Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.
As Ukrainian leaders stepped up their demands on Western allies to provide further support, NATO foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels on Thursday to discuss expanding military aid to Ukraine, and the European Union was considering yet another round of sanctions on Russia, including a possible ban on Russian coal.
Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, who was also in Brussels, said his agenda for the NATO meeting contained only three items: “Weapons, weapons, and weapons.”
Ukraine has said that more military supplies from Western countries are needed to save lives and defeat Russian forces, which have pulled back from most of northern Ukraine but are believed to be refocusing on a fuller offensive against the east and south. But the NATO allies’ discussions were expected to focus on how to help Ukraine without entangling the alliance in direct combat with Russian forces.
“We are making sure there is no room for misunderstanding, a miscalculation in Moscow,” Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, said ahead of the meeting.
Bucha, a town in northern Ukraine where dozens of bodies were found after Russian forces retreated in the past week, has become a rallying cry for more Western support for the embattled nation. Russia has denied responsibility, saying the atrocities were fabricated or were committed by the Ukrainians.
Western allies have moved to provide more weapons to Ukraine’s military and increasingly isolate Russia economically and politically, with several European nations expelling Russian diplomats this week. The Senate on Wednesday night voted to authorize President Biden to use a lend-lease program, last used in World War II, to speed up the delivery of military equipment to Ukraine. And the European Union is expected on Thursday to approve its harshest batch of sanctions yet against Moscow, including a ban on coal from Russia, the leading provider of fossil-fuel energy to Europe.
In other major developments:
With thousands of people have fled eastern Ukraine in fear of Russia’s escalating its attacks, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in an overnight address that Russian forces had begun to accumulate fighters “to realize their ill ambitions” in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where analysts say Moscow has escalated its offensive but is making only slow progress. On Wednesday, at least two people were killed in a Russian attack on a humanitarian aid site in Donetsk, a local official said.
Oleg Synegubov, the state administrator for the Kharkiv military region, said on Wednesday in a post on Telegram that the Ukrainian army would evacuate two towns in the east because fighting was escalating there.
The United Nations is set to vote on Thursday to exclude Russia from its Human Rights Council over accusations of “systemic violations and abuses of human rights” committed by its troops in Ukraine. The move was put forward by the United States after the killings in Bucha.
The House voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday night to call for an investigation of war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Six House Republicans voted against the measure.
The Finnish customs authorities have seized three shipments containing works of art being transported back to Russia from exhibitions in Italy and Japan because they were suspected of being subject to European Union sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish customs service said on Wednesday.
The shipments, containing paintings and sculptures, were stopped at Vaalimaa, a border crossing between Finland and Russia, on Friday and Saturday, according to a news release on the website of the Finnish customs service, Tulli.
A spokesman for the service, Mika Parkkonen, confirmed the seizure.
Mr. Parkkonen said in a telephone interview that the shipments had an estimated insurance value of 42 million euros ($46 million) but gave no further details.
“The works of art were being transported from Italy and Japan to Russia via Finland,” the statement on the website said. “They had been displayed at exhibitions.”
Images provided by the customs service showed the shipments in large wooden containers.
Sami Rakshit, the director of the Finnish customs enforcement department, gave some details about the seizure at a news conference on Wednesday. According to Reuters, he told reporters that the works had included antiquities and that they had been temporarily on loan from Russian museums and art galleries.
The Russian news agency Tass reported that the artwork shown in Italy had been featured in two exhibitions: one, at the Piazza Scala Gallery in Milan, with pieces from the State Hermitage and the Tsarskoye Selo, Pavlovsk, and Gatchina museum reserves; and another at the Museum of Modern Art in Udine, with works from the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Museum of the East.
The customs service said that Finland’s Foreign Ministry had confirmed that the European Union’s sanctions list “contains a paragraph on works of art” and that the ministry had started a preliminary investigation into whether the works stopped at Vaalimaa contravened E.U. sanctions.
The Finnish authorities said they would also consult with the European Commission in Brussels.
“The preliminary investigation will continue in the form of information gathering, international cooperation, and requests for mutual assistance,” the statement on the customs services’ website said. “Finnish Customs aims to complete the investigation as soon as possible.”
