be a significant prize for Russia, because it would allow creation of a land corridor between Russian-controlled territory and the Crimean peninsula, seized by Moscow eight years ago.
In a seeming scale-back on the threat of using chemical weapons, a spokesman for Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s east — who had said Monday on Russian state television that such munitions would be used against Ukrainian forces in Mariupol — said Tuesday that it had not engaged in such tactics. The spokesman, Eduard Basurin, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying separatists “haven’t used any chemical weapons in Mariupol.”
Zelenskyy, in his overnight address, said without mentioning Basurin by name that the earlier statement “testifies to [Russia’s] preparation for a new stage of terror against Ukraine and our defenders.” One senior British defense official said Tuesday that if chemical weapons were in fact used by Russian forces, “all possible options are on the table” for a response.
Ukrainian and Western officials said they were monitoring unconfirmed social media reports that a chemical agent of some kind had been used in Mariupol. The British official, Armed Forces Minister James Heappey, told Sky News that “there are weapons that simply should not be used, and if they are used, people will be held to account.”
Fighting in the east had not yet begun in earnest, British military intelligence said in a new assessment Tuesday, but it said combat would “intensify over the next two or three weeks as Russia continues to refocus its efforts there.”
In the meantime, it said attacks were being aimed at Ukrainian positions near the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, with fighting around the southern cities of Kherson and Mykolaiv.
Neighboring Belarus, Russia’s ally, has become a key transit point for redeployment of Russian forces away from northern areas in preparation for fighting in the east. Putin’s comments about the war came as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko accompanied him to a spaceport in Russia’s far east.
There, Putin likened the struggle against punishing Western economic sanctions imposed after the invasion to the Cold War-era Russian space program, whose early successes stunned the United States. In televised remarks carried by Interfax, the Russian leader declared that “there is no doubt that we will achieve our goals” in Ukraine.
Sounding themes he has previously used to justify the war, Putin blamed Western aggression, and said he had acted to ensure Russia’s security.
“Its goals are absolutely clear and noble,” he said of Moscow’s military campaign, which has devastated Ukrainian towns and cities and left thousands of civilians dead or wounded.
In an ominous indicator of Putin’s determination to crush dissent at home, the Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza was reported to have been detained by police in Moscow. Kara-Murza recovered from two separate life-threatening bouts of poisoning that he and his supporters have blamed on the Kremlin. Word of his detention came from another opposition figure, Ilya Yashin, writing on Twitter.
Meanwhile, major Western companies continued an exodus from Russia. On Tuesday, Finland-based telecom network Nokia said it was exiting the Russian market. A day earlier, the Swedish telecom giant Ericsson said it was suspending operations in Russia, and France’s third-largest bank, Societe Generale, said it was selling its controlling stake in Russia’s Rosbank.
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(McDonnell reported from Kyiv and King from Warsaw.)
