UN seeks to broker civilian evacuation from ruins of Mariupol, while Russia continues offensive...

Live Updates: Russia’s Eastern Offensive Appears to Falter

Russian forces in eastern Ukraine face logistical and morale problems like those seen earlier in the war, analysts say. The E.U. is poised to approve a ban on Russian oil.

 

Victoria Kim and Lauren McCarthy

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/30/world/ukraine-russia-war-news

 

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

• Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine appears to be faltering, as its troops suffer battlefield losses and logistical and morale problems similar to those they faced in the war’s first phase, Western officials and analysts say.
•  
• As Russian efforts to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east by attacking from three sides seemed to stall in recent days, Ukrainians managed to retake a small town near the northern city of Kharkiv. Russia was relying on artillery to pound Ukrainian forces along the 300-mile-long eastern front, but it only managed to make incremental gains, a senior Pentagon official said.
•  
• In a sign of Moscow’s troubles, some of the troops who had been trying to stamp out the last pockets of resistance in the southern port city of Mariupol were redirected to the eastern front in the Donbas region, according to the Pentagon official. Yet Russian forces continued to rain destruction on civilians trapped in Mariupol, some of whom were sheltering at the Azovstal steel plant. The city’s mayor warned that people at the plant would be without water and medicine in “a matter of hours.”
•  
• In a significant new move to support Ukraine, the European Union is expected to ban Russian oil next week, an embargo that would be phased in over a period of months. The ban is expected to be approved at a meeting of ambassadors, allowing the bloc to avoid the time-consuming process of gathering heads of state together.

 

In other developments:

 

• Family members of a United States citizen confirmed on Friday that he had died fighting alongside Ukrainians. He is believed to be the first American killed in action in the war. Britain’s Foreign Office also confirmed the death of a British national, said to be a former soldier who had been fighting as a volunteer.
•  
• President Biden wants Congress to expedite visas for Russian scientists eager to leave their country by temporarily suspending the requirement of a sponsoring employer. That would eliminate one of the biggest obstacles for many scientists seeking to come to the U.S. and accelerate a brain drain already underway in Russia.
•  
• Russian troops occupying Mariupol have plundered more than 2,000 items from its museums and taken them to the city of Donetsk, the capital of an eastern region controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, according to the Mariupol City Council.
•  
• Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, accused the United States and the European Union of using the war to battle Russia without regard to the cost in civilian lives, according to RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency. Western allies are supplying Ukraine with arms not to support the country’s sovereignty, but to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian,” he said.