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Russia has cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, both members of the European Union and NATO, intensifying its confrontation with Ukraine's allies in a move the continent's leaders labeled “gas blackmail.”
Russia’s state-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom said early Wednesday it had suspended gas supplies to the two countries after they refused to pay for the shipments in rubles.
The move marked an escalation of the Kremlin's efforts to weaken the resolve of those supporting Ukraine's defensive stand with sanctions and military support. Europe relies heavily on Russian energy supplies, and the halt ratcheted up the economic stakes in a standoff that increasingly resembles the Cold War.
In a surprise deal, Russia on Wednesday released former Marine Trevor Reed in a prisoner exchange with the U.S., a diplomatic maneuver made all the more extraordinary because the war with Russia has driven relations to their lowest point in decades.
President Joe Biden is expected to ask Congress to fund a new supplemental aid package for Ukraine on Thursday morning. The extra funding is intended to last for the next five months.
Explosions boom in Russian-occupied city of Kherson
KYIV, Ukraine — In the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, a series of explosions boomed near the television tower late Wednesday and at least temporarily knocked Russian channels off the air, Ukrainian and Russian news organizations reported.
The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti said missiles and rockets were fired at the city from the direction of the Ukrainian forces to the northwest. NBC News has not independently verified the allegation.
Kherson has been occupied by Russian forces since early in the war.
Ukrayinska Pravda, an online newspaper, said the strikes set off a fire and knocked Russian television channels off the air.
RIA Novosti said the broadcast later resumed. It said Russian channels began broadcasting from Kherson last week.
Russia has been determined to strengthen its control over the city, but residents have continued to come out onto the streets to protest the occupation.
Canadian lawmakers vote unanimously to label Russia’s acts in Ukraine as ‘genocide’
Canadian lawmakers voted unanimously on Wednesday to call Russia’s attacks in Ukraine a “genocide," with members of parliament saying there was “ample evidence of systemic and massive war crimes against humanity” being committed by Moscow.
The Canadian House of Commons’ motion said war crimes by Russia include mass atrocities, systematic instances of willful killing of Ukrainian civilians, the desecration of corpses, forcible transfer of Ukrainian children, torture, physical harm, mental harm, and rape.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was “absolutely right” for more and more people to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine as genocide, supporting an accusation made by President Joe Biden a day earlier.
Biden had said earlier in April that the Ukraine invasion amounted to genocide but had added that lawyers internationally would have to decide whether or not the invasion met the criteria for genocide.
Russia, which denies the genocide charges, calls its action in Ukraine a “special military operation." Moscow accuses Ukraine of the genocide of Russian-speaking people, a charge that Ukraine dismisses as nonsense.
Germany bought most Russian energy during first months of Ukraine war, study finds
BERLIN — An independent research group says Germany was the biggest buyer of Russian energy during the first two months of the war in Ukraine.
A study published by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air calculates that Russia earned $66.5 billion from fossil fuel exports since Russian troops attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Using data on ship movements, real-time tracking of gas flows through pipelines and estimates based on historical monthly trade, the researchers reckon Germany paid Russia about 9.1 billion euros for fossil fuel deliveries in the first two months of the war.
The German government said it can’t comment on estimates, and it declined to provide any figures of its own.
Biden set to address support for Ukraine on Thursday
President Joe Biden is expected to deliver remarks Thursday “on support for Ukrainians defending their country and their freedom against Russia’s brutal war,” according to a White House schedule released Wednesday.
The details of the remarks are not laid out.
Administration officials have said the White House is preparing to send a funding request to Congress for additional aid for Ukraine.
The officials said the aid request, which is likely to be designed to last Ukraine for the next five months, could be sent to Congress as soon as Thursday. The officials described the amount of the request as “massive.”
Biden last week announced $1.3 billion more in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, including $800 million in weapons, including artillery. Biden said then that additional funding would soon be needed from Congress.
Parents of American released by Russia in prisoner exchange say son’s life saved
The parents of a Texas man imprisoned in Russia for almost three years before he was freed in an exchange Wednesday thanked President Joe Biden and their state’s lawmakers for their son’s freedom.
“We believe that he probably saved our son’s life,” Joey Reed said of Biden in Texas on Wednesday afternoon, hours after Russian authorities released their son, Trevor Reed.
Trevor Reed, a former Marine sentenced to nine years in prison on claims he’d assaulted an officer, was freed after Biden commuted the sentence of Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian serving a 20-year U.S. prison sentence on a drug trafficking conviction. Reed said he was innocent, and U.S. officials said he had been unjustly detained.
The Reeds had been advocating for their son’s release and talking to State Department and other officials before Russia attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24, and they worried that the conflict would disrupt those efforts.
“Then they said, in the next week, ‘OK, we’re speaking again,’” Paula Reed said.
They also thanked Texas Republicans Rep. August Pfluger and Sen. John Cornyn, who advocated for their son, and called it a bipartisan effort. They hope other Americans held in Russia and other countries are freed.
U.K. diplomat calls on allies to ‘double down,’ send Ukraine tanks, jets
LONDON — Britain’s top diplomat called Wednesday for Western allies to send tanks, warplanes and other heavy weapons to Ukraine, saying fears of escalating the war were misplaced and “inaction would be the greatest provocation.”
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said “this is a time for courage, not caution” among countries helping Ukraine fight Russia’s invasion.
“Heavy weapons, tanks, airplanes — digging deep into our inventories, ramping up production. We need to do all of this,” Truss said in an annual foreign policy speech at Mansion House, the residence of the Lord Mayor of London.
NATO countries have supplied Ukraine with military weapons and gear, including missiles and armored vehicles. But they have been reluctant to send fighter planes — despite pleas from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — for fear of escalation. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has already accused NATO of effectively waging a proxy war against Russia.
Western officials deny that, saying the conflict is between Russia and Ukraine because of Russia’s illegal invasion of its neighbor.
Britain has sent $565 million in military aid to Ukraine, including thousands of missiles. But despite Truss’s call for jets, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman, Max Blain, said there were “no plans” for the U.K. to send planes. He did not rule out Britain’s sending planes to another country, such as Poland, that would then give its own jets to Ukraine, but he said there were “no specific plans” to do so.
Russian hackers creating chaos in Ukraine, Microsoft says
BOSTON — Cyberattacks by state-backed Russian hackers have destroyed data across dozens of organizations in Ukraine and produced “a chaotic information environment,” Microsoft said in a report released Wednesday.
Nearly half the destructive attacks were against critical infrastructure, many times simultaneous to physical attacks, the report says.
A top Ukrainian cybersecurity official, Victor Zhora, told reporters in a news briefing Wednesday that cyberattacks on telecommunications have sometimes coincided with artillery and other physical attacks.
Microsoft assessed that Russia-aligned threat groups were “pre-positioning for the conflict as early as March 2021,” hacking into networks to obtain footholds they could later use to collect “strategic and battlefield intelligence or to facilitate future destructive attacks.”
During the war, Russia’s cyberattacks “have at times not only degraded the functions of the targeted organizations but sought to disrupt citizens’ access to reliable information and critical life services, and to shake confidence in the country’s leadership,” the company’s Digital Security Unit says in the 20-page report.
Kremlin cyber operations “have had an impact in terms of technical disruption of services and causing a chaotic information environment, but Microsoft is not able to evaluate their broader strategic impact,” the report says.