A woman outside her burning house after a Russian attack in Kherson, Ukraine, this month.Credit...Felipe Dana/Associated Press
KYIV, Ukraine — Shelling killed two municipal workers in Kherson on Friday morning, the latest deadly attack in a relentless Russian bombardment of the southern Ukrainian city that has complicated efforts to assess the toll of the Kakhovka dam disaster.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson regional military administration, said two workers had been killed and five others hospitalized when a Russian attack hit their facility on Friday morning. Mr. Prokudin said in a post on the Telegram messaging app that Russian forces had carried out 91 strikes in the region over the previous day and had shelled the city of Kherson 26 times.
The attacks come as the authorities are still working to establish how many people died when the Kakhovka dam, which lies upstream from Kherson, was destroyed this month. While the floodwaters unleashed by the dam’s destruction have receded significantly, the human toll remains unclear more than two weeks after the disaster.
Even as the ecological impact has started to come into focus, it has been extremely difficult to determine how many people were killed in the wide-scale flooding as waters rushed downstream and engulfed residential areas. At least 21 people have been confirmed dead and more than 100 people are still missing, according to Ukrainian officials.
But parts of the Kherson region are occupied by Russian forces, and the Ukrainian authorities say they do not have a clear picture of the human toll in those areas. Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, a spokesman for the Kherson regional military administration, said that the number of victims could be very high in Russian-held areas, but that an accurate assessment had not been possible. Russian officials have released scant information about the conditions in these areas.
“All we can get is the number of dead from the hospital,” Mr. Tolokonnikov told Ukraine’s Radio Svoboda this week. So far, about 11 people have been reported killed in the Russian-held town of Oleshky and the same number in Hola Prystan, a town farther south.
He also accused Russian forces of moving flood victims out of the region, a claim that could not be independently verified.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made a similar accusation in his nightly address on Thursday, describing it as part of Moscow’s efforts to hide the toll of its invasion. Evidence reviewed by The New York Times suggests that Russia, which had occupied the dam, blew it up from within.
“This is not the first time Russia has done this — it is trying to destroy evidence and traces of its crimes in the occupied territory,” Mr. Zelensky said, adding, “But this is a truth that cannot be hidden.”
Counteroffensive: As much of the world pays close attention to the slow progress of Ukraine’s campaign, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his aides are trying to tamp down expectations, saying that expelling Russia was going to be a hard, bloody slog.
Summer in Odesa: The Ukrainian city was ready to reclaim its beaches, which last year were closed by wartime fears. Then the Kakhovka dam was destroyed.
In Lviv: As the fighting grows more intense during the counteroffensive, the unmarked graves of those killed in past wars are being exhumed to make way for a seemingly endless stream of new dead.
Ukrainian soldiers from the 28th Mechanized Brigade south of Bakhmut, Ukraine, firing at Russian positions.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
OVERVIEW: Moscow’s forces have been trying to advance in eastern Ukraine even as they endeavor to hold off a Ukrainian counteroffensive to the south. In the Donetsk region, Russian troops have been aiming to push toward four municipalities, according to Ukrainian defense officials: Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Lyman and Marinka. Ukrainian forces reclaimed Lyman in October; Russian forces seized Bakhmut last month after the war’s bloodiest battle; and Moscow has been fighting to take Marinka and Avdiivka for more than a year.
THE LATEST: Hanna Malyar, a deputy Ukrainian defense minister, said on Friday that Ukrainian forces had halted an attempted Russian push in the directions of both Lyman and Kupiansk, a Ukrainian-controlled town in the Kharkiv region in the country’s northeast. “Our defense forces stopped the enemy’s offensive” in both directions, Ms. Malyar said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
Russia did not immediately provide an account of fighting in the area, and it was not possible to verify Ukraine’s claim. The Ukrainian Army’s general staff said on Friday that Russian forces had continued to focus on Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Lyman and Marinka, with over 30 clashes in those areas in the preceding day.
WHY IT MATTERS: Even as Ukrainian forces focus the initial phase of their counteroffensive in the southeast, aiming to retake areas occupied by Russian forces, they are still on the defensive in a number of areas in the east. The areas where Ms. Malyar said Russian forces were trying to advance in Donetsk have been the scene of fierce fighting almost since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion 16 months ago. All four have been deeply scarred by artillery and other fire, with only a handful of civilians remaining in each.
Because of the nature of the fighting, in which both sides have dug extensive trenches to withstand constant artillery attacks, military experts say that it is easier to defend ground than to advance. As a result, while the Ukrainians may have the upper hand in defending their positions in the Donetsk region, they could face a harder task in trying to wrest back territory in the southeast. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly said that it will take time before their long-anticipated counteroffensive shows substantive results.
“It is causing great pain in the region. Since it involves major powers, the outcomes are severe,” he said, without naming those powers.
But as Mr. Modi hewed to his country’s line of strict neutrality on the war in Ukraine in his four-day state visit to the United States, Russia and its decades-long role as India’s biggest arms supplier was a pertinent backdrop to the pledges of closer defense cooperation between the United States and India.
With President Biden, he announced a deal for coproduction in India of engines for fighter aircraft; a $3 billion purchase of about 30 American Reaper drones by India; and a road map to expand cooperation between the two countries’ defense industries. The two leaders also praised new agreements on intelligence sharing and space-based quantum and other strategic technologies.
In helping India expand its defense manufacturing and diversify the sources of its arms, the Biden administration is seeking to ease India away from its long reliance on Russia for its military equipment, born of decades of U.S. policy when it held back on sales to India and instead supplied its chief rival, Pakistan.
The defense cooperation with the United States is also attractive to India because it will help the country toward its aim of strengthening domestic manufacturing and reducing dependence on foreign partners, whose supplies come with geopolitical strings.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, India has remained on the sidelines of efforts by the United States and its allies to isolate Russia economically and choke off its ability to fund the war. Mr. Modi has maintained military and economic ties with Russia and has stopped short of denouncing its war in Ukraine. India remains a major buyer of Russian oil.
At the same time, India has sought closer ties with the United States. Mr. Biden has called U.S. ties to India the “defining relationship of the 21st century,” and his administration has said it hopes to improve the countries’ economic and security relationship to help counter China’s growing influence.
When the United Nations voted in 2022 to condemn the invasion and remove Russia from its Human Rights Council, India abstained both times.
In April 2022, Mr. Biden urged Mr. Modi not to increase India’s reliance on Russian oil and gas. Even so, India’s oil imports from Russia have risen drastically. In a little over a year, it went from purchasing hardly any Russian oil to buying about half of what the country exports by sea.
Mujib Mashal and Alex Travelli contributed reporting.
Two Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft, of the United States Air Force, at Lechfeld Air Base during a media event this month.Credit...Alexander Koerner/Getty Images
LECHFELD AIR BASE, Germany — Flying a 50,000-pound attack jet while 10,000 feet above Earth may not be the best time for a language lesson. But it was part of the drills that Maj. Greg Kirk of the Idaho Air National Guard had to decipher last week as he sought clarity on his mission from a heavily accented German military air traffic controller issuing the orders.
English is the lingua franca for most military air forces, and the German joint terminal attack controller was fluent, but with his accent he was hard to understand over the headset feedback in Major Kirk’s A-10 jet.
“I know what he’s trying to say now,” Major Kirk said three days into the exercises. “Training together with all of our NATO partners over the week — things are moving now, things are happening a lot more efficiently.”
The joint air power exercises, which end on Friday after a 12-day run, have been the largest in NATO’s history. They involve 250 aircraft and around 10,000 personnel from 25 nations. Conducted in several places in Germany, they are technically not run by NATO, and they were planned well before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine 16 months ago.
But the implications in the face of the current conflict, the largest in Europe since World War II, could not be more obvious. “As we face the biggest security crisis in a generation,” said Oana Lungescu, the NATO spokeswoman, “we stand united to keep our countries and our people safe.”
Yet even the most fearsome warplanes and other weapons depend upon effective communications, a particular problem when they can be drawn from any of the numerous alliance members.
Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, and Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, at a conference in London on Thursday.Credit...Pool photo by Henry Nicholls
Western allies raised almost $66 billion toward Ukraine’s economic recovery and stability over a two-day donors’ conference hosted by the British government that came to a close on Thursday.
“Ukraine will rebuild. But they cannot do it alone,” the British foreign secretary, James Cleverly, said in a speech concluding the conference. “So together, as governments, as international organizations, as businesses, as representatives of civil society, we have shown Ukraine and the Ukrainian people that we stand with them.”
During the conference, Britain pledged $305 million in direct economic assistance to Ukraine and $3 billion in World Bank loan guarantees for the country over the next several years. The funds will help Ukraine regain macroeconomic stability, Mr. Cleverly said.
In addition, the United States announced $1.3 billion in new economic aid, to be directed toward overhauling Ukraine’s heavily damaged energy infrastructure and modernizing its ports, railways and border crossings.
Still, Mr. Cleverly’s tally of new aid includes the European Union’s previously announced $54 billion package to reconstruct Ukraine, which has yet to receive approval from all 27 member nations. And it falls far short of the $411 billion the World Bank has estimated would be needed to rebuild the country, with $14 billion needed this year for rebuilding important infrastructure.
On Wednesday, Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, spoke of the steps necessary for his country’s recovery, both in the short and long term. He said Ukraine was still seeking about $6.5 billion more in aid to rebuild key infrastructure over the next year. “We have set an ambitious goal of securing pledges for this amount as a result of this conference,” he said.
Leaders at the gathering touched on the idea of using confiscated Russian public and private assets — which are estimated to be worth at least $300 billion — to help pay for reconstruction costs. Britain and the European Union are exploring legal pathways to using frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine.
In his address, Mr. Shmyhal said that Ukraine was preparing mechanisms to lay claim to the frozen Russian assets.
“One of the key questions we are constantly facing is who will pay the hundreds of billions for the recovery,” Mr. Shmyhal said. “First and foremost, Russia must pay for what it has destroyed.”
At a beach in Odesa, Ukraine, this month. The destruction of a faraway dam has dumped debris and dangers into the Black Sea.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
ODESA, Ukraine — Last summer, the beaches that ring the port city of Odesa in southern Ukraine were crowded with volunteers packing sandbags under bluffs where troops were positioned in machine gun nests as the threat of a Russian amphibious assault still loomed.
This summer was supposed to be different. In the first days of June, the sun was warm, the Black Sea was a shimmering blue and many Ukrainians were already packing the beaches despite an official ban on swimming.
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After a year’s absence because of the Russian invasion, the sun seekers who typically throng the Odesa waterfront started to return before the dam broke.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
It released a torrent of water rushing down the Dnipro River, washing over towns and villages across southern Ukraine. Thousands of houses and businesses were flooded, vast stretches of rich farmland were ravaged, and the full environmental and economic cost is likely to take years to measure.
The floods also carried mountains of debris out to the Black Sea — pieces of buildings, trees, appliances, boats, livestock carcasses and even instruments of war, like the land mines both Russian and Ukrainian forces had planted near the river. Now, the tides are carrying much of that to shore, along with a stew of toxic chemicals, fouling the famed beaches of Odesa and other coastal communities.
“The sea is turning into a garbage dump and animal cemetery,” Ukraine’s border guard agency warned last week. “The consequences of ecocide are terrible.”
Anna Lukinova and Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting.