War In Ukraine

War Displaces 1 in 5 People in Ukraine, U.N. Estimates Tank battles raged on Saturday on the streets of the strategic coastal city of Mariupol, where the fighting has been among the most brutal of the war. In eastern and southern Ukraine, millions have fled or are cut off from humanitarian aid. Here’s the latest. For the U.S., a Tenuous Balance in Confronting Russia.

Navigating between aiding Ukraine and avoiding an escalation with Moscow has led to tortured distinctions over weapons and other elements of policy. Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine. After days of a slowed offensive, Russian forces have dealt several blows to Ukraine’s military over the last 48 hours, destroying a marine barracks in the southern city of Mykolaiv, taking out a large underground weapons depot in the west and moving into the center of the besieged port city of Mariupol.

Rescuers on Saturday were combing through what remained of the headquarters of the 36th Ukrainian Naval Infantry Brigade in Mykolaiv, which was hit by a rocket a day earlier as marines slept. As many as 40 marines were killed, a senior Ukrainian military official said, and there were indications that the death toll could be much higher. In Mariupol, which has held out for weeks amid brutal missile assaults, the mayor told BBC that there was now fighting in the city center. If Mariupol falls, it would be one of the few major cities to be taken by Russia and would give its forces control of a swath of Ukraine’s southern coastline. In other areas, Ukraine’s army claimed to have taken back towns around Kherson, one of the first cities to fall to Russian forces.

Here are the latest developments: Russian officials said Saturday that they had hit a weapons depot in western Ukraine, which Ukrainian officials confirmed. Russia claimed that its forces had used advanced hypersonic missiles, though that could not be independently verified. A Ukrainian official in Mariupol accused Russian forces of taking thousands of Ukrainians against their will across the border into Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called on Saturday for direct negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but a senior Turkish official said that Mr. Putin was not ready for such talks. Around Kyiv — Ukraine’s capital, a key target of the Russian offensive — new satellite images appeared to show Russian artillery establishing defensive positions, digging in for a long fight. The United Nations estimates that one in five people in Ukraine have been internally displaced or have fled the country since Russia’s invasion began.

Russian forces extended their bombardments into a relatively unscathed part of western Ukraine on Friday, striking a warplane repair plant about 50 miles from the Polish border, as President Biden warned President Xi Jinping of China not to provide military aid to Russia amid a scramble of diplomatic efforts to end the violence engulfing Ukraine. During a nearly two-hour video call, Mr. Biden warned Mr. Xi, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, that there would be “implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians,” according to the White House. But a senior administration official declined to discuss what kind of penalties the United States would impose on China if it provided Moscow with military hardware or offered it financial relief. The official also declined to say how Mr. Xi responded to Mr. Biden’s warning. “We will continue to watch until we see what actions they take or don’t,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said. As Russian forces pounded cities and towns across Ukraine, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, spoke to Mr. Putin, urging him to end the fighting.

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