Ukraine-Russia War: Live News And Updates – The New York Times

While Russia has denied committing war crimes, European leaders are scheduled to vote on Wednesday on measures that could cut off imports of Russian coal. It will be a test for the continent, which depends on oil, natural gas and coal from Russia. So far, Europe remains divided on blocking Russian gas.

And in the United States, the Biden administration is expected to impose broader sanctions on two of Russia’s biggest banks in response to the killings in Bucha. The move might come as early as Wednesday morning, according to a person familiar with the decision.

Mr. Zelensky’s call for stronger sanctions comes as Russian forces refocus their efforts in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky said that “the most difficult situation” at the moment was in the Donbas region and Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, but that his government would continue to “do everything to ensure” that Ukrainian troops can resist Russian forces.

“We are aware that the occupiers outnumber us,” Mr. Zelensky said. “But we have no other choice. The fate of our land and our people is being decided. We know what we are fighting for, and we do everything to win.”

Here are some other major developments:

• A desperately needed aid convoy that has been trying to reach the city of Mariupol since Friday has stalled, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Tuesday. The latest hurdle for the convoy came on Monday, when members of the team were detained on the outskirts of Mariupol. The team was released Monday night.

• The United States has started blocking Russia from making debt payments using dollars held in American banks, a move designed to deplete its international currency reserves and potentially push Russia toward its first foreign currency debt default in a century.

• For the first time since the war, journalists from The New York Times were able to reach the town of Borodyanka, northwest of Kyiv, where the mayor estimated 200 dead lay beneath the rubble.

“Ultimately, India remained relatively nonaligned while clearly and unequivocally condemning the killing of civilians, thus showing a primary concern for the people of Ukraine without wanting to get drawn into the broader geopolitical contest itself,” said Rohan Mukherjee, an assistant professor of political science at the Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

India has been reluctant to criticize Russia, one of its largest suppliers of weapons, over the war. Instead, it has emphasized the need for neutrality in humanitarian assistance and called for diplomacy to end the conflict, whose economic effects are increasingly being felt within India as oil and fertilizer prices soar.

India shares deep historical and cultural ties with Russia, and its privileged place was visible last week when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in New Delhi. Mr. Modi did not meet with Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, or Liz Truss, the British foreign secretary, who were also in New Delhi last week.

India’s statement at the United Nations on Tuesday was in some ways closer to China’s than those of the United States, Britain and the European Union, Mr. Mukherjee said. “The main difference between India and China was the latter’s emphasis on verifying the authenticity of the images coming out of Bucha,” he said, referring to growing evidence of atrocities carried out in a Kyiv suburb.

Experts say that with its continuing stance, India risks alienating the West at a time when the country’s ill-equipped military remains stretched on two fronts by territorial disputes with China and Pakistan. On the other hand, if India goes against Russia, it could endanger its own supply of weapons for any future conflict with China or Pakistan.

India maintained its balancing act on Tuesday, promising at the Security Council meeting to supply more humanitarian aid to Ukraine in the coming days. “We stand ready to provide more medical supplies,” said T.S. Tirumurti, the country’s representative.

“I literally told her the exact steps she needs to take,” Ms. Tuv, 36, said. “But she’s coming up with all sorts of excuses.”

In a recent WhatsApp interview, Ms. Guzik, 53, explained that she had fled before, with all the subsequent feelings of panic, fear and loss, when Russia took over her hometown in Crimea in 2014. It had taken her years to feel like she was home again, and Kyiv was where she intended to stay.

Ms. Guzik tries to placate her niece in New York by sending her photos of food items she is able to find amid shortages: cherry-liqueur chocolates one day, a baguette another.

“Look!” she said to Ms. Tuv during a WhatsApp chat after one such successful foraging, before describing how, on a recent trip to the supermarket, she heard a loud bang. She ran out to find a rocket had fallen and gotten stuck between two houses. Still, that didn’t deter her: She was staying.

“Have you lost your mind?” Ms. Tuv recalled saying to her aunt.

“Have you lost your mind?” her aunt retorted. “Stop being hysterical and go take your meds.”

Such fraught conversations — between middle-aged and older people refusing to join the exodus of four million Ukrainians from their homeland and their panicked, imploring relatives overseas — have been taking place since the war began. And many of those conversations involve residents of the New York City metropolitan area, which has the largest Ukrainian community in the United States.

Reasons for staying vary. For some it’s pride of place, a need not to desert the homeland. For others, it’s the paralyzing fear of unknown factors, like getting caught in crossfire while on a bus or train or bridge. For those who have seen war and displacement before — something many Ukrainians are familiar with — it can be a triggered response to past trauma and violence, psychologists say.

“You’re in an altered state,” said Sophia Richman, a Holocaust survivor who is a faculty member at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

“You could justify to yourself and it would be a true rationalization — ‘Oh, everything will be all right. I’m sure everything will be all right.’” Basically, she said, for many older people who have experienced warlike situations before, a kind of self-defense can kick in.

This makes sense to Nazar Lubchenko, who has parents and extended family in Kramatorsk, a town bordering Donetsk, one of the breakaway regions that Russia invaded eight years ago. The town was captured for three months. Once Ukraine regained control of the area, his parents renovated their “dacha,” or summer house, planting vegetables and pruning their peach trees.

“There is a saying in Ukraine which roughly translates to there being a cherry tree next to my home, and the bees are humming. It symbolizes your ideal life in Ukraine — you have your house, your property and your garden,” he said. “So they will not leave it.”

When the invasion began in February, Kramatorsk was shelled a number of times. Mr. Lubchenko, 32, who lives in Hoboken, N.J., urged his parents to take a train to western Ukraine. His appeals fell on deaf ears.

Taras, his father, shared a link that gave instructions on how to operate an antitank missile, followed by a winking emoji. Olga, his mother, explained that a local oligarch “would take care of us,” and then shared photos that showed her planting seeds in the garden.

“They won’t grow well in the basement where you’ll be hiding,” responded Mr. Lubchenko, who has a degree in nuclear physics from M.I.T. and works at a hedge fund.

Although he has the resources to help, no amount of money will change his parents’ mind, Mr. Lubchenko said. “They think that they know everything about this life and have all their life experience, and they don’t need any advice from me.”

His parents went through the Russian invasion eight years ago, and they are predicting the same will happen this time around, he said. “They still have pasta left over from 2014!”

Liza Gutina, who lives in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, has a 65-year old uncle who is refusing to leave Kherson, in southern Ukraine, one of the cities that was taken over by the Russians in the early days of the invasion.

At first her uncle Alexander, a mathematician who asked not to be fully identified, was staying put for logistical reasons: The routes out of the city were blocked, and some people got killed on their way out. But now conditions in the streets, her uncle said, have gone from frightening to practically absurd. She worries that he sees life there as a new normal — something disturbing, but survivable.

After the Russian soldiers finished looting, her uncle told her, they confined themselves to their armed vehicles in particular parts of the city. Occasionally, he would pass by local protests on his daily walks, during which he would watch the soldiers forcefully remove the most active participants. A few days later, they’d be released and he’d see the protesters again, at another rally.

“I feel like I’m in a sci-fi movie where you live a normal life, but you know the aliens are there, and every so often, they steal people, and then give them back,” he said during a recent WhatsApp conversation.

For some older Ukrainians, familiarity continues to trump uncertainty.

Sasha Krasny, 48, who lives in Forest Hills, Queens, has been trying to persuade her 83-year-old aunt, Ludmila Steblina, to leave her home in Kharkiv, where a bomb went off on her street two weeks ago, blowing out the balcony windows of her apartment.

“I thought that would shake her up,” Ms. Krasny said. “But she’s like, ‘No. I know everything here. I know what to expect. If I left, I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know how I’m going to survive this journey. If I need to go to the bathroom, who will I ask for help?’”

After the bomb, Ms. Steblina moved her bed away from the windows, but then fell ill from the cold wind that entered through the blown-out windows, she said. Ms. Krasny worked with volunteers to get her aunt a heater. But future help is uncertain — some of the volunteers have died amid heavy shelling. When there is shelling, Ms. Steblina sits inside her bathtub.

“It’s so stressful for me to be on the outside,” Ms. Krasny said. “I cannot even comprehend what it feels like to be there, so I have to be cognizant of that. Putting pressure — I don’t think it works.”

Ms. Guzik, Ms. Tuv’s aunt in Kyiv, has tried to explain to her niece why she is intent on staying in the capital.

“Look, you’re round your four walls. You feel safer than when you’re just out wherever you are,” she said from her living room one recent evening, her windows taped over with thick fabric, so that the light would not attract the attention of nocturnal missile strikes.

She tried to cheer her niece up, describing how she was skirting a ban on alcohol sales, which was just lifted, by stocking up on chocolates filled with cherry liqueur and getting mildly drunk.

She smiled at her niece, her cheeks glowing white from the light of her smartphone.

“Somebody has to keep the roots here,” she said, “because whoever hasn’t left yet has to be responsible for keeping the roots.”

Misha Friedman contributed reporting.

Hungary, a member of the European Union, signed off on an initial package of E.U. sanctions against Russia but has been an outspoken opponent of sanctions against Russian energy. It has also refused to permit weapons transfers to Ukraine through Hungarian territory.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Mr. Orban into political contortions in the weeks leading up to Hungary’s elections. But Mr. Orban has parried criticism of his close ties to Moscow by in effect declaring neutrality in the war, declining to condemn Russia’s aggression and accusing his opponents of seeking to drag Hungary into the conflict.

Days before the election, Mr. Orban claimed Ukraine’s leadership had “made a pact” with his political rivals. Earlier, Mr. Szijjarto claimed that his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, had called the Ukrainian ambassador, Ljubov Vasilina Nepop, to “consult on the possibility of influencing the election results in Hungary” in cahoots with the opposition. Ukraine has denied interfering in the election.

Mr. Kuleba responded by accusing his Hungarian counterpart of “inventing nonsense” for “short-term benefit before the elections” and “destroying the long-term relationship” between the two countries.

Since the conflict began, South Koreans have flooded online chat rooms with discussions about their country’s need to have nuclear weapons to prevent an invasion from North Korea, their own nuclear-armed neighbor. On Tuesday, North Korea warned that it would use its nuclear weapons “at the outset of war,” should one with the South ever start.

Like Ukraine, South Korea once had nuclear weapons within its borders. And Seoul abandoned its own covert nuclear program in the 1970s in exchange for security guarantees from the United States. But as they watch Ukrainians battle Russian forces and plead for outside military assistance, many South Koreans fear that was a mistake.

“There is no justice in this world, only national interests,” said one commentator on Twitter. “We must build our own defense, arming ourselves with nuclear weapons, unless we want to find ourselves in the sorry state Ukraine is in now.”

The pair of pipelines has become a twin symbol of Germany’s dangerous dependence on Russian gas — and the country’s belated and frenzied effort to wean itself off it — with calls growing for the European Union to hit Moscow with tougher sanctions as atrocities come to light in Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, proposed banning imports of Russian coal and soon, possibly, its oil. But Russian gas — far more critical to Germany and much of the rest of Europe — was off the table. At least for now.

“We are dependent on them,” said Axel Vogt, the mayor of Lubmin, which has a population of just 2,119, as he stood in the industrial harbor between the two pipelines one recent morning. “None of us imagined Russia ever going to war. Now Russia is one of our main suppliers of gas and that’s not something we can change overnight.”

That dependence on Russia — accounting for more than a quarter of Germany’s total energy use — has meant that Berlin has so far refused to cut off President Vladimir V. Putin, whose war it is effectively subsidizing to the tune of an estimated 200 million euros, or about $220 million, in energy payments every day.

The images of mass graves and murdered civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha have horrified Europe and spurred demands for a Russian energy embargo, especially among Germany’s eastern neighbors.

“Buying Russian oil and gas is financing war crimes,” said Gabrielius Landsbergis, the foreign minister of Lithuania, which has stopped all Russian gas imports. “Dear E.U. friends, pull the plug. Don’t be an accomplice.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany reacted swiftly to the images from Bucha, condemning the “war crimes committed by the Russian military,” expelling 40 Russian diplomats and promising new and tougher sanctions on Moscow. Germany’s network regulator went so far as to take over the German subsidiary of Gazprom, Russia’s main gas company and owner of Nord Stream.

But government ministers have, for now, ruled out a ban on Russian gas imports. The reasons are clear.

One in two German homes is heated with gas, and gas also powers much of Germany’s vaunted export industry. For years, Berlin happily relied on Moscow for more than half of its gas imports, a third of its oil and half of its hard coal imports, ignoring warnings from the United States and other allies about Russia weaponizing its energy supplies.

Quitting that habit will not be easy in the short term without a shock to a German economy that like others in Europe is still recovering from the pandemic.

“Our strategy is to become independent of Russian gas, coal and oil — but not immediately,” said Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister and vice chancellor, who has been busy traveling to Qatar and Washington in search of alternative gas contracts.

The government is taking steps to make Germany independent of Russian coal by the summer, and of Russian oil by the end of the year. Already, the share of oil imports from Russia has fallen to 20 percent and Russian coal imports have been halved.

But gas — on which Germany is banking as a bridge toward its goal of a carbon neutral economy by 2045 — is an entirely different matter. Mr. Habeck and others said that becoming independent of the Russian supply would take at least two years.

“We can’t substitute gas in the short term,” Christian Lindner, the finance minister said. “We would harm ourselves more than them.”

It has not helped that Germany committed itself to phasing out nuclear power under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, leaving the country more reliant on Russia than before. The legacy of that decision can be seen in Lubmin, too.

Behind the gleaming pipelines are the outlines of a shuttered nuclear power plant, once the biggest in the Communist East Germany. The same year that Ms. Merkel celebrated the opening of Nord Stream 2, she announced that Germany would be quitting nuclear power. The last three nuclear plants are scheduled to come off the grid this year.

“That was a huge mistake, which in light of what’s happening now is more evident than ever,” said Mr. Vogt, the mayor.

Even before Russia’s attack on Ukraine, plans by Mr. Scholz’ new coalition to simultaneously phase out nuclear power and coal while turning Germany into a carbon-neutral economy looked ambitious.

Now even politicians with the Greens, like Mr. Habeck, are exploring what it would take to keep the last nuclear plants running longer. Some worry that the 2030 deadline for closing the last coal plants might also have to be pushed back.

But the pressure for a swift exit from Russian fossil fuels is growing even within Germany, with some arguing that rooted in its own history of genocide, Germany had a moral obligation that trumped economic considerations.

“The country that proudly proclaims that Europe will ‘never again’ see the likes of Auschwitz is pumping 200 million euros each day into Putin’s war chest,” the financial newspaper Handelsblatt wrote in an editorial. “All of a sudden the discussion in Germany about whether our economy would grow by 6 percent or just 3 percent in the event of an energy embargo seems petty and insignificant. We resemble a hostage to the Kremlin.”

Russia’s war on Ukraine was a wake-up call for Germany, which for decades had bet that trade and economic interdependence with Moscow would keep the peace in Europe.

But, within days of the invasion, Mr. Scholz vowed to break with the energy policy of Ms. Merkel and her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who still sits on the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft and chairs the shareholders committee of Nord Stream 2.

Mr. Vogt, the mayor of Lubmin, remembers hosting Ms. Merkel and Mr. Schröder in 2011. They had come to open the gas spigot with Dmitri Medvedev, then Russia’s President. “This gas pipeline will make Europe’s energy supply significantly safer,” Mr. Schröder said at the time.

In February, after Mr. Scholz suspended Nord Stream 2, Mr. Medvedev, now deputy chair of the Russian security council, said on Twitter: “Welcome to a new world, in which Europeans will soon pay 2,000 euros for 1,000 cubic meters gas.”

On her morning walk along the beach and past the pipelines in Lubmin one recent morning, Petra Krüger, a 57-year-old radiologist assistant and mother of two, said she was worried about rising energy costs and was only heating in the afternoons now. She recalled the excitement in the village when the original Nord Stream pipeline was built after years of industrial decline.

“It felt like the community had gained this long-term lifeline,” she recalled.

“We were all fooled,” she added. “We should have never allowed ourselves to become this dependent. It’s scary.”

Rising energy costs not only in Germany but also across Europe have raised questions of who will be hurt more by a Russian energy embargo — Mr. Putin or the West.

Some argue that Germany should cut the gas ties first.

“We should act before Putin does,” said Roderich Kiesewetter, a conservative lawmaker and member on the foreign affairs committee of the German Parliament.

The prospect of Mr. Putin himself closing the gas tap is a scenario that the German government is actively preparing for. Last week, Mr. Habeck activated the first step of a national gas emergency plan that could eventually lead to the rationing of natural gas.

Every day, a crisis team of government representatives, regulators and private industry meets to monitor gas supplies. If they start running low, the government will intervene to begin rationing natural gas supplies. Households and critical public services, including hospitals and emergency services, would be prioritized over industry, according to a planning document.

Not only Nord Stream is controlled by Russia. So is Germany’s — and Western Europe’s — biggest gas storage facility, which was taken over by Gazprom in 2015 along with others. Some of these facilities have been running conspicuously low, say German officials, who spy a strategic move by Moscow.

“We must increase precautionary measures to be prepared for an escalation on the part of Russia,” said Mr. Habeck, the economy minister, urging German consumers and companies to begin making efforts to cut their energy use wherever possible.

“Every kilowatt-hour counts,” he said.

But already there is the concern that Germany will trade one dependency for another.

Long term, the strategy is to accelerate Germany’s move into renewable energies — or “freedom energies,” as the finance minister called them. The government is offering new subsidies for the wind and solar sector. Until a decade ago, Germany was a leader in solar production. Today, 95 percent of solar cells and 85 percent of solar modules are made in China.

“If Russia and China ganged up on us right now, they could flatten us,” said Gunter Erfurt, chief executive of Meyer Burger, the only European company currently making solar modules with its own solar cells. “We need to bring solar manufacturing back to Europe. Europe needs to diversify and fast.”

“We have a lot of sun and wind up here,” Mr. Vogt said. “Maybe that’s the next chapter.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.

Recalling the significance of the trial, Human Rights Watch, the advocacy group, observed in a 2006 report that bringing the former president before an international criminal tribunal “marked the end of the era when being a head of state meant immunity from prosecution.”

Since then, it noted, other former heads of state, including the former Liberian prime minister Charles Taylor and the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, have been brought to justice.

Mr. Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison for his role in atrocities committed during Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s. Mr. Hussein was convicted in 2006 by an Iraqi special tribunal for crimes against humanity for the brutal repression of a Shiite town in the 1980s and sentenced to death by hanging.

Mr. Milosevic died in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006, denying his victims the closure of a final judgment, but the public airing of his heinous crimes was nevertheless an important moral and legal reckoning.

While the circumstances in Ukraine and the Balkan wars differ in fundamental ways, including the scope and scale of the bloodshed, some parallels jump out — not least of which is Russia’s obfuscation and denial. In the face of graphic evidence that Ukrainian civilians in the suburb of Bucha, some with hands bound, were killed by Russian soldiers, Moscow has claimed it is all a “hoax.”

Mr. Milosevic, too, responded with a fanciful conspiracy theory when he was accused of complicity in the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, in Bosnia, during which some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, many with their hands tied behind their backs. He said the people really responsible for the worst bloodbath in Europe since World War II were French intelligence operatives, Muslim officials from Bosnia and mercenaries.

The wartime massacre of civilians at a Sarajevo market was not done by Serbs but staged by Muslims with bodies from a morgue, he claimed.

“It is all lies,” he said, as his trial began.

Whatever the echoes, legal experts say that bringing the Kremlin to account would be far more difficult than it was with Mr. Milosevic.

In the first place, no sitting president has ever been handed over to an international court. While President Vladimir V. Putin has significant public support and leads a nuclear power, Mr. Milosevic had already been ousted from power by the time he was sent to The Hague in June 2001.

And Russia is not Serbia.

Mr. Putin is an authoritarian leader with vociferous antagonism toward the West and its legal structures.

The Serbian prime minister in power when Mr. Milosevic was handed over for trial, Zoran Djindjic, was eager for a rapprochement with the West, while $30 billion in foreign aid to rebuild Serbia’s devastated economy was at stake.

The burden of proof for war crimes, moreover, is very high.

Even with the Serbian government’s reluctant cooperation after Mr. Djindjic was assassinated in 2003, the task was difficult because of Mr. Milosevic’s obstructionism. A defiant Mr. Milosevic refused to recognize the U.N. war crimes tribunal, lied, dissembled and called in sick when insider witnesses materialized.

War crimes prosecutors are sometimes fortunate enough to have real-time evidence of atrocities at their disposal, but they still face enormous challenges. Many dots must be connected.

In the case of Mr. Putin, prosecutors would have to demonstrate that he issued specific orders that led to specific atrocities or that he knew about the crimes or did nothing to prevent them. Prosecutors would also have to show that Russian commanders had intentionally targeted civilian structures, or struck them during attacks that failed to discriminate between civilian and military targets.

Experts say the International Criminal Court in The Hague offers the best chance for real accountability for Russia. It was established in 1998 after separate United Nations tribunals that prosecuted mass atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia demonstrated the need for a standing judicial body to handle such cases.

The United States is not among the Hague court’s 123 member nations, and Mr. Putin recently instructed his government to withdraw from the treaty that created the court. His government assailed the tribunal as “ineffective and one-sided.”

By contrast, the tribunal that tried Mr. Milosevic was created by the United Nations Security Council in 1993 to track down and punish those responsible for the horrific violence against civilians during the breakup of Yugoslavia. As such, it had some political muscle behind it.

Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council on Tuesday that Nazis in Ukraine were “running the show,” and added, “how can it be any other way when the people running Ukraine are Nazi collaborators?”

But now, in the aftermath of harrowing images surfacing from dozens of civilians killed and tortured in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, Ukraine’s government and its allies have flipped the Nazi narrative to use against Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust, addressed the Council on Tuesday and called for the creation of an international tribunal to prosecute Russians, modeled after the Nuremberg trials that prosecuted Nazi war criminals.

“Anyone who has given criminal orders and carried them out by killing our people will be brought before the tribunal, which should be similar to Nuremberg tribunals,” said Mr. Zelensky. He gave examples of two Nazi war criminals and said he wanted to remind Russia that none of them “escaped punishment.”

Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya, was much more direct comparing Russia’s war strategy to Hitler’s.

“How have Russians gotten to the cruelty of Nazis?,” asked Mr. Kyslytsya. “When have you started acting like Nazis? Killing civilians, setting the task to finally resolve the Ukrainian issue like Hitler attempted to resolve the Jewish issue.”

Even the United States ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made an oblique reference to the Nazi concentration camps on Tuesday in her speech of support for Ukraine.

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said Russian forces had removed thousands of Ukrainian civilians from their cities and taken them to “filtration camps” in Russia. She said their passports, IDs and mobile phones were taken away and families were separated.

“I do not need to spell out what these so-called filtration camps are reminiscent of. It’s chilling, and we cannot look away,” said Ms. Thomas-Greenfield.

The Nazi slur first began when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sought to use stereotypes, distorted reality and his country’s lingering World War II trauma to justify his Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.

The Kremlin has cast the war as an extension of Russia’s fight against evil in what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, relying on Russian pride in the victory over Nazi Germany to translate into popular support.

Many scholars of genocide and Nazism have criticized Mr. Putin’s rhetoric to “de-Nazify” Ukraine as historically erroneous and repugnant.

It may seem hard to fathom that regular Russians could accept Mr. Putin’s comparison of neighboring Ukraine — where millions of Russians have relatives and friends — to Nazi Germany, which invaded the Soviet Union at the cost of some 27 million Soviet lives, including as many as seven million in Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union then.

Like many falsehoods, the Kremlin’s narrative about a Nazi-controlled Ukraine has a connection to reality.

Jewish groups and others have, in fact, criticized Ukraine since its pro-Western revolution in 2014 for allowing Ukrainian independence fighters who at one point sided with Nazi Germany to be venerated as national heroes. And some fringe nationalist groups, which have no representation in Ukraine’s Parliament, use racist rhetoric and symbolism associated with Nazi Germany.

Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.

The Red Cross team, which includes nine workers and three vehicles, was released Monday night, a spokesman for the organization said. It was not clear how long they were held.

“This is of great relief to us and to their families,” the I.C.R.C. spokesman said. “This incident yesterday shows how volatile and complex the operation to facilitate safe passage around Mariupol has been for our team.”

Iryna Vereshchuk, the Ukrainian deputy prime minister, said on Facebook that it was Russian troops who had blocked the Red Cross team. They were released after negotiations, she said.

On Friday, the Red Cross, citing “a glimmer of hope,” said it hoped to carry thousands of people out of Mariupol in an evacuation convoy of about 54 buses.

But on Tuesday, the newly released team members did not try to enter the city, focusing instead on helping people in areas nearby, the spokesman said.

Thousands of civilians remain trapped in Mariupol with limited access to food, water and electricity. The city has been subject to devastating attacks by Russian forces for weeks.

While plans for the large-scale Red Cross evacuation have not yet materialized, small groups have been able to leave the city in private vehicles, according to local officials.

Speaking to the Spanish Parliament on Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russian troops had blocked access to Mariupol for more than three weeks. He said that more than 90 percent of all buildings in the city had been destroyed, and that Russian aircraft have targeted buildings where civilians were known to be hiding.

“They are destroying this city completely,” Mr. Zelensky said. “There is already nothing there but ruins.”

The video is aerial footage recorded by Ukraine’s military in late February, when Russian forces still held the town. It has been independently verified by The New York Times.

Weeks later, after Russia withdrew from Bucha, a body in civilian clothes was filmed beside a bicycle in this precise location in a second video verified by The Times. The body, with one leg mangled, lies behind a concrete utility pillar that has collapsed from an apparent strike. The damage to the pillar is consistent with high-caliber ammunition. The person’s clothing — a dark blue top and lighter pants — matches the cyclist’s attire.

In the aerial footage, the Russian armored vehicles visible on the street appear to be BMD-4 infantry fighting vehicles, which are commonly mounted with a 100-millimeter gun and 30-millimeter cannon, according to a Times analysis of the video. More than 20 Russian military vehicles are positioned near the two vehicles that fired, both on the same street and stretching for blocks along a cross street.

The military convoy is stationed at an intersection on Yablonska Street, where The Times on Monday documented more than a dozen dead bodies. Satellite images confirmed that the people were killed in March while Russia controlled the town; the new video confirms that a Russian convoy was situated where many of those bodies were found.

John Ismay contributed reporting and David Botti contributed video editing.