Russia-Ukraine live updates: Biden gathers Western allies amid unconfirmed reports of evacuations from separatist area

KYIV, Ukraine — The Russian-backed leader of a separatist-controlled area of eastern Ukraine said Friday that officials there were launching a mass evacuation of civilians into neighboring Russia, citing the threat of military action in the region by Ukrainian troops.

A mass exodus into Russia, which could not be immediately confirmed, would be seen as a worrisome signal that major military activities are imminent.

Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine’s Donbas region, said in a video address that Russia has agreed to accept residents of the region and that checkpoints and border crossings were ready to speed their progress.

“First of all, women, children and the elderly are subject to evacuation,” Pushilin said. “By agreement with the leadership of the Russian Federation, places to take in and accommodate our citizens are ready in the Rostov region” of Western Russia.

But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in a response to a question from a reporter about the reports of an evacuation from Donbas, said “I have no information about what is happening there now.”

Pushilin beseeched residents of the region to leave the area, at least temporarily, to “save their life.” Pushilin claimed without evidence that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “will soon give an order to … invade the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.”

The evacuation announcement is particularly worrying, after Russian President Vladimir Putin twice accused Ukraine of “genocide” in the separatist east during a news conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz Tuesday. There are fears the evacuation itself could be used by Moscow as a pretext to launch an attack based on claims Ukraine’s military mounted major attacks. Peskov warned this week of the “high risk” of a Ukrainian attack on the separatist regions.

Many civilians in the region fled over the border to Russia during fighting in 2014 and 2015, but there was not an organized mass evacuation.

Russia’s Interfax news agency, citing an unnamed source, said officials were planning for the evacuation of “several hundreds of thousands of people.”

“Accommodation centers have already been set up for them,” the source was quoted as saying by Interfax.

Putin noted the spiking tensions, which he also blamed on Ukraine and its Western allies, during a news conference Friday in Moscow. “All Kyiv needs to do is sit down at the negotiating table with representatives of Donbas and agree on political, military, economic and humanitarian measures to end the conflict,” Putin said.

“Unfortunately now we are seeing the opposite — the escalation of the conflict in Donbas.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba rejected accusations that Ukraine was poised to launch a major attack on Donbas. "We categorically refute Russian disinformation reports on Ukraine’s alleged offensive operations or acts of sabotage in chemical production facilities,” Kuleba wrote on Twitter. “Ukraine does not conduct or plan any such actions in the Donbas. We are fully committed to diplomatic conflict resolution only.”

David Stern in Lviv in Ukraine contributed to this story.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday urged global powers to provide his country with security guarantees, stressing: “It’s not altruism, it’s about you being next.”

In an interview with RBC-Ukraine, a Ukrainian news agency, Zelensky said that NATO is the only security alliance available for his country to join, but that there is “a long way to go — years and months,” and he noted Russia’s willingness to use military force to stop Kyiv from doing so.

Therefore, he said, Ukraine “must get a system of guarantees” from other countries, which should be “equal to the system offered to NATO countries.” According to Article 5 of NATO’s charter, an armed attack on one of its members is considered an attack on all of its members, which can respond with armed force if required. It was invoked for the first time after the 9/11 attacks against the United States.

Offering security guarantees to Ukraine would help protect other countries in the region, as well, Zelensky said. “Ukraine not only defends its territory, but also deters further encroachments in Eastern Europe,” he said.

He added that Ukraine was not asking other countries to deploy troops to Ukraine: “We do not want to give an extra reason for the Russian Federation to say that we have bases here and that they need to ‘protect’ themselves.”

After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Ukraine abruptly came into possession of the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994, the United States and Russia persuaded Kyiv to give up the weapons in return for security assurances, which were nonbinding agreements that didn’t require the United States to send troops to protect Ukraine.

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea has been viewed by the West as a breach of those assurances.

MINSK, Belarus — Russian President Vladimir Putin received his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko, in the Kremlin on Friday as the two countries conducted massive military drills near the Ukrainian border.

Putin greeted Lukashenko with a hug, and the two were seated at a small table, notably unlike the seating arrangement with a string of Western leaders, who were separated from the Russian president by a table 20 feet long.

Lukashenko is hosting the Russian armed forces for a lengthy exercise involving air and ground troops along with ballistic missile systems capable of reaching Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

Both Minsk and Moscow deny that they are preparing to attack their neighbor but have significantly ratcheted up the rhetoric against the Kyiv government and the West.

“The military-political spectrum was brought to the center of the stage thanks to the effort of our Western partners, as you call them, and we have to react to this, including by holding military exercises and through diplomacy,” Lukashenko said Friday.

Putin, in turn, invited Lukashenko to attend another major military exercise on Saturday that will involve launching strategic ballistic and cruise missiles.

The United Nations children’s agency called for safe access to education for children in eastern Ukraine after the country’s military said an artillery shell hit a kindergarten building.

Ukrainian officials said the kindergarten in the east was among civilian structures hit by artillery from Russian-backed separatist forces Thursday, heightening tensions in a region already on edge in the wake of Moscow’s troop buildup along the Ukrainian border.

Three adult employees suffered concussions, the Ukrainian military said in a statement posted to social media, but no children were reported hurt. The kindergarten is located in an area where both Ukrainian troops and separatists withdrew from front-line positions in 2019 as part of an agreement to create a disengagement zone.

Pro-Russian separatists accused Ukrainian government forces of opening fire, which Ukraine’s armed forces denied.

Cease-fire violations in the country’s disputed eastern territories intensified Thursday and continued into Friday, according to European monitors.

“Attacks on kindergartens and schools have been a sad reality for children in eastern Ukraine over the last eight years,” UNICEF said in a statement. More than 750 schools have been damaged during the conflict, “disrupting access to education for thousands of children on both sides of the contact line,” it said.

“The conflict has taken a severe toll on the psychosocial well-being of an entire generation of children growing up in Eastern Ukraine,” the agency added. “UNICEF calls on all parties to … protect children and their caregivers from attacks, regardless of the circumstances they might find themselves in.”

KYIV, Ukraine — The security chief for Ukraine’s capital said Friday that officials have plans ready to evacuate most of Kyiv’s 2.9 million residents in case of a major attack by Russian forces.

The city is prepared to all but empty the metropolitan area, or to move residents from vulnerable neighborhoods to safer parts of the city, according to Roman Tkachuk, director of Kyiv’s Municipal Security Department.

“The civilian safety system of the city of Kyiv is fully ready for mass evacuation of its citizens,” Tkachuk told The Washington Post.

City officials could make an evacuation order mandatory, Tkachuk said, exempting only essential emergency workers, including military, police and medical personnel and staff needed to operate critical infrastructure.

In the case of a general threat of attack, officials would use buses and trains to transport Kyiv residents to safe zones, probably in the western parts of the country. Tkachuk said planning has been informed by the city’s experience in 2014, when officials converted Kyiv’s main rail station into a transit hub to handle thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting in the eastern Donbas region.

If only certain neighborhoods are targeted, the city will help residents find shelter in other parts of the metropolitan region. Kyiv’s 42-mile Metro system would cut operations to three morning hours and three evening hours in an emergency. Otherwise, the network’s 52 stations, including some of the deepest in the world, would operate as air-raid bunkers.

Some stations and rail lines would be closed entirely, according to local media reports, allowing them to serve as full-time shelters. Workers have already tested the stations for air quality and ventilation and have had water supplies and toilets prepared for heavy use, the reports said.

Kyiv residents have struggled to prepare for the possibility of an attack on the city as officials have downplayed the possibility of strikes on the capital.

They have directed civilians to a network of Cold War-era bunkers throughout the city, although many of those remained locked, cluttered or repurposed as cafes, strip clubs and storage rooms.

Some residents have already left the capital in recent days, relocating to cities to the west or to vacation homes in the Carpathian Mountains.

Several Western governments have evacuated their staffs from Kyiv. U.S. Embassy officials have left the country or set up emergency operations in Lviv, near the Polish border.

Alex Sipigin in Kyiv contributed to this report.

The United States plans to sell 250 Abrams tanks to Poland, potentially boosting an important ally in Eastern Europe amid the escalating crisis in Ukraine.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the planned sale at a meeting in Warsaw with his Polish counterpart where they discussed the buildup of Russian forces around Ukraine.

In a joint news conference, he also addressed Polish concerns about the deployment of Russian forces in Belarus, noting that some of them are “within 200 miles of the Polish border.”

Austin said that additional Russian attacks on Ukraine could send people fleeing to Poland. The country “could see tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians and others pouring across the border, trying to save themselves and their families from the scourge of war,” he said.

Though he offered no timeline on the sale, Austin said the Abrams M1A1 tanks will “strengthen our interoperability with the Polish armed forces, boosting the credibility of our combined deterrence efforts and those of our other NATO allies.”

Nearly 5,000 U.S. troops are now in Poland. Austin said Friday that they are prepared to respond to “a range of contingencies” and that the military would work with the State Department and Polish authorities should there be a need to help Americans leave Ukraine.

He called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to choose the path of diplomacy but vowed that NATO allies would stand together if he did not. “It’s ironic that what Mr. Putin did not want to see happen was a stronger NATO on his flank,” he said. “And that’s exactly what he will see going forward.”

MOSCOW — As Russia-NATO tensions peak over Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin will personally oversee a major military exercise Saturday of Russia’s nuclear forces, involving the launch of strategic ballistic cruise missiles, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

The ministry said the object was to “verify the reliability of weapons of strategic nuclear and conventional forces.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that even during training exercises of Russia’s nuclear forces, Putin had to be on the scene as commander in chief. He said Putin will be at the Defense Ministry’s situation center during the exercises.

“Putin will be in the center of the situation. Even such training launches are impossible without the head of state. You know about the famous black suitcase, red button and the like,” Peskov told reporters on Friday. Peskov said the exercise should not be cause for alarm, despite intensifying Russia-NATO tension, and that other nations were informed.

“Exercises and training launches of ballistic missiles are quite a regular training process,” he said. “It is preceded by a whole series of notifications forwarded to different countries via various channels. All this is precisely regulated, and no one has any questions or concerns,” he said.

He said Putin would decide with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is visiting Moscow, on whether he, too, would attend. Russia and Belarus are currently holding a massive joint military exercise due to end Sunday.

The nuclear forces exercise was described as “routine” by the Defense Ministry on Friday.

However, the “Grom,” or Thunder, strategic nuclear forces exercises, usually held in late summer, were moved up to what NATO officials are calling a “dangerous moment” in Europe, as the alliance faces the most serious crisis in its relations with Moscow since the end of the Cold War.

“The exercise will involve forces and hardware belonging to the Aerospace Forces, the Southern Military District, the Strategic Missile Forces, the Northern Fleet, and the Black Sea Fleet,” according to the ministry, giving a sense of the scale of the planned exercise.