Russia-Ukraine live updates: U.S. will sanction Putin as Russian forces close in on Kyiv

Russian troops escalated their assault on Ukraine on Friday but did not advance as planned, according to Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States. Oksana Markarova said that her country’s prosecutor general was collecting evidence of alleged war crimes for international tribunals.

“The second day was even harder,” Markarova told reporters. “The attacks have been more brutal.”

Markarova said Moscow’s forces have targeted civilians, including homes, ambulances and an orphanage. Roughly 50 children at the orphanage when the shelling occurred were not harmed, she said.

Russian soldiers also took 92 operations workers hostage when they captured the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant site, the ambassador said.

Markarova thanked protesters in Russia for opposing their nation’s war and the United States for sanctioning Moscow.

“We also heard from President Biden that it’s a first wave of the strong sanctions package,” she said. “So our reaction has been — voiced by our president right away — we’re very thankful for these very strong sanctions that will be heard and felt in Russia, and we look forward to the next waves.”

Ukraine remains ready for peace negotiations, Markarova said, but will not “capitulate or surrender” as Russian soldiers press closer to Kyiv.

“Kyiv has been Ukrainian for the past couple of thousand years,” she said. “And we intend to keep it for the next couple of thousand years.”

Local employees of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv made an appeal for urgent American assistance this week, accusing the U.S. government of abandoning them when they most need help following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In a letter representing 618 local employees of Embassy Kyiv, a local staff committee said they had received no communication from the State Department in the hours following Russia’s launch of missile strikes on the capital Kyiv and other cities. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the letter.

There was “no word from the leadership, which yesterday claimed that they care about our safety,” the committee wrote in its letter to the State Department, which was first reported by Foreign Policy.

The State Department pulled all American staff out of the Kyiv embassy earlier this month in anticipation of the Russian assault on Ukraine.

The pleas of those left behind echo what occurred following the shuttering of U.S. embassies in Afghanistan and Yemen, where local employees of U.S. embassies pleaded for assistance and complained of being vulnerable to reprisal for their work with the American government.

The letter laid out a series of demands, such as assistance departing Ukraine, including by providing vehicle transport out of the country; help establishing temporary assignments in other countries; financial support at a time when Ukrainians are queuing at ATMs and banks; and more clear guidance from the State Department as employees seek to navigate a frightening, quickly evolving situation.

State Department spokesman Ned Price, asked about the letter during a media briefing on Friday, said the United States had tried to provide as much relevant information to local staff as it could. He said the United States had not seen indications that Russia would seek to target embassy staff specifically.

“We are exploring all legal options available to us that would enable us to support them,” he said.

PARIS — French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Friday that cutting off Russia from the Swift global payment system would be an option of “last resort.”

Eastern European countries have backed such a measure, which could pose severe harm to the Russian economy but would have major implications for some Western companies. A number of European nations with significant trade ties to Russia had cautioned against targeting Swift in the next set of sanctions.

Swift — short for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — is a key mechanism for facilitating cross-border trade, allowing banks to rapidly communicate with one another. Being cut off from that system would make it more difficult for Russian entities to process transactions.

On Thursday, President Biden said Swift was not part of the current sanctions plan because “that’s not the position the rest of Europe chooses to take.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz did not directly respond to a question about Swift on Thursday night but said it was important to adopt the sanctions that had been discussed for weeks and to “retain everything else for a situation in which it’s necessary to do more.”

Speaking to reporters Friday morning next to his German counterpart, Le Maire said E.U. sanctions would “hit a number of strategic sectors,” including transportation, aerospace, the semiconductor industry and the Russian financial system.

“We want to financially isolate Russia. We want to cut all links between Russia and the global financial system,” he said.

Residents of Kyiv filmed explosions that lit up the night sky. The following morning, Post reporters sheltered from explosions in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Hundreds of Ukrainians were stuck at the border with Poland looking to escape the country, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky filmed a video in Kyiv, saying he was among those continuing to defend the capital city.

The United States will join the European Union in imposing sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday.

“Following a telephone conversation President Biden held with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and in alignment with the decision by our European allies, the United States will join them in sanctioning President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov and members of the Russian national security team,” Psaki said at a regular news briefing. “I expect we will have more specific details out later this afternoon.”

Earlier Friday, E.U. foreign ministers agreed to freeze the assets of Putin and Lavrov, the first time the two men have been targeted personally by such measures. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also said that the United Kingdom will introduce sanctions against Putin and Lavrov “imminently,” although he didn’t give details on what form the sanctions will take.

It was not immediately clear which assets — and in which countries — the Biden administration plans to target. Psaki declined to address the specifics of Putin’s assets on Friday, telling reporters only that the move “sends a clear message about the strength of the opposition to the actions by President Putin and the direction in his leadership of the Russian military.”

A travel ban will likely be part of the U.S. sanctions, Psaki added.

Emily Rauhala and Michael Birnbaum contributed to this report.

Video shared to social media early Friday morning shows people scrambling over a bridge destroyed on the northwest outskirts of the Ukrainian capital. The bridge is about 12 miles from the center of Kyiv.

According to Associated Press correspondent Francesca Ebel, who posted the video, the bridge was blown by Ukrainian forces to prevent Russian tanks from advancing.

Kyiv experienced predawn explosions Friday as Russian forces continued their attack. Russian forces continued to bomb neighborhoods to the north of the city, Ebel reported.

BRUSSELS — European Union foreign ministers agreed Friday to freeze the assets of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the first time the two men have been targeted personally by such measures.

The decision, part of a larger round of sanctions approved to punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, probably won’t be the last step taken against the Kremlin during the conflict, policymakers said.

It wasn’t clear how many E.U.-based assets the two men control, and E.U. foreign policy officials said that it would take some technical work to target the sanctions properly. Neither man will be barred from traveling to the European Union, a step that in some ways would have been more concrete but could also have complicated any diplomatic settlement to the escalating violence that Russia is inflicting on its neighbor.

“Russia needs to see that it’s going to be isolated from the international community,” said E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, announcing the measures in Brussels on Friday.

NATO will deploy troops from an alliance response force for the first time, as the Western military bloc seeks to respond with strength to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg did not provide specific figures but said “thousands of troops” would be deployed to countries as part of the response force’s activation. He said troops would come from France, Germany, the United States and other countries.

“There must be no space for miscalculation or misunderstanding,” he told reporters in Brussels. “We will do what it takes to protect and defend every ally and every inch of NATO territory.”

Stoltenberg said the United States, Canada and European countries had already moved thousands of troops to Eastern Europe and put more than 100 planes on alert. More than 120 ships are operating from northern Europe to the Mediterranean.