Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russia pounds military range near Poland border, makes gains near Kyiv

From the hillsides above Barcelona, the superyacht looked like a building. The titanic vessel, christened Dilbar in 2016, was often docked at Port Vell, dwarfing the Barcelona aquarium next door and stretching nearly the length of two football fields.

By gross tonnage, Dilbar is the largest yacht on the planet, according to Boat International, and No. 5 in length. On board is a diesel electric power plant, a 48,000-gallon swimming pool, two helipads, 12 state rooms and accommodations for 96 crew members running a maritime operation that costs $60 million a year. Dilbar sails under the flag of the Cayman Islands, the offshore tax haven in the Caribbean, but its namesake is Russian — specifically the mother of its owner, billionaire Alisher Usmanov, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Usmanov is one of the “Russian elites” on whom the United States imposed sanctions and who, in the words of Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, support Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “war of choice” against Ukraine. After years of cushy complacency in the service of Putin, some of Russia’s wealthiest and most well-connected are yoked with economic sanctions, hounded by bad press and spooked by public outrage over a chaotic invasion that is imperiling their lifestyle.

The government of the United Kingdom will give anyone in Britain willing to provide housing for Ukrainian refugees about $450 a month under a newly announced “Homes for Ukraine” program.

“I urge people across the country to join the national effort and offer support to our Ukrainian friends,” Michael Gove, the secretary of state for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, said in a statement. “Together we can give a safe home to those who so desperately need it.”

A website is set to go live Monday to allow Britons to register to provide a rent-free space for those fleeing the conflict in Ukraine for a minimum of six months, according to a government statement announcing the program. Anyone can apply — including individual households, charities, community groups and businesses — to “sponsor a named Ukrainian or a named Ukrainian family.”

Sponsors will receive 350 pounds, or about $450, a month “as a ‘thank you’ for putting a roof over the heads of those fleeing war,” the government said. Ukrainians who are sponsored and accepted into the program will be given the right to live and work in Britain for three years. Applications are expected to open at the end of next week.

The program will be open to Ukrainians with no family ties in the United Kingdom if they are sponsored by someone in the country. That is a departure from previous U.K. immigration policy, which mostly only allowed Ukrainians with U.K.-based family members to apply for emergency visas.

The Refugee Council, a U.K.-based charity, criticized the new policy as insufficient in a statement on Sunday.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said “we are concerned that people from Ukraine are still not being recognised as refugees and being asked to apply for visas when they just need to be guaranteed protection.”

“By establishing a visa route and naming scheme,” Solomon said, the program “will inevitably be restricted to those who are known to people in the UK and be a quite complex lengthy visa application process.”

“We are also worried about ensuring the safety and wellbeing for Ukrainians who have fled bloodshed, and the level of support available for their sponsors,” Solomon added. “We are talking about very traumatised women and children whose experiences are unique, and the level of support needs to match that.”

During the worst of the starvation, when Petro Mostovyi was a child, he was afraid to venture to a nearby hamlet because all the residents there were dead. They were still in their houses and barns. But for weeks, no one had been able to bury them.

Houses filled with the dead were commonplace in Ukraine in 1932 and ’33. Those who collected the corpses knew where to stop if they saw ravens nearby. And sometimes the emaciated living were carted away with the deceased.

Desperate, starving people, deprived of their livelihood by ruthless edicts of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, were forced to eat grass, tree bark, flowers, rats, dogs and, in the end, their children, historians have recorded.

People died in the streets, on sidewalks, in train stations, in farm fields and on country roads.

About 4 million of them perished in the great famine, known as the Holodomor, or death by hunger.

Today, as Ukraine battles Russian invaders and the dead again lie in the streets of places, including Mariupol, that have been cut off from supplies, memory of the famine and its links to the Kremlin remain strong.

A centuries-old Orthodox Christian monastery in eastern Ukraine was damaged in an airstrike Saturday evening, leaving several people hurt, Ukraine’s parliament said.

More than 500 refugees — including 200 children — were sheltering at the monastery, the Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra, in the Donetsk region. The refugees and monks were evacuated to the monastery’s basement Saturday, the parliament said in a post on Telegram.

The monastery posted a similar statement on its website.

The airstrike happened about 10 p.m. local time, according to the statements. No one was killed in the attack. The injured were treated at a nearby hospital or in the monastery.

“Window frames flew out as a result of the terrible force of the explosion in the Lavra’s temples,” according to the parliament’s statement. “An explosive wave smashed all the windows and doors in the Lavra hotels.”

The monastery is at least 495 years old, with the first mention of its existence recorded in 1526, the parliament said.

IRPIN, Ukraine — For days, I have witnessed the scenes of nightmares: frightened people fleeing in snow flurries, the elderly carted in wheelbarrows, desperate children clinging to stuffed toys, frightened families cuddling their pets. And on Thursday, bodies of the dead from both sides of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Every journalist I have met, even those with decades of experience covering war, is shocked by what they are witnessing and fearful of what is ahead.

See more photos

In Mariupol, Ukraine, Russian tanks take aim at apartment buildings. Blocks of high-rises are smoldering. Fields are pockmarked from artillery rounds. Doctors dodge sniper fire. The dead are buried in mass graves.

These are among the terrifying scenes and snapshots that have emerged in recent days from the city on Ukraine’s southeastern coast, an important port coveted by Moscow, which hopes to seize control and use it as a launchpad for troops and supplies. The Kremlin’s forces have surrounded the city for at least 10 days, cutting off from sources of water, electricity and heat, with temperatures plummeting and food running low. Attempts to evacuate have been stalled for days.

On Saturday, after Russian troops captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, additional footage and photographs surfaced, shedding more light on the scope of the devastation there — a city under siege and suffering. Video from an Associated Press journalist still in the city shows Russian tanks repeatedly firing on a nine-story apartment complex. The shells collide with the building and ignite fires inside.

The AP reporter was shadowing a group of medical workers who came under fire while treating the injured, the news service said.

In the corridors of a hospital, Anastasia Erashova held a sleeping child and wept. She and her family were sheltering at her brother’s home when it was shelled, she told the AP, and two children were killed. She had blood on her head and a cut on her hand.

“I don’t know where to run to,” Erashova cried. “Who will bring back our children, who?”

PHILADELPHIA — President Biden and his party have moved in recent days to reorient their election-year pitch to voters around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — seeking to shift blame for struggles to tame rising prices onto Vladimir Putin and promoting the White House strategy to punish the Kremlin as a muscular response to a geopolitical threat.

Democrats said they hope the message, which they honed in political meetings over the past week, will help address some of their biggest liabilities ahead of the November midterm elections. Chief among them are Biden’s low approval ratings and a widespread perception that Democrats are at fault for a sharp increase in inflation.

Now, Biden is repeatedly bringing up “Putin’s price hike” at the pump. White House officials have distributed talking points to allies urging them to echo this line. And Democrats are touting the economic sanctions Biden has leveled on Russia, contrasting them with former president Donald Trump’s praise for Putin.

Amid the stately beiges of Geneva’s Palais de Nations last week, United Nations diplomats from Ukraine and Russia were launching strikes.

Ukraine was chastising Russia not over the country’s ongoing invasion but a more abstract topic: autonomous weapons.

The comments were a part of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a U.N. gathering at which global delegates are supposed to be working toward a treaty on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, the charged realm that both military experts and peace activists say is the future of war.

Autonomous weapons — the catchall description for algorithms that help decide where and when a weapon should fire — are among the most fraught areas of modern warfare, making the human-commandeered drone strike of recent decades look as quaint as a bayonet.

Proponents argue that they are nothing less than a godsend, improving precision and removing human mistakes and even the fog of war itself.

The weapons’ critics — and there are many — see disaster. They note a dehumanization that opens up battles to all sorts of machine-led errors, which a ruthless digital efficiency then makes more apocalyptic. While there are no signs such “slaughterbots” have been deployed in Ukraine, critics say the activities playing out there hint at grimmer battlefields ahead.