Russia-Ukraine war live updates: Pelosi meets Polish president Duda; Mariupol evacuees expected in safer area

Moscow is preparing to annex vast new swaths of Ukrainian territory in coming days, the United States said on Monday, potentially moving to cement control of much of the country’s east even as Russian forces struggle to capture key areas on the battlefield.

A move by the Kremlin to formally claim as part of Russia the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with the southern city of Kherson, amid an intense ongoing military battle could thrust the conflict into an unpredictable, even more explosive phase.

It is not clear how Ukrainian forces and their allies would respond to such an attempt, which would echo the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 but, in a crucial difference, occur as forces loyal to Ukraine fight to retain control of their territory.

The Russian offensive may be getting bogged down, but facts on the ground are changing rapidly. The invasion has been largely disastrous for the Kremlin, whose “special operation” next door has entered its third month, costing thousands of lives and triggering Western sanctions that have ravaged the Russian economy while considerably depleting the Russian war machine.

But Russia now controls large swaths of Ukrainian territory in the country’s east and south and appears intent on consolidating its hold in these areas. Some analysts suggest Moscow’s goal is to build a coastal corridor from Ukraine’s separatist east to the major city of Odessa in the west and to the border of Transnistria, the breakaway post-Soviet republic in Moldova that is Russian-aligned.

While Russia found it impossible to turn off Ukraine’s access to the Internet and the outside world in the early stages of its invasion, it is steadily doing so in these new areas under its control.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to address Ukraine’s Parliament via video link on Tuesday, delivering a speech that recalls an unflinching 1940 oratory by wartime leader Winston Churchill during the darkest hours of World War II.

Johnson will say the British people, like Ukrainians now, showed such unity in the fight against Nazi Germany that “we remember our time of greatest peril as our finest hour.”

“This is Ukraine’s finest hour,” he will say, according to excerpts of the speech released by Downing Street. “Your children and grandchildren will say that Ukrainians taught the world that the brute force of an aggressor counts for nothing against the moral force of a people determined to be free.”

The British leader will unveil around $375 million in new military aid during his speech, his office said, including electronic warfare equipment, a counter battery radar system, GPS jamming equipment and thousands of night vision devices.

Britain will also send a dozen new specialized Toyota Landcruisers in coming weeks to help protect civilian officials in eastern Ukraine and evacuate civilians from front-line areas, following a request from the Ukrainian government.

Johnson made a surprise visit to Kyiv on April 9, during which he called Moscow’s war “inexcusable,” and pledged to intensify sanctions against Russia. The trip was Johnson’s first to the war-ravaged country since the Russian invasion.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday called recent comments by the Russian foreign minister “sickening” and “dangerous,” saying the diplomat “did what many others who now reside in the dustbin of history have done before him — resort to antisemitism to defend his nation’s action.”

Speaking on Italian television over the weekend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated his government’s false portrayal of the war in Ukraine as a campaign against Nazis. Asked how that squares with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, Lavrov said that “means absolutely nothing.”

“So what if Zelensky is Jewish?” he said. “The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood. … The wise Jewish people said that the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews.”

The comments were widely condemned. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called the claim about Hitler “unforgivable” — an effort to “blame Jews themselves for antisemitism.”

Hitler’s father was born out of wedlock, leaving the identity of his grandfather unclear. A lawyer for Hitler claimed he had evidence that the grandfather was Jewish, but historians point to facts inconsistent with his story.

Schumer — the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S. — said on the Senate floor Monday that Lavrov’s comments “tap into the very old and very poisonous notion that the Jewish people themselves were the architects of the worst human atrocities of modern history, even when they were aimed at Jews themselves. Mister Foreign Minister, you’re fooling no one.”

Then Schumer addressed President Biden’s proposal for billions in new aid to Ukraine. The senator said he hopes lawmakers can reach a bipartisan agreement “very soon,” with the Senate potentially starting to process the aid package next week.

After weeks of failed efforts, officials are hopeful long-awaited evacuations will continue at a steel plant in Mariupol. Elsewhere in the east, front-line fighting continued as Russia sought more territory in Donbas. Progress is plodding, according to the Pentagon and Western military analysts. Britain’s Defense Ministry said Monday that about a quarter of the 120 battalion tactical groups that Russia committed at the start of the war have now been rendered combat ineffective; some could take years to reconstitute.

Here are some of the major developments from across Ukraine:

Mariupol: A convoy of about 100 evacuees who had been holed up in a steel plant in this besieged southern port city is expected to arrive in Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday morning local time, after what President Volodymyr Zelensky described as the first real cease-fire of the war allowed them to flee. Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian-held city, is about 130 miles northwest of Mariupol.

Kharkiv: Ukraine’s second-largest city, about 25 miles from the Russian border, has been a target of attacks since the invasion’s earliest days. On Sunday, the head of Kharkiv’s regional government said shelling had killed three people and injured eight, hours after he said the strikes seemed to be slowing. The Washington Post embedded with a team of paramedics there for a grueling 24-hour shift.

Kherson: In this Russian-occupied southern city, Moscow appears to have instituted an Internet blackout in a bid to consolidate political control. Its pro-Russian puppet government had said the city would begin using the Russian ruble on May 1, an indication of the Kremlin’s intention to keep its hold on the city permanently, Western military analysts said. Ukrainian officials said Monday that a man went to the hospital in critical condition after shelling in a Kherson-area village.

Kyiv region: Ukrainian officials said Monday that 148 people have been found in eight mass graves around the region — mostly in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where footage of civilian corpses and accounts of gruesome violence under Russian occupation drew an international outcry last month. Well over a thousand Ukrainians have been killed in the area around Kyiv, from where Russian forces have now withdrawn, according to the Ukrainian government. Officials reiterated Monday that bodies were found with tied hands and feet and shots to the head. Journalists have observed similar details.

Odessa: A rocket was fired at one of the city’s “infrastructure facilities,” said Maksym Marchenko, governor of the region, in a Telegram post. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “there are dead and wounded.” The city council said on Telegram that a 15-year-old boy was killed and another child was taken to a hospital with injuries.

Inside Russia: The regional governor of Belgorod, a Russian city near Ukraine’s eastern border, said he was awakened in the early hours Monday by two explosions, the latest in unexplained fires and explosions at strategic locations in Russia.

Ukrainians fleeing Mariupol and Russian-occupied territories arrived Monday in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, recounting long journeys. Photographer Nicole Tung captured the scene for The Washington Post.

Much of the world’s attention has focused on Mariupol, the southern port city where Russian forces have mostly taken control. Some Ukrainian soldiers remain there at a steel plant, holed up with civilians who began to leave the factory this weekend. But steel plant evacuees had yet to arrive late Monday night, and families at a Zaporizhzhia center for the displaced came from many cities. Some cars bore “children” signs meant to discourage attacks.

MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — About 200 civilians, including 20 children, remain at the Mariupol steel plant where Ukrainian soldiers have refused Russian demands to surrender, a Ukrainian official told The Washington Post late Monday local time.

Mykhailo Vershynin, head of the Donetsk regional patrol police, said a convoy of buses was supposed to leave Monday for Zaporizhzhia, a city to Mariupol’s northwest and a hub for Ukrainians fleeing areas under Russian occupation or blockade.

But “something didn’t work out,” Vershynin said, and now the convoy is set to leave Tuesday.

Civilians at the steel plant began evacuating this weekend, according to Ukrainian officials, but had yet to arrive in Zaporizhzhia Monday. Ukrainians say Russia has continued shelling the plant despite President Vladimir Putin’s claims last week that he had ordered no further attacks.

“Today all day there was shelling,” Vershynin said Monday, adding that he expected another round of shelling.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Monday on Telegram that civilians left the steel plant Saturday and Sunday. Some of them left for Kyiv-controlled territory with representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ministry said, while others chose to stay in Moscow-backed separatist territory.

Vershynin said Ukrainians hope to extract not only civilians from the plant but also “the wounded and possibly the military contingent.” However, he also described a possible “negative” scenario in which Russia “just levels completely from the face of the earth everything that’s left at the factory.”

“This won’t be easy, because one way or another we’ll defend to the last fighter,” Vershynin said. “There will be losses for Russia.”

The Russian government plans to annex more of Ukraine’s territory in the coming days, including the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern city of Kherson, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said Monday.

Moscow plans to give the annexations a “veneer of democratic or electoral legitimacy” by holding “sham” votes or referendums, Michael Carpenter told reporters at the State Department, noting: “This is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook.”

“Just as Russia engineered these quasi statelets — the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic — now we believe that the Kremlin may be trying to organize a Kherson People’s Republic,” he said.

Donetsk and Luhansk were taken over by pro-Russian separatists after Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and recently recognized as independent states by Russia. Kherson was captured by Russian forces as part of its ongoing war in Ukraine, which began in late February.

Carpenter declined to explain the intelligence undergirding the U.S. assessment, saying he did not want to compromise intelligence sources and methods. He underscored that although the United States believes the Kremlin has plans to annex the territories, it does not know whether Moscow will succeed.

He said the United States has “highly credible” reports of tactics Russia is using to carry out this plan, including abductions of mayors, local officials, journalists, school directors and activists.

“There have been reports of plans to impose a Russian school curriculum in the south and east,” Carpenter continued. “Russia plans to force the local population to use the ruble. More recently, there have been reports, as well, that Russian forces have cut off Internet and some cellular phone access in these regions in order to disable the flow of reliable information.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Monday rejected the assertion by Russian officials that NATO was fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine, saying such notions were talking points used by the Kremlin.

“It is not a proxy war,” Psaki told reporters at a White House briefing. “This is a war between Russia and Ukraine. NATO is not involved. The United States is not fighting this war … It’s important and vital for all of us to not repeat the Kremlin talking points on this front.”

Psaki stressed, as she has for weeks, that President Biden’s position continues to be that the United States will not send American troops to Ukraine to fight this war on the ground. She also emphasized that Russian officials have, as recently as last year, made clear that a nuclear war could not be won.

“We agree with that, and that is important for every country to restate and every elected official to restate around the country here as well,” Psaki said.

They support Ukraine. So they can’t support Alex Ovechkin.

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