Russia-Ukraine live updates: Dozens killed after strike on military barracks; fighting hinders Mariupol rescues

About 1.5 million children have fled Ukraine in the three weeks since Russia’s invasion, UNICEF said Saturday, and they face a heightened risk of being trafficked or exploited.

The U.N. agency, which advocates for the welfare of children globally, called for stronger safeguards, such as screening children at border crossings to ensure that minors aren’t being exploited while traveling alone or being separated from family members.

From the start of the invasion on Feb. 24 through Thursday, more than 500 unaccompanied children were identified crossing from Ukraine into Romania, said UNICEF, adding that the number of children separated from their family members probably is much higher.

An estimated 28 percent of trafficking victims around the world are children, according to an analysis by UNICEF and the Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons.

Afshan Khan, UNICEF’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement that the war could lead to a “significant spike” in trafficking and an “acute child protection crisis.”

“Displaced children are extremely vulnerable to being separated from their families, exploited, and trafficked. They need governments in the region to step up and put measures in place to keep them safe,” Khan said.

UNICEF announced that it had partnered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and civil services in the receiving countries to establish the organization’s safety and informational service hubs — known as Blue Dots — for women and separated children.

The war in Ukraine has sparked the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II with nearly 3.5 million Ukrainians — mostly women and children — fleeing to neighboring countries including Poland and Romania, while others have continued west to countries such as Germany.

ON THE POLAND-UKRAINE BORDER — There were no passport officers on the dirt road, no customs lane, no signs marking this isolated patch of farmland for what it has become: a clandestine gateway for military supplies entering Ukraine.

“No pictures, no pictures,” shouted a Polish border guard as a convoy of 17 trucks hissed to a halt on a biting morning this week.

Not far from here was a Ukrainian military base where at least 35 people had been killed a few days earlier by a Russian missile barrage, and no one wanted to call attention to this ad hoc border crossing. Washington Post journalists were given permission to observe the delivery on the condition that they turn off the geolocation function on their cameras.

In a call with Turkey’s leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin outlined conditions for a potential cease-fire with Ukraine, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesperson told a news outlet.

Erdogan offered to bring Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky together in Turkey, but Putin wants first to reach an agreement on six topics, Turkish presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin told the newspaper Hurriyet in an interview published Saturday.

Putin’s demands, Kalin said, include that Ukraine pledge its neutrality and not seek to join NATO, an alliance of 30 nations that includes the United States; disarmament; and “denazification” — a reflection of Putin’s baseless claim that Ukraine is led by a fascist government. Putin also reportedly wants the removal of obstacles to the widespread use of the Russian language in Ukraine.

“It is understood that some progress has been made in the first four articles of the ongoing negotiations,” Kalin told Hurriyet. “It is too early to say that there is full agreement or that an agreement is about to be signed.”

What a Russia-Ukraine peace deal might look like

The two more difficult issues, Kalin said, are Putin’s requirement that Ukraine recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the autonomy of two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. Kalin said Putin may be willing to meet with Zelensky to discuss those topics after they have reached an agreement on the first four.

Turkey has served as a mediator since Russia invaded Ukraine last month. Although it is a member of NATO, Turkey’s relations with Western allies are sometimes strained and it has done little to support Kyiv. Turkey also has points of contention with Russia, including that country’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s government in the Syrian civil war.

The war in Ukraine has unsettled American politics. The degree to which it is changing American politics is the more consequential question for President Biden and the Democrats.

Russia’s brutal and unprovoked aggression against its sovereign neighbor has refocused the world. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become a figure of international acclaim and admiration. Russian President Vladimir Putin has become an international pariah. NATO has been rejuvenated, and the United States is once again leading the Western alliance.

How much does that matter to American voters, and how much will it matter in the November midterm elections? Today, inflation and other domestic issues remain the main drivers of the upcoming elections. One change the war has brought is that it has frozen the political environment at home and placed some issues — gas prices specifically — into a more-than-purely-domestic context.

We know from scatterings of recent history that at this stage of a conflict like the one that continues to unfold in Ukraine, projections months into the future are risky to foolhardy. Surprise is one certainty of politics.

BERLIN — Yaroslava Sveshnikov danced and sang. He ate hamantaschen, pastries symbolizing the wicked courtier Haman, whose thwarted effort to annihilate the Jews in ancient Persia is narrated in the Old Testament and commemorated each year with Purim.

The festivities this week in the German capital were not unlike those enjoyed by Jews worldwide. But for Sveshnikov, 16, the celebration was transformed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “I try to be happy to make other people happy,” he said. “But the thoughts inside me are about the war.”

Sveshnikov was attending 10th grade in Odessa when the port city on the Black Sea became a fortress. Two weeks ago, he boarded a bus to Moldova with his mother and 5-year-old brother, who found the journey too difficult to continue. His mother sent him on alone to Berlin.

On July 12, 2018, British scientists gathered at a military base for a first look at the weapon used in a bizarre murder attempt a few weeks before. The device was a perfume bottle, tossed away by the assailants as they fled the country, and containing less than a tablespoon of a liquid so deadly that it could only be handled with heavy rubber gloves and hazmat gear.

Investigators already suspected that the weapon was of Russian origin — the intended victim was a Russian ex-spy living in England, and the attackers were identified as military intelligence operatives from Moscow. The surprise, as the examination unfolded, was the sheer potency of the oily fluid inside the vial. It was enough poison, the scientists calculated, to wipe out a small town: the equivalent of thousands of lethal doses.

This was Novichok, a powerful nerve agent invented by Russia. A year earlier, in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin had declared to the world that his country no longer possessed such chemical weapons. U.S. and British intelligence officials said at the time that Putin was lying, and here, in a laboratory in southern England, was tangible proof. Russia had secretly preserved at least some of its arsenal of poisons, and it clearly was willing to use them — including on foreign soil.

Satellite imagery collected Saturday morning shows the extent of the damage at the Mariupol Drama Theater, which was hit by a Russian airstrike on Wednesday while more than a thousand people sheltered inside.

The image, which was provided to The Washington Post by Maxar Technologies, shows that more than half the roof collapsed. The remaining portion is damaged, buckling inward. Rubble is visible on both sides of the building, and portions of the interior appear to have burned. Video previously verified by The Post in the hours after the strike shows flames and smoke rising from the center of the building.

The Russian word for “children,” written in large white letters, is still visible on one side of the building. The word had appeared at the front and back of the theater in satellite imagery taken Monday.

Civilians sought shelter in the theater as Russian strikes began across the city, according to local officials. A Ukrainian official said Friday that 130 people had been rescued from the bombed theater — although the fate of an estimated 1,300 others who had been sheltering there remained unknown.

China’s vice foreign minister sought to blame NATO for the war in Ukraine during a Saturday conference in Beijing. Criticism of the NATO alliance has a been a recurring theme on Chinese state-run media amid the American effort to discourage China from aiding Russia.

In a speech, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng criticized Western sanctions against Russia and called NATO a “Cold War vestige” that should have been “consigned to history” after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“A NATO commitment of no eastward expansion could have easily ended the crisis and stopped the sufferings. Instead, one chose to fan the flames at a safe distance,” Le added, calling the action “highly immoral and irresponsible.”

Le reiterated China’s opposition to unilateral sanctions and likened the effort to “fighting fire with firewood.” He made similar remarks a day earlier during the roughly two-hour talks between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

China has warned that such sanctions — which could extend to China should it provide Russia with material assistance — could harm those far outside the scope of Russian political leaders and elites.

Le’s remarks were more direct: “The abuse of sanctions will bring catastrophic consequences for the entire world.”

Before Russia’s invasion, relations between Moscow and Beijing were drawing closer — a signal to U.S. officials that Xi could be one of the few world figures able to influence Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We believe China in particular has a responsibility to use its influence with President Putin and to defend the international rules and principles that it professes to support,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday.