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LVIV, Ukraine — At least six people were killed overnight in Russian aerial attacks across Ukraine, including an attack far from the front lines in the southern port city of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.
A missile hit a warehouse in Odesa, killing at least three people who worked there, Ukraine’s southern military command said Wednesday morning.
The Ukrainian Interior Ministry said that Russia had fired four Kalibr missiles at civilian infrastructure in the Odesa region, hitting the warehouse and damaging a business center, an educational institution, a residential complex, fast-food restaurants and shops. Seven people were injured, the ministry said.
As Ukrainian cities weathered another aerial attack, Kyiv’s counteroffensive plodded on with no major breakthroughs. In its daily update on Wednesday, the Ukrainian military’s general staff said fighting was underway in several villages in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhzhia.
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Hanna Malyar, a deputy defense minister, said on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian troops had “partial success” in fierce fighting, though the gains were measured in feet, not miles. She said the country’s forces had advanced 650 to 1,600 feet in places around the eastern city of Bakhmut, and around 1,000 feet in some places in the south.
Photographs posted by Odessa’s emergency response service showed the city’s firefighters battling the blaze in the warehouse as they navigated fallen pieces of ceiling and bent steel. The precision cruise missiles were launched from the Black Sea, the southern command said in a statement, and two were intercepted.
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Direct hits by missiles have become rare as Ukraine has gained more experience shooting down Russian volleys. But intercepting aerial weapons carries its own risks, with debris often raining down on civilian areas.
Nearer to the front lines in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, missile attacks left two people dead and two others injured early on Wednesday, and in nearby Kostyantynivka, one person was killed and another injured, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk regional military administration, said in a statement.
In a separate episode in the northeastern Sumy region of Ukraine near the border with Russia, six people traveling in a vehicle were shot dead by Russian forces, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app. The victims included four forestry workers and two civilians, the statement said, adding that the prosecutor’s office had opened an investigation. The statement did not elaborate, and the report could not be independently verified.
Russia’s forces have continued to launch aerial attacks on cities away from the front lines, even as they also push back against a nascent Ukrainian counteroffensive. In the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, the death toll from a missile strike on Tuesday rose to 12, Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city’s military administration, said on Telegram on Wednesday.
Hundreds more were most likely displaced by the attack, with nearly 400 apartments damaged, Mr. Vilkul wrote in a post on Telegram.
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President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus said on Tuesday that the country has started to receive nuclear weapons from Russia, a long-threatened provocation and the latest sign of the worsening relationship between Russia and the West.
“We have rockets and bombs, we received from Russia. A bomb three times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Mr. Lukashenko said in Russian in an interview with Russian state television.
Mr. Lukashenko’s claim could not be independently verified. For months, he and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a close ally, have talked publicly about plans to move tactical nuclear weapons — short-range weapons designed for use in battle — into Belarus. That would put such weapons closer to the war in Ukraine, but would also position them closer to NATO members like Poland.
The U.S. government estimates Russia has about 2,000 tactical weapons, which have lower explosive power than strategic weapons designed to destroy entire cities far from the battlefield.
There was no immediate response from White House to Mr. Lukashenko’s claim. On Monday, the National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, said the Biden administration had seen no evidence of changes in Russia’s nuclear deployments that would force the United States to change its posture with respect to nuclear weapons. He said the “constant rhetoric” from Mr. Lukashenko “is in keeping with reckless and irresponsible ways of talking about nuclear capabilities.”
Mr. Lukashenko’s statement that the weapons were already arriving appeared to contradict remarks by Mr. Putin when the two leader met in Sochi, Russia, last week.
At the time, Mr. Putin said that Russia would start deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus immediately after storage facilities were made ready on July 7 and 8, according to a Kremlin translation of the conversation between the two leaders.
Mr. Putin has raised the prospect of resorting to nuclear weapons several times since he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. U.S. officials have repeatedly condemned Mr. Putin’s remarks as dangerous saber-rattling but they have also said the risk of nuclear escalation remains low.
In March, Mr. Putin said that he would be able to position nuclear weapons in Belarus by the summer, a claim analysts said was probably bluster to put pressure on the West to halt its support of Ukraine. Mr. Putin said that Moscow would remain in control of the weapons placed in Belarus.
In May, Russian and Belarusian defense ministers signed an agreement detailing how to store Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus. Mr. Lukashenko said the relocation of the weapons had already begun by that point.
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Russian state actors were involved in a wide-ranging and coordinated disinformation campaign that used fake French government and news websites to spread false information and undermine support for Ukraine, the French government said this week.
The French government stopped short of directly accusing Moscow of creating the phony web pages, but said several bodies affiliated with the Russian government, including Russian cultural centers and embassies, “actively participated” in spreading disinformation in 2022 and 2023. The phony websites were created by Russian individuals and companies with ties to Russian government institutions, the French government added.
“This campaign consists, among other things, of creating fake web pages usurping the identity of national media outlets and government websites as well as creating fake accounts on social media,” Catherine Colonna, France’s foreign minister, said in a statement on Tuesday, calling it a “hybrid strategy that Russia is implementing” to undermine democratic institutions and countries.
The French foreign ministry thwarted an attempt to imitate its own website, she said.
Anne-Claire Legendre, a spokeswoman for France’s foreign ministry, said on Tuesday that the campaign had not had a measurable impact on French public opinion, but she noted that French authorities had taken the unusual step of publicly and explicitly denouncing the campaign.
“It is obviously a message that will be heard by those involved,” she said.
The disinformation campaign was dubbed the “Doppelganger” operation in a 2022 report by the E.U. Disinfo Lab, which found Russian propaganda being spread by sophisticated replications of major news outlets in several European countries. Meta, the social media company, publicly attributed the campaign to two Russian companies.
VIGINUM, an official French government agency created in 2021 to counter online misinformation from foreign bodies, said in a summary report of its investigation that the campaign involved “clearly inaccurate or misleading narratives” about the war that were produced by Russian or Russian-speaking individuals and several Russian companies, and that were then spread by Russian state or state-sponsored entities.
Obscure news websites, created shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, discredited Ukrainian authorities and spread false information — for instance that depleted-uranium ammunition given to Ukraine had created a radioactive cloud heading toward France.
The campaign also spoofed over 300 websites of news outlets or government agencies in Europe, often through “typosquatting” — registering a purposely misspelled domain name close to a legitimate site’s address. One convincing clone of the French foreign ministry website claimed that a tax would be imposed to raise money for Ukraine.
That misinformation was then amplified through “inauthentic” social media accounts and bots, but also by Russia’s own diplomatic network, the report said.
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ISTANBUL — High-level talks on Wednesday in Turkey aimed at bridging differences over Sweden’s application to join NATO ended with no progress being announced.
Before the meeting, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey showed little sign publicly of easing his opposition to the Nordic nation’s membership, a dispute that has strained his ties with Western allies amid the war in Ukraine.
The talks between Mr. Erdogan and senior officials from Finland, Sweden and NATO were the first since the Turkish president secured re-election last month, and Turkey’s allies were watching closely for signs that Mr. Erdogan’s position on Sweden’s application — which he has so far blocked — has changed.
After the meeting, the Turkish government said in a statement that the discussions would continue, while Sweden’s chief negotiator, Oscar Sternstrom, told reporters that “Turkey is not ready to make a decision yet.” There was no date set for another meeting.
In comments published in the Turkish news media on Wednesday as the meeting began, Mr. Erdogan said that Sweden should expect no change in Turkey’s position as long as pro-Kurdish protests continued to be held in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.
Turkey wants a tougher stance toward pro-Kurdish activists and members of an outlawed religious group whom Turkey considers terrorists.
“This is not a constitutional matter, not a legal matter,” Mr. Erdogan told Turkish reporters on a flight returning from Azerbaijan on Tuesday, referring to steps Sweden had taken to address Turkey’s concerns. “What is the use of law enforcement?”
Sweden and Finland both applied to join NATO after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February last year, but Turkey has hobbled the expansion process, accusing the two Nordic nations of not taking Turkey’s security concerns seriously. In April, Turkey allowed Finland to join NATO, but it has so far refused to do the same for Sweden, accusing it of not meeting Turkey’s demands.
Finland and Sweden have amended their terrorism legislation and a small number of people accused of crimes in Turkey have been extradited, but many fewer than Turkey has asked for.
Hungary is the only other NATO member that has not allowed Sweden to join. New members of the alliance must be accepted by all members.
Last week, NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, renewed his call for Turkey to let Sweden join the alliance after failing to reach a breakthrough in talks in Istanbul.
“Sweden has fulfilled its obligations,” Mr. Stoltenberg said, adding that it had lifted an arms embargo on Turkey, strengthened its antiterrorism legislation and amended its constitution.
President Biden said that he had raised the issue with Mr. Erdogan during a call last month to congratulate him on his presidential victory. “I told him we wanted a deal with Sweden, so let’s get that done,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House.
Optimism had been growing that Sweden might be able to join before a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month, but analysts said that may now be unlikely.
“In terms of the negotiations, it was make or break, and it just broke in terms of getting Sweden into NATO by the Vilnius summit,” said Paul Levin, director of the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University.
Christina Anderson contributed reporting.
— Ben Hubbard and Safak Timur
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Microsoft said Wednesday that it had traced attempts at destructive cyberattacks in Ukraine ahead of Moscow’s invasion to a group affiliated with Russian military intelligence.
In a blog post, the company warned that the same group is now launching surveillance operations against a number of NATO nations — mostly former Soviet states that joined NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union — but said those efforts had not been very successful.
The group, which Microsoft has called Cadet Blizzard, launched a series of attacks using data-erasing software in January 2022, before the invasion. Those attacks were meant to destroy computer networks, but had relatively modest impact, Microsoft said.
After the invasion, other groups also affiliated with Russian military intelligence, known as the G.R.U., conducted related attacks with similar malware. But those attacks, in February 2022, affected more organizations and had a deeper impact on Ukraine. The relationship between the G.R.U. and the hacking groups is not fully understood, but American officials believe they are acting under the direction of the intelligence agency.
Cadet Blizzard, Microsoft officials said, is not as effective as other groups affiliated with Russian military intelligence, including ones that specialize in either destructive attacks or influence operations. Cadet Blizzard’s success rate, said Microsoft, is relatively low.
“You could call them the B-team,” said Tom Burt, a Microsoft vice president. “They don’t seem to be as good at what they’re doing.”
Why a group that is effectively the junior varsity team was employed to attack Ukraine before the invasion is not clear. Cybersecurity experts have only an imperfect understanding of the various G.R.U.-affiliated groups.
Before last year’s full-scale invasion, Russian intelligence operatives had the reputation for conducting powerful cyberoperations, but they have struggled to have much effect on the battlefield during the war. Ukraine’s government has successfully thwarted many of Moscow’s attempts to take down critical networks.
Unlike other G.R.U.-affiliated groups that take off weekends and Russian holidays, Cadet Blizzard has been active seven days a week. The group, Microsoft said in a blog post, “has conducted its operations during its primary targets’ off-business hours when its activity is less likely to be detected.”
Cadet Blizzard also seems to have the ambition to conduct intelligence gathering operations and other cyber-activity in NATO countries, Microsoft said. The group was very active in the first half of 2022, then appeared to dissipate, and now has emerged once again this year to restart operations.
The group uses stolen passwords and credentials to get access to less well protected computer servers on the edge of a network. They then use various tools to work their way deeper into a network.
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The opening phase of a long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian forces began this month, with reports from the Ukrainian side of some limited territorial gains and some signs that Russia is carrying out counterstrikes.
Kyiv’s troops have been trained and supplied with armored vehicles and other advanced equipment from Western allies for fighting that could unfold over months. While the fog of battle — and Ukrainian officials’ practice of saying little about military operations — means that many aspects of the offensive remain unclear, here is what is known about the first few days.
Where is the counteroffensive happening?
So far, Ukraine’s push to retake territory captured by Russia appears to be focused on the eastern and southern Donetsk region, near the boundary with the Zaporizhzhia region. Kyiv’s forces are apparently trying to drive a wedge into Russian-held territory between the Russian border and occupied Crimea.
There have been reports of fierce fighting near the Mokri Yaly River and the string of small settlements that run along it. Ukraine has also accused Russian forces of destroying a small dam there, with the aim of slowing the counteroffensive, days after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam drained a huge reservoir and caused widespread flooding.
How much territory does Ukraine say it has reclaimed?
Over the weekend, Ukraine said that it had retaken several farming villages along the Mokri Yaly River, including Storozhove and Blahodatne. The recaptured territory covers about 35 square miles, a senior Ukrainian official claimed on Monday.
But the significance of those gains remained to be seen, and by Wednesday, Ukraine did not appear to have broken through any of Russia’s defensive lines. It could take weeks or months to gauge the success of the military actions, analysts say.
In its daily update on Wednesday, the Ukrainian military’s general staff said fighting was underway in several villages in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhzhia. Hanna Malyar, a deputy defense minister, said Ukrainian troops had “partial success” in fierce fighting, but she did not claim any significant gains.
How is Russia responding?
President Vladimir V. Putin, speaking to Russian war correspondents and military bloggers, acknowledged on Tuesday that his forces had suffered some losses in June. But he denied Ukraine’s claims that its forces had made progress on the battlefield and claimed that Ukrainian forces had suffered significantly more losses of military equipment than the Russians.
Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary group that has fought for Russia in Ukraine, offered a different view, saying on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces had most likely reclaimed more than 100 square kilometers (about 38 square miles). Mr. Prigozhin has often been at odds with Russian military officials.
On Tuesday, Russian officials and military bloggers said that Russian attack helicopters had struck a Ukrainian position near the town of Velyka Novosilka, in the area of the villages Ukraine claims to have retaken.
How great are Ukraine’s losses?
Although Ukraine is tight-lipped about its casualties and equipment losses, it is clear that its forces are facing heavy defenses that Russia has built up over months, including minefields, trenches, anti-tank ditches, a well-equipped air force, and artillery fire. And as soldiers venture forward, military analysts say, they move out of the range of their own army’s air defenses and electronic jamming systems, leaving them vulnerable to Russian air attacks.
Several American-made Bradley fighting vehicles were abandoned by Ukrainian troops or destroyed in the early days of the counteroffensive, based on videos and photographs posted by pro-war Russian bloggers and verified by The New York Times. Such losses, as well as casualties, are to be expected in the initial phase of the counteroffensive, military analysts say.
So far Ukraine has not committed the bulk of its forces, including Western-trained units, to any one place, instead trying to probe Russian lines for weaknesses. At earlier points in the war, the true toll of intensified fighting often became clear only weeks later, with an uptick in military funerals in communities across Ukraine.
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Two allies of Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, were sentenced to years in prison on Wednesday, in a sign of an escalating crackdown on dissent in the country.
Lilia Chanysheva, the head of Mr. Navalny’s office in the central Bashkortostan region, and her former colleague, Rustem Mulyukov, are the first of Mr. Navalny’s team to be convicted of charges related to national security since the Russian government declared his grass-roots anti-corruption group an “extremist organization” in 2021.
Mr. Navalny himself, who has been jailed since 2021 for fraud and contempt of court, is on trial for similar charges, in a case that is widely expected to significantly extend his nine-year prison term.
A court in the city of Ufa sentenced Ms. Chanysheva to seven and a half years in prison for participating in “an extremist organization.” Mr. Mulyukov received two and a half years for similar charges.
About 15 other people who have been affiliated with Mr. Navalny’s organization are on trial, according to Kira Yarmysh, his spokeswoman.
Moscow has put pressure on Mr. Navalny’s supporters for years, but the situation escalated in 2020, when he was poisoned in what he said was an attempt by the Kremlin to murder him. The Russian authorities denied involvement despite evidence collected by Mr. Navalny’s team. President Vladimir V. Putin’s government outlawed Mr. Navalny’s organization soon after the opposition leader returned to Russia after recovering in Germany.
Ms. Chanysheva, 41, was among the few prominent members of Mr. Navalny’s team to remain in Russia. She was detained in late 2021.
In a brief speech after the sentencing, Ms. Chanysheva was visibly emotional, expressing gratitude to supporters and urging them to continue writing her letters in prison.
“I would not exist without you,” she said, according to a video posted on social media by an exiled aide of Mr. Navalny, Leonid Volkov.
Ms. Chanysheva’s husband, Almaz Gatin, said public support for her case had been growing since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He said the courthouse was full during her sentencing on Wednesday.
“Lilia, her inner light and strength, give hope and a bridge to the future,” Mr. Gatin said by telephone from Ufa.
Alina Lobzina and Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.
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The annual international economic forum opening in the Russian city of St. Petersburg on Wednesday has long been the country’s premier event for attracting Western investors, and, at first glance, the agenda this year seems to indicate that the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine changed little.
Planned panel topics include “Russia as a Global Tech Hub” and “The Arctic: Territory of Investment Opportunities and Vivid Travel,” while the word “war” never appears — even if euphemisms crop up repeatedly, such as the “evolving circumstances” or the “military-political crisis in Europe.”
The real clue that the war and its accompanying Western economic sanctions have transformed the state-run St. Petersburg International Economic Forum into a shadow of its former self is the scant international presence. Significant trading partners like China and India are dispatching representatives, as are a small number of other Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Latin American friends.
Yet the world, for the most part, and the Western world in particular, is staying away. The forum, first held in 1997, was intended to present Russia’s “modern, technologically advanced face to the West,” said Yevgeny Nadorshin, the chief economist at PF Capital, a small Moscow consulting firm. “The idea behind the forum has significantly deteriorated because most of the potential Western investors who could have come now have no reason to come.”
Ever since the West imposed some of the strictest economic sanctions in history on Russia in reaction to its February 2022 invasion of neighboring Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to reassure his country that it can sustain its economy by pivoting to Asia.
Long gone are the days when President Emmanuel Macron of France showed up with Mr. Putin, or when Russian oligarchs sponsored parties on the sidelines with free-flowing Champagne and leggy models where executives from top Western oil companies hobnobbed with ministers.
Some of Russia’s die-hard Western friends are expected to appear, like Karin Kneissl, a former Austrian foreign minister who danced with Mr. Putin at her wedding, or Matthias Moosdorf, a, far-right member of the German Parliament. They are scheduled to sit on a panel focused on selling Russia’s narrative abroad of a declining Western influence.
The United Arab Emirates agreed to serve as this year’s honored guest, an annual tradition. A high-level official is expected to appear with Mr. Putin at the main session likely to happen on Friday, although the U.A.E. has yet to confirm who it will be. Those invited to attend will have to be tested for the coronavirus.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, suggested that Russia was not publicizing the names of all of the Westerners attending because they would be “eaten alive” back home, and that Russia had denied credentials to some reporters from what it calls “unfriendly countries.”
Given crumbling ties with the West, holding the forum albeit mostly with Russians, is considered part of the Kremlin’s strategy of keeping the war in the background.
“The very fact of holding the forum is an attempt to signal to the population that Russia is still conducting business as usual, which is all an illusion, of course,” said Cliff Kupchan, the chairman of the Eurasia Group, a risk analysis firm.
The agenda includes discussions about certain pet projects of Mr. Putin’s, like trying to replace the dollar as the main currency of international trade, and the concept of “technological sovereignty,” meaning doing away with dependence on the West.
There are at least hints at Russia’s changed circumstances, including a discussion about the fact that the country has been banned from numerous international sports competitions, which the agenda refers to as the “reform of the competition calendar.” In what seems to be a rare realistic nod to the war, one panel will discuss how Russian soldiers injured in the fighting can be integrated back into regular lives.
A correction was made on
June 14, 2023
:
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Eurasia Group. While it has an office in Washington, its headquarters is in New York.
How we handle corrections
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BERLIN — Germany unveiled its first comprehensive national security strategy on Wednesday, an effort to address Germany’s priorities and ambitions in a Europe transformed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The strategy was announced as part of the new government’s coalition agreement when Chancellor Olaf Scholz took office in December 2021. But the war in Ukraine has since heightened Germany’s sense that it had become vulnerable to new military, economic and geopolitical threats, including climate change.
“Germany’s security environment is undergoing profound change and we are living through a watershed era, a Zeitenwende,” or turning point, the paper says. With Russia’s threat to European security, and China seen as a complicated competitor, systemic rival but still “a necessary partner,” the paper says, “we are redoubling our efforts with a view to keeping our country secure and free.”
Mr. Scholz praised the paper’s effort to combine foreign, domestic and economic priorities, calling it “a big, big change in the way we deal with security issues.” But while the publication of the document was largely welcomed, some analysts said it lacked detail, especially on how its ambitions would be funded.
In general, the strategy focuses on three pillars of German security. First, an active, “robust” defense, including a new strategic culture, commitments to high military spending, including reaching the NATO goal of 2 percent of gross domestic product from next year, and a concentration on deterrence, not disarmament.
Second is resilience — the ability of Germany and its allies to protect their values, to reduce economic dependencies on rivals, to deter and defeat cyberattacks and to defend the United Nations Charter and the rule of law.
Third is sustainability, a pillar that includes issues like climate change and the energy and food crises.
The document got relatively positive reviews from analysts as a statement of how far Germany has come in changing its strategic culture since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but some questioned whether the ministries of a rivalrous coalition government will carry through the document’s ambitions, especially given the lack of financial commitments.
“To call it a status quo document sounds unfair, but it does try to take stock of where we stand now, and it’s already an achievement to say how far Germany has come,” said Claudia Major of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Strategies are expected to connect means and ends, she said. “But to a certain extent this strategy is not able to do that, because it’s not linked to clear budget consequences,” she said.
Christian Lindner, the country’s finance minister and head of the Free Democrats, acknowledged Wednesday that new commitments proposed in the strategy — notably the 2 percent spending on defense — would require new financing, but he was unable to give projections on the cost.
The strategy has been long delayed because of coalition infighting — including an agreement to drop the idea of a German national security council altogether. China has been such a contentious issue that it will be dealt with in a separate paper scheduled to be published next month.
“It’s hard to be ambitious with so many cooks,” said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst. The vagueness in the document about how Germany intends to meet its ambitions is deliberate, he suggested, a way for Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat, to keep freedom of action on the big issues of foreign policy inside the chancellery and not cede them to the foreign ministry and Ms. Baerbock, a Green.
Norbert Röttgen, an opposition legislator from the Christian Democratic Union and a foreign-policy expert, was sharply critical of the document, which he called “the lowest common denominator” of a divided coalition government, “a description of the undisputed part of the status quo” and “essentially without strategy.”
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KYIV, Ukraine — The leader of the United Nations atomic watchdog said on Tuesday that he would cross the front line in southern Ukraine to investigate conditions at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, after the destruction of a dam compromised a key source of water to cool the plant’s reactors.
After meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday afternoon, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he was setting off for the plant on Tuesday evening, although it appeared on Wednesday that his travels were delayed. The Russian state-run Tass news agency reported that Mr. Grossi’s visit to the plant would take place on Thursday, citing an adviser to Russia’s nuclear power engineering company.
It was not clear what security arrangements had been reached with the warring sides, but Mr. Grossi said he hoped to spend several hours assessing the situation at the plant, where inspectors from the I.A.E.A. are already stationed. Mr. Grossi and Ukrainian officials have said that there is no imminent threat of a meltdown, but his trip appeared calculated to call the world’s attention, again, to the precarious situation there.
An explosion a week ago at the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on the lower Dnipro River unleashed a flood downstream and drained much of the reservoir that had served as the primary source of water for a cooling pond at the plant, which is critical to prevent a nuclear meltdown.
Mr. Grossi said that the loss of the water supply in itself is not a cause of “immediate danger,” but that any problem with the containment system for the pond on site could prove incredibly challenging. The pond provides water to cool the nuclear fuel inside the plant’s six reactors as well as spent nuclear fuel.
“If there was a break in the gates that contained this water or anything like this, you would really lose all your cooling capacity,” he said.
The pond is currently full and has a surface area of more than three square miles and a depth of more than 50 feet, according to Ukrainian officials. The water level is closely monitored and five of the nuclear plant’s six reactors are in cold shutdown mode, which greatly reduces the amount of water they require to ensure safety. A sixth still produces some steam, which is used for the plant’s internal operation, Mr. Grossi said.
Mr. Grossi has said in recent days that there is enough water in the pond to last for “several months,” but on Tuesday he painted a more pessimistic picture, telling journalists that “there could be water for a few weeks or maybe a month or two.” He said he was going to the plant to make a better assessment. The dam breach is “another step into the weakening of the safety net that one has in any nuclear power plant,” he said. Mr. Zelensky said in a statement later that he supported an I.A.E.A. proposal to send its experts to assess the risk.
The nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, has faced a series of crises since Russian forces seized it more than a year ago amid a blaze of gunfire. Last summer, it was subject to repeated shelling, and on at least one occasion artillery hit an area where spent nuclear fuel is stored.
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In an unusual, wide-ranging interview with war correspondents and military bloggers, President Vladimir V. Putin on Tuesday portrayed the Russian military as standing firm against the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive and suggested that the conflict was fulfilling the goals he set initially.
“The enemy did not succeed in any of the sectors,” Mr. Putin said of the Ukrainian offensive that has been rolling out over recent days, instead suffering huge losses compared with relatively few for Russia. In terms of tanks, for example, he said that Ukraine had lost 160 compared with 54 for Russia, adding that some of the latter could be repaired. His claims could not be independently confirmed.
Mr. Putin touched on virtually every aspect of the conflict in recent weeks. He chose a format he has rarely used, allowing 18 reporters to inquire about the war for more than two hours in a style reminiscent of his annual “Direct Line” performance, when he answers questions for hours from all over the country.
Russia did not need to draft more new soldiers because it had attracted about 156,000 contractors or other volunteers since January, he said, on top of the 300,000 drafted last year.
Trying to make the best of the fact that Russia had suffered repeated setbacks with both men and weaponry, he suggested that the country had learned valuable lessons on how to better organize its armed forces.
He admitted that the cross-border attacks from Ukraine by Russian partisans had been damaging, suggesting with some bravado that Russia might have to carve out an “exclusion zone” on the Ukrainian side of the border to prevent its artillery from reaching into Russia.
At one point he also suggested that the Russian Army might have to again march on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Russian forces were driven out of Kyiv after failing to take it as promised in just a few days after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, and lost a wide stretch of the area around the eastern city of Kharkiv to a Ukrainian offensive last fall.
To Nikolai Petrov, a seasoned political analyst, the entire effort sounded as though Mr. Putin was trying to demonstrate that he was a commander in chief fully in control of the facts on the ground. More important, Mr. Petrov speculated that the remarks could be a prelude to seeking negotiations by implying that the Ukrainian counteroffensive was doomed.
Given that the general public trusts the correspondents and bloggers far more than the Ministry of Defense, his choice of interlocutors, along with throwing out details like the number of Russian tanks destroyed, was intended to build a semblance of evenhanded analysis, Mr. Petrov said.
“There is no reason for him to be so public and to give such detailed explanations unless he was trying to address a Western or Ukrainian audience,” he said. “The very idea is to demonstrate that he is the commander in chief who knows everything about everything.”
Mr. Putin claimed that Russia was doing a great job of demilitarizing Ukraine despite its Western backers. He admitted to various bits of information that had been an open secret before, like the pardons he was issuing for convicts who had fought for the Wagner private military group.
Much of what he said was not new, such as threatening to pull out of a deal that has allowed Ukraine to export millions of tons of grain from its Black Sea ports, despite Russia’s control of the waterways, saying that he was only doing it because so much of the world needed the grain.
He noted that military production had increased 2.7 times, and in some cases was 10 times greater, he said, using a somewhat odd anecdote to illustrate their quality. A T-90 Russian tank that hit a land mine had emerged unscathed, even though the person inside took such a hard hit that he died, Mr. Putin said.
In latest chapter of the feud between Sergei K. Shoigu, the minister of defense, and Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the pugnacious founder of the Wagner private military force, Mr. Prigozhin rejected a call by the Defense Ministry for all such organizations to sign contracts by July 1. The move was considered an effort by the ministry to extend some control over such forces, which are technically illegal in Russia, while also granting them full military benefits.
Mr. Putin said he backed the call for paramilitary organizations to sign such contracts. Mr. Petrov, the analyst, suggested that the president was using Mr. Prigozhin as a foil, making the president seem the more temperate figure as the mercenary commander repeatedly calls for escalating attacks against Ukraine and putting the economy on a war footing. “It is his style before any negotiation to let his guy say something horrible in order to look better,” Mr. Petrov said.
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
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Ukraine’s Western allies announced two new military assistance packages on Tuesday, offering armored fighting vehicles and air defense abilities to the country as it forges ahead with its counteroffensive against Russia. Altogether, the new aid provides $441 million to Ukraine in security aid.
The Joint Expeditionary Force, an alliance of European countries, said it would send an additional $116 million of military aid to Ukraine in the coming months, including radar systems, guns and ammunition, to help Ukraine secure critical infrastructure, the civilian population and military staff.
The British defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said in a statement that “we are providing a package of air defense to help Ukraine protect their critical national infrastructure and defend against indiscriminate Russian airstrikes.”
Led by Britain, the Joint Expeditionary Force includes Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.
At the same time, the Biden administration announced a new tranche of $325 million in military hardware for Ukraine. The package includes antiaircraft and anti-armor systems; Bradley and Stryker armored fighting vehicles; and additional ammunition.
The American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, said in a statement that the latest package — the 40th one Washington has provided — included artillery rounds, long-range rockets for HIMARS launchers and anti-tank weapons.
The package also includes 25 armored vehicles, which are critical to Ukraine’s push to recapture land, the Defense Department said. The United States will send an additional 15 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and six Stryker personnel carriers. Washington is also sending more than 22 million rifle rounds and grenades, which will be critical during the counteroffensive.
The United States is the most significant contributor to the Ukrainian war effort, having given nearly $40 billion in aid so far.
Mr. Blinken said in a statement that, until Russia withdraws, “the United States and our allies and partners will stand united with Ukraine, for as long as it takes.”
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, thanked President Biden and allies for the military support on Twitter, saying that the new aid was “exactly what Ukrainian Defense Forces need today.”
