Russian Invasion of Ukraine: What Happened on Day 52 of the War in Ukraine (Published 2022) (2024)

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Russia fires missile barrage at Ukrainian cities and military targets.

The coming battle in the east will be fought largely on open terrain offering far fewer havens for Ukrainian fighters to hide while launching attacks on Russian armored vehicles, as they did so successfully in repelling the Russian forces from around Kyiv. The Russian missile attacks on Friday into Saturday seemed calibrated to weaken Ukraine’s ability to withstand armored assaults in that setting.

The strikes served as a reminder that wherever the fighting is concentrated on the ground, Russia still can and will strike anywhere in Ukraine, and they underscored the importance of Ukraine’s industrial capacity, including its ability to make and repair weapons.

Why Russia waited until two months into the war to target these facilities is unclear. While the strikes could have been a response to the sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s Defense Ministry has not acknowledged that Ukrainian missiles hit the ship, which it says was mortally wounded by a fire and ammunition explosion.

Some analysts have pointed to the recent appointment of a top Russian battlefield commander in Ukraine, Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, as a factor in Moscow’s strategy. He is expected to address the lack of coordination and planning that has hampered Russian forces so far, reorganizing and redirecting them for the fighting in Donbas.

The rocket and missile attacks on Saturday also rained down on an airport in central Ukraine, the Black Sea port of Odesa, the northeastern city of Kharkiv and the western city of Lviv. Explosions from at least one strike shook Kyiv, the capital, and Ukraine’s air defense force said it had shot down a volley of four cruise missiles in flight elsewhere in the country.

Moscow retaliated diplomatically against the West on Saturday, barring Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other senior British officials from entering the country over their support for Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. Mr. Johnson has been a leading voice in Europe against Moscow, and even traveled to Kyiv a week ago to meet with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Britain has supplied Ukraine with new anti-ship missile systems, armored vehicles and other military equipment. Ukrainian fighters have used lightweight anti-tank weapons supplied by Britain to devastating effect against Russia’s armored vehicles.

In Germany, the economy minister called on people to cut back their energy consumption, including by drawing curtains and lowering the temperature in their homes, as part of what he described as a national effort to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Germany has joined other Western nations in imposing embargoes on Russian coal and possibly oil, but it is reluctant to do the same with Russian gas, which accounts for more than half its gas imports.

“We can only become more independent of Russian imports if we see it as a large joint project in which we all participate,” the minister, Robert Habeck, told the Funke media group on Friday. He added, in reference to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: “It’s easy on the wallet and annoys Putin.”

In the weeks since Ukrainian forces repelled the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv, residents have been streaming back into the city. But the window-rattling blasts Saturday offered a stark reminder that the war is far from over, even far from the front.

Russia’s cruise missiles, the principal weapon in Saturday’s attacks, can strike over long distances at sites throughout the country. Through the day Saturday, air raid sirens wailed in Kyiv, and overnight the distant, dull thuds of air defense missiles exploding could be heard in the sky over the city.

“Our air defenses are working, our military is defending us, but all the same there were explosions,” in a southeastern district of the capital, Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said in a statement on Telegram. The strike killed one person and wounded several others, he said.

In the statement, Mr. Klitschko said Kyiv remains a target for Russia despite the defeat of its ground assault force, which retreated hastily, leaving in its wake burned tanks, its own war dead and hundreds of civilian bodies lying on streets. Police said Friday they have so far found 900 bodies of civilians in the Kyiv region, the administrative district surrounding the capital.

President Zelensky said in a late night address on Saturday that Russian forces had been expelled from nearly 1,000 villages, towns and cities of varying sizes across Ukraine. Most of the liberated communities lie in the northern parts of the country, and had suffered extensive damage to buildings and infrastructure during the monthlong Russian occupation.

Mr. Zelensky also acknowledged the Ukrainian army had lost as many as 3,000 troops in fighting to date, while insisting that Russian fatalities were far higher.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, the air defense force said it had shot down four cruise missiles flying toward Lviv, and that a missile had exploded in the air near Odesa. Also near Odesa, Ukraine shot down a Russian unmanned aerial drone as it was reconnoitering military sites, the local authorities said.

Later, Mr. Zelensky acknowledged that Russia seemed poised to take full control of Mariupol, a strategic southern port, with its troops controlling all but a small part of a besieged city they have reduced to ruins. In recent days, Russian forces have advanced to the city center, and the remaining Ukrainian troops, hunkered down in the sprawling Azovstal steel plant and in Mariupol’s port, are greatly outnumbered and desperately short of provisions.

“Nevertheless, our guys are heroically defending,” said Mr. Zelensky, speaking to Ukrainian media outlets. “We are grateful to them for that.”

Near Kirovograd in central Ukraine, Russian long-range rockets struck an airport Thursday night, according to a local mayor, who said there were dead and wounded after the attack but did not specify how many.

The cruise missile strikes in Kyiv have continued nearly daily through the war but often hitting targets in outlying areas, without causing much disruption to life in the city, which has been reviving. So far, missiles have not struck key government buildings, including the presidential office and Parliament — whether they were targeted but successfully shielded by Ukraine’s air defenses is not clear.

“The war goes on in Kyiv and we cannot relax,” said Galina Ostapenko, 72, a retired postal worker, who was walking in the yard of her apartment building a block or so from the site of the strike Saturday.

“What happened pains my heart,” she said of the explosion in her neighborhood. “I will teach my grandchildren to hate the Russians.”

As Russia steps up its attacks on Ukrainian military targets, Washington has been speeding up efforts to supply Ukraine with advanced weapons and long-range artillery pieces in recent days. Russia warned Washington of “unpredictable consequences” if it continues to ship heavy arms to Ukraine.

The attacks with precision munitions came as Russia continued to move equipment and forces into position for a renewed offensive, which military analysts have warned could be both long and bloody.

The eastern front stretches over some 300 miles from Kharkiv in the north to Mariupol in the south and many of the people living in the region have fled as weeks of shelling have destroyed critical infrastructure, flattened homes and left scores dead.

The shelling has increased as Russia moves troops and equipment into position for a full-scale assault. Unlike the precision strikes on military targets in other parts of the country, the indiscriminate bombardments in the east are often directed against homes and infrastructure.

On Saturday, a Russian shell hit an oil refinery in the city of Lysychansk in the Luhansk region, setting off a large blaze, according to Serhiy Haidai, the regional governor. “Shelling continues in residential areas of Lysychansk, and locals are asked to remain in shelters,” he wrote in a message posted on social media.

In Kharkiv, where Russia is trying to keep Ukrainian forces tied up as its troops try to advance into areas further south, two people were killed and 18 others wounded when what appeared to be guided missiles slammed into a shopping center in the heart of the shattered city.

In Dnipro, the local government said that a Russian missile had struck an abandoned poultry farm.

There were also reports from local and national Ukrainian officials of Russian rocket attacks on Poltava, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv.

Even as Ukrainians take stock of the devastation left in the wake of the Russian occupation across the north of their country, the situation in areas under Russian occupation remained grave.

Ukrainians also say that Russian forces are trying to cover up evidence of war crimes in places that they control, although witness accounts and statements to that effect from local officials have been impossible to verify as Russian forces have blocked access to outsiders.

Local residents have relayed reports of Russian soldiers exhuming the bodies of civilians buried in the yards of residential buildings in Mariupol, and forbidding people to bury or remove the bodies of the dead, according to a statement posted on the City Council’s Telegram channel. Local officials say that Russia is burning the bodies as part of an effort to hide the extent of the slaughter in the city.

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kyiv, Marc Santora from Krakow, Poland, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels. Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Times photographers document strikes and destruction in Ukraine.

Olha Petrovna Kosyanchuk and her aunt Rayisa Misura, 94, mourn the loss of Anatoly Kosyanchuk, 77, Ms. Kosyanchuk’s husband, at a cemetery on Friday in Bucha. Mr. Kosyanchuk was killed by a heavy hit to the head, believed to be a rifle butt, a day before Russian forces fled the city.

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Mental health professionals across Eastern Europe say the war has sown intense anxiety.

“I never had anxiety attacks before,” said Dr. Neliubsiene, a family physician in Kaunas, Lithuania. “But after the first week of the war, I started thinking that maybe I should take some of the pills that I am prescribing to my patients.”

Many Eastern Europeans feel intimately connected to the conflict in their region. Although the violence has not yet spilled outside Ukraine, some people in neighboring countries said they were making detailed war contingency plans — just in case. They complained that they were unable to escape the relentless news coverage.

Because of the proximity of the war in Ukraine, some Eastern Europeans are afraid of getting pulled into the fight. Images of the bloodshed only hundreds of miles away are dredging up painful memories of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers during World War II and the Soviet occupation in this part of the world years ago.

“When I saw those images, I was not able to move,” Dr. Neliubsiene said. “My family did not get supper that evening.”

According to interviews with over a dozen mental health professionals and patients from Eastern Europe, there has been a surge in profound anxiety, as well as in requests for sleeping pills and calls to crisis hotlines.

“This is a raw existential crisis,” said Sara Koszeg, a psychologist from Budapest, who started a project documenting people’s nightmares about the war. “And it has a biological effect: You are alert all the time, and this affects your sleep.”

Psychologists say that the challenge of anxiety is that people worry about things that are out of their control. And one of the most frequent symptoms of anxiety is insomnia.

Dr. Neliubsiene has been swamped with requests from patients experiencing insomnia and anxiety. She has been prescribing them muscle relaxants for short-term use, and has been recommending physical activity, reduced screen time and fixed routines. One of her patients, a woman in her 50s, told her she was afraid to fall asleep. “She said, ‘What if Putin invades while I am sleeping?’” Dr. Neliubsiene recalled.

Russians turn to Telegram for uncensored news on Ukraine.

“This is one of the few channels that are left where you can receive information,” she said in a call over Telegram.

As Russia has silenced independent news media and banned social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Telegram has become the largest remaining outlet for unrestricted information. Since the war started, it has been the most downloaded app in Russia, with about 4.4 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower, an analytics firm. (There have been 124 million downloads of Telegram in Russia since January 2014, according to Sensor Tower.)

“Telegram is the only place in Russia where people can exchange opinions and information freely, although the Kremlin has worked hard to infiltrate Telegram channels,” said Ilya Shepelin, who used to cover the media for the now-shuttered independent TV channel Rain and has established a blog critical of the war.

After the independent radio station Echo of Moscow was shut down last month, its deputy editor in chief, Tatiana Felgengauer, said, her Telegram audience doubled. And after the Russian authorities blocked access to the popular Russia news site Meduza in early March, its Telegram subscriptions doubled, reaching nearly 1.2 million.

“I get my news there,” said Dmitri Ivanov, who studies computer science at a university in Moscow. He said that he relied on Telegram to view “the same media outlets I trust and the ones whose sites I would read before.”

Opponents of the war use the platform for everything from organizing antiwar protests to sharing media reports from the West. In March, The New York Times launched its own Telegram channel to ensure that readers in the region “can continue to access an accurate account of world events,” the company said in a statement.

But the freedom that has allowed the unfettered exchange of news and opinion has also made Telegram a haven for disinformation, far-right propaganda and hate speech.

Propagandists have their own popular channels — Vladimir Solovyov, the host of a prime time talk show that is a font of anti-Ukraine vitriol every weeknight, has more than 1 million subscribers. Channels in support of Russia’s war, many of them run by unidentified users, proliferate.

State-run media outlets, like Tass and RIA News, also distribute their reports via Telegram.

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Ukrainian refugees attend a Passover Seder in Poland.

For some, their recent journey has been a reliving of the Passover story, in which the Israelites fled Egypt.

In the Passover story, the Israelites left Egypt with almost no notice. Tatiana Bolldanova, 68, escaped her home in Darnytskyi, on the outskirts of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, after a missile hit nearby. “We left within several hours,” she said. “I fit my life into a small suitcase.”

Putin’s forces are pivoting to a very different battlefield.

Military analysts, Ukrainian commanders, soldiers and even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, acknowledge that a wider war that began with a failed attempt to capture the capital will now be waged in the eastern Donbas region.

With few natural barriers, the armies can try to flank and surround each other, firing fierce barrages of artillery from a distance to soften enemy positions.

“What we’re talking about is, no kidding, a conventional, very lethal battle of maneuvers where Russian forces are going to attack Ukraine’s fixed positions on ground that is more open,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe.

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Russia claims it has surrounded a steel plant where Mariupol’s last defenders are holding out.

A ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Russian forces had surrounded about 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers in the steel plant, blocking any exit. “The only chance to save their lives is to voluntarily lay down their arms and surrender,” he said, according to the state news agency Tass.

President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged on Saturday that the Ukrainian forces still defending Mariupol control only a small part of the city, and face a better-equipped force that is six times larger than their own.

Speaking to reporters in the capital, Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky described the area as “not a very large part” of the city, which has been besieged since the early days of the war. “Nevertheless, our guys are heroically defending,” he said. “We are grateful to them for that.”

Mr. Zelensky said that his government was in daily contact with the defenders that have been holding the plant, near Mariupol’s port. “Certain plans and negotiation processes are being worked out” in an effort to help them, he said. He did not elaborate on those efforts, except to say, “There is no trust in the Russian negotiators regarding Mariupol.”

He also said in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda, a news outlet, that if the remaining Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol were wiped out it would put an end to peace talks with Russia.

In recent days, Russian forces had advanced to the center of the city. On Friday they seized another steel plant in the north of Mariupol.

Local officials have said thousands of civilians and an unknown number of soldiers are believed to have died in Russian bombardments over the last eight weeks. The executive director of the World Food Program warned that civilians trapped in Mariupol are at risk of starving to death.

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Zelensky acknowledges that Mariupol’s defenders now control only a small part of the city.

Mr. Zelensky said that his government was in daily contact with the defenders, who have been holding out in the Azovstal metal plant near Mariupol’s port. “Certain plans and negotiation processes are being worked out” in an effort to help them, he said. He did not elaborate on those efforts, except to say, “There is no trust in the Russian negotiators regarding Mariupol.”

In recent days, Russian forces have advanced to the center of the city. On Friday they seized another steel plant in the north of Mariupol, where Ukrainian forces were holding out. The remaining Ukrainian forces are concentrated in the sprawling Azovstal steel plant and in the city’s port.

The executive director of the World Food Program warned Friday that civilians trapped in Mariupol are at risk of starving to death. Local officials have said thousands of civilians and an unknown number of soldiers are believed to have died in Russian bombardments over the last eight weeks.

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A Russian default is looming. A bitter fight is likely to follow.

The coming fight, which would probably pit Russia against big investors from around the world, raises murky questions over who gets to decide if a nation has actually defaulted in the rare case where sanctions have curbed a country’s ability to pay its debts.

Fire, debris and charred mannequins: A missile strike hits a Kharkiv shopping center.

The strike, which happened just before noon, lit the building on fire and spattered debris across the city block. It was unclear what the intended target was, but a National Guard training center is a few hundred yards from where the missiles struck.

Firefighters on scene battled a blaze that had ignited on the buildings’ top floors well into the afternoon as burning pieces fell to the ground. The shopping center was conjoined with an unoccupied factory.

A walkway that spanned across the street was damaged in the blast, and tilted precariously over a street littered with burning cars; parts of at least one of the missiles that had struck the buildings; and charred mannequins.

A bystander stumbled through the wreckage, looking for the front license place of his small sedan that had been all but destroyed in the explosions.

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Putin says Russia should redirect energy exports to ‘the south and the east.’ It’s not that simple.

Ramping up energy deliveries to Asia, though, would require building pipelines, railways and ports in Russia’s east — a process that would take years, if not decades. It also would require political will and a commitment to increase infrastructure for countries on the receiving end.

“When you look at the amount they send to Europe, even if Europe halves its dependence, that would be a huge amount to send elsewhere,” said Philip Andrews-Speed, a senior principal fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Energy Studies Institute.

Oil and liquefied natural gas, delivered by ship, can be more easily redirected, he said, but replacing gas exports will be far more difficult.

“The idea that they can send huge amounts of gas that goes to Europe and switch it to Asia, even in a year or two, is a non-starter really,” Mr. Andrews-Speed said.

Europe accounts for about half of Russia’s crude oil and condensate exports, three quarters of its natural gas exports, and a third of its coal exports, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Early indications are that Russia has found interest in India and China.

India said in mid-March that it was in talks with Russia to increase oil imports at a discounted price, despite warnings by some U.S. officials that undercutting efforts to isolate Russia could have consequences. India depends on imports for about 80 percent of its oil needs, with 3 percent of that coming from Russia.

In the first five weeks of the war in Ukraine, India’s purchases of Russian oil jumped more than 700 percent compared to the prior five weeks, according to the Russian Tanker Tracking Group, an initiative led by Ukraine’s government to monitor Russian oil sales.

On the eve of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia signed a $20 billion, yearslong deal to sell 100 million tons of coal to China. A senior Chinese diplomat said in early April that China was not a party to the conflict in Ukraine and didn’t think “our normal trade with any other country should be affected.”

China already receives Russian gas through the 1,800-mile-long “Power of Siberia” pipeline, which began flowing in 2019, and is in talks to build a second pipeline.

Europe has banned Russian coal and indicated on Thursday that an oil embargo was in the works, likely to be adopted in the coming weeks. European nations have been paying about a billion euros a day to Russia for the bloc’s energy imports, the E.U.’s foreign policy chief said last week in a speech before the European Parliament.

Russia’s need to find new destinations for its energy exports could mean countries are able to command a steep discount, according to analysts.

“Western companies divesting from Russia means that Asian companies will likely face fewer competitors in the Russian commodity market, giving them the upper hand in the negotiation of terms and prices,” analysts for the British consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft wrote in a report this week. “Major importers such as China and India will be in a more comfortable position to negotiate terms with other energy suppliers.”