Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russia widens assault in Ukraine, raising fears of humanitarian disaster

Russia’s deputy energy minister said Thursday that electricity lines to the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant site have been repaired, but the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no confirmation that power to the closed plant has been restored.

Yevgeny Grabchak was quoted in the ministry’s news service Thursday as saying that Belarus has reestablished electricity lines to the Chernobyl site. However, IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said communications were too “shaky” to confirm that.

Earlier, Ukraine’s national electricity grid operator, Ukrenergo, said it had a team ready to restore power at the Chernobyl site, scene of a 1986 disaster, and was waiting for a safe corridor to be created. It also rejected an offer from neighboring Belarus to send specialists to help fix the high-voltage power transmission line.

A Ukrainian official said she hopes a corridor could open Friday to evacuate civilians from the southern port of Mariupol after days of shelling thwarted attempts to move residents out of the besieged city.

“We are waiting and hoping that it works today,” Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a video, laying out plans for routes from cities such as Volnovakha and Izyum to other parts of the country and from the outskirts of Kyiv toward the capital. She said the cities would also receive aid deliveries.

An official at Ukraine’s presidential office also said a string of evacuation attempts would resume Friday, including from an area near a nuclear power plant in the southeast.

In Mariupol, however, local Ukrainian authorities have sought for days to deliver aid and open a safe passage out, but they say Russian bombardment and a blockade are preventing residents from leaving the city on the Sea of Azov. The Mariupol city council said an airstrike on a maternity hospital this week killed three people, including a child, and injured 17 others.

While bodies piled up in Mariupol during what the mayor described as “two days of hell,” residents of other urban areas have evacuated to different parts of the country through “humanitarian corridors” agreed between Kyiv and Moscow during temporary cease-fires.

More than 80,000 people have evacuated in the past two days, Vereshchuk said earlier, with about 60,000 leaving a northeastern region around the city of Sumy and 20,000 others from areas northwest of Kyiv.

David L. Stern contributed to this report.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved recruiting “volunteers” to reinforce the Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine, and his defense minister said Moscow has received “a colossal number of applications” from across the world to join what it is calling a “Ukrainian liberation movement.”

“If you see that there are people who want to come voluntarily, especially free of charge, and help people living in the Donbas, you need to meet them halfway and help them move to the war zone,” Putin told Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during a televised Russian Security Council meeting Friday. Donbas is a region of eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed separatists have declared independent “republics” and where Putin has baselessly accused Ukraine of committing genocide against Russian speakers.

Shoigu said the Kremlin has received more than 16,000 applications, of which most came from the Middle East. There have been numerous reports that Russia has been trying to recruit Syrians for its assault on Ukraine, and a senior U.S. defense official said this week that it is “noteworthy that [Putin] believes he needs to rely on foreign fighters.”

During the same meeting, Putin criticized Ukraine for seeking to enlist foreigners in countering Russian aggression. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry created a unit called the International Legion to enlist foreign volunteers to help the Ukrainian army, and it estimated that more than 20,000 volunteers and veterans from 52 countries have expressed a desire to join.

“As for the gathering of mercenaries from all over the world and sending them to Ukraine, we see the Western sponsors of Ukraine and the regime do not hide it. They do it openly, dismissing all norms of international law,” Putin said.

During the meeting, Shoigu also said Russia is ready to hand over seized Ukrainian weapons, including Javelin and Stinger systems, to the separatist armies of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics in Ukraine’s east.

Britain has said the Kremlin, contrary to its denials, has deployed conscript troops to Ukraine. The British Defense Ministry said “experienced mercenaries” from Russian private military companies were also “likely deploying to fight in Ukraine.”

Up to 4,000 Russian troops may have died since Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, a senior U.S. military officer said Tuesday.

As the war in Ukraine rages into its third week, air raid sirens sounded repeatedly in cities across the country overnight Friday, as people continue to say goodbye to loved ones and seek refuge in neighboring Poland and further afield.

More than 2.5 million refugees have left Ukraine since Feb. 24, according to the United Nations, with 80,000 alone fleeing from areas north and east of Kyiv through humanitarian corridors in the past two days, according to a senior Ukrainian official.

The exodus is historic, U.N. officials say: The number of refugees fleeing Ukraine in less than two weeks is equal to the flow of mainly Syrian refugees into Europe in 2015 and 2016.

Among those who have fled are 1 million children, according to UNICEF. Train stations and bus terminals fill with families preparing to separate, with many men of fighting age staying behind to defend the country.

Elsewhere, the fighting continued Friday. Rescuers worked at the scene of a reported airstrike in the southeastern city of Dnipro after civilian targets came under Russian shelling.

The port region of Odessa also remains a key Russian target. Volunteers there put sandbags around the city’s Monument to the Duke of Richelieu on Thursday, part of an effort to protect historic sites.

The White House and Congress are rushing to enact an emergency aid package to stabilize Ukraine’s besieged economy, a dramatic bipartisan effort that reflects the economic challenges facing the country following its invasion by Russia.

Up-to-the-minute data on Ukraine’s economy is impossible to collect during the war, but Ukrainians have reported shortages of food, medicine, gasoline and other necessities. Russia’s war effort has choked off Ukraine’s primary source of imports, caused mass displacement within the country and destroyed vital parts of its infrastructure. Over 2 million people have fled, according to the United Nations, leaving displaced family members behind.

The highest oil prices since the 2008 financial crisis are dealing a heavy blow to the global economy, slowing Europe’s pandemic recovery to a near stall and complicating the fight against inflation in the United States.

China, the world’s largest oil importer, will probably strain to reach this year’s economic growth target, while developing countries in North Africa and the Middle East confront the danger of social unrest over rising energy and food costs, economists said.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its third week, military and civilian casualties are mounting — but no one, not even the United Nations or the Ukrainian government, can provide an accurate count of how many people have been injured or killed.

According to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, which has been tracking civilian casualties, at least 549 civilians have been killed and 957 wounded since Russia invaded on Feb. 24. In the seaside hub of Mariupol, the target of relentless Russian shelling in recent days, an adviser to the mayor said that 1,300 people have been killed in the city alone and that at least 3,000 more have been injured.

For independent observers, the ongoing fighting across much of the country means that the effort to count the dead and wounded has become a painstaking but necessary struggle.

More than 40 Republican U.S. senators called Thursday for President Biden to aid “the transfer of aircraft and air defense systems” to Ukraine a day after officials quashed Poland’s offer to send fighter jets with American help.

The senators said in a letter that they “strongly disagree” with the Biden administration’s stance on Poland’s proposal and that the Ukrainian military is in “dire need of more lethal aid” as it fights Russia’s invasion. They urged the president to work with NATO allies on providing those resources — uniting behind a step that U.S. officials have warned could draw the Western alliance into war.

American officials have criticized Poland’s proposal to transfer MiG-29 jets through U.S. auspices as risking escalation without significantly changing the situation in Ukraine, given that Ukraine’s air force is largely intact.

A White House spokesman, Sean Savett, on Thursday evening noted comments from the U.S. military commander in Europe and Pentagon press secretary John Kirby.

“We believe the most effective way to support the Ukrainian military in their fight against Russia is to provide increased amounts of anti-tank weapons and air defense systems, which is on-going with the international community,” the commander of U.S. European Command, Gen. Tod D. Wolters, said in a statement.