Russia-Ukraine live updates: Biden calls for Putin ‘war-crimes trial’ as world leaders issue fresh rebukes

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said U.S. intelligence indicates Russia is “revising its war aims” to focus its offensive operations in eastern and southern Ukraine, rather than attacking most of the country as it has so far, and he warned that the next phase of the war would probably be measured in months or longer.

Russian forces are retreating from Kyiv to Belarus, and it is likely that dozens of additional Russian battalion tactical groups will be deployed instead to the front line in Ukraine’s east, Sullivan told reporters Tuesday.

“We assess Russia will focus on defeating Ukrainian forces in the broader Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, which encompasses significantly more territory than Russian proxies already controlled before the new invasion began in late February,” Sullivan said. “Russia could then use any tactical successes it achieves to propagate a narrative of progress.”

Sullivan added that Russia could extend its presence even deeper into Ukraine and that it would probably try to hold the Ukrainian city of Kherson to control access to water. Meanwhile, cities such as Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv and Lviv remain under threat, he said.

“Moscow will likely continue to launch air and missile strikes across the rest of the country to cause military and economic damage and, frankly, to cause terror,” Sullivan said. “Russia’s goal in the end is to weaken Ukraine as much as possible. … The next stage of this conflict may very well be protracted. We should be under no illusions that Russia will adjust its tactics, which have included and will likely continue to include wanton and brazen attacks on civilian targets.”

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that the Biden administration does not consider Russia’s actions in Ukraine a genocide, although it is monitoring the situation.

Earlier Monday, Biden called Putin a “war criminal” but stopped short of calling the mass deaths genocide. Some world leaders, including Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, have used “genocide” to describe Russia’s actions.

“So this is something we, of course, continue to monitor every day based on what we have seen so far,” Sullivan told reporters Monday at a news briefing. “We have seen atrocities. We have seen war crimes. We have not yet seen a level of systematic deprivation of life of the Ukrainian people to rise to the level of genocide. But again, that’s something we will continue to monitor.”

Sullivan added that there is “not a mechanical formula” for making such a determination. He noted that the State Department recently determined that the mass killing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar amounts to genocide.

“That was a lengthy process based on an amassing of evidence over a considerable period of time and involving, frankly, mass death [and] the mass incarceration of a significant portion of the Rohingya population,” Sullivan said. “And we will look to a series of indicators along those lines to ultimately make a determination in Ukraine. But as the president said today, we have not arrived at that conclusion yet.”

U.S. authorities seized a 255-foot luxury yacht in Spain owned by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg on Monday under a new sanctions drive to punish the financial elite close to Russian President Vladimir Putin by seizing assets such as ships, luxury real estate and private aircraft.

Spanish and U.S. law enforcement agents boarded the $90 million Tango early Monday as the ship docked at the Marina Real in the port of Palma de Mallorca, in Spain’s Balearic Islands. Spanish authorities executed a court order freezing the vessel after the Justice Department obtained a seizure warrant in federal court in Washington alleging U.S. bank fraud, money laundering and sanctions violations.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the seizure, the first by the United States as it and its allies have sought to punish Kremlin supporters for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

BERLIN — Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, responded on Monday to criticism from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about her handling of Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.

Zelensky singled out Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France, in remarks over the weekend following the emergence of footage appearing to show Russian atrocities against civilians in Bucha, near Kyiv. He said the European leaders had led efforts to deny Ukraine access to NATO during the alliance’s 2008 summit in Bucharest and invited them to travel to Bucha to see firsthand what he described as the failures of their Russia policy.

“I invite Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha and see what the policy of concessions to Russia has led to in 14 years,” he said. “To see with their own eyes the tortured Ukrainian men and women.”

Merkel “stands by her decisions in connection with the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest,” a spokeswoman for the former chancellor told the German Press Agency, or dpa. But the spokeswoman also said the former chancellor supports efforts by the German government and the international community to “put an end to the barbarism and the war by Russia against Ukraine.”

Merkel, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, did not run for a fifth term as chancellor and stepped down in December after 16 years in power. She was succeeded by Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party, who served as finance minister and vice chancellor in her final coalition government.

BERLIN — Germany on Monday declared 40 Russian diplomats “undesirable persons” and said they had five days to leave the country, a move prompted by scenes of what it described as “unbelievable brutality” in Bucha, near Ukraine’s capital.

Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said the diplomats had “worked against our freedom” and posed a threat to the cohesion of German society. The decision was communicated, she said, to the Russian ambassador in Berlin, Sergei Nechayev.

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced a similar decision Monday, which could affect about three dozen diplomats.

“France decided this evening to expel many Russian personnel with diplomatic status assigned to France whose activities are contrary to our security interests,” the ministry wrote in a statement. “This action is part of a European approach. Our first responsibility is always to ensure the safety of French people and Europeans.”

The expulsion orders came as European governments grappled with how to punish Russia for what leaders on the continent described as “war crimes.” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said earlier Monday that the Russian ambassador in his country had been asked to leave.

In contrast to the European Union’s consensus over diplomatic penalties, the bloc has been divided over what to do about imports of Russian fossil fuels. France on Monday joined such countries as Poland in saying that the E.U. should embargo Russian oil and coal, while leaders in Germany and Austria, for instance, continued to resist such a measure.

U.S. Ambassador to Poland Mark Brzezinski said the world is “bearing witness” to the gruesome scenes out of Bucha.

Reports and photos are emerging from the suburb northwest of Kyiv, where Ukrainian authorities in recent days have described mass graves and where a Post photographer witnessed volunteers placing and carrying away bodies in bags.

“This is an effort to terrorize and intimidate the people of Ukraine, who are standing up for their nation, for their people, to fight back against invaders,” Brzezinski said in an interview with The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “These images may have local roots, but they have global reach. We are all bearing witness.”

In discussing a potential cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine, Brzezinski said he does not know “whether that would result, actually, in a cessation of hostilities. Or, actually, is that something that could metastasize into quickly open conflict again?”

“We have to be careful about any kind of pledge or promise that we hear from the Russians because we need to remember what we heard from them in the lead-up to this attack,” Brzezinski added in The Washington Post Live interview. “That nothing was underway, nothing was being planned, no attack was going to occur.”

As the world expresses outrage over mounting evidence that Russian troops slaughtered civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, officials in Moscow are denying Russian involvement and dismissing images of bodies as fraudulent.

Russian diplomats and pro-Kremlin accounts on Monday amplified that view on social media, going so far as to suggest that the corpses seen in video footage were actors participating in a hoax to discredit Russia. State-controlled news programs, meanwhile, either ignored the apparent atrocities or echoed the official line.

The reaction was one of the starkest examples yet of the extreme propaganda the Kremlin is using to try to control the domestic narrative of a war that has obliterated Ukrainian cities and villages, killed thousands of Russian soldiers and turned Russia into a global outcast.

Some liberal Russian voices expressed grief over the reports and photos emerging from Bucha. The city’s mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, told The Washington Post that around 270 residents had been buried in two mass graves. A Post photographer in Bucha on Sunday witnessed the corpses of eight civilians being placed in body bags. Two of them had their hands tied behind their backs.

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that members of a team tasked with aiding evacuation efforts in Mariupol are being held, after a Ukrainian official said the team was detained after being unable to reach the city for several days.

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said Monday in a news briefing that the team set out for the southeastern city the day before. The ICRC members arrived in the town of Manhush, west of Mariupol, but were detained. He said Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk is attempting to secure their release into Ukrainian-controlled territory.

In a statement emailed to The Post, an ICRC spokesperson confirmed a team is being held in Manhush and said it had been stopped Monday “while carrying out humanitarian efforts.”

“The ICRC has been in direct contact with our colleagues and is speaking with the parties on all sides to bring clarity to the situation and allow them to resume their humanitarian work,” the spokesperson said.

It was not immediately clear who is detaining the team members.

The ICRC told The Post via email earlier Monday that due to “security conditions, our team has not been able to reach Mariupol today.”

Vereshchuk had said earlier Monday that people could flee Mariupol in their own vehicles along a humanitarian corridor to nearby Zaporizhzhia; she also said that 15 evacuation buses “have set off from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol to evacuate our people.”

The Mariupol City Council posted a video on Telegram on Monday morning of what it said were 15 buses leaving Zaporizhzhia to get to Berdyansk, about 50 miles west of Mariupol.

Vereshchuk also said civilians would be evacuated from five areas in the contested eastern region of Luhansk, on the border with Russia, and accused Russian forces in the region of attacking humanitarian convoys.

Boychenko said Monday that as many as 130,000 people remained trapped in Mariupol in “inhumane” conditions.