Russia-Ukraine live updates: Invasion escalates as convoy threatens Kyiv, Kharkiv ‘surrounded’

In the days leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian state media unleashed a flurry of articles online baselessly or misleadingly casting Ukrainians as aggressors and their government as a nuclear threat, according to an analysis shared with The Technology 202.

The findings shed light on the narratives Russian outfits sought to spread in the crucial days before the invasion — and before major platforms announced new measures intended to limit misinformation and disinformation by state-funded outlets.

According to researchers at Oxford University’s Programme on Democracy and Technology, state-funded and state-run Russian news outlets including RT and Sputnik peppered the web with articles portraying Ukraine as instigators in the conflict the week before the invasion, echoing a consistent theme of Russian information operations.

But while certain narratives had long been a fixture of the messaging by Russian state media, others gained prominence during that pivotal stretch. That included postings raising the specter of the Ukrainian government reviving its nuclear arsenal.

Many children with cancer in Ukraine are being forced to take cover and continue their treatment in the basement of one of the country’s largest pediatric hospitals, as fighting continues around them.

The Ohmatdyt children’s hospital in the capital, Kyiv, is the largest children’s hospital in Ukraine, according to its official website, with 620 hospital beds, where it treats up to 20,000 children annually.

“If we stop [treatment], they will die,” Lesia Lysytsia an onco-ophthalmologist told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “We cannot stop their treatment. They’re at war with cancer every day.”

Chef José Andrés had spent nearly all day handing out plates of hot food to hungry Ukrainian children and women who’d fled Russian missile attacks in their country and crossed the border into Poland.

But by early Tuesday in Poland, the 52-year-old chef and founder of the World Central Kitchen organization had reached his breaking point in Sesow, a town in central Poland.

He was about to go to bed in a warm hotel room, he said in a nearly four-minute-long video posted to his Twitter account, while thousands of refugees would face freezing weather as they continued their trek to neighboring countries. Others, mostly men, would be walking in the opposite direction to join the fight against Russian forces.

TEL AVIV — Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel laid out a litany of complaints Tuesday about Jerusalem’s response to the Russian invasion, accusing Israeli officials of failing to match the aid offered by other nations and of forgetting Ukraine’s history of aiding Jews during the Holocaust.

Ambassador Yevgen Korniychuk said Israel had rejected requests to provide defensive equipment and to accept some of the refugees fleeing the fighting. He broke down in tears as he spoke about relatives still in Ukraine in a briefing with journalists at the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Tel Aviv.

“We hope that Israel will behave like the rest of the world and help us with weapons as well,” said Korniychuk. “We’re getting more help from our other partners and friends than from Israel at the moment.”

Korniychuk said that he was “disappointed” with the refusal by the Israeli Ministry of Interior to accommodate a number of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who have fled their homes and are temporarily stationed across Ukraine’s border countries. Israel has set up processing centers for Jewish refugees who want to enter Israel, but has declined to accept other Ukrainians.

“We do believe that you remember the time of the Second World War, when Ukrainians were massively saving Jewish lives from the Holocaust. Almost 4,000 are called the 'righteous among the nations,” he said, referring to the honorific used by Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. “This is a humanitarian catastrophe. We are asking for your humanity.”

Israel also refused a request by Ukraine to supply medical care to wounded soldiers and civilians, for the wounded to be sent for treatment in Israel, and for Israel to ban Russian television networks that air in Israel and issue Russian propaganda, Korniychuk said.

Saturday, the Ukrainian Embassy in Tel Aviv issued an open call on its Facebook page for volunteers “who wish to participate in combat actions against the Russian aggressor.” The post, which drew a lot of media attention, was deleted after a few hours because of what the embassy called “extreme hype.” But the embassy restored the call for fighters on Monday and provided information on how to join Ukraine’s “foreign legion.”

Thousands of Ukrainian-Israelis are based in Ukraine, including an unknown number of men who had served in the Israeli Defense Forces and moved to Ukraine in the years following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Over the last two days, Israel has airlifted 100 tons of humanitarian equipment to Ukraine, including water purification systems, sleeping bags and coats.

But the deliveries did not include the items Ukraine had specifically asked for, said Korniychuk, including helmets and protective vests, which are reportedly in short supply throughout Europe.

Israel has tried to balance support for Ukraine without angering Russian, which has unofficially coordinated with Jerusalem on military operations against Iran-backed proxies in Syria. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has expressed support for Ukraine, without criticizing Russia by name. But Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said in a tweet on Monday that Israel would back an upcoming United Nations resolution condemning the Russian invasion.

The move will place Israel “on the right side of history,” Lapid tweeted.

Russian conductor Valery Gergiev was fired from the Munich Philharmonic orchestra Tuesday because he supports Russian President Vladimir Putin and has not rejected Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the German city’s mayor said.

Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter said in a news release that the decision came after he issued an ultimatum to the 68-year-old Russian conductor to reject the invasion. When Gergiev, a close friend of Putin, did not respond by Monday, Reiter said he was left with no choice but to dismiss the conductor.

“I had expected him to rethink and revise his very positive assessment of the Russian leader,” Reiter said. “After this didn’t occur, the only option is the immediate severance of ties.”

The move to dismiss Gergiev, a prominent classical music conductor who has led the Munich Philharmonic since the 2015-16 season, follows a stretch of widespread anger toward the conductor for his refusal to denounce Putin. Some of Gergiev’s concerts have been canceled, and he been asked to resign from honorary positions because he has not spoken out against the invasion.

Although the Internet overall continues to operate remarkably well across most of embattled Ukraine, data stopped flowing Tuesday in the eastern city of Severodonetsk, the acting administrative center of Luhansk that reportedly has come under heavy Russian shelling in recent days.

Services that track Internet flows reported the outage shortly after noon. The cause was not immediately clear, but it was the extensive outage in the contested eastern regions of the nation so far.

Severodonetsk has a population of about 100,000. It became the seat for administrative functions in Luhansk Oblast after separatist fighting began in 2014.

Prince Charles, Britain’s future king, spoke out Tuesday against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and expressed “solidarity with all those who are resisting brutal aggression.”

It was the latest statement on the conflict from a member of the royal family. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was “grateful” to the royals for their support.

Prince Charles briefly spoke of Ukraine during an event in Southend-on-Sea, England, in honor of its former member of Parliament Sir David Amess. Amess was killed last year in a brutal attack that shocked Britain. The person charged with fatally stabbing Amess reportedly considered himself affiliated with the Islamic State.

“What we saw in the terrible tragedy in Southend was an attack on democracy, on an open society, on freedom itself,” Charles said Tuesday. “We are seeing those same values under attack today in Ukraine in the most unconscionable way.”

“In the stand we take here, we are in solidarity with all those who are resisting brutal aggression,” he said.

On Saturday, Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, expressed their support for Ukraine in a tweet. “In October 2020 we had the privilege to meet President Zelenskyy and the First Lady to learn of their hope and optimism for Ukraine’s future,” they said. “Today we stand with the President and all of Ukraine’s people as they bravely fight for that future.”

Zelensky thanked them and the royal family for their support early Tuesday.

On Thursday, the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, issued a statement through their Archewell Foundation. It said they “stand with the people of Ukraine against this breach of international and humanitarian law and encourage the global community and its leaders to do the same.”

Ukrainians and their supporters have used social media to bruise, belittle and humiliate the Russians, seeking to boost citizens’ spirits and sap invaders’ morale during the most Internet-accessible war in history.

A flood of real-time videos across Facebook, Telegram, TikTok and Twitter has blunted Kremlin propaganda and rallied the world to Ukraine’s side as it fights to defend its democracy from a military behemoth.

It has also potentially saved lives: Ukrainians have raced to disseminate defensive strategies, plot escape routes and document the brutality of a raging clash. Some expect that the phone footage recorded in recent days could play a critical role in investigating war crimes after the combat ends.