Russia-Ukraine live updates: U.S. planning to ban Russian oil and gas imports; Ukraine says Russia still disrupting evacuations

The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Russia’s advance in Ukraine had “slowed significantly,” as fighting continued for a 13th day.

“The opponent continues the offensive operation, but the pace of promotion of his troops has slowed significantly,” he said Tuesday in an address on YouTube. “The occupants are demoralized.”

“The Defense Forces of the city of Kyiv continue to protect the capital,” he added.

In a separate address, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told reporters Tuesday that the tempo of the Russian advance has “slowed considerably,” Reuters reported.

The United Nations said Monday that it had recorded at least 406 civilian deaths so far, including at least 27 children, and 801 people have been injured, but the actual tolls are likely to be higher.

British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Tuesday that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not going as Moscow had planned and that there had been “large scales” of Russian troops killed in the conflict.

“It’s not going particularly well for the Russians,” Wallace told Britain’s Sky News. “Probably the biggest single casualty so far are Russian military soldiers,” he added, “who have been let down by appalling leadership and appalling plans.”

Wallace also said the 40-mile convoy of Russian military vehicles headed from the north toward Kyiv was “still stuck” outside Ukraine’s capital. “We can see that the Russians are having real logistic problems, so that affects morale; they’re not getting through, they’re getting more desperate,” he added. “Russia has built itself a trap.”

Annabelle Chapman contributed to this report.

The Biden administration plans to ban imports of oil and natural gas from Russia as soon as Tuesday, aiming to punish Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

The move represents one of America’s most far-reaching actions to penalize Moscow since the beginning of the war.

The United States has already deployed a number of economic measures to hurt Russia, including sanctioning its central bank and oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the White House up to now had sought to protect global energy markets from the impact of banning Russian oil and gas, while keeping a wary eye on soaring gas prices in the United States.

President Biden is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning to announce “actions to continue to hold Russia accountable for its unprovoked and unjustified war on Ukraine,” the White House said in a statement.

The United Nations on Tuesday said 2 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion nearly two weeks ago, a staggering total highlighting a situation described by Ukrainian and world leaders as a humanitarian catastrophe.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi recently said the conflict in Ukraine represents “the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.” Since a Sunday tweet from Grandi that noted how more than 1.5 million people had crossed into neighboring countries, about 500,000 more people have reportedly fled the country at a time when Ukraine has accused Russia of shelling evacuation routes for civilians.

“Today the outflow of refugees from Ukraine reaches two million people,” he tweeted Tuesday. Grandi repeated the distressing figure: “Two million.”

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law criminalizing news coverage that describes the invasion of Ukraine as such — rather than as a “special military operation” — with offenders facing a possible 15-year prison sentence. In response, a slew of major news organizations announced plans to limit their footprint in Russia amid fears of prosecution.

Now, concerns about the law’s reach are spilling over into the technology sector, where platforms may soon face even more pressure from the Kremlin to crack down on what their users are posting about the war.

Residents of the Ukrainian city of Sumy boarded buses to leave along an evacuation corridor Tuesday after shelling had thwarted attempts to shuttle Ukrainians out of besieged cities in recent days.

Dmytro Zhivitsky, the regional governor, said the buses were headed for the Ukrainian city of Poltava, with priority for children, disabled people and pregnant women. He said the only route available was southwest to Poltava and noted that there may not be enough space for everyone who wants to leave.

The buses arrived carrying supplies for Sumy. The passengers who escaped included students from India and China, and a line of private cars was also forming to depart, he said. While the governor said the corridor stemmed from an agreement between Ukraine and Russia, he warned that there was still a “very high risk of provocation,” urging people to evaluate the risks for themselves.

Russia said Tuesday it was opening humanitarian corridors from a number of besieged cities as Ukraine accused Moscow of violating cease-fires that would allow civilians to evacuate. Ukraine said Tuesday that the only agreed routes were for regions inside the country, rejecting the idea of corridors leading to Russia or its ally, Belarus, after Russian officials said earlier that some evacuees would be taken to Gomel, Belarus, and flown to Russia.

“Let’s try again,” an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted earlier on Tuesday.

But a planned evacuation from the southern city of Mariupol could not start Tuesday morning, according to Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said a fleet of vehicles was ready to deliver aid to the port city and carry civilians northwest toward another region, but it blamed Russian forces for violating the cease-fire and shelling the route. In a video Tuesday, Zelensky also accused Russia of shelling people trying to flee through the corridors and said if this continued, “it will be in front of the whole world.

An 11-year-old Ukrainian boy who fled his war-torn country alone — with only a plastic bag, a passport and a telephone number scrawled on his hand — has been hailed as a hero by Slovakian authorities.

His safe escape from Zaporizhzhia, a city that narrowly avoided a nuclear catastrophe on Friday after a projectile set part of a massive power plant on fire, is a rare bright moment in an increasingly brutal conflict.

“Little Hassan is only 11 years old, but in his way he has shown huge determination, courage and fearlessness that sometimes adults don’t have,” Roman Mikulec, Slovakia’s interior minister, wrote on his official Facebook page Monday after a meeting with the boy, who traveled hundreds of miles by train on his own.

Anybody who is using social media to follow the Russian invasion of Ukraine has probably come across it by now: a 10-minute video of a man who appears to be a Russian prisoner of war, rejecting his homeland’s justifications for the invasion and the misinformation campaign that undergirds it.

One version, posted Sunday morning, has racked up more than 90,000 retweets and 220,000 likes on Twitter. (We’re not linking to the video, for reasons we’ll soon get to.)

It’s merely the latest in a string of such Russian POW videos that have been disseminated far and wide in recent days, as most of the world unites behind Ukraine. And it’s kibble for the social media crowd, in that it confirms their prior beliefs — and indeed, confirms much of what we know objectively about Russian misinformation — in a compelling and seemingly heartfelt appeal.

As Ukrainians huddled together in a dimly lit bomb shelter in Kyiv, seeking safety from deadly

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