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One of the features of modern warfare is the role played by non-state militias, and Ukraine is no exception. Reporting of the war has highlighted the role of the Wagner Group on the Russian side, for instance. This 6,000 strong mercenary force, which is usually based in Africa and recently saw action in the Sahel, is believed to be funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with close links to Vladimir Putin.

About 1,000 Wagner Group fighters have been drafted in as part of the invasion. It was reported at the end of March that members of the group had been tasked with finding and assassinating the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Alongside the Wagner Group, Moscow has also drafted in militia volunteers from both Chechnya and Syria to reinforce the Russian army ahead of assaults on key strategic areas in Ukraine. On the other side, Ukraine has relied heavily upon established militias such as the Azov Battalion, as well as newly formed civilian militias, to repel Russian armed forces.

Militias are armed non-state groups that are usually recruited from the civilian population to support state security forces, primarily during times of emergency. These para-militarised, quasi-institutional groups strengthen both the quantity and sometimes the quality of the states military capability.

Governments often contract militia groups to conduct operations against armed rebel organisations during counterinsurgency warfare. In Colombia, the Bogota government enlisted the support of right-wing paramilitary groups often trained by the US in its war against Farc and other left-wing insurgent groups. Militias have also been used by governments as a protector against internal threats, such as threats of coups from other state actors, including the military.

Depending on how close the militia is to the government, the state may provide weapons, resources, training and intelligence to the group. In other cases, a state will delegate power to a militia to conduct military operations on its behalf.

Militias have also often been used by states in inter-state warfare, so their use in the war in Ukraine is unsurprising. What is surprising is the role these militias are playing in the conflict. Militias deployed by Russia are tightly controlled, recruited, directed and resourced by Russias government and armed forces. On the Ukrainian side, the state-militia relationship is more ambiguous and fluid, with the Kyiv government not always securing direct control over pro-Ukrainian militias that can be deemed semi-independent or independent armed actors.

In early March, it emerged that Russia had contracted the Chechen Kadyrov militia to conduct specific operations in Ukraine, including a plot to kill President Zelensky. The deployment of the militia by Russia was also viewed as a form of psychological warfare in that it was designed to instil fear and terror into the minds of both the Ukrainian armed forces and the civilian population, given the brutality associated with the Kadyrov militia in past conflicts. Russian forces have also begun recruiting volunteers from pro-Assad militias involved in the Syrian civil war. It is believed these militias are already in Russia awaiting deployment to Ukraine.

As for the Wagner Group unlike other militias deployed by Russia it has been heavily involved in pursuing Russias foreign policy objectives in both Africa and the Middle East, and with proficiency and tactical efficiency. The group is highly professional and operates almost like a special forces organisation.

Pro-Ukrainian militias, meanwhile, tend to be more autonomous than their Russian counterparts, and have successfully used guerrilla-style tactics to repel vastly superior Russian tank and troop columns.

The Azov Battalion is the most prominent of Ukraines non-state militias. It has cooperated with the official Ukrainian armed forces and has been partly co-opted into the national guard, albeit it has retained its identity and semi-autonomous independence. The militia was formed in 2014 in response to pro-Russian separatist rebels operating in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. It is believed to be a far-right organisation that emerged from a far-right political movement, Svoboda, designed to promote white nationalist, anti-immigrant politics.

A vast array of other smaller, pro-Ukrainian militias are also engaged in combat against Russian ground forces, including the Dnipro Battalion, funded by Ukranian banking tycoon, Ihor Kolomoisky.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has armed large sections of the civilian population, in effect creating a mass-mobilised pro-government militia. These citizens have also engaged Russian units in hit-and-run attacks with small arms and Molotov cocktails. The civilian militia has helped in preparing urban defences in Ukrainian cities against possible Russian advances.

The fighting looks set to shift towards the eastern regions of Ukraine, after the failure of Russian forces to take Kyiv in the first part of the war. The Donbas has been a focus for fighting by pro-Russian separatists since 2014 and has the biggest concentration of Russian speakers.

If the conflict shifts eastwards towards the Donbas region, then so too will the militias already embroiled in the conflict. Human rights abuses have been committed by militias here in the past. Away from the urban centres of Kyiv and Kharkiv, oversight of these militias by regular armed forces on both sides may become more limited.

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Ukraine war: the key role played by volunteer militias on ...

An Ukrainian man stands among the ruins at a residential area damaged by shelling in Lysychansk, Ukraine, on Wednesday. Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images hide caption

An Ukrainian man stands among the ruins at a residential area damaged by shelling in Lysychansk, Ukraine, on Wednesday.

As Wednesday draws to a close in Kyiv and in Moscow, here are the key developments of the day:

Russia continues to build up its military for the expected offensive in eastern Ukraine, including ground troops, artillery systems and helicopters. The Pentagon says Russian forces are gathering on the Russian side of the border and moving into Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, where Moscow has recognized two self-proclaimed separatist republics. Earlier, Russia's defense ministry said more than 1,000 Ukrainian marines surrendered in the port of besieged Mariupol. Ukrainian officials said a brigade of its marines in the area successfully completed a maneuver to reconnect with other Ukrainian forces. Neither claim has been independently verified. Mariupol remains contested, the Pentagon said.

The U.S. is sending another $800 million worth of weapons systems and other security assistance to Ukraine. This includes artillery systems, artillery rounds, armored personnel carriers and additional helicopters. To date, the U.S. has sent over $2 billion worth of military assistance to Ukraine.

The Kremlin decried as "unacceptable" President Biden's comment that Russian President Vladimir Putin is committing genocide in Ukraine. The U.S. historically has rarely used the word genocide, a violation of international law that is harder to prove than war crimes or crimes against humanity, as it requires evidence of intent. Biden had escalated his rhetoric in a Tuesday speech, as he blamed the Russian invasion for higher gas prices. A National Security Council representative said the shift in rhetoric from previously accusing Russia of atrocities and war crimes did not indicate a shift in the U.S. response.

The presidents of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have traveled to Kyiv. They are the latest European leaders to visit Ukraine with a message of political support and military assistance. Earlier, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson toured Kyiv with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Economists warn Russia is on the verge of defaulting on its foreign debt for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution more than a century ago. The country has blown past two payment deadlines on bonds sold to foreign investors, which it was supposed to pay in dollars. Citing severe sanctions imposed by the U.S. and its allies, Russia made the payments in rubles.

Ukrainians have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border by the thousands.

Residents of a devastated Chernihiv ponder their future after a Russian siege ends.

Ukrainian Holocaust survivors flee war again this time to Germany.

Some 600 companies have withdrawn from Russia to some degree, Yale researchers say.

"All wars are fought twice": NPR's Throughline podcast examines how wars are remembered and forgotten.

Russian forces assemble in eastern Ukraine ahead of an anticipated offensive.

You can read more daily recaps here. For context and more in-depth stories, you can find NPR's full coverage here. Also, listen and subscribe to NPR's State of Ukraine podcast for updates throughout the day.

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Russia-Ukraine war: What happened today (April 13) - NPR

Investigators from almost a dozen countries combed bombed-out towns and freshly dug graves in Ukraine on Wednesday for evidence of war crimes, and a wide-ranging investigation by an international security organization detailed what it said were clear patterns of human rights violations by Russian forces.

Some of the atrocities may constitute war crimes, said investigators from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who examined myriad reports of rapes, abductions and attacks on civilian targets, as well as the use of banned munitions.

On Wednesday, civilians were still bearing much of the brunt of the seven-week-old invasion as Russian forces, massing for an assault in the east, bombarded Ukraines second-largest city, Kharkiv, striking an apartment building.

In an hourlong phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraines leader, President Biden said the United States, already a major provider of defensive armaments to Ukraine, would send an additional $800 million in military and other security aid. The package will include new capabilities tailored to the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine, Mr. Biden said in a statement.

American officials said Wednesday that the United States, in helping Ukraine prepare for such an assault, had increased the flow of intelligence to Ukraines government about Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine eight years ago. The administration also is considering whether to send a high-level official to Kyiv, Ukraines capital, in the days ahead as a sign of support for the country, according to a person familiar with the internal discussions.

War crimes claims are famously difficult to investigate, and still harder to prosecute. Its rare for national leaders to be charged, and even rarer for them to end up in the defendants chair.

But the war in Ukraine may prove different, some experts say, and momentum has been building to hold the Kremlin leadership responsible.

An International Criminal Court investigation into possible war crimes has been underway since last month, and a number of countries have been looking at ways for the United Nations to help create a special court that could prosecute Russia for what is known as the crime of aggression. Other possibilities include trying Russians in the courts of other nations under the principle of universal jurisdiction, the legal concept that some crimes are so egregious they can be prosecuted anywhere.

Part of the motivation for accountability is the revulsion in Europe and much of the world over the behavior of President Vladimir V. Putins forces, including reported executions of bound civilians and other atrocities.

War crimes experts also point to technological advances in forensic tools like facial identification software not available to those looking into earlier conflicts, and the sheer number of investigators on the ground in Ukraine crucially, with the governments blessing. A dozen French investigators joined the inquiries this week.

There will be prosecutions, and probably all over the world, said Leila Sadat, an international law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and a longtime adviser to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on crimes against humanity. Ukraine is actually crawling with war crimes investigators right now.

Still, experts warned that the process would be slow, and that any early indictments would most likely be against lower-ranking Russian officials and armed-service members. Russia, which has described the accusations as fictional or unfounded, is not expected to cooperate in any prosecution.

The report released Wednesday by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-member organization based in Vienna that includes Russia, Ukraine and the United States, is one of the first in-depth studies of human rights abuses during Russias offensive against Ukraine.

Investigators looked at some of the most notorious attacks and other violent acts of the war, including Russias bombings of a theater and a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol, both depicted in the report as apparent war crimes.

They also pored through accounts of other horrific, if less visible, acts of violence. There are allegations of rapes, including gang rapes, committed by Russian soldiers in many other regions in Ukraine, they wrote.

But often, they were stymied.

Russia declined to cooperate with the three-person team of investigators, making it impossible for the mission to take account of the Russian position on all pertinent incidents, the report said.

Investigators found that Ukrainian forces, too, had been guilty of some abuses, particularly in the treatment of prisoners of war. The violations committed by the Russian Federation, however, are by far larger in nature and scale, their report said.

Michael Carpenter, the American ambassador to the O.S.C.E., said the report documents the catalog of inhumanity perpetrated by Russias forces in Ukraine. The European Union issued a similarly positive appraisal.

This war is not only fought on the ground, the bloc said in a statement. It is clear that the Kremlin is also waging a shameful disinformation campaign in order to hide the facts of Russias brutal attacks on civilians in Ukraine. Reliable information and collection of facts have therefore never been as important as today.

The Kremlins own mission to the O.S.C.E. dismissed the findings as unfounded propaganda.

On Tuesday, even as the Ukrainian authorities were unearthing bodies in full view of international journalists and other observers, Mr. Putin called the atrocities a fake that had been elaborately staged by the West.

On Wednesday, standing near the site of two mass graves, Ukraines prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said there was an obligation both to uncover the facts and to do so in a transparent way to combat Russian disinformation.

When you see dead bodies here, from the other side, from the Russian Federation, they say it is all fake, all this is our theater, Ms. Venediktova said.

Ukrainian prosecutors and the newly arrived team of French experts exhumed bodies this week from mass graves in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb, where hundreds of civilians were killed during the brief Russian occupation of the area. The French government said that its team included ballistics and explosives experts and that it had the ability to do rapid DNA tests.

Evidence from the French investigation and others involving several different countries will be channeled to the International Criminal Court, which started looking into possible war crimes a week after the Feb. 24 invasion. Although Ukraine is not part of the agreement that created the court two decades ago, it has granted the court authority to investigate and prosecute in this conflict.

Investigators say they are intent on showing the world the reality of the war.

They can see everything. They can see the situation here: real graves, real dead bodies, real bomb attacks, Ms. Venediktova said. Thats why for us this moment is very important.

The O.S.C.E. report described a range of subterfuge by Russian forces, including the use of Red Cross emblems, white flags, Ukrainian flags and civilian clothes. And the organizations investigators expressed concern that both sides might be holding more prisoners than disclosed.

On Wednesday, President Zelensky spoke directly about one of them: Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian politician and ally of Mr. Putins who was detained this week. Mr. Zelensky proposed exchanging him for Ukrainians held captive by Russian forces.

Even as agreement grew among many world leaders that war crimes charges were warranted, there was some disagreement over how to characterize Russias actions. Some leaders, among them Mr. Biden, have begun to use the term genocide an escalation of his rhetoric. On Wednesday, Frances president, Emmanuel Macron, dissented.

What is happening is madness, its a brutality thats unheard-of, Mr. Macron said. But, he said, Genocide has a meaning. The Ukrainian people and the Russian people are brethren people.

Im not sure that an escalation of words serves the cause, he said.

The war crimes report came amid signs that Russias invasion may have backfired in at least one respect. Mr. Putin has long objected to NATOs expansion eastward into the onetime domains of the Soviet Union, describing it as a fundamental threat to Russia. But on Wednesday, two militarily nonaligned nations, Finland and Sweden, said they were seriously considering joining the alliance.

Legal experts did not rule out the possibility, some day, of an indictment of Mr. Putin, who has already been castigated as a war criminal by some Western leaders. And were Mr. Putin to be criminally charged by a court outside Russia, it would likely mean he would have to restrict his international travel in order to minimize the risk of possible arrest were he to venture beyond Russias borders.

David Crane, a legal scholar at Syracuse University who was the chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, an international war crimes tribunal that convicted the former president of Liberia, Charles G. Taylor, said he was confident that the International Criminal Court or some other judicial body would find legal grounds to charge the Russian president.

And even if Mr. Putin is never arrested and remains the leader of Russia, he said, the legal and diplomatic consequences of a war crimes indictment would severely undermine his credibility.

It would be as if theres like an ash mark on his forehead, Mr. Crane said. Theres no good options for him.

Marc Santora reported from Warsaw, Erika Solomon from Berlin and Carlotta Gall from Bucha, Ukraine. Reporting was contributed by Jane Arraf from Lviv, Ukraine; Aurelien Breeden from Paris; Cora Engelbrecht from Krakow, Poland; Farnaz Fassihi from New York; Eric Nagourney from Los Angeles; and Rick Gladstone from Eastham, Mass.

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What Happened on Day 49 of the War in Ukraine - The New York Times

Every day Russian forces stay in control of Ukrainian territory is another day innocent civilians are murdered.

Bodies of men lie face down in the mud, hands tied behind their backs. Women and girls have been raped. Local political leaders have been tortured and killed. Corpses not left on the street have been thrown into mass graves. In Irpin and Trostyanets, Bucha and Chernihiv, the Russian army has unleashed hell on the inhabitants. It is doing the same on a much larger scale in Mariupol, where the Russians have apparently deployed mobile crematoriums, which (in the innocent days of late February) the world thought were deployed to avoid having to send dead Russian soldiers back to their mothers. Now they are apparently being used to destroy evidence of war crimes.

There can now be no illusions about Russian plans for Ukraine. They are repeating what they did in Chechnya and Syria: systematically destroying the civilian population. It is treatment unseen in Ukraine since the genocidal Soviet famine known as the Holodomor or the Nazi invasion of 1941.

Every day Russian forces stay in control of Ukrainian territory is another day innocent civilians are murdered.

Bodies of men lie face down in the mud, hands tied behind their backs. Women and girls have been raped. Local political leaders have been tortured and killed. Corpses not left on the street have been thrown into mass graves. In Irpin and Trostyanets, Bucha and Chernihiv, the Russian army has unleashed hell on the inhabitants. It is doing the same on a much larger scale in Mariupol, where the Russians have apparently deployed mobile crematoriums, which (in the innocent days of late February) the world thought were deployed to avoid having to send dead Russian soldiers back to their mothers. Now they are apparently being used to destroy evidence of war crimes.

There can now be no illusions about Russian plans for Ukraine. They are repeating what they did in Chechnya and Syria: systematically destroying the civilian population. It is treatment unseen in Ukraine since the genocidal Soviet famine known as the Holodomor or the Nazi invasion of 1941.

Current intelligence suggests the Russians are planning a new, concentrated advance from the Donbas region. Civilians have been encouraged to evacuate Kharkiv and other major eastern Ukrainian cities. If the Russians succeed, they could perpetrate crimes against humanity that would make genocidal former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevics crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo fade into insignificance.

The moral imperative is self-evident: Ukraine must be given all the help it needs to expel Russian forces from its territoryand the sooner, the better. But even if Western leaders set aside worries about nuclear escalation and energy supplies to Europe, arming Ukraine effectively requires more thought and planning than it has been given.

Ukraines most immediate need is more anti-tank weapons (such as Javelin surface-to-air missiles, next-generation light anti-tank weapons, and panzerfausts) and drones (including the Switchblade kamikaze drones from the United States and the highly effective Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 models).

These destroy Russian armored vehicles, leaving its artillery, where Russia keeps most of its firepower, vulnerable to capture. Ukraine could also benefit from anti-ship missiles (the United Kingdom has announced it is supplying some Harpoon anti-ship missiles) and far more longer-range anti-aircraft capabilities to protect its cities and civilian infrastructure from Russian airstrikes.

In the long term, over a period of several years, Ukraine, whatever decision it chooses to make about formal NATO membership, should be integrated into the NATO military supply chain and build up a NATO-style force. Ukraine has imposed heavy casualties on Russia using old weapons. The latest modern tanks, aircraft, missile systems, and drones will give Ukraine the qualitative edge needed to make future Russian aggression unthinkable. This will be the strategic defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin deserves, given that he wanted the war to prevent Ukraine from ever being able to defend itself by integrating into the Western alliance.

NATOs more technologically advanced militaries keep their firepower in the air, allowing them to attack the enemy at greater distances and at less risk to their soldiers and equipment. In this war, Ukraine has shown itself able to operate with the mission commandmajor authority delegated to local commandersnecessary to bring modern weapons firepower to bear in modern combat, where things move too fast to allow top commanders to micromanage effectively.

Mission command enables high-end forces that pack far more power per soldier than Russias and are more suited for a population, like Ukraines, where there are fewer people of fighting age. However, such high-end equipment requires time to train on and needs to be supported by logistics and maintenance services considerably different from the ones Ukraine currently has.

The most difficult problem is what to do in the medium term, when Ukraine will need to fight to drive the Russians back. Such offensive operations require heavy firepowermeaning tanks, planes, and artillery. Ukraine mostly uses ex-Soviet equipment, which is these days mainly manufactured in Russia, so its obviously not possible to just buy more; it must be obtained from other ex-Eastern Bloc states like Slovakia and Poland. NATO equipment can only be used once operators have been trained to use them and maintenance crews learn how to fix them up. Personnel being retrained on new equipment cant be used to operate what Ukraine already has, and right now, it needs everyone it can muster.

There is, however, at least a partial solution, especially on the ground. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies Military Balance, former Warsaw Pact countries have around 750 battle tanks, mostly in Poland, in their inventories. These can be used by Ukraine with minimal adaptation, almost doubling Ukraines prewar tank force. Considerable quantities of artillery can also be supplied.

The air situation is more difficult. Former Warsaw Pact countries retain relatively few Soviet-era aircraft (though the United States was wrong to block Polish MiG-29 fighter jets from being sent to Ukraine), and military aviation has advanced hugely since the 1990s. Although the Ukrainian defense minister insists his pilots could learn to fly F-16s in a few weeks, it would probably take longer to fly them well. Supplying fuel, missiles, and ammunition to Ukraine is also a significant challenge.

However, sending tanks and planes to Ukraine (the Czech government has already announced it has sent tanks, and Poland has begun some transfers this week) leaves holes in these NATO members defenses. Those holes need to be plugged in the medium term with modern equipment and in the short term with permanent West European or North American forces and equipment.

Its clear then that a phased strategy is needed to give Ukraine the weapons it needs to beat Russia.

First, NATO countries should supply all available Warsaw Pact-style equipment that Ukraine can use: This should include tanks, planes, missiles, and ammunition. Eastern European NATO members that supply this equipment must immediately be reinforced with high-end NATO troops and equipment from Western Europe and North America. This is particularly crucial for Poland, which, because of its size, is where most of this equipment would come from.

Second, Ukraine needs Lend-Lease-style programs so it can buy all the equipmentincluding artillery, drones, targeting systems, and loitering munitionsit needs on the market and be able to pay it back over the long term after it regains its territorial integrity and integrates further into Europe. Lithuania has announced it will train Ukraine in the use of Western weapons while the European Union is running its accession process on turbo speed for Ukraine, which has also shown during the war that it has built impressive civil as well as military capacities. (Electric power, internet, and rail services are still operating, for example.)

Third, militaries in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Ukraine and Moldova need to be upgraded. The amount of money required will be orders of magnitude greater than the $1 billion or so already being supplied by the United States and the European Peace Facility. This military assistance needs to be part of a coherent long-term program and should be financed by a European financial instrument similar to the post-COVID-19 recovery and resilience fund as well as restricted to countries committed to supporting Ukraine; Prime Minister Viktor Orbans Hungary, for example, should not benefit from the fund.

Fourth, there must be a long-lasting commitment to upgrading Ukraines military to NATO standards and equipment. Even if Ukraine does not formally become a NATO member, it shouldlike Sweden and Finlandnow develop interoperable forces that are strong enough to deter Russia on their own.

Enabling Ukraine to defeat Russia is practical and feasible. The massacres uncovered last week in Bucha, Ukraine, are just a foretaste of what awaits Ukrainians if the world doesnt act.

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How the West Should Arm Ukraine - Foreign Policy

Austrias chancellor visited President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday the first Western leader to see him in person since the Ukraine invasion and said he came away feeling not only pessimistic about peace prospects but fearing that Mr. Putin intended to drastically intensify the brutality of the war.

Describing Mr. Putin as dismissive of atrocities in Ukraine, the visiting chancellor, Karl Nehammer, said it was clear that Russian forces were mobilizing for a large-scale assault in eastern Ukraines Donbas region, the next phase of a war now in its seventh week.

The battle being threatened cannot be underestimated in its violence, Mr. Nehammer said in a news conference after the 75-minute meeting at Mr. Putins residence outside Moscow that the visitor described as blunt and direct.

The Austrian chancellor said he had told the Russian president that as long as people were dying in Ukraine, the sanctions against Russia will stay in place and will be toughened further.

The Kremlin, playing down the meetings significance in a terse statement, said only that it was not long by the standards of recent times.

Even as Mr. Nehammer was visiting, Russian forces were bombarding Ukrainian cities and towns, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said tens of thousands are dead in Mariupol, the besieged southern city that has been the scene of the most intense destruction of the war.

And Mr. Putin, despite Russias military blunders in the war, and for all the Western efforts to ostracize him, still appeared in control of the crisis. He has severely repressed any dissent and benefited from widespread domestic support, continuing revenues from oil and gas sales to Europe, the implicit backing of China and the refusal of much of the world to join sanctions against Russia.

Many commentators in the West had criticized the Austrian chancellor his country is a member of the European Union but not of NATO for having visited Moscow at all, seemingly playing into Mr. Putins narrative that American-led efforts to isolate Russia would necessarily end in failure.

Mr. Nehammer told reporters afterward that he had tried to confront Mr. Putin with the horrors of war and of the war crimes that Russian troops are accused of having committed in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere. He said he also had told Mr. Putin about the destroyed Russian tanks he saw on a recent visit to Ukraine, to make clear the enormous loss of life that Russia was suffering.

Mr. Nehammer said that Mr. Putin had brushed aside the accusations of war crimes as having been staged by Ukraine.

At the end, Mr. Putin told him: It would be better if it the war ended soon, Mr. Nehammer said, but the meaning of those words was unclear, since they could either signal that Mr. Putin was prepared for further peace talks or that he could be readying a quick and brutal assault in the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraines military since 2014.

We can have no illusions: President Putin has totally adopted the logic of war, and is acting accordingly, Mr. Nehammer said. This is why I believe it is so important to permanently confront him with the facts of the war.

How much more brutal the war could become was signaled in an interview with Eduard Basurin, a separatist commander, aired on Russian state television. Mr. Basurin said that with Ukrainian forces ensconced in underground fortifications at a steel plant in Mariupol, storming the redoubt did not make sense. Instead, he said, Russian forces needed to first block the exits and then turn to the chemical troops who will find a way to smoke the moles out of their holes.

Mr. Putin was silent on Monday but was expected to speak publicly on Tuesday, when he will travel to the Vostochny spaceport in Russias far east with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, his ally, to mark the annual Cosmonauts Day.

The Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has increasingly been framed by Mr. Putin as not against that country, but against the West specifically, the United States, as the supposed patron of Mr. Zelenskys government and its aspirations to escape Russias sphere of influence as a former Soviet republic.

Sergey V. Lavrov, Russias foreign minister, said in a Russian television interview that aired on Monday that what the Kremlin calls its special operation in Ukraine is aimed at rolling back American influence which the Russian government characterizes as the root of the worlds ills.

Our special military operation is designed to put an end to the reckless expansion, and the reckless course toward complete dominance, of the United States, Mr. Lavrov said.

The United States and European Union have imposed increasingly severe economic sanctions on Russia over the invasion and are sending weapons to Ukraines military. But they do not want to get drawn into a war with Russia. And the European Union remains reluctant to ban Russian oil and natural gas, which remain critical to the blocs own economic health.

E.U. foreign ministers met on Monday in Luxembourg and the blocs foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said that nothing is off the table, including sanctions on oil and gas.

While ministers discussed a possible phaseout of Russian oil, more easily replaceable from other suppliers than gas, the meeting also laid bare the blocs divisions. Austria, Hungary and Germany opposed any effort, for now, to restrict Russian gas imports.

Still, European Union leaders were expected to approve another 500 million euros in funds to repay member states for sending weapons to Ukraine, which would mean a total of 1.5 billion euros so far nearly equivalent to the $1.7 billion in weapons that the United States has authorized.

Russian troops, having retreated from northern Ukraine after a failed effort last month to reach the capital, Kyiv, have been resupplying and regrouping in Russia and Belarus so they can join the battle in eastern Ukraine. But Western officials said on Monday that effort may still take some time.

Ukrainian officials have been warning since last week that civilians in east Ukraine should flee while they can. Mr. Zelensky warned that tens of thousands of Russian troops were preparing a renewed assault there.

If and when the southern port city of Mariupol finally falls, Russian troops can move north to meet up with Russian troops attempting to move south from Izyum and try to encircle the bulk of Ukraines army, which is concentrated further east, said Mathieu Boulgue, an expert on the Russian military at Chatham House, the London research institution.

That is easier said than done, Mr. Boulgue said, as the battered Russian troops await reinforcements. The Ukrainians, he said, were trying to block the Russians and organize a counterattack that would be more complicated than the fighting around Kyiv, which had forced the Russians to retreat.

Given the reports of Russian atrocities at Bucha, Kramatorsk, Mariupol and other cities, negotiations between the Ukrainian and Russian governments are on hold.

But few believe that the antagonists are ready for real talks, because Mr. Putin needs to show more military gains and because the Ukrainians believe that they can still repel the Russians, said Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO.

The Ukrainians think they have an opportunity not just to prevent Russia from gaining more ground in the east but expelling them from there, while Putin needs to find something he can sell as a victory, Mr. Daalder said. So diplomacy is not going anywhere.

If and when talks on a settlement finally occur, Mr. Putin will inevitably be part of them, said Franois Heisbourg, a French defense expert. Diplomats deal with leaders of governments, no matter how distasteful, he said.

The West also hopes that increasing economic pain will encourage Mr. Putin to scale down the war and end it. Russia is already is deep recession and its economy is expected to shrink by 11 percent this year, the World Bank reported.

But the impact is severe on Ukraine, too. The bank forecast that Ukraines economy would shrink by about 45 percent this year because of the Russian invasion and the impact of a deep humanitarian crisis.

Mr. Putin originally named one goal of the war as the denazification of Ukraine, falsely labeling as Nazis those who resist Russian domination. An article on Monday in a Russian state newspaper, Parlamentskaya Gazeta, written by an adviser to the chairman of Russias lower house of Parliament, expanded on that concept to define the enemy as Ukrainian-American neo-Nazism.

The fight also included a cold war against enemies of the state inside Russia, the article said, adding: The denazification of Ukraine is impossible without a parallel denazification of Russia.

It was the latest sign that, even as the war in Ukraine rages, Mr. Putin is priming his security apparatus for an ever-widening intolerance for dissent. The crackdown has accelerated in recent weeks, with pro-war Russians turning in teachers and neighbors who speak out against the war.

Last Friday, Russia closed some of the last remaining independent institutions of civil society, including the Carnegie Moscow Center and the Moscow offices of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. It expanded the practice of naming government critics as foreign agents, for the first time adding a popular musician to the list: the rapper Ivan Dryomin, 25, who goes by the name Face.

Steven Erlanger reported from Brussels and Anton Troianovski from Istanbul. Reporting was contributed by Monika Pronczuk in Brussels.

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What Happened on Day 47 of the War in Ukraine - The New York Times