E.U. leader says the new Russian oil import ban sends a ‘clear’ message to Moscow. (Published 2022) (2024)

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Here’s the latest on the war in Ukraine.

Wrapping up a two-day summit meeting in Brussels, E.U. leaders agreed to $9.7 billion in aid to Ukraine this year, albeit with demands attached to fight the corruption that has plagued the country. And Ursula von der Leyen, president of the E.U. executive commission, said the developing global food crisis is “only the fault of Russia,” which has seized or blockaded all of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.

“The only reason we are struggling with this is because of this brutal, unjustified war against Ukraine,” she said.

Details of the oil embargo have yet to be hammered out, but E.U. officials said that it would reduce imports of Russian oil by 90 percent by year’s end — a severe blow to a major source of revenue for Vladimir V. Putin’s government and its ability to pay for high-tech weaponry.

The agreement reached on Monday allows continued imports through pipelines, effectively exempting Hungary, which relies very heavily on Russian energy, after the Hungarian leader Viktor Orban said a complete embargo would be “an atomic bomb being dropped on the Hungarian economy.” Mr. Orban, who has been friendlier with Mr. Putin than any other E.U. leader, had held up the deal for weeks, raising alarms about the ability of the bloc, which operates by consensus, to continue ratcheting up its actions against Russia.

Some E.U. member countries are calling for confiscating, rather than just freezing, Russian assets abroad, but the Biden administration has so far resisted that move.

In Ukraine, Russia’s military has been trying to cut off the easternmost pocket still controlled by Ukrainian troops, and in particular the eastern tip, Sievierodonetsk, hammering the city for weeks with artillery before trying to take it. Russian troops fought their way into the outskirts of the city on Monday, and on Tuesday were “gradually moving toward downtown,” said Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Ukrainian regional military administration.

But about 12,000 residents, out of a prewar population around 100,000, remain in the ruined city, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group, without enough food, water, medicine — or shelter from continued bombardment. Many of them are old or infirm people who were unable or unwilling to join the millions fleeing westward from eastern Ukraine.

“It breaks my heart,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former United Nations humanitarian coordinator. “It is really a war on the elderly.”

Thousands more Ukrainian civilians remain in cities very near the front lines, like Lysychansk and Bakhmut, and others like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk that are farther west but still in the path of Russian offensives, and all have seen civilians and civilian infrastructure bombarded. An unknown number are still in territory seized by Russia and subjected to Moscow’s increasingly harsh rule in the eastern Donbas region, the Kharkiv area north of it, and the coastal areas to the southwest.

Early in the war, some Russian offensives failed because they were spread too thin. Around Sievierodonetsk and other parts of Donbas, “Russia has achieved greater local successes than earlier in the campaign by massing forces and fires in a relatively small area,” the British defense ministry said Tuesday in its latest intelligence assessment.

Western military analysts say the Russians probably set out to encircle a large pocket, trapping Ukrainian troops as they did those defending the southern city of Mariupol. They have shrunk the pocket, but have so far been unable to cut it off.

Heavy losses have reduced Russia’s fighting strength by about 20 percent, a Pentagon official said Tuesday. Despite a leadership shake-up, U.S. officials say the Russian military’s continued mistakes and plodding pace are worsening its own attrition.

Since they invaded on Feb. 24, the Kremlin’s forces have been stretched by major troop casualties and equipment losses, and by fierce and shrewd Ukrainian resistance, surprising analysts who expected a quick Russian victory.

Now, the Ukrainians are mounting a counteroffensive against the captured southern city of Kherson, partly in hopes of forcing Russia to divert forces from Donbas.

Ned Price, the spokesman for the U.S. State Department, cited statements by several Russian officials indicating that the Kremlin plans to annex the territory it has seized.

“We remain concerned about steps Russia is taking to attempt to institutionalize control over sovereign Ukrainian territory, particularly in the Kherson region,” he said at a news briefing. He added, “Multiple reports indicate Russian forces have forcibly removed legitimate Ukrainian government officials and installed illegitimate pro-Russian proxies.”

On Tuesday, a Ukrainian court concluded the second war crimes trial against captured Russian soldiers, finding two of them guilty of shelling a civilian area, and sentencing them to 11 and a half years in prison. A third trial — which is the first to involve accusations of a sex crime — is expected to begin soon.

The soldiers convicted on Tuesday were accused of shelling Derhachi, a town near Kharkiv, in the northeast — an area where towns and cities are still bombarded by Russian forces, though the Ukrainians have pushed them back several miles. In Derhachi, houses are being destroyed on a regular basis and hundreds of people are still living in underground shelters.

Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Irina Venediktova, wrote on Facebook that a Russian soldier “will be tried for the murder of a civilian man and the sexual abuse of his wife.”

Ukraine is usually one of the world’s biggest exporters of food staples like corn, wheat and sunflower oil, but its output has plummeted as the war has interfered with sowing, harvesting, storing and, most debilitating of all, shipping. Even before the war, global food reserves were low and supply chains disrupted by the pandemic, and the United Nations has predicted that the loss of Ukrainian grain will lead to famine.

Ukraine says the Russian blockade has prevented 22 million tons of grain from leaving Ukraine, and there is limited capacity to shift that to export by trains and trucks. In addition, Ukrainian and international officials charge that Russian forces have targeted grain silos and railways used to transport food, stolen Ukrainian grain stores, and littered farms with explosives, both accidentally and intentionally.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said Tuesday that his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Russian military officials would visit Turkey to explore a deal to allow grain ships to leave Ukrainian ports.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff reported from Brussels and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Reporting was contributed by Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Marc Santora from Krakow, Poland; Valerie Hopkins from Kyiv, Ukraine; Monika Pronczuk from Brussels; Dan Bilefsky from Montreal; Victoria Kim from Seoul; Safak Timur from Istanbul; and Farnaz Fassihi from New York.

To house refugees, Lviv wants to make beautiful buildings that last.

Those who stay have been housed in schools and sports arenas turned into shelters. Recently, hundreds of families have moved into container housing set up in parks and empty lots.

But with permanent housing costing the same as container housing, Anton Kolomeytsev, the city’s chief architect, said Lviv would turn to construction, combining residential and commercial units with green space and recreational facilities.

“When we build a building, we have to think it’s built for not months, not years, but for dozens of years, for centuries,” said Mr. Kolomeytsev, 35, who studied and worked in Vienna, but says his work is shaped by having grown up in Lviv, whose architecture shows a blend of Eastern European, Italian and German influences. “We are in a very rich cultural environment.”

A rendering of one project shows white metal-clad buildings so delicate they appear to almost float on the fields of grass. The vertical lines of the siding flow into peaked roofs above large rectangular windows, while the asymmetrical entranceway contains floor-to-ceiling windows flooding the interior with natural light.

Scheduled to open in two months, it will accommodate 120 people — initially, pregnant women and their children.

The new construction is part of planning by Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, who said he envisioned a new, more resilient Ukraine after this war and is revamping his city’s infrastructure to prepare for an almost constant state of conflict.

“We must be ready for the next Russian invasion,” he said.

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The U.S. will send more advanced rocket systems to Ukraine, Biden says.

But a senior administration official said later that the weapons system — the most advanced provided to the Ukrainians to date — was promised only after direct assurances by Ukraine’s leaders that they would not use it against targets within Russian territory.

As the war has dragged on, the Biden administration has progressively widened the array of weaponry it has provided to the Ukrainians, and the latest package will also include Javelin antitank missiles, artillery rounds, helicopters and tactical vehicles. But top administration officials have been concerned about provoking a broader war with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by providing equipment that could allow Ukraine to strike deep inside his country.

That has proved to be a tricky line to walk for the president and his advisers since Mr. Putin sent his troops into Ukraine nearly 100 days ago.

In his article on Tuesday, Mr. Biden described his administration’s resolve to support Ukraine in its attempts to repel Russian invaders. But Mr. Biden also offered specific assurances for Mr. Putin that the United States does not intend to provoke a wider conflict or the use of weapons of mass destruction.

“We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”

Mr. Biden stated bluntly in his article that he did not seek to overthrow Mr. Putin, despite his off-the-cuff remarks during a speech in Poland earlier this year, when he said the Russian president “cannot remain in power.” On Tuesday, Mr. Biden presented a different view.

“We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia,” he said. “As much as I disagree with Mr. Putin, and find his actions an outrage, the United States will not try to bring about his ouster in Moscow. So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces.”

Mr. Biden’s administration has already sent Ukraine about $5 billion worth of antitank and antiaircraft missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters and other military equipment as the European country seeks to repel Russia’s invasion.

Administration officials said the advanced rockets and other equipment will be formally announced on Wednesday, along with a spare parts package that will allow Ukrainians to maintain the artillery equipment that has been provided.

Officials said on Tuesday that Ukraine will be receiving the American High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which is a weapon capable of firing satellite-guided rockets that carry roughly the same explosive power as a 500-pound bomb dropped from the air.

The system can strike targets up to 48 miles away, a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday evening, well beyond the range of any artillery Ukraine now uses. According to a report published by the Congressional Research Service in June, the Pentagon has spent about $5.4 billion to buy more than 42,000 such rockets since 1998.

The system could be outfitted with even longer-range rockets, capable of flying nearly 200 miles before striking a target, officials said Tuesday. But Mr. Biden decided against providing those rockets to Ukraine, a senior administration official said.

Mr. Biden had told reporters on Monday that “we’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that can strike into Russia.”

One senior administration official acknowledged that even the rockets with a 48-mile limit could be used to attack targets inside Russia if the system was brought to the Ukraine-Russia border. But the official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, said that Ukraine’s government had assured the United States that would not happen, and that the administration was comfortable with the assurances.

Mr. Biden made clear in his Op-Ed on Tuesday that it was important for the United States, and other countries, to provide more advanced weapons to Ukraine as the Russian military makes gains in the eastern part of the country.

“Standing by Ukraine in its hour of need is not just the right thing to do,” he wrote. “It is in our vital national interests to ensure a peaceful and stable Europe and to make it clear that might does not make right.”

The tone of Mr. Biden’s article indicated that he believed Americans should prepare for the war to continue for a long time. He said he wrote the article to make the aims of the United States clear “as the war goes on.”

Even as he vowed ongoing military support for Ukraine, Mr. Biden said he continued to hope that the countries could find a diplomatic end to the conflict.

“Ukraine’s talks with Russia are not stalled because Ukraine has turned its back on diplomacy,” he wrote. “They are stalled because Russia continues to wage a war to take control of as much of Ukraine as it can. The United States will continue to work to strengthen Ukraine and support its efforts to achieve a negotiated end to the conflict.”

John Ismay contributed reporting.

Europe, fresh from adopting an oil embargo on Russia, turns to the food crisis.

Unlocking the blockade could prove to be the most serious global challenge yet generated by the Russian invasion as President Vladimir V. Putin uses food as a political weapon.

Ukraine used to be a major global food exporter: it produced 12 percent of the world’s wheat, 15 percent of its corn, and 50 percent of its sunflower oil. But Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports has disrupted global supply chains and sent prices for agricultural goods soaring, exposing several countries, especially in Africa, to perilous food shortages.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, didn’t mince words. “The only reason why we are struggling now with a food crisis is because of this brutal unjustified war against Ukraine,” she said.

Russia is currently blocking 22 million tons of grain in Ukraine, bombarding houses where wheat is stored, and mining fields, Ms. von der Leyen said. It is also seeking to blame Western sanctions for the food crisis, an accusation Ms. von der Leyen vehemently rejected.

Getting the wheat out of Ukraine will be “tedious and expensive,” she said, but it is “necessary.”

Ms. von der Leyen’s words were echoed by prime minister Mario Draghi of Italy, who said Tuesday that if the West were to “lose the war on food security,” African countries “will feel betrayed.” That, in turn, he added, could have “strategic consequences that are very serious.”

Earlier this month, the commission announced a set of measures to ramp up Ukraine’s exports of blocked grain and oilseed through existing land routes, mainly through Poland and Romania. But there are complex challenges, including the difference in the gauge of railway tracks between Ukraine and its neighbors. Even without that hurdle, railway travel is significantly slower than sending grain by sea.

But there is not much that the European Union alone can do to solve the problem, and E.U. leaders this week also called on the G7, the world’s wealthiest large democracies, and the U.N. to redouble their efforts.

Nevertheless, E.U. leaders can take some satisfaction in agreeing to an embargo on Russian oil arriving in the bloc by sea. It is an unprecedented economic measure that will ban two-thirds of Russian imports, and is expected to hurt both the Kremlin and Europe’s households.

The once unthinkable measure is expected to significantly affect Moscow’s ability to finance the war. The bloc also promised an aide package of $9.7 billion over the rest of this year to cover Ukraine’s reconstruction, with losses inflicted on the country by Russian aggression estimated by Ukrainian authorities to now be at least $650 billion.

The oil embargo was expected to inspire the Kremlin’s ire. Even as the E.U officials were meeting, Russia disrupted supplies of natural gas to the Netherlands, having already done the same to Bulgaria, Poland and Finland over their refusal to pay in rubles, offering a glimpse of Moscow’s willingness to leverage its energy supplies.

The oil embargo is part of the bloc’s sixth package of sanctions against Russia, which have also included barring the country’s largest lender, Sberbank, as well as two other Russian banks from the Swift messaging platform that facilitates international transactions.

The oil ban had been blocked for more than a month by Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who maintains warm relations with President Vladimir V. Putin. In the end, he got an exemption from the embargo, undermining European unity and underlining how even one mercurial leader can be an E.U. spoiler.

True to form, Mr. Orban turned to social media to proclaim “victory” for Hungary.

Nevertheless, before Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, such a robust E.U. ban on Russian oil imports seemed all but impossible to achieve.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, a staunch advocate for strong sanctions against Moscow, hailed the summit as an achievement. “We managed to maintain unity, and today we are even stronger than a couple of days ago,” he said.

Elisabetta Povoledo and Benjamin Novak contributed reporting.

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Russia’s military is repeating mistakes in Eastern Ukraine, the U.S. says.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appointed a new commander, Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, in April in what was widely viewed as an acknowledgment that the initial Russian war plan was failing.

Soon after his arrival, General Dvornikov tried to get disjointed air and land units to coordinate their attacks, American officials said. But he has not been seen in the past two weeks, leading some officials to speculate as to whether he remains in charge of the war effort.

Russian pilots also continue to demonstrate the same risk-averse behavior they did in the early weeks of the war: darting across the border to launch strikes and then quickly returning to Russian territory, instead of staying in Ukrainian air space to deny access to their foes. The result is that Russia still has not established any kind of air superiority, officials said.

The Russian military has made some progress in the east, where concentrated firepower and shortened supply lines have helped its forces fight intense battles in recent days. After three bloody months, Russia finally took Mariupol in mid-May, potentially creating a land bridge from the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula to the south.

As Russia struggles to move forward, Ukraine has also suffered setbacks. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine recently said that as many as 100 Ukrainian servicemen might be dying every day in the fighting. And on Tuesday, Russian troops advanced toward the center of Sievierodonetsk, a city that has become a central focus for the military since it shifted its attention to the east.

But some of the areas that Russian forces managed to seize have been quickly contested again, and sometimes retaken, by Ukrainian troops.

Consider Kharkiv. Russia spent six weeks bombarding the eastern city, once home to 1.5 million people, as troops encircled it.

But by May 13, control of the city had flipped again. “The Russians took Kharkiv for a short period of time; the Ukrainians counterattacked and took Kharkiv back,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said at a news conference at the Pentagon last week. “We’ve seen them really proceed at a very slow and unsuccessful pace on the battlefield.”

Ukraine is now pushing Russian troops north and east from Kharkiv, “in some cases all the way back to Russia,” said retired Gen. Philip Breedlove, the former supreme allied commander for Europe. “So now Ukrainians are threatening to cut off Russian lines of supply and pushing their forces to the rear.”

Cutting off Russian supply lines east of Kharkiv would put Russian troops in the same situation they were in after their advance on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, at the beginning of the war, officials said. Ukrainian units carrying shoulder-fired Javelin antitank missiles picked off Russian soldiers as miles-long Russian convoys near Kyiv stopped moving forward. The invasion stalled, and thousands of Russian troops were killed or injured. Russia then refocused its mission on the east.

In the early weeks of the war, Russia ran its military campaign out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, American and other Western officials said. In early April, after Russia’s logistics and morale problems had become clear, Mr. Putin put General Dvornikov in charge of a streamlined war effort.

General Dvornikov arrived with a daunting résumé. He started his career as a platoon commander in 1982 and later fought in Russia’s brutal second war in Chechnya. Moscow also sent him to Syria, where the forces under his command were accused of targeting civilians.

In Ukraine, he established a more streamlined process. Russian pilots began coordinating with troops on the ground toward a similar objective in the eastern region of Donbas, and Russian units were talking to one another about shared goals.

But the invasion is not “proceeding particularly differently in the east than in the west because they haven’t been able to change the character of the Russian army,” said Frederick W. Kagan, a senior fellow and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. “There are some deep flaws in the Russian army that they could not have repaired in the last few weeks even if they had tried. The flaws are deep and fundamental.”

At the top of that list is the Russian army’s lack of a noncommissioned officers corps empowered to think for itself, Pentagon officials said. American troops have sergeants and platoon leaders and corporals who are given tasks and guidelines and left to accomplish those tasks as they see fit.

But Russia’s military follows a Soviet-style doctrinal method in which troops at the bottom are not empowered to point out flaws in strategy that should be obvious or to make adjustments.

The Ukrainians, after seven years of training alongside troops from the United States and other NATO countries, follow the more Western method and have proved particularly agile at adapting to circ*mstances, American military officials said.

A two-week fighting pause after the Russian military gave up the fight for Kyiv was not long enough to turn the campaign around, even with a more limited goal, General Breedlove said. General Dvornikov’s “new tactics, resetting the command and control so there was a focused decision maker — all that was right or proper,” he said.

But, General Breedlove added: “Even our army would be hard-pressed to refit, refurbish and reorganize in two weeks after having received such a sound whipping.” When General Dvornikov took control, “the force was thrust back into the battle too quickly. That decision had to have come from Moscow.”

After renewing an assault on the Donbas, Russia has pounded cities and villages with a barrage of artillery. But troops have not followed that up with any kind of sustained armored invasion, which is necessary if they will hold the territory they are flattening, military officials say. That means that Russia may find itself struggling to hold on to gains — as it did in Kharkiv.

Evelyn Farkas, a former senior Pentagon official for Ukraine and Russia in the Obama administration, said Mr. Putin was still too involved in the fight.

“We keep hearing accounts of Putin getting more involved,” said Ms. Farkas, who is now executive director of the McCain Institute. “We know that if you have presidents meddling in targeting and operational military decisions, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

The White House and European allies disagree on whether to seize Russian central bank assets to help Ukraine.

The cost to rebuild Ukraine is expected to be significant. Its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, estimated this month that it could be $600 billion after months of artillery, missile and tank attacks — meaning that even if all of Russia’s central bank assets abroad were seized, they would cover only half the costs.

In a joint statement last week, finance ministers from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia urged the European Union to create a way to fund the rebuilding of cities and towns in Ukraine with frozen Russian central bank assets, so that Russia can be “held accountable for its actions and pay for the damage caused.”

Confiscating the Russian assets was also a central topic at a gathering of top economic officials from the Group of 7 nations at a meeting this month, with the idea drawing public support from Germany and Canada.

The United States, which has led a global effort to isolate Russia with stiff sanctions, has been far more cautious in this case. Internally, the Biden administration has been debating whether to join an effort to seize the assets, which include dollars and euros that Moscow deposited before its invasion of Ukraine. Only a fraction of the funds are kept in the United States; much of it was deposited in Europe, including at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland.

Russia had hoped that keeping more than $600 billion in central bank reserves would help bolster its economy against sanctions. But it made the mistake of sending half those funds out of the country. By all accounts, Russian officials were stunned at the speed at which they were frozen — a very different reaction from the one it faced after annexing Crimea in 2014, when it took a year for weak sanctions to be imposed.

Those funds have been frozen for the past three months, keeping the government of President Vladimir V. Putin from repatriating the money or spending it on the war. But seizing or actually taking ownership of them is another matter.

At a news conference in Germany this month, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen appeared to close the door on the United States’ ability to participate in any effort to seize and redistribute those assets. Ms. Yellen, a former central banker who initially had reservations about immobilizing the assets, said that while the concept was being studied, she believed that seizing the funds would violate U.S. law.

“I think it’s very natural that given the enormous destruction in Ukraine and huge rebuilding costs that they will face, that we will look to Russia to help pay at least a portion of the price that will be involved,” she said. “It’s not something that is legally permissible in the United States.”

But within the Biden administration, one official said, there was reluctance “to have any daylight between us and the Europeans on sanctions.” So the United States is seeking to find some kind of common ground while analyzing whether a seizure of central bank funds might, for example, encourage other countries to put their central bank reserves in other currencies and keep it out of American hands.

In addition to the legal obstacles, Ms. Yellen and others have argued that it could make nations reluctant to keep their reserves in dollars, for fear that in future conflicts the United States and its allies would confiscate the funds. Some national security officials in the Biden administration say they are concerned that if negotiations between Ukraine and Russia begin, there would be no way to offer significant sanctions relief to Moscow once the reserves have been drained from its overseas accounts.

Treasury officials suggested before Ms. Yellen’s comments that the United States had not settled on a firm position about the fate of the assets. Several senior officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal debates in the Biden administration, suggested that no final decision had been made. One official said that while seizing the funds to pay for reconstruction would be satisfying and warranted, the precedent it would set — and its potential effect on the United States’ status as the world’s safest place to leave assets — was a deep concern.

In explaining Ms. Yellen’s comments, a Treasury spokeswoman pointed to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which says that the United States can confiscate foreign property if the president determines that the country is under attack or “engaged in armed hostilities.”

Legal scholars have expressed differing views about that reading of the law.

Laurence H. Tribe, an emeritus law professor at Harvard University, argues that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act gives the president ample authority to freeze and seize Russia’s central bank assets. Even if that were in doubt, he said, an amendment to the law that passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks gives the president broader discretion to determine if a foreign threat warrants confiscation of assets. President Biden could cite Russian cyberattacks against the United States to justify liquidating the central bank reserves, Mr. Tribe said, adding that the Treasury Department was misreading the law.

“If Secretary Yellen believes this is illegal, I think she’s flatly wrong,” he said. “It may be that they are blending legal questions with their policy concerns.”

Mr. Tribe pointed to recent cases of the United States confiscating and redistributing assets from Afghanistan, Iran and Venezuela as precedents that showed Russia’s assets did not deserve special safeguards.

But according to Paul B. Stephan, a law professor at the University of Virginia, the examples of Afghanistan and Venezuela are not comparable because the United States did not recognize those governments as legitimate. He also argued that Mr. Biden would be escalating the conflict with Russia if he conflated cyberattacks with an act of war to justify seizing Russian assets.

“I would find that alarming,” Mr. Stephan said. “We’ve been trying to be stable, rather than destabilizing, in this area.”

He added that Congress could amend the law to clearly grant the United States the authority to confiscate Russia’s assets, but that doing so was likely to lead to complex legal battles between the two countries.

Congress could be heading in that direction. Last month, the House passed the bipartisan Asset Seizure for Ukraine Reconstruction Act, which would encourage the Biden administration to devise a way to liquidate the properties of sanctioned Russian oligarchs and companies, with the proceeds given to Ukraine. But officials say it is one thing to seize the physical assets of oligarchs and another to seize the central bank reserves of countries.

The White House last month released a package of proposals seeking new powers to garnish the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs. The process for the federal government to take ownership of assets such as yachts and planes is cumbersome and time-consuming.

Canada also introduced legislation in April that would give its government new authority to seize and sell assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs and give the proceeds to Ukraine.

Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister and finance minister of Canada, said during the Group of 7 meetings that other countries were considering similar legal frameworks.

“Canada recognizes — and this was a view shared by our G7 partners that Ukraine’s financial needs are huge — the needs for the rebuilding are huge, and it is entirely appropriate for the aggressor to help pay for that rebuilding,” Ms. Freeland said.

As nations debate how to handle the Russian assets, Ukraine passed a law this month that allowed it to confiscate Russian property in the country and use the funds to replenish the national budget. In an address to the World Economic Forum, Mr. Zelensky urged others to follow suit by tracking down, freezing and seizing Russian assets.

“They should be allocated to a special fund,” he said, “that would be used to help all of those affected by the war.”

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Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield also said the U.S. supported all efforts to get Ukrainian grain to the open market. The U.S. is willing to write “comfort letters” for shipping and insurance companies reassuring them that Russia’s fertilizers and grains are not under sanctions, she said.

E.U. leader says the new Russian oil import ban sends a ‘clear’ message to Moscow.

European leaders wrapped up their meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, but negotiators will still need to work out technical details in the coming days. E.U. leaders said they had agreed to ban Russian oil arriving in the bloc by sea by the end of the year.

Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orban, an occasional ally of Mr. Putin, had been blocking the measure. To win Hungary’s approval, European leaders agreed to allow pipeline imports.

Five European countries import Russian oil by pipeline. Germany and Poland agreed to cut off all Russian imports, including those arriving by pipeline, by the end of the year, but Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic made no such pledge. The three countries are very dependent on Russian oil imports, but Slovakia and the Czech Republic have already indicated that they were working toward switching their supply away from Russia.

As part of the agreement, Hungary also received assurances that, should the pipeline that delivers Russian oil, which runs through Ukraine, be hit, the country would be permitted to import oil without being accused of violating sanctions.

Even with the exceptions to appease Hungary, a small country that represents a tiny fraction of the Russian oil imported by the bloc, the measure will cost the Kremlin billions of dollars a year in revenue while also strategically decoupling Europe from Russia in a lasting way. It will also likely hit Europe hard, as households and businesses are already facing steeper energy prices.

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The developing global food crisis, Ms. von der Leyen said, is “only the fault of Russia.” She said Russia was blocking 22 million tones of grain in Ukraine, bombarding houses where the wheat is stored, and mining the fields. “The only reason we are struggling with this is because of this brutal, unjustified war against Ukraine.”

Russian forces advance in Sievierodonetsk, where as many as 12,000 civilians are trapped.

“Street fighting continues,” he said. Two civilians had been killed since Monday and four others were wounded.

Most of the city’s civilian prewar population of around 100,000 has fled in the face of a Russian artillery barrage that has endured for weeks, but 12,000 people, many of them elderly, are trapped in appalling conditions, according to an estimate by the Norwegian Refugee Council aid group.

Families and young people have largely left the city. Many of the older people who remain have health problems or disabilities that make flight impossible, according to Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former United Nations humanitarian coordinator.

“It breaks my heart,” Mr. Egeland said in an interview. “It is really a war on the elderly.” He called for a humanitarian cease-fire to allow for evacuations and the resupply of aid.

Ukrainian authorities halted attempts to evacuate civilians via a road leading to the city of Bakhmut on Monday after a French journalist was killed when the armored bus he was riding in was hit by shrapnel from what Ukrainian officials said was a Russian shell.

A relentless artillery barrage that has damaged as much as 90 percent of the city’s buildings has forced the residents who remain to hide in basem*nts and bomb shelters, emerging briefly to cook food.

Mr. Egeland said he had visited his aid group’s operation in the city just before the war began and found it hard to believe how much had changed since. The group has now lost contact with the only staff member who remained there; in the last phone call with him, the staff member described the situation as horrendous, Mr. Egeland said.

Russian forces have pounded Sievierodonetsk for weeks with artillery. In recent days, they have seized two key points in the northeast of the city, a hotel and a bus station, and have also gained ground in the southeast.

Moscow has gained leverage in its effort to take the city by focusing its forces on the region, according to military analysts. In doing so, it may be starting to correct an error made at the outset of the invasion in February, when spreading its forces across the country contributed to Moscow’s failure to take Kyiv or the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv.

Russian forces have fired on 46 settlements in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk over the past day, killing at least three civilians and wounding seven others, Ukraine’s chief of staff said in a statement on Tuesday.

Grain producers confront a new challenge engendered by war: clearing the fields of potentially lethal shells.

The Ukrainian military had laid mines in some of these fields to impede Russian forces seeking to advance on Kyiv, the capital, and then removed them as the position shifted. The emergency services were responsible for removing shells, rockets and missiles. But the risk of an overlooked shell or rocket presented a particular challenge for the staff at Agro-Region, one of dozens of Ukrainian grain producers facing intensifying hurdles as grain exports remain blockaded by Russian forces, choking revenues and threatening a global food crisis.

The company specializes in corn, wheat and soy bean production on farms spread across western and northern Ukraine.

Ivan Volodymyrovych, 27, manager of an Agro-Region facility in Boryspil, a city to the east of Kyiv, which stores and transports grain, said that many staff members had remained throughout some of the fiercest bombardments, determined to continue their work. Farmers sowed the fields, while employees slept under ground at night and kept watch over giant bins where the precious grain is stored.

The ground would shake, he recalled, and staff would find artillery shells — both exploded and unexploded ones — in the fields.

Even after having sowed seeds and cleared the fields of unexploded ordnance, the company is now facing a growing storage crisis because of the Russian blockade. “Right now, one of our biggest problems is not having space to store all the grain because we weren’t able to export it this year,” Mr. Volodymyrovych said.

The war in Ukraine is threatening to drive up global food prices as the country’s southern ports grapple with blockades by the Russian military.

Agro-Region, which produced about 275,000 tons of crops including wheat and grain last year, exported 90 percent of its goods through Black Sea ports before the war broke out. The company is also facing logistical challenges in transporting grain because Ukrainian railways are menaced by Russian attacks, while Russia has taken territory in the east and the south, making it perilous to transport grain to Russian-controlled territories.

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A Ukrainian court sentences 2 Russian soldiers in a second war crimes trial.

“The guilt of Bobikin and Ivanov has been proven in full,” Judge Evhen Bolybok told the courtroom in the Kotelva district court in central Ukraine.

When the proceedings began last week, both men pleaded guilty to being members of a unit that targeted Derhachi with shelling from the region of Belgorod, on the Russian side of the border. The men and their unit had then entered Ukraine and continued attacking the town. They later surrendered to the Ukrainian authorities.

Prosecutors said the soldiers had shelled an educational facility, though no casualties were registered. The defense attorneys argued that both defendants had been following orders.

The two soldiers were charged with violating the laws and customs of war. The charge is laid out by the Geneva Conventions, to which Ukraine is a party. Prosecutors had sought a 12-year sentence.

Derhachi, like Kharkiv and its other northern suburbs, is still regularly targeted by Russian positions less than 10 miles away. Houses are being destroyed on a daily basis, said Vyacheslav Fysun, a local councilman, when New York Times journalists visited over the weekend. Hundreds of people are still living in underground shelters.

The verdict is part of Ukraine’s large undertaking to account for the destruction and death that Russian soldiers have wrought since February. Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Irina Venediktova, has said that there are at least 11,000 investigations underway that could result in war crimes indictments.

Ms. Venediktova also announced on Monday that the first case involving wartime rape had been sent to trial. “Mikhail Romanov will be tried for the murder of a civilian man and the sexual abuse of his wife,” Ms. Venediktova wrote on Facebook on Monday.

The prosecutor said the accused was a serviceman of the 239th Regiment of the 90th Guards Rifle Vitebsk-Novgorod Division of the Russian Armed Forces.

In March, during the occupation of the Brovary district in the Kyiv region, “He shot and killed the owner of a house while intoxicated and raped his wife, together with another occupant immediately after the murder,” Ms. Venediktova wrote. “They threatened the woman with possible violence against her child.”

Hungary’s oil embargo exemption is the latest sign of its leader’s affinity for Russia.

The pivot has occurred despite deep-seated suspicion in Hungary of Russian power and influence based on the history of Russian and Soviet troops brutally cracking down on Hungarian uprisings in 1848-49 and in 1956.

Mr. Orban, an avowedly illiberal leader who earlier in his career was a vocal critic of Moscow, has increasingly spoken admiringly of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his brand of nationalism, expressing sympathies for Mr. Putin’s security demands to NATO. He has also painted Hungary’s interests as being distinct from the West by fanning culture wars and fears of liberal values lapping at Hungary’s borders, speaking in March about “the gender insanity sweeping across the Western world.”

Under Monday’s deal, E.U. nations agreed to block imports of Russian oil by sea, which leaves Hungary’s supply intact because it is landlocked and receives its oil by pipeline. The agreement also includes an assurance that should the pipeline be damaged — it runs through Ukraine — Hungary could buy Russian oil by other means without being accused of violating the European blockade.

“Hungary is exempt from the oil embargo!” Mr. Orban declared on his Facebook page Monday. He had previously said cutting off Russian oil “amounts to an atomic bomb being dropped on the Hungarian economy.”

Hungary accounts for only a small fraction of the flow of Russian oil to the E.U.; the embargo will deprive Russia of billions of dollars in revenue regardless of Hungary’s continued imports.

On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, as other allies were raising alarm about Russia’s buildup of troops near the border, Mr. Orban traveled to Moscow to reaffirm a deal for cheap Russian natural gas that has helped him keep energy prices low at home and maintain political support.

Since the war’s start, Hungary has treaded a fine line, joining the first rounds of sanctions against Russia and accepting Ukrainian refugees, while refusing to allow deliveries of arms bound for Ukraine to go through the country or to accept additional U.S. troops. Mr. Orban won re-election in April for a fourth consecutive term despite criticism that he was cozying up to Mr. Putin, who publicly congratulated him on his victory.

Hungary is more reliant on Russian energy than other European nations, receiving around 80 percent of its gas from the Russian state-run Gazprom and more than half of its oil from Russia. Russia has also heavily invested in the expansion of a nuclear power plant in the country, which generates about half of its electricity.