Ukraine live briefing: U.S. ambassador to Russia retiring; Germany announces $65 billion in aid for energy crisis
By Annabelle Timsit and Paulina Villegas
Updated September 4, 2022 at 11:10 a.m. EDT|Published September 4, 2022 at 4:24 a.m. EDT
A woman looks at a primary care center and family clinic hit by a strike in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on Monday. (Umit Bektas/Reuters)
U.S. Ambassador to Russia John J. Sullivan is retiring after more than 2½ years in Moscow. Meanwhile, the ruling coalition in Germany has agreed on a relief plan worth about $65 billion for households dealing with the soaring cost of energy.
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Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects around the globe.
Sullivan was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019 and agreed to stay in Moscow when asked by President Biden. Since the Ukraine invasion began, he has been the main U.S. interlocutor in Moscow as U.S.-Russia relations have deteriorated to post-Cold War lows. He retires from a decades-long career in public service with five different administrations that included serving as deputy secretary of state under Trump, and senior positions at the Departments of Justice, Defense and Commerce, according to a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The Biden administration confirmed the resignation.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced new measures under the relief plan, from expanded housing and transportation benefits to one-time direct aid to seniors and students. He said Germany “will get through this winter” thanks to “timely decisions” taken by the government to shore up energy supplies. “My promise stands: You’ll never walk alone,” he added.
Europe is urgently preparing for the possibility that Russia will shut off its gas supply entirely, a potential act of retaliation for its support of Ukraine. Zelensky, in his nightly address Saturday, said Europe should respond to Russia’s threats with more “unity” and by “increasing sanctions at all levels, and limiting Russia’s oil and gas revenues.”
Mykolaiv was struck by “massive” shelling overnight, the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych, said Sunday. Twenty-six residential buildings, three health facilities, two schools, a hotel and a museum were damaged in the strikes, Senkevych wrote on Telegram. Photos from the southern city show a building that functions as a primary care center and family clinic with its windows blown out and piles of debris on the floor. Sunday strikes also damaged buildings in Voznesensk and Ochakiv, to the northwest and southwest of Mykolaiv, according to the regional governor, Vitaliy Kim.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant lost its connection to its last main external power line but was still supplying the national grid through a reserve line, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a news release Saturday. “One reactor is still operating and producing electricity both for cooling and other essential safety functions,” it said. Access to three other main lines was lost earlier, the IAEA said, and the most recent disconnection occurred Friday evening due to shelling.
Battlefield updates
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“Our military meter by meter is liberating the south of Ukraine,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Zelensky, said in a Telegram post, amid an uptick in fighting there. Arestovych urged patience as he said a counteroffensive in the south would take time to bear fruit. The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based think tank, wrote that “the ongoing counteroffensive will likely not result in immediate gains” while Ukrainian forces “seek to disrupt key logistics nodes that support Russian operations in the south and chip away at Russian military capabilities.” Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian Army, told U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that he did not think the fighting around Kherson was “some grand sweeping offensive” with which Ukrainian forces “expect to win the war.”
Missiles hit the northeastern city of Kharkiv overnight into Sunday, striking a restaurant in the Kyivskiy district, local authorities said. The effort to prevent a fire from spreading to a nearby forest took eight fire tankers and about 50 emergency workers and was ongoing early Sunday, the state emergency service said. A woman was killed, and two people were injured in strikes Saturday across the Kharkiv region, according to Oleh Synyehubov, head of the Kharkiv regional administration.
“Russian forces continue to suffer from morale and discipline issues,” the British Defense Ministry said Sunday in its daily assessment of wartime intelligence. A major issue for Russian forces deployed on Ukrainian territory is probably insufficient pay, particularly unpaid combat bonuses, the ministry said.
Global impact
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Ukraine’s first lady said that while Britons were “counting pennies,” Ukrainians were counting casualties. In a BBC interview published Sunday, Olena Zelenska was asked what she would say to people in the United Kingdom facing soaring energy costs as a result of the war. “I understand the situation is very tough,” she said, but “when you start counting pennies on your bank account or in your pocket, we do the same and count our casualties.”
President Zelensky called on the European Union to impose more sanctions on Russia, including a ban on tourist visas for Russians. Zelensky said Sunday on Twitter that he spoke with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen about this and “emphasized the need to prepare the 8th package of sanctions,” while working with the E.U. official on “steps to limit Russia’s excess profits from the sale of oil and gas.”
The exodus from Venezuela has grown to the point that its refugee numbers are now close to those displaced by the war in Ukraine. Data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration show that more than 6.8 million refugees and migrants have left the South American country since 2015, fleeing political instability and poverty, while more than 7 million people have fled Ukraine. But the crisis in Ukraine has attracted significantly more international aid funding, according to the advocacy group Refugees International.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia has expressed outrage at a mural recently unveiled in Melbourne depicting a Russian and a Ukrainian soldier hugging. Vasyl Myroshnychenko said the artwork, entitled “Peace before Pieces,” is “utterly offensive to all Ukrainians” because it “creates a sense of a false equivalency between the victim and the aggressor.” The artist, Peter Seaton, said Sunday that he intended to spread an antiwar message, and that he did not mean to “excuse the aggression that the Russians have perpetrated” in Ukraine. He plans to paint over the mural in response to the backlash, Australian media reported.
From our correspondents on the ground
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Ukrainians line up to donate blood to save “soldiers who are fighting for us”: In Mykolaiv, a city in southern Ukraine close to the front line, hundreds of civilians and soldiers responded to a call for blood donations Saturday, Steve Hendrix and Serhii Korolchuk reported.
Civilians and soldiers line up in Mykolaiv on Saturday to donate blood for wounded Ukrainian soldiers in the nearby Russian-occupied Kherson region. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)
Ellen Francis, Praveena Somasundaram, Bryan Pietsch and Hari Raj contributed to this report.
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