Russia-Ukraine WarWhat Happened on Day 37 of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

“This decision underscores the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in support of its heroic efforts to repel Russia’s war of choice,” Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said in the statement.

The list of weapons includes laser-guided rockets, tactical drones that can both surveil targets and crash into them with an explosive charge, and “non-standard” weapons and ammunition — a term typically used by the Defense Department to refer to Soviet-designed weapons such as those used by Ukrainian troops.

The aid package will also include Puma drones, night vision devices and thermal optics, counter-drone devices, encrypted radios, medical supplies, and commercial satellite imagery services.

“The United States has committed more than $2.3 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration, including more than $1.6 billion in security assistance since Russia’s unprovoked, premeditated invasion,” Mr. Kirby said.

The official said the transfers would begin soon, but declined to say how many tanks would be sent, or from which countries they would come. They will allow Ukraine to conduct long-range artillery strikes on Russian targets in Donbas, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The tanks’ arrival could be another signal of a new phase in the war, which is five weeks old and has been dominated by Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and installations from the air, and a stalled Russian advance on the ground. Earlier this week, Russian officials indicated that they were refocusing their efforts on eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian soldiers since 2014.

Mr. Zelensky called on Sunday for NATO allies to provide tanks and planes, in addition to the antitank and antiaircraft weaponry that have become a staple of the arms transfers to Ukraine from the West. Frustrated at what he views as a slow pace of weapons transfers, Mr. Zelensky asked specifically for tanks, in remarks a day after President Biden met with senior Ukrainian officials in Poland.

An angry Mr. Zelensky criticized the West for what he called its “Ping-Pong” about weapons transfers. “I’ve talked to the defenders of Mariupol today,” he said, in a reference to the besieged city that has been under an onslaught from Russia for four weeks. “If only those who have been thinking for 31 days on how to hand over dozens of jets and tanks had 1 percent of their courage.”

In the past, the Biden administration has taken pains to call the weapons it is providing to Ukraine defensive, and has focused on smaller, easily portable arms. But as the war has progressed, the definition of defensive has become more elastic.

Ukraine had already found one source of tanks, capturing at least 161 from Russia on the battlefield, according to the military analysis site Oryx, though Russia has also destroyed a number of Ukrainian tanks. For its part, Russia has captured 43 Ukrainian tanks, according to analysts who study photos and videos on social media.

The decision to help transfer the tanks comes as the Ukrainian military has continued to turn back Russia’s ground advance. Pentagon officials have been quick to point out that Russia’s pivot to Donbas and away from capturing Kyiv, the capital, might be a necessity for Moscow after Russian forces stalled out in the central part of the country.

On Wednesday, Biden administration officials, citing declassified U.S. intelligence, said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had been misinformed by his advisers about the Russian military’s problems in Ukraine. The intelligence, American officials said, also showed what appeared to be growing tension between Mr. Putin and his defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, who was once among the most trusted members of the Kremlin’s inner circle.

Russian officials have disputed the allegations, with the Kremlin on Thursday calling it a “complete misunderstanding” of the situation that could have “bad consequences.”

Even as Russian forces pull back from Kyiv, the capital, and the city of Chernihiv farther north, “in the east of our country, the situation remains extremely difficult,” he said. “The Russian militaries are being accumulated in Donbas, in the Kharkiv direction. They are preparing for new powerful blows. We are preparing for even more active defense.”

Mr. Zelensky’s video messages have galvanized support among Ukraine’s allies, but his new address had an ominous tone, threatening his own people with unspecified consequences for cooperating with the invading Russians.

“The responsibility for collaboration is inevitable,” he said.

He noted that the Russians have appointed people to take over local governments and enterprises in areas they occupied — pointedly calling them “gauleiters,” a term for a regional administrator in Nazi Germany.

“There will be problems for cooperation with them or with the occupiers directly. This is the last warning,” Mr. Zelensky said.

He also asked Russians to resist conscription into the Kremlin’s military, which he said would result in “guaranteed death for many very young guys.”

“Warn each such conscript, their parents,” he said. “We don’t need more dead people here. Save your children so that they do not become villains. Don’t send them to the army. Do whatever you can to keep them alive. At home. At their home. The Russians won’t be told the whole truth about this conscription and about the fate of the conscripts. But still, if you can convey the truth to them — do it.”

In northern Ukraine, where Russian forces have been pulling back from positions around Kyiv and Chernihiv, “they are mining all this territory,” Mr. Zelensky said. “Mining houses, equipment, even the bodies of killed people. Too many tripwire mines, too many other dangers.”

His claims about mining could not be independently verified.

With Ukrainian forces mounting counteroffensives and Russians suffering heavy losses, the Russian military said earlier this week that it was reducing military activity around Kyiv to concentrate on Donbas, the southeastern region of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s military claims to be in control of dozens of towns that had been contested. Not all of those claims could be verified, but evidence has emerged to support some of them.

Videos posted to social media appeared to show abandoned streets in the suburb of Bucha, which had been one of the most contested areas around the capital. And satellite imagery of a key airport in Hostomel by Maxar Technologies, a U.S.-based imaging company, appeared to show that Russian equipment had been removed some time in the last 10 days.

The new analyses come after Pentagon and NATO officials had initially raised doubts about the Russian withdrawal, arguing that it could be just a repositioning of forces or a chance to refit and resupply forces in Belarus, away from Ukrainian attacks.

Frederick Kagan, a military expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said the Ukrainian counterattack that began last week appears to have convinced Russian commanders to change their strategy.

“The counterattacks probably prompted the Russian decision to give up on Kyiv,” Mr. Kagan said. “The counterattacks demonstrated that the Russians were actually not going to be able to hold the positions they occupied anyway. And so they made the decision to retrograde in good order rather than be chased back.”

Continued air and missile strikes on Kyiv and Chernihiv may be aimed at covering the Russian retreat and keeping pressure on the Ukrainian government, rather than a renewed attack on Kyiv or other cities in the region, analysts say.

Janes, an independent defense intelligence firm, reported that multiple Russian units had withdrawn from Kyiv, moving toward Belarus. Janes also reported that Ukrainian counterattacks had successfully reopened a road to Sumy, splitting apart one of the Russian fronts.

One European diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss candidly intelligence assessments, said while it is hard to tell what Russia’s shifting strategy will be, initial signs are its new, narrower goals include expanding the amount of territory it occupies in Eastern Ukraine, and potentially consolidating control over the southeastern Ukrainian coast between Donetsk and Crimea, including the besieged city of Mariupol.

While officials and analysts expect Russia to move forces to eastern Ukraine, not all of the troops pulling back from Kyiv are likely to be redeployed there, Mr. Kagan said. Many of the forces assembled to attack the capital were inexperienced, poorly organized and incompetent in battle.

“The forces that are around Kyiv are largely combat ineffective, and we do not expect to see those forces turning up with significant combat power in the east anytime soon,” he said.

Instead, units of the First Guards Tank Army, a more experienced and less badly damaged unit, are more likely to be moved from near Kharkiv and then used in the fight against the Ukrainian army in Donetsk, Mr. Kagan said.

Russian forces now seem to be pursuing a strategy to encircle Ukrainian positions in the country’s east, according to diplomats and analysts. So far the Ukrainians have successfully kept their supply lines open, and Russia’s pullback from Kyiv may allow Ukraine to reinforce its units in the east, the European diplomat said.

And Russia’s encirclement strategy may face significant problems. To execute it, Russian commanders will need to stretch their supply lines and thin out an already thin force, making it hard to protect those supply lines from Ukrainian attack.

“The bigger the force you encircle, the more forces required to do that,” Mr. Kagan said. “It’s going to be very complicated. Currently, the Russian penetration is itself very thin. The Russian lines are also very long, and we’ve seen that movie before. They tried long lines of supply from Sumy to Kyiv and that ended in tears for the Russians.”

Loznitsa, 57, recently made news when he quit the European Film Academy over a statement by the group on the Russian invasion that he deemed “toothless”; then he returned to the headlines after he was ejected from the Ukrainian Film Academy for opposing boycotts of Russian filmmakers. Even Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, weighed in during a March 27 interview with Russian journalists, saying of Loznitsa, “He’s an artist who supports Ukraine.”

Loznitsa regards the conflict as “a European war, not just a Ukrainian war.” Speaking in Russian, with his producing partner Maria Choustova-Baker serving as an interpreter, he spoke about his films and current events during a video chat from Berlin, where he lives. These are excerpts from our conversation.

Where were you when the Russian invasion started?

Vilnius. I am finishing a new film there. I was awoken by an SMS from my friend, Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky. It said, “Forgive me. What a nightmare.”

Is it true that you helped your parents get out of Ukraine?

In contrast to many others, I actually believed in what the U.S. intelligence was reporting and what President Biden was telling the world [that Russia had planned to invade]. I even guessed the dates correctly. My friend, the Ukrainian co-producer Serge Lavrenyuk, helped me remove my parents [from Kyiv, three days before the invasion started]. This war comes as an enormous shock for millions of people. My father was born in 1939, and he remembers very well his childhood and these horrors. My mother was born in 1940 and also remembers all the movement during the war. Now they are [in their 80s] and it is the same circumstances!

How would you compare the situation now with the history in “Babi Yar: Context”?

The fundamental difference is that back then, it was a fight between two totalitarian regimes. Now there is one totalitarian regime fighting with a country aspiring to be independent. Back then, the big countries like the U.S. and the U.K. also participated in the war. But today, the majority of the countries who have the potential to stop this war have chosen this immoral position of an onlooker, of noninterference. And the politicians of these countries have put their citizens in this situation of immorality, because the only choice the citizens have is to observe online, in real time, how city after city of Ukraine is destroyed.

You could say that Putin is winning at the moment internationally, because the policies of world leaders are based on fear. They’re not even capable of taking a rather neutral step of introducing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Some worry that such involvement would lead to escalation and nuclear conflict.

I don’t think it’s a valid excuse. First of all, do these politicians have any guarantee that in case — God forbid — Russia does manage to swallow Ukraine, they won’t use nuclear weapons? Putin had no valid reason for invading Ukraine. So why do you think he would need a valid reason to use nuclear weapons? This can only be stopped by force. Sooner or later, NATO will have to get involved, and the longer they wait, the bloodier the resolution of the conflict would be.

“Babi Yar: Context” doesn’t shy from addressing the role of people within Ukraine in the massacre of Jews. Have you experienced any criticism about this?

There were people who criticized me in Ukraine for making this film the way I made it. The contemporary situation is completely different. And it’s absolutely obvious that all that Putin is talking about, that there are Nazis in Ukraine, was all nonsense. At the same time this question of collaboration in history is very, very painful in Ukraine. Yes, I was heavily criticized.

Do you have relatives that were affected by the Babi Yar killings?

[Nods]

In “Donbass” you take a different approach: dramatizing events based on actual cellphone videos. Why this form?

First, because I was mesmerized by those amateur videos that I found on the internet. Second, I wanted to create this grotesque form because I needed something to keep the film together and I didn’t want to use just one protagonist or a group of protagonists. I wanted you to observe the idiocy in all its shapes and forms. This wonderful film by Luis Buñuel, “The Phantom of Liberty,” also employs this method.

One of the scenes shows Russians moving artillery around from place to place after firing on a civilian bus.

Yes, the most important thing for them was not to be identified. So this is why they had to move from one place to the other. And the killing that occurs afterward [in the film] is because they wanted to get rid of the witnesses.

That sounds like a mafia movie.

Yes, in fact, these criminal gangs that took power in 1917 and that hold power today, there’s no difference between them and any other mafia. Before this, the mafia covered itself up with Soviet ideology. Nowadays there is no ideology anymore. It’s just mafia.

“Donbass” also portrays people who are hired to pretend to be witnesses to a staged explosion.

Yes, it happens all the time. This is the technique that’s routinely employed by Russian television, and monitoring groups managed to identify actors who play the parts of witnesses in different locations. So they have almost a cast of actors that they employ for fabrication of fake news. There was a notorious TV report around 2014: a story of how Ukrainians crucify a Russian boy. This report was analyzed by professionals who proved that every single element was fake, all staged.

When you were growing up in the Soviet Union, was there a point where you became disillusioned?

The fact is that the entire Soviet Union lived in this kind of double reality or multiple realities, and everybody was aware of it, but very few people actually questioned it. But I was a very bad pupil. [Laughs] I was a very good pupil in terms of school results, but I always questioned this double reality and asked myself, “Where am I and what is going on?”

Today this criminal group [in power in Russia] has regrouped. They fixed the country’s economy a little bit. They upgraded their military force. And now they’re ready to conquer the world again. [Laughs]

These days your movies can look like prophecies because of their familiar images of war.

The problems that I talk about in my films have been around for a long time. This is why I wanted to make “Mr. Landsbergis” [a new film about Lithuania’s successful bid for independence from the Soviet Union in 1989-91]. Because there is this unique and fantastic and colossal experience of fighting against the Soviet Union and winning.

Mr. Naumov had been chief of the internal security department at the Security Service of Ukraine, the main public safety and counterintelligence agency, but was removed from his post in July 2021, according to Ukrainian media, and he reportedly left the country just before the Feb. 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Kryvoruchko, the head of the security service in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, was removed from his post on Thursday.

The president did not say why the men had been stripped of their ranks but described them as “antiheroes” and said they were “no longer generals.”

The Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., is the successor to the Ukrainian branch of the Soviet K.G.B., responsible for national and international security and counterintelligence. The city of Kherson has been under Russian control since the first days of the war and Mr. Kryvoruchko’s performance may have come under special scrutiny because of that.

Mr. Zelensky uses his nightly video address to boost popular morale and resolve, and always praises the fighters defending the country against the Russian invasion. But occasionally recently he has turned to criticizing those who have betrayed the national cause.

“I do not have time to deal with all the traitors now. But gradually they will all be punished,” he promised.

He quoted a disciplinary statute of the Ukrainian military that demands loyalty to the Ukrainian state.

“Those servicemen among senior officers who have not decided where their homeland is, who violate the military oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people as regards the protection of our state, its freedom and independence, will inevitably be deprived of senior military ranks,” he said. “Random generals don’t belong here!”

On Wednesday Mr. Zelensky said he was recalling two of his ambassadors from Morocco and Georgia. “There are those who waste time and work only to stay in office,” he said. “Today I signed the first decree to recall such a person.”

He warned that he wanted to see results from Ukraine’s diplomats and military attaches in gaining military and diplomatic support for Ukraine from other countries. “With all due respect: if there are no weapons, no sanctions, no restrictions for Russian business — please look for another job,” he said as if addressing the diplomats in person.

And on Thursday he warned of more difficult battles still ahead against Russian troops.

“We know that they are moving away from the areas where we are beating them to focus on others that are very important. On those where it can be difficult for us,” he warned.

“There will be battles ahead. We still have a very difficult path to cover to get everything we strive for.”

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the president’s office, wrote on Telegram, the messaging platform, that 6,266 people were evacuated from Ukrainian cities on Friday, including 3,071 from Mariupol, a glimmer of hope in a city buffeted by despair.

However, a larger-scale evacuation by a Red Cross team that had been on its way to Mariupol to escort a convoy of buses and cars carrying civilians had to turn back because it failed to receive guarantees of conditions that would ensure safe passage, the organization said in a statement.

The I.C.R.C. said the team, made up of three vehicles and nine personnel, would try again on Saturday. “For the operation to succeed, it is critical that the parties respect the agreements and provide the necessary conditions and security guarantees,” the statement said.

The Red Cross said it had expected about 54 buses, along with an unknown number of private vehicles, to take part in an evacuation convoy carrying thousands of people. It said two trucks filled with food, water and medicines were supposed to accompany its team into Mariupol, but it did not receive permission from the Russians to deliver the aid, and left the trucks behind.

While the larger convoy failed on Friday, smaller groups of people have been able to leave the city in cars, according to local officials. On Friday afternoon, Iryna Vereshchuk, the deputy prime minister, in a statement on her Telegram page confirmed that a corridor had opened from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia by private transport.

Around noon local time, Pyotr Andryuschenko, the mayor’s adviser, said that some buses had left Mariupol for nearby Berdyansk.

Around that time, the Mariupol City Council published a video of a convoy with a note that said, “Almost 2,000 people will be taken away by buses alone!” It remained unclear on Friday how many people ultimately left in that convoy.

Friday’s efforts came a day after International Red Cross said a corridor could be opened up, after an announcement by Russia’s Defense Ministry that a cease-fire had been agreed that would allow people to leave to the west of the city. By Friday evening, all hope for a broader evacuation had ended.

Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting from Geneva.

“This morning, over 30 countries from across the world convened in an extraordinary meeting and agreed to the release of tens of millions of additional barrels of oil onto the market,” President Biden said at a news conference on Friday.

The agency, which is based in Paris, did not say how much oil would be released. It said more details will come next week.

The United States and the I.E.A. have been unusually aggressive in trying to control the disruptive impact that the war in Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia have begun to have on the global economy and consumers in the United States facing escalating gasoline prices. Friday’s meeting was led by the U.S. secretary of energy, Jennifer M. Granholm.

The announcement is only the agency’s fifth emergency release of oil in its 48-year history and comes only about a month after a release of 63 million barrels. The agency appears to be working closely with the United States under its executive director, Fatih Birol, who was recently appointed to a third term. Mr. Birol has held the post since 2015.

The I.E.A. warned about the dangers of disruption to global oil markets posed by the outsize role that Russia plays as the world’s third-largest producer and largest exporter. The agency issued a statement saying the war in Ukraine is putting “significant strains on global oil markets.” Storage tank farms are at eight-year lows, and the agency said oil producers had a “limited ability” to add supply in the short term.

At a meeting on Thursday, the OPEC Plus group of producers declined to add more than a modest amount of oil to the market. Two members of the group, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are believed to have the ability to produce substantial amounts of additional oil but have so far declined to do so, blaming “geopolitics” rather than shortfalls of oil for volatile prices.

Analysts at Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients that the deluge of oil from the strategic reserves would “help the oil market rebalancing in 2022” and potentially ease the need for “demand destruction” or reduced economic activity to bring consumption in line with lower supplies.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell about 0.25 percent on Friday to $104.40 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. standard, was down nearly 1 percent to $99.40 a barrel.

The analysts also said there were risks associated with the reserve releases, including potential logistical bottlenecks for oil that is trying to reach refineries and terminals in the United States. The releases might also discourage potential growth in shale oil production in the United States, the analysts said.

The swinging prices of recent weeks and uncertainties over the outcome of the war in Ukraine, all surrounding a potential deal that might allow Iran to sell more oil, may combine to discourage investments by oil producers, the analysts suggested.