Latest Ukraine-Russia War News: Live Updates – The New York Times

The additional aid follows growing evidence of atrocities committed by Russian troops in the suburbs of Kyiv, the capital. Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly held allies to task, insisting they provide weapons that could be used to attack Russian forces, not just defend against them.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that the package would include “new capabilities tailored to the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine.” The Pentagon said the equipment would be sent as soon as possible.

The supplies include weapons, ammunition, artillery systems, armored personnel carriers, helicopters, counter-artillery radars and air surveillance radars, and unmanned coastal defense vessels. It will also have protective equipment for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks.

“We’re aware of the clock,” said John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “And we know time is not our friend.”

Here are other major developments:

• A Russian warship in the Black Sea was “seriously damaged,” according to both a Ukrainian military official and Russian state news agencies. The head of Odesa’s military forces, Maxim Marchenko, said on Telegram that Ukrainian forces had struck the ship with missiles. Hours later, Russia’s Defense Ministry said a fire had caused ammunition to explode on the ship, the Moskva, according to the Russian state news agency Tass.

• Ukrainian officials say that departing Russian soldiers have laced large swaths of the country with buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs — some hidden as booby traps inside homes.

In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee.

Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin.

Thousands of other Russian tech workers fled to Armenia in the weeks after the invasion. Thousands more flew to Georgia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries that accept Russian citizens without visas.

By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country’s economy.

The exodus will fundamentally change the Russian tech industry, according to interviews with more than two dozen people who are part of the tightknit community of Russian tech workers around the world, including many who left the country in recent weeks. An industry once seen as a rising force in the Russian economy is losing vast swaths of its workers. It is losing many of the bright young minds building companies for the future.

“Most Russian tech workers are part of the global market. Either they work for global companies or they are tech entrepreneurs trying to build new companies for the global market,” Mr. Siniushin said through an interpreter from his office in Riga. “So they are leaving the country.”

The recent exodus reverses 10 to 15 years of momentum in the Russian tech industry, said Konstantin Sonin, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, who immigrated from Russia to the United States. “It is now like the ‘90s, when whomever was able to move moved out of the country,” he said.

Tech is a small part of the Russian economy compared with the energy and metals industries, but it has been growing rapidly. The loss of many young, educated, forward-looking people could have economic ramifications for years to come, economists said.

In its first official report on the war’s impact, the U.N. said the war in Ukraine was having “alarming cascading effects” on a global economy already “battered” by the Covid-19 crisis and climate change.

The report said that up to 1.7 billion people — a third of whom are already living in poverty — now face food, energy and finance disruptions. With energy prices rising by as much as 50 percent for natural gas in recent months, inflation growing and development stalled, many countries risk defaulting on their debts, according to the report.

“These are countries where people struggle to afford healthy diets, where imports are essential to satisfy the food and energy needs of their populations, where debt burdens and tightening resources limit government’s ability to cope with the vagaries of global financial conditions,” the report said.

It said that 107 countries have severe exposure to at least one the three dimensions of the crisis, and that of those nations, 69 have severe exposure to all three dimensions.

Ukraine and Russia provide about 30 percent of the world’s wheat and barley, according to the report.

The war has sent commodity prices to record highs — with food prices 34 percent higher than this time last year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and crude oil prices up by around 60 percent.

“Vulnerable populations in developing countries are particularly exposed to these price swings,” the report said, adding that “the rise in food prices threatens knock-on effects of social unrest.”

But the report said that swift action, coupled with political will and existing resources, could soften the blow — recommending that countries not hoard foodh supplies, offer help to small farmers, keep freight costs stable and lift restrictions on exports, among other things.

The report called on governments to make strategic fuel reserves available to the global market and reduce the use of wheat for fuel.

Hours later, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said that ammunition had exploded on the ship, a missile cruiser called the Moskva, as a result of “a fire,” according to the state news agency Tass. The agency reported that the crew had evacuated from the ship and that the cause of the fire was under investigation.

Neither account could be independently confirmed. If Mr. Marchenko’s claims are correct, the damage to the warship would mark a notable military triumph for Ukraine — the formidable Moskva is the flagship vessel of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The ship, which is more than 600 feet long, first entered service in the early 1980s with the Soviet Navy and carries 16 Vulkan missile launchers with a strike range of more than 400 miles, Russian news agencies have reported. It was deployed off the coast of Syria in 2015 to provide air defenses and patrolled the coast of Georgia during a conflict with Russia in 2008.

Ukraine has repeatedly claimed to have destroyed Russian warships since the start of the war, but its reports have not always been independently verified.

In March, Ukraine’s military said it had destroyed a Russian ship at the port of Berdiansk, under Russian occupation in southern Ukraine, and videos and photos reviewed by The New York Times confirmed that a Russian ship was on fire at the port.

It is highly unlikely that Mr. Biden or Ms. Harris would go to Kyiv, according to the person familiar with the deliberations. The security requirements for the president or vice president in a war zone are enormous and would require a huge number of American personnel and equipment to make the trip.

But it is possible that another official — perhaps a cabinet secretary or senior member of the military — could make the trip safely with a smaller security entourage.

Top officials — including some world leaders — from other nations have made official visits to the Ukrainian capital since the war began. Boris Johnson, the prime minister of Britain, made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday. The presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia visited Kyiv on Wednesday.

A possible visit by a senior U.S. official, which was earlier reported by Politico, would be intended as another show of solidarity with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. But it would also be a high-risk mission, putting Americans in harm’s way and potentially risking a direct confrontation with Russian forces that Mr. Biden has repeatedly vowed to avoid.

No decision has been made, and the administration is unlikely to announce a visit in advance, given concerns about security. Previous visits by senior American officials to other war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, were typically not announced until after the official had arrived in the country — and sometimes not even until after the official had left.

As ordinary Ukrainians emerge from basements and bunkers into the ruins of their hometowns, many are being confronted with a new horror: thousands of mines and unexploded bombs left behind by retreating Russian troops.

Residents and authorities say that departing Russian soldiers have laced large swaths of the country with buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs — some hidden as booby traps inside homes. The explosives now must be found and neutralized before residents can resume a semblance of normal life.

Some of the explosives have been attached to washing machines, doorways, car windows, and other places where they can kill or injure civilians returning to their homes, according to residents and Ukrainian officials. Some were even hidden under hospital stretchers and corpses.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine this week called his country “one of the most contaminated by mines in the world,” and said that authorities were working to clear thousands in the areas from which Russian armies had retreated in recent weeks. He accused Russian soldiers of leaving the explosives in their wake “to kill or maim as many of our people as possible.”

He said that the tactic was a war crime and that Russian soldiers must have been acting on instructions from top officials, adding: “Without the appropriate orders, they would not have done it.”

Human Rights Watch and The New York Times have reported that Russian forces in Ukraine appear to be using advanced land mines in the eastern city of Kharkiv. Several local officials have also said that bomb squads in their districts have found explosive devices left behind in homes.

Anti-personnel mines, which are designed to kill people, are banned by an international treaty signed by nearly every country in the world, including Ukraine; Russia and the United States have declined to join.

Ukraine’s emergency services agency has deployed a small army of about 550 mine specialists to clear the areas recently occupied by Russian forces. The teams have been working to remove about 6,000 explosives per day, and since the start of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, they have found more than 54,000 explosive devices, the agency reported on Tuesday.

“Wherever the occupiers stayed overnight, they would set up tripwires,” Ukraine’s interior minister, Denys Monastyrsky, said during a televised interview on Sunday. “Explosives have been found under helmets, attached to doors, in the washing machine, and in cars.”

The placement of explosives in Ukrainian homes could not be independently verified.

Mr. Naumenko, who was killed on April 4, worked as a driver in the village of Hoholiv, about 40 miles outside of Kyiv. But his talent lay in repairing cars. After Russian forces retreated from a nearby village, neighbors found an abandoned vehicle and turned it over to him.

His wife learned of his death the next day in Poland, where she had fled with their 7-year-old son and her mother at the start of the war. She returned to their village as soon as she got the news. “What was left was the car, with the door still open and a pool of blood,” Ms. Naumenko, 28, said, “and a big emptiness.”

Her account was confirmed through photos and by the Kyiv regional police, who posted a report about the incident on their Facebook page, cautioning returning residents to “not touch objects and things that are not previously tested by experts.”

Other local officials are urging residents to call emergency services before entering their homes.

Retreating armies often bury land mines in order to slow the advance of enemy armies. But experts say Russian forces have a well-earned reputation for booby-trapping areas they have vacated in order to kill and maim returning civilians.

Human Rights Watch has documented Russia’s use of antipersonnel mines in more than 30 countries where Moscow’s forces were involved, including conflicts in Syria and Libya. In Palmyra, during the Syrian war, booby traps surfaced after the Russians vacated the town.

“Leaving behind little presents for the civilians when they return — like hand grenades, trip wires, unexploded shells, pressure plates — it’s in the Russian military tradition to do that,” said Mark Hiznay, the senior arms researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again,” he said.

Mr. Hiznay said “putting a land mine in someone’s freezer” was a tactic that has no utility other than to terrorize civilians. Ukraine will be dealing with the consequences of land mines “one civilian leg at a time,” he added, explaining that it can often take years, and possibly decades, to clear all the ordnance.

“The presence of these devices denies civilians their terrain and forces them to make hard choices: take the sheep out to graze or risk stepping on a mine in the pasture,” he said.