Russia-Ukraine live updates: U.S. citizen killed in Chernihiv; Survivors found in theater wreckage

ISTANBUL — An attempt to rescue Turkish citizens stranded in Mariupol has been stymied by Russian forces, who have refused to allow buses waiting to pick up the civilians into the city, according to the leader of a mosque where many are sheltering.

“Our 30 buses are waiting at an area that is in Russian control,” Ismail Hacioglu, head of the Sultan Suleiman Mosque association, said Thursday. “The Russians are not letting our buses pass. If our buses went to the Ukrainian-held area, then we wouldn’t have any problems.”

Turkish officials have said since last week that they are trying to rescue an estimated 100 citizens who are still in the hard-hit southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and have expressed some optimism that Ankara’s close ties with Moscow — as well as Kyiv — would aid in the effort. But during a visit to Moscow on Wednesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu suggested that a “misunderstanding on the ground” was hampering any progress.

“Both sides are saying something different,” he said. His Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, blamed Ukraine for not allowing the Turkish nationals to leave. Hacioglu said as many as 200 people from Mariupol were sheltering in the mosque, including non-Turks.

“We take everyone in, whether they are Muslim or not,” he said. “There are people who have had their homes bombarded and demolished, and we give them space in the mosque, too. There are so many people.”

At one point in the last few weeks, “a bomb” fell close to the mosque, but since then, the building hadn’t been targeted, he added. He said Turkish officials have shared the mosque’s coordinates with Russian leaders, hoping to protect the site.

He has received scattered reports from those inside Mariupol, whenever cellphone service is available. Those still there describe a city full of destroyed buildings, constant bombing and shelling and bodies in the streets.

“It is a heartache,” he said. “The mosque is the safest place in the city right now.”

U.S. stocks extended their gains Thursday, a day after the Federal Reserve’s first interest rate increase since 2018 spurred an emphatic rally.

Around 1:15 p.m., the Dow Jones industrial average and the S&p 500 index had both advanced about 0.5 percent despite opening in negative territory. The tech-heavy Nasdaq also turned positive and edged up 0.25 percent.

Oil prices, meanwhile, soared more than 7 percent in morning trading, again surpassing $100 per barrel as fighting intensified in Ukraine. After eclipsing $130 per barrel earlier this month, prices had been declining amid hopes for a cease-fire even as evidence of progress remains to be seen.

The Russian invasion has introduced a fresh degree of uncertainty to markets already grappling with a bevy of challenges, from a tight labor market to a supply chain crisis and the highest inflation in 40 years. Russia’s role as one of the world’s biggest energy producers means that the financial fallout from the conflict will quickly ripple through a global economy still trying to recover from the covid-19 pandemic.

The International Energy Agency warned Wednesday that “the prospect of large-scale disruptions to Russian oil production is threatening to create a global oil supply shock.” It estimated that by April, Russian output could be reduced by 3 million barrels per day.

Although the United States has minimal direct exposure to the Russian economy, consumers are feeling the burn: The national average for a gallon of gas Thursday was $4.29, up 77 cents from a month ago, according to data from AAA.

Investors got some comfort Wednesday from the Fed’s long-telegraphed move to raise its benchmark interest rate and set the stage for further rate increases this year, as the central bank harnessed its best weapon against surging prices that are burdening American businesses and households. But the Ukraine war’s potential impacts on inflation and global growth remain “highly unpredictable,” according to Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.

“Central bankers can’t both bring inflation under control and provide a soft landing for economies and markets, which have been shaken by the conflict,” Mould said Thursday in comments emailed to The Washington Post. “In fact, they may well struggle to do either.”

Government bonds swung lower, with the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note sliding to 2.164 percent. Bond yields move inversely to prices.

The World Health Organization has verified at least “43 attacks on health care” — including assaults on patients, health-care workers, facilities or infrastructure — since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the agency’s director general, told reporters Wednesday.

More than 300 health-care facilities are in combat zones or areas that Russia now controls, while 600 other facilities are within about six miles of the conflict line, he said.

An attack on March 9 on a maternity hospital in the port city of Mariupol initially left three dead and 17 injured. A pregnant woman — shown being carried on a stretcher in a photo that became a symbol of the toll the Russian invasion is inflicting on civilians — and her baby died a few days later, the AP reported.

Koch Industries, the American manufacturing giant that employs 122,000 people across the world, said Wednesday it would not exit its operations in Russia, on grounds that doing so would put its “employees there at greater risk and do more harm than good.”

The multinational conglomerate’s presence in Russia is relatively small, Koch Industries president and chief operating officer Dave Robertson said in a statement Wednesday. It has about 600 workers at its Guardian Industries subsidiary operating two glass-manufacturing facilities in Russia and an additional 15 people working outside Guardian but in the country, he said. “We have no other physical assets in Russia,” Robertson added.

Guardian Industries and its family of companies employ over 14,000 people in 26 countries and have bases in Rostov and Ryazan in Russia, according to the firm’s website.

Koch’s decision was disclosed after more than 400 global companies publicly announced plans to withdraw, suspend and scale back their operations in Russia because of its invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

President Biden on Thursday decried the “brutality” of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, telling Micheál Martin, the Taoiseach of Ireland, that he considered the war being prosecuted to be “inhumane."

Biden’s comments came at the outset of a virtual meeting between the two leaders. They had been scheduled to meet in person, but plans changed as a result of a positive coronavirus test for Martin.

“We meet at a moment when demands on unity in the world are really accelerating,” Biden said. “We have to be united. We certainly are. But Putin’s brutality, and what he’s doing, and what his troops are doing in Ukraine, is just inhumane.”

On Wednesday, Biden called Putin a “war criminal” in seemingly off-the-cuff remarks.

Martin also harshly criticized “the barbaric attack on the civilians of Ukraine” and saluted Biden’s leadership in rallying allies to impose sanctions on Russia and take other steps in response. Martin said his country supports the “broadest and widest sanctions possible.”

Before reporters were being escorted out of the meeting, Biden said Ireland’s willingness to accept Ukrainian refugees “speaks so loudly about your principles.”

“I want to publicly compliment you for it,” Biden said.

The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol called a Russian strike on a local theater where civilians were sheltering a “terrible tragedy” in a video late Wednesday. While the fate of hundreds of residents who had been sheltering in the Mariupol theater remained unclear, reports of survivors have emerged. Ukrainian officials said Thursday that rescue efforts were being hampered by rubble and continued shelling.

The strike was “another tragedy, in our already mangled Mariupol, of which there is already practically nothing left,” Mayor Vadym Boychenko said in a video posted on Telegram. He said a “direct strike” hit the theater Wednesday, and he blamed Russian forces, which have denied responsibility. Satellite images from before the attack showed the word “children” written in Russian in large white letters on the ground on both sides of the theater.

Serhiy Taruta, a Ukrainian politician, wrote on Facebook that there was “good news” Thursday and that many people had emerged alive from the theater. Oleksiy Honcharenko, a lawmaker from Odessa, said on Telegram that the bomb shelter in the theater’s basement had withstood the strike and that, despite the debris, “people are coming out of the shelter alive and well!”

“We live in frightening times that are called war,” Boychenko said in the video address. “We want to close our eyes and forget, like a bad dream, everything that is happening to us now — but we open them and see war again, we see the devastation, we see all this horror.”

A Russian court handling the investigation into Brittney Griner’s drug charge extended the American basketball star’s detention until May 19, according to a report by Russian state news agency TASS. With no indication whether she could be released then, the latest news means Griner, 31, will have spent more than three months, at least, in Russian custody.

Griner was arrested on Feb. 17 after Russian officials said they found vape cartridges containing hash oil in her luggage at the Sheremetyevo Airport outside of Moscow, an offense that could carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison. Griner, a seven-time WNBA all-star, was returning at the time to Russia, where she plays for UMMC Ekaterinburg during her Phoenix Mercury offseasons.

The TASS report, according to several U.S. outlets, cited the Khimki Court of the Moscow region for the update on Griner’s status. Ekaterina Kalugina, a member of Russia’s Public Monitoring Commission — an agency that monitors the treatment of prisoners — told TASS that Griner is sharing a cell with two other women who are also charged with drug-related offenses.

PRZEMYSL, Poland — Their husbands and fathers stayed behind to fight. So the women and children have fled war-ravaged Ukraine mostly on their own.

That makes their flight distinct from other mass refugee movements this century, prompting heightened concerns, from Poland’s eastern border to Germany’s capital, about human trafficking. European authorities and aid organizations are warning that criminals may seek to capitalize on the desperation of refugees, with more than 3 million leaving Ukraine since Feb. 24, according to U.N. estimates.

The International Organization for Migration on Wednesday said those concerns were based in reality, pointing to initial reports of traffickers exploiting the large-scale human displacement, including instances of sexual violence. The U.N. agency did not quantify the problem, noting that many cases go unidentified in the immediate aftermath of a displacement event.