Russia-Ukraine live updates: Zelensky to address U.N. Security Council; E.U. eyes ban on Russian coal

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Tuesday for more serious commitments from countries willing to serve as guarantors of Ukraine’s security in a possible peace agreement with Russia.

“So far, we have not received a full list of … countries that are 100 percent ready to get involved” by supporting Ukraine’s defense in the event of another Russian attack, Zelensky said in a televised interview.

In Istanbul two weeks ago, Ukrainian negotiators said they offered Russia a deal under which Kyiv would pledge to remain “nonaligned and nonnuclear” if a set of countries including the United States, Turkey and others agreed to support Ukraine’s military if Russia were to attack again.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a briefing Tuesday that Moscow does not reject the possibility of a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Zelensky, but only once the two countries’ delegations reach a form of agreement in the negotiations. “Nothing has changed for us,” Russia’s Tass news agency quoted him as saying.

Zelensky said security guarantees were the No. 1 item on Ukraine’s list of demands for a peace deal, and he implied that concrete commitments on that front had yet to materialize.

“We do not need 40 countries in the world,” he said. “We need serious players that are ready for everything. We need a circle of states that are ready to provide any kind of weapons within 24 hours. We need distinct countries that sanctions policy really depends on.”

Zelensky said security guarantees are needed because joining NATO is not a realistic option, although he said that “we are ready to join tomorrow” if asked. In a speech announcing the invasion of Ukraine, Putin called NATO’s “eastward expansion” a fundamental threat to Russia’s security.

Amar Nadhir and Annabelle Chapman contributed to this report.

PARIS — France’s counterterrorism prosecutor’s office opened three probes Tuesday into alleged war crimes in Ukraine, amid mounting legal scrutiny of Russian soldiers’ acts in the country.

In a statement, the prosecutor’s office said the probes concerned “acts likely to have been committed to the detriment of French nationals in Ukraine in recent weeks,” giving French courts jurisdiction.

French authorities said the incidents were believed to have occurred in Mariupol, Hostomel and Chernihiv between Feb. 24 and March 16. The presumed crimes include “deliberate attacks against civilians not taking part in hostilities,” “voluntary attacks causing psychological harm,” deliberate damage or destruction of civilian objects and property, and depriving civilians of items that are essential for survival.

The French probes highlight mounting Western efforts to hold Russia accountable for its invasion of Ukraine through judicial means.

After images of destruction emerged from Bucha last week, French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter that “the Russian authorities will have to answer for these crimes.”

French prosecutors had already opened an investigation last month into the death of Pierre Zakrzewski, a French-Irish cameraman with Fox News, who was killed in Ukraine on March 14.

Germany moved Monday to take control of a subsidiary of Russian energy giant Gazprom, three days after the St. Petersburg-based company said it was abandoning business in the country.

European governments are debating the feasibility of an embargo on Russian oil and gas, as photos showing evidence of atrocities continue to emerge from the Ukrainian town of Bucha, near the capital, Kyiv. Russian forces recently retreated from Bucha, leaving behind what many Western governments have described as evidence of war crimes.

The debate has highlighted the role of Germany, which Poland’s prime minister accused of being the main European Union holdout after German leaders sent mixed messages Sunday and Monday about their willingness to stop buying Russian energy. A third of Germany’s crude oil and half its coal came from Russia last year.

The German Finance Ministry said Monday in a news release that the Bundesnetzagentur, the federal agency that regulates the energy sector, would take control of the Gazprom Germania Group until Sept. 30.

The ministry said its decision to place Gazprom’s German subsidiary under the trusteeship of the government came “against a background of unclear legal relationships and follows the violation of the reporting obligation under the Foreign Trade and Payments Ordinance.” It said it was not clear who owns the two Russian firms moving to acquire and liquidate Gazprom Germania, calling that a national security risk.

The ministry said the company “operates critical infrastructure in Germany and is therefore of outstanding importance for the gas supply.”

Also on Monday, Germany joined other European nations in moving to expel 40 Russian diplomats.

Emily Rauhala and Rick Noack contributed to this report.

The European Union is set to propose a phaseout of Russian coal and other new penalties on Russia, according to an E.U. official and an E.U. diplomat.

The European Commission will propose the measures Tuesday. The package would then need to be approved by all 27 E.U. member states.

Though additional sanctions have been in the works for a while, reports of possible war crimes led the E.U. to press ahead on coal, according to the E.U. diplomat. They said the details and timing of the coal measures are still under discussion.

The E.U. has hit Russia with a series of sanctions packages but has faced calls to do more. Grisly footage from Bucha led Ukrainian and some E.U. leaders to call once again for a full-scale embargo on Russian energy.

The new commission proposal is expected tackle Russian coal, but not oil or gas — at least for now.

BERLIN — Amy Gutmann, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, expressed support Tuesday for Berlin’s calculus on a Russian energy embargo, saying punitive measures should not harm people in Germany and Europe more than they harm Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

The issue has divided the European Union, which buys about 40 percent of its gas and 25 percent of its oil from Russia. Rifts within the bloc became starker this week following evidence of Russian atrocities in Bucha, near Ukraine’s capital. But Germany, which is among the countries most dependent on Russian energy supplies, has resisted calls for an energy embargo, saying it would devastate entire sectors of the economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Economists disagree about the effect on economic output.

“I see Germany as doing everything it can short of harming itself more than it harms Mr. Putin,” Gutmann said during a question-and-answer session following remarks at the Free University in Berlin. The German government, she said, is seeking to “ramp down its dependency” while “ensuring that German citizens can afford to be warm in the winter, you know, not freeze in the winter.”

The United States, which previously received a far smaller share of its gas and oil from Russia, moved to ban those supplies last month. Germany’s situation is different, Gutmann acknowledged, while praising efforts to develop alternative energy sources and saying with reference to an embargo, “The sooner the better.”

Sweden joined Denmark and Italy in moving to expel dozens of Russian diplomats Tuesday — the latest European nations to do so after evidence emerged of possible Russian war crimes in Ukraine, sparking calls for an investigation.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde said Tuesday that her country had “decided to deport three Russian diplomats whose work in Sweden is not in accordance with the Vienna Convention.”

Earlier, Denmark’s Foreign Ministry had said that 15 Russian diplomats it accused of spying would have 14 days to leave the country. Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod said the move sent “a clear signal to Moscow” that Denmark would not accept “Russian intelligence officers spying on Danish soil.”

Soon after, Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio said Italy would expel 30 Russian diplomats, citing national security concerns.

In both cases, Russia immediately promised to retaliate, state-backed news outlets RIA Novosti and Tass said, citing Russian officials. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the expulsions as “a short-sighted step” that he said would narrow the possibilities for diplomacy to resolve the crisis, according to Tass.

On Monday, Germany and France announced similar expulsions, while Lithuania went further, expelling Russia’s ambassador and shutting down the Russian Consulate in the west of the country.

In its statement, Denmark’s Foreign Ministry made clear it would not expel Russia’s ambassador and wanted to maintain diplomatic communication with Moscow. It said it met with the Russian ambassador Monday morning to inform him of the expulsions and to condemn “Russia’s brutality against Ukrainian civilians in Bucha,” a town near the capital, Kyiv. Ukrainian authorities and independent journalists have reported finding mass graves and streets lined with dead civilians in Bucha after Russian troops withdrew from the area.

LONDON — After 40 days of fighting in Ukraine, Russian forces are withdrawing from areas around Kyiv and near Chernihiv, in the country’s north. Military analysts believe Moscow is re-prioritizing after its attempt to swiftly capture the capital stalled, and is likely to shift its focus to the south and east of Ukraine, particularly the Donbas region.

In its Tuesday intelligence assessment, the British Ministry of Defense said that “low-level fighting is likely to continue in some parts of the newly recaptured regions, but diminish significantly over this week as the remainder of Russian forces withdraw.”

As Ukrainian forces reentered suburbs of Kyiv that have been occupied by Russian troops for weeks, they reported scenes of material and human destruction that sparked global accusations of war crimes.

Britain said Russian troops withdrawing from the areas around Chernihiv may not be able to immediately pivot east, instead needing “significant re-equipping and refurbishment before being available to redeploy."

John Spencer, chair of the urban warfare studies program at the Madison Policy Forum, previously told The Washington Post that Russian troops being withdrawn from northern Ukraine are unlikely to be more effective in a new location than they were in the initial stages of the invasion.

“These forces are exhausted,” he said. “Soldiers can’t keep up this level of losses and sustain the pace. They are demoralized, they have wounds, mental injuries, they’ve lost their friends, you can’t just throw them into another fight.”

Liz Sly and Max Bearak contributed to this report.

Seven humanitarian corridors, agreed on by Russia and Ukraine, will operate Tuesday, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a daily update on Telegram — including one nonstop route for people in private vehicles from the besieged southern city of Mariupol northwest to Zaporizhzhia.

Other routes are intended to take people from coastal Berdyansk and inland Tokmak in the southeast to Zaporizhzhia, which has been a main evacuation path for people in the Donetsk region. Vereshchuk and the International Committee of the Red Cross both said Tuesday that Red Cross humanitarian workers who were detained in Manhush, about 12 miles west of Mariupol, have been released after negotiations. Vereshchuk said the team was detained by Russian forces.

She said corridors would also operate from cities in the Luhansk region to the city of Bakhmut on Tuesday.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Kirill Timoshenko confirmed the humanitarian routes for Tuesday in a separate Telegram post. He said 3,376 people were evacuated Monday, 1,553 of them from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia.

The regional governor of Chernihiv, Viacheslav Chaus, said Tuesday that a direct route from the capital, Kyiv, to Chernihiv city has been restored and is functioning, as Russian troops continue to withdraw from northern Ukraine.