Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russia seizes nuclear plant in Ukraine; radiation levels stable after projectile sparks fire

A besieged Ukraine has adopted a gruesome tactic in hopes of stoking anti-government rage inside Russia: posting photos and videos of captured and killed Russian soldiers on the Web for anyone to see.

On Telegram, Twitter and YouTube, Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs since Sunday has posted a constant stream of extremely graphic images showcasing the horrors of war and inviting Russians to examine them to determine whether the images feature a missing loved one.

In many of the images, soldiers’ corpses can be seen burned, ripped apart, mangled in wreckage or abandoned in snow; in some, their faces are featured in bloody close-ups, frozen in pain.

In others, prisoners are interrogated by captors about the invasion as they shake with emotion. Some of the men sit crumpled, hands bound, eyes blindfolded with tape.

Analysis of satellite imagery by U.S. firm Maxar Technologies shows the extent of the devastation wrought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with bridges and roads damaged and homes destroyed in towns and cities across the country.

In Chernihiv, a strategic northern city on a highway that links Ukraine’s border to Kyiv where a fierce battle has been waged in recent days, the images showed damaged roads, bridges and homes. Some factories appear to have been leveled.

On Friday, Chernihiv’s regional authority said in a Facebook post that strikes killed 47 people, including nine women.

Previous images showed that a massive convoy of Russian ground forces was heading toward Kyiv, drawing within 20 miles of the center of the capital. The convoy has made limited headway since Monday, Western defense officials said.

Roughly a week after Russian forces fired their first shots into Ukraine, the White House joined congressional lawmakers on Thursday in pursuing another round of steep punishments — hoping to strike deeper at the heart of the Kremlin and its now-embattled economy.

Even with historic, wide-ranging and global sanctions securely in place, Washington policymakers signaled they are far from finished with leveraging the global financial system and pressuring Russia to abandon its war. The Biden administration expanded the list of wealthy, Kremlin-aligned oligarchs now subject to asset freezes, for example, while lawmakers began to discuss a halt to Russian oil imports, cutting at the heart of one of the country’s most lucrative industries.

The flurry of economic penalties — those levied and those perhaps on the horizon — haven’t curtailed Russia’s continued advance. The humanitarian situation instead has worsened, with the United Nations’ refugee agency estimating that 1 million people have fled the destruction. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, remained defiant in the latest round of negotiations, leaving French officials fearful that “the worst is yet to come.”

U.S. firm Maxar Technologies has produced a video using satellite images of the huge convoy of Russian military vehicles northwest of Kyiv.

The video was produced from images collected over the convoy area in a single orbital pass on Feb. 28, the company said. It shows Russian military vehicles and equipment along a road, positioned near lines of trees and parked in farmland and fields.

Russia’s last independent news and radio stations folded this week as journalists and other newsroom staffers left their positions to flee their country as the war against Ukraine intensifies.

TV Rain suspended its coverage Thursday, its director general, Natalya Sindeeva, announced in a statement on the station’s website and on the air.

“We need strength to exhale and understand how to work further,” she said. “We really hope that we will return to the air and continue to work.”

Russia blocked access to the station and declared it and fellow news station Radio Echo as foreign agents for using “war” and “invasion” — terms banned by the Kremlin — in their coverage of the attack on Ukraine, the New Yorker reported.

The blocking of TV Rain portended danger for its editor in chief, Tikhon Dzyadko, who left Russia with his family as some staffers received threats, according to Current Time TV.

Radio Echo, also known as Echo of Moscow, shut down Thursday based on the decision of its board of directors, a day after Russia pushed broadcasting barriers against TV Rain’s website and social accounts, CNN reported.

The radio station found itself facing immense scrutiny from Russia’s prosecutor general over its coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NBC News reported.

The last seconds of TV Rain’s broadcast, after one of its journalists walked off reportedly saying “No war,” was of a black-and-white broadcast of “Swan Lake.” The choice was a nod to state television playing the performance in 1991 when the Soviet Union was on the edge of collapsing, according to NBC News.

Correction: A previous version of this report said TV Rain aired “Swan Lake” in 1991. It was the Soviet state television that broadcast the show in 1991. This version has been corrected.

After Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and surrounding area early Friday, the mayor of the nearby city of Enerhodar said in a video address that the plant — part of which had earlier been on fire — was operational and running as usual, in a video address that Ukraine’s national atomic energy company said may have been made under duress.

Following the Russian capture of the town, a visibly grimacing Mayor Dmytro Orlov put out an awkward video statement on Telegram calling on Ukrainians not to provoke Russian troops and saying that no shots had been fired at civilians. He also suggested, improbably, that Russian troops had fired blanks.

“There were no shots fired at the civilian population; if they were fired, then these were blanks. There were no shots at residential areas. There were no victims or casualties among the unarmed population,” Orlov said, appearing to read from a piece of paper while being hesitant to look at the camera. “We call the population not to provoke the troops of the Russian armed forces.”

The mayor also said the city of Enerhodar, about 342 miles southeast of Kyiv, does not currently have any heating, but he added that his team is working to return things to normal.

Ukraine’s national atomic energy company Energoatom said in a post on its official Telegram account that Orlov’s statement appeared to have been made under duress. “There is a high probability that the recent speech of the mayor of Enerhodar was recorded under the barrel of a machine gun,” the post reads.

Energoatom said similar videos may appear from other officials “detained by the occupiers,” and it urged caution and vigilance.

The Zaporizhzhia facility is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Earlier Friday, a building at the complex was on fire for around four hours before it was extinguished at 6:20 a.m. local time, Ukrainian authorities said.

ON THE UKRAINE-MOLDOVA BORDER — Her body was shaking as she crossed the border, a mix of cold and fear and everything she was running from. She had scarcely slept in six days. She hadn’t eaten in two. But now finally, amid the snow and chaos of volunteers, Ira Ivanitskaia and her son were safe.

She had spent the previous seven days focused on escaping the war, on getting away from the rockets she’d heard howling at night. But the cost of the conflict was about to become apparent in new ways.

“A dividing line between my old life and new,” Ira, 46, would later call it. On the new side, all she had were muddy duffel bags of clothes, a few tools she needed as a hairdresser, and two unfamiliar men flagging her down.

The volunteer van drivers.

Ira started to sob.

MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — The southern Ukrainian city of Kherson faces a “global catastrophe” if a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians to be evacuated, and food and medicines to be delivered, is not opened in the nearest future, the secretary of the city council said.

“In Kherson, we are running out of food — literally, we can still last for maybe three, four days,” Galina Luhova said by telephone from Kherson. “We’re running out of medicines, we’re out of baby food, we are running out of diapers, and we are running out of first aid in hospitals.”

Kherson was among the first cities Russian troops attacked as they swept into Ukraine last week, and local eyewitnesses say that it is the first major city to fall to Kremlin forces. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry has not confirmed that it is controlled by Moscow, however.

But according to Luhova, Russian equipment and soldiers are “absolutely everywhere,” and Ukrainian forces are “currently not in the city.” Ukrainian city officials continue to carry out their duties, however, and the Ukrainian flag still flies over city hall.

What’s more, she said, Moscow’s forces encircle Kherson, as the fighting continues to rage in southern Ukraine, making it impossible fo