Russia-Ukraine live updates: U.S. finds Russian forces have committed war crimes; Biden arrives in Brussels

A correspondent with a Russian news outlet was killed while reporting on shelling in Kyiv, her outlet said, marking at least the fifth journalist to die covering the war in Ukraine.

The Insider, an independent Russian news site, said Oksana Baulina “died under fire” while filming the destruction from Russian shelling of a district within the Ukrainian capital. A civilian also was killed, and two others who accompanied Baulina were injured and hospitalized, the news site said. Few other details were immediately available.

The Insider said Baulina previously worked as a producer for the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which was founded by Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny. The organization was declared “extremist” last summer by a Moscow court, and Baulina “had to leave Russia in order to continue reporting on Russian government corruption for The Insider,” the news site said.

After heading to Ukraine as a correspondent, she filed reports from Lviv and Kyiv.

“The Insider expresses its deepest condolences to Oksana’s family and friends,” the outlet said. “We will continue to cover the war in Ukraine, including such Russian war crimes as indiscriminate shelling of residential areas which result in the deaths of civilians and journalists.”

Before Baulina’s death was reported, the Committee to Protect Journalists had counted four journalists killed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

Yevhenii Sakun, a camera operator for the Ukrainian station LIVE, was killed March 1 in Russian shelling. Brent Renaud, a documentary filmmaker, was fatally shot March 13 while working for Time magazine. And Oleksandra Kuvshynova and Pierre Zakrzewski, who were on assignment for Fox News, were killed when their vehicle was struck by incoming fire.

Several others have gone missing or been detained, the journalists’ committee said.

Russian forces appear to be pouring new energy into an offensive against Ukrainian forces from the eastern provinces under separatist control — a seeming shift in strategy as the Kremlin’s assault continues to stall in other areas of the country.

“Russians are really starting to prioritize that part of eastern Ukraine,” a senior defense official said Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the Pentagon. “We think the Russians are basically trying to cut it off and therefore pin down Ukrainian forces” operating in areas around Donetsk and especially Luhansk, the official added.

The decision may be strategic. Russia enjoys a base of support in areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, where separatists have asserted a degree of independence from Kyiv that has been formally recognized by Moscow, but not by the West. Elsewhere in the country, however, Russians have been met with stiff resistance as they try to claim authority over population centers — to the point where they have started to establish defensive positions outside Ukraine’s capital city.

“We’ve started to see now that they’re basically digging in and they’re establishing defensive positions” around Kyiv, the official said, adding that Russian troops stuck 15 to 20 kilometers outside the city center were “not trying to advance right now.”

“We now assess that the Ukrainians have pushed them back further to the east and northeast of Kyiv,” the official added, noting: “That is a change from yesterday.”

The official said that Russia had fired more than 1,200 missiles since the start of the invasion. The Pentagon has thus far refused to speculate about the scope of losses Russia has incurred since its forces invaded a month ago, but the official expressed some skepticism about a new estimate from a senior NATO military officer that 30,000 to 40,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded. The defense official had “not seen estimates that look like that,” explaining that they “aren’t that high.” The official also added that the Pentagon continues “to have low confidence in those estimates” because casualties are difficult to observe directly.

The United States has not moved forward with sanctions against prominent Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the United States not to do so, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Zelensky advised that Abramovich may be helpful in negotiating a peace deal with Russia, the U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Asked for comment Wednesday, Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said, “We are not going to read out private conversations between President Biden and President Zelensky.”

A spokeswoman for Abramovich, Rola Brentlin, told Bloomberg News in late February that he was “contacted by the Ukrainian side for support in achieving a peaceful resolution, and … has been trying to help ever since.” The Washington Post could not immediately reach Brentlin on Wednesday.

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked international efforts to punish powerful people with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Abramovich announced last month that he was handing over “stewardship” of his London soccer club, Chelsea FC, to the team’s charitable foundation. Members of the British Parliament urged him to give up his assets; Abramovich put the club up for sale earlier this month.

The United Kingdom soon announced sanctions against Abramovich and six other Russian oligarchs, seeking to isolate those close to Putin. Their assets in the United Kingdom would be frozen, British officials said, and the oligarchs would be banned from traveling to the United Kingdom or doing business with any British citizen or company. The European Union also imposed sanctions on Abramovich last week.

The United States has similarly sought to punish Putin and “Russian elites and family members who continue supporting [him] despite his brutal invasion of Ukraine,” as the White House said this month. But it has not targeted Abramovich.

On most days, Kyle Glen is an ordinary 29-year-old working a clinical research job in Wales. But on March 6, as videos claiming to show the Russian army bombing a civilian escape route surfaced on Telegram, his alternate identity kicked in: Twitter spy.

Some thought the video was faked to smear Russia; others pointed to it as evidence of Russian aggression. Glen’s task: Verify its authenticity.

In the footage, he spotted a landmark — an Orthodox church with four golden domes. He found it in Irpin, using Google Maps and a file photograph from the Associated Press to generate precise coordinates. A scan of Discord, Reddit and Twitter revealed chatter from witnesses of the bombing. Twelve minutes after seeing the footage, he felt confident the video was real and posted the work on his Twitter account.

“The way wars and conflicts are now, they’re so fast moving, there’s a lot of information. [Things] can get missed,” Glen said. “I think it’s really useful that there are people doing this as a hobby.”

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unfolded at a blistering pace over social media, it has swollen the ranks of hobbyist spies such as Glen. Armed with day jobs or coursework, the self-proclaimed open source intelligence — or “OSINT” — community tracks every movement of Russian and Ukrainian forces online. Five weeks into the war, their findings are affecting strategy on the ground.

Stocks tumbled Wednesday ― with the Dow shedding nearly 450 points ― as inflation fears and the continuing conflict in Ukraine weighed on investors.

The Dow Jones industrial average lost 448.96 points, or 1.3 percent, to close at 34,358.50. The broader S&P 500 index lost 55.37 points, or 1.2 percent, to settle at 4,456.24. The tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 186.21 points, or 1.3 percent, to end at 13,922.60.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield topped 2.38 percent in the early morning, hitting its highest point since 2019. Bond yields move inversely to prices.

Last week the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2018, the first of seven planned rate hikes of 0.25 percent each. The markets got a jolt on Monday when Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said the central bank might decide on larger rate hikes throughout the year, signaling a more hawkish stance with respect to curbing inflation.

Crude prices crept upward Wednesday morning as the war in Ukraine continued. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, jumped nearly 5 percent to trade near $115 per barrel. Brent crude, the international benchmark, sailed past $121.50 per barrel, up 5.4 percent.

Russian forces bombed a bridge in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, cutting it off from the highway leading to the country’s capital, Kyiv, and plunging the besieged city into an even more catastrophic situation, local and federal authorities said Wednesday.

“Today Chernihiv remains completely cut off from the capital,” Ludmila Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, said Wednesday, adding that the population has “effectively been turned into hostages by Russia forces who have cut off the main routes for humanitarian aid.”

“The city has no electricity, water, heat and almost no gas, infrastructure is destroyed. According to local residents, the occupiers are compiling lists of civilians for the ‘evacuation’ to Lgov [Kursk region of Russia],” she added, according to the Guardian.

Videos posted online by Ukrainian officials showed that the bridge, which crossed the Desna River in the city’s south and had been used to transport humanitarian aid to the city and evacuate civilians, had been partly destroyed. The roadway had collapsed, with twisted metalwork falling onto the northern bank of the river. The videos were verified by The Washington Post.

Chernihiv — about 90 miles northeast of Kyiv — has been bombarded by Russian attacks since the start of the war last month. Authorities have said the city faces a humanitarian disaster.

Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko has estimated that about half of its 285,000 residents have fled. Several refugees have told The Post that before being evacuated, they had been living underground to avoid relentless Russian shelling and bombings for weeks, while others hid in hallways in freezing temperatures without power, heat or phone service for days.

Atroshenko has said Russia was targeting the city’s hospitals and intentionally destroying civilian infrastructure.

But despite the widespread destruction, Viacheslav Chaus, the Chernihiv region’s governor, said in a video posted to Facebook on Wednesday that officials would find alternative routes for aid and vowed to rebuild damaged infrastructure.

“Without fail, we will build a new bridge, much better than the one we had, which was already old,” Chaus said. “A city like Chernihiv, a hero city, deserves a new, cool, modern bridge. We will build it without fail following our victory.”

Russia rebuked Poland’s proposal to send an international peacekeeping mission into Ukraine and warned that it would lead to dangerous consequences.

In a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that if pursued, such an initiative “would be a very reckless and extremely dangerous decision,” Reuters reported.

Peskov added that any possible contact between Russian and NATO forces “could have clear consequences that would be hard to repair.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also condemned the proposal Wednesday, arguing that it would lead to a “direct clash between Russia and NATO armed forces that everyone has not only tried to avoid but said should not take place in principle,” he said Wednesday in a statement to students at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

Russia’s warnings come after the leader of Poland’s ruling party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, stressed last week from Kyiv the need for an international peacekeeping mission to be sent to Ukraine.

“I think that it is necessary to have a peace mission — NATO, possibly some wider international structure — but a mission that will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory,” Kaczynski said during a news conference alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Last Friday, Poland said it would formally submit a proposal for such a mission in Ukraine at the next NATO summit.

The U.S. government has concluded that members of Russia’s military have committed war crimes in Ukraine, the State Department said Wednesday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the new assessment is based in part on U.S. intelligence. He referred to the suffering of civilians in the city of Mariupol, where he said more than 2,400 noncombatants had been killed. He pointed to Russian strikes that have hit hospitals, schools, residential buildings and ambulances across Ukraine, including targets identified as civilian.

“Putin’s forces used these same tactics in Grozny, Chechnya, and Aleppo, Syria, where they intensified their bombardment of cities to break the will of the people,” Blinken said in a statement. “Their attempt to do so in Ukraine has again shocked the world.”

In recent weeks, U.S. officials had said that Russian actions appeared to be war crimes. President Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” a remark that prompted the Russian government to summon the U.S. ambassador to deliver a protest. Blinken previously said he personally believed that war crimes had taken place.

In his statement, Blinken noted that a court would need to make a legal determination about the matter.