Russia-Ukraine live updates: Ukraine holds Kyiv, second-largest city Kharkiv as Putin intensifies invasion

KHARKIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian and Russian forces battled Sunday morning for control of the country’s second-largest city, with intense street fighting and back-and-forth rocket firing. The afternoon in Kharkiv was quieter, as the sounds of bombardment faded from downtown and Governor Oleg Synyehubov announced that Ukraine’s second-largest city remained under government control.

Synyehubov claimed that groups of Russian troops had surrendered.

Police asked residents not to go outside and warned that they were searching for “saboteurs,” so they might open fire. Synyehubov said on his Telegram channel to “stay at home and hide during the complete destruction of the Russian enemy in the city.” That followed an earlier message from Synyehubov that Russian forces had blown up a gas pipeline in the area.

In an incursion that represented Russia’s most significant yet into any Ukrainian city, local social media accounts showed Russian troops and armored vehicles driving through the streets, within five miles of downtown. The British Ministry of Defense, which has been providing regular accounts of the war, said that the fighting was “heavy.”

Though much of the Russian onslaught has focused on Kyiv, the eastern city of Kharkiv — with 1.5 million residents — is also crucial. It is predominantly Russian-speaking, but there is little appetite for separatism, and the Kremlin’s sway with the public has been on the decline.

Telegram channels asked citizens to carefully take photos and videos of the Russian troops so that civilian defense forces know where they are.

The Biden administration and its European allies vowed Saturday to block Moscow’s access to its sizable foreign currency reserves in the West, teeing up one of the most powerful financial penalties and threatening to send the Russian financial market into free fall.

The United States and the Europe Union also announced they were moving to sever some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global messaging network that enables banks to communicate their financial transactions in a secure manner. The steps come as Russian President Vladimir Putin intensifies his military aggression against Ukraine in an attempt to topple its government and take the capital, Kyiv.

“Putin embarked on a path aiming to destroy Ukraine. But what he is also doing in fact is destroying the future of his own country,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Saturday. In response, she said, “we will paralyze the assets of Russia’s central bank. This will freeze its transactions. It will make it impossible for the central bank to liquidate assets.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday announced a major increase in the country’s defense spending, potentially marking one of the most significant changes in decades to the country’s long-hesitant approach to international security.

Scholz said the German military would receive a one-off additional payment of over $110 billion this year — about twice the amount of Germany’s defense budget last year.

“Better and more modern equipment, more staff, that costs a lot of money,” Scholz told lawmakers in a special session of the Bundestag, the German parliament.

Scholz also committed to exceeding the NATO defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP “from now on, every year” — a target that Germany had long failed to meet.

“We are not only striving for this goal because we have promised our friends and allies that we will increase our defense spending to 2 percent of our economic output by 2024, but we do this for ourselves, too, for our own safety,” Scholz said.

The announcement upends decades of German hesitation to invest more in its military, with Scholz’s Social Democratic Party having been one of the core opponents of a major increase in spending. That stance had long frustrated its allies, including the United States and countries in Eastern Europe.

The sea change in Germany’s defense policy comes amid widespread shock over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The German army’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais, said last week that “the army that I am allowed to lead, is more or less powerless” against Russia amid the current crisis. Defense associations have warned the German military is underfunded and lacks crucial equipment.

The International Judo Federation said in a statement Sunday that it was suspending Russian President Vladimir Putin as its honorary president and ambassador, citing the “ongoing war conflict in Ukraine.”

The announcement came just days after the organization canceled its May Grand Slam event in Kazan, Russia, with IJF President Marius Vizer saying he was “saddened by the current international situation,” although the earlier statement did not directly reference Russia or Ukraine.

Putin, 69, is a keen judoka and holds a black belt. He has also co-written a book titled “Judo: History, Theory, Practice.”

In 2019, Putin was videoed sparring with Olympic athletes at a judo training session in Sochi, with Euro News reporting at the time that the president was shown on Russian television toppling several opponents before being taken down by a female judoka.

Kyiv was rocked by a major explosion in the early hours of Sunday as fighting continued close to the capital of Ukraine. Video circulated online showed the sky in the capital’s southwest pulsing with flames after an attack that caused a large fire.

According to an unverified video a local official posted online Sunday, an oil depot had been blown up as a result of a shelling attack in Vasilkov, an area roughly 21 miles southwest of the center of Kyiv.

The depot belonged to KLO, a Ukrainian company that operates a chain of gas filling stations.

“Within minutes of a strike by a Russian missile and explosion amid burning fuel tanks at the KLO oil depot, 15 wagons of diesel fuel and eight wagons of gas managed to be saved,” a statement posted on the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Facebook page said.

Later, a statement from Ukraine’s state emergency service said that the fire had been contained and that there was no threat to residents in the surrounding area.

Images and photos of the attack shared online show a single blast hitting the depot followed by a mushroom cloud of smoke. The site then erupted into tall flames that continued to burn brightly enough to be visible from central Kyiv.

A Ukrainian news service cited Ukrainian authorities saying residents should close their windows to avoid being affected by smoke and other harmful materials spreading in the areas as a result of the blast.

It follows explosions and gunfire around the capital the previous day as Ukrainian forces fight to keep the capital out of Russian hands.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Sunday that the conflict in Ukraine could last “a number of years” as Britain’s Defense Ministry issued an intelligence update warning that Russian forces were continuing to advance via “multiple” routes, but were still being met with “stiff resistance” from Ukrainians.

“This is not going to be, I fear, over quickly,” Truss said in an interview with Sky News. “We need to be prepared for a very long haul.”

Truss praised the bravery of Ukrainian civilians and armed forces, saying: “They’re determined to stand up for their sovereignty and territorial integrity, and they’re determined to fight.”

Her comments came after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Saturday that countries around the world would continue “working together to ensure Putin pays the price for his aggression,” by implementing sweeping sanctions and removing some Russian banks from the SWIFT international money transfer system.

MOSCOW — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday accused Russia of attacking civilian targets and warned that Russian crimes in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, towns and villages was genocide that “would lead to an international tribunal” for the perpetrators.

Speaking early Sunday, looking tired and unshaven, he said “last night was brutal” in Ukraine: “Shelling again, bombing of residential areas, civilian infrastructure again.

“Russia’s criminal actions against Ukraine have the sign of genocide,” he said. “Russia is on the path of evil,” he said, calling for Russia to be stripped of its U.N. Security Council vote.

“There is not a single — not a single — object in the country today that the occupiers would not consider a permissible target,” he said referring to Russian forces, adding that Ukraine was collecting evidence to refer to an international tribunal.

“They are fighting against everybody, they are fighting against everything alive: against kindergartens, against residential houses and even against ambulances. They use rocket artillery, rockets against entire urban areas where there is no military infrastructure and never has been.”

Speaking with visible anger he listed cities that came under indiscriminate attacks of a kind he said had not seen in Ukraine since World War II: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Vasylkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy.

Russia has denied targeting civilian infrastructure in the course of its invasion. Russia’s Defense Ministry said Sunday it launched long range cruise missiles from ships and warplanes striking “military infrastructure.”

Soon after Zelensky’s speech, Putin issued a prerecorded message of his own on the occasion of Special Operations day and congratulated the nations’ special forces for “their impeccable service” with “special gratitude to those who these days are heroically fulfilling their military duty in the course of a special operation to provide assistance to the People’s republics of Donbass.”

Zelensky addressed the citizens of neighboring Belarus as well, saying the Belarusian leader enabled Russian attacks on Ukraine from Belarusian soil.

“From your territory, Russian Federation troops are launching missiles at Ukraine. From your territory they kill our children, destroy our homes, try to blow up everything that was built over decades. And, by the way, not only by us, but also by our fathers, our grandfathers.

“You decide who you are, you decide who you will be, how you will look your children in the eyes, how you will look each other, your neighbors. And we are your neighbors. We are your neighbors, we are Ukrainians,” Zelensky said. “Be Belarus, not Russia.”

A Ukrainian border control station processing people fleeing the country into neighboring Romania was hit by data-wiping software Friday, a cybersecurity expert who was at the checkpoint said.

“It’s massively hitting the border control,” said the expert, Chris Kubecka. “They are processing people with pen and pencil.”

Security experts had previously reported that a new wiping program had been deployed as the invasion unfolded. Russia has for years used cyberattacks against Ukraine, including the costly 2017 NotPetya attack, which wiped data and programs from machines in Ukraine causing billions of dollars in losses.