Deaths of 2 Women and a Girl Outside a Locked Bomb Shelter Shake War

Outside the children's clinic-turned-bomb-shelter, residents asked the question haunting Ukraine's capital: Who was responsible for the locked door that left women and children seeking safety exposed to a missile strike?

After deaths outside a bomb shelter, a question haunts Kyiv: Who locked the door?

Blinken finishes his Nordic trip with a focus on the war.

Ukraine's counteroffensive promises to be deadly. These recruits signed up anyway.

A Belarusian tennis star avoids the press after pointed questions from a Ukrainian journalist.

Turn off public webcams, Ukraine's intelligence agency pleads.

A Russian official says Ukrainian shelling has forced the evacuation of 2,500 people from his border region.

Here is what it takes to protect Kyiv from Russian bombardment.

Outside the children's clinic turned bomb shelter in Kyiv, a huddle of passers-by navigated a question that has haunted Ukraine's capital for over a day: Who's to blame for their neighbors’ deaths?

Three people, including a woman and her child, were killed in an explosion around the entrance of their neighborhood bunker early Thursday morning, having been locked out in the middle of an air raid. At least a dozen others were wounded.

The deaths rattled a city used to air raids and missiles, leading to multiple investigations, four detentions and widespread mourning. President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for law enforcement to bring those responsible to justice, saying in a speech Thursday night that such deaths should "never happen again." On Friday night, as criticism mounted, Mr. Zelensky also ordered an inspection of all bomb shelters across the country.

By Friday afternoon, three distinct memorials of flowers, children's stuffed animals and candles had been erected near where the three had been killed. One woman, standing outside the police line, cried quietly. A young boy drew the Ukrainian flag in blue and yellow chalk on the sidewalk next to one informal tribute, writing in blocky text, "Glory to Ukraine."

"My daughter got delayed by 30 seconds, which saved her life. If they were running together, she would be dead too," said Larysa Sukhomlyn, 64, whose daughter, Olya, often went to the clinic's basement during the air raids.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the war, like most armed conflicts, has been defined by moments of happenstance and terror: with mere minutes or yards sometimes dictating who lives or dies. But on Thursday morning, by all accounts, Natalia Velchenko, 33, Olha Ivashko, 34, and Olha's 9-year-old daughter, Viktoria, seemed to have enough time to get to safety.

Their deaths reflected a worst-case scenario of what happens when Kyiv's residents have to navigate a sometimes confusing web of hundreds of bomb shelters scattered around the city. Those shelters have become more and more important as Russia has ramped up aerial attacks on the city in recent weeks, after an already brutal winter of long-range strikes and power outages.

Some of the shelters are closed. Others are in poor condition. And it is often confusing to find those responsible for their upkeep, according to several Kyiv residents. This inaction has put the burden on local residents to coordinate with each other so they know where to find safety during attacks.

"Was it necessary for people to die so that the shelters start to be kept open around Kyiv?" asked Tetiana Kukuruza, a 26-year-old who lives in the city's center. "They should have dealt with this matter before the full-scale invasion, not almost a year and a half after the beginning of an active war."

On Thursday, Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv's mayor, said on Telegram that the authorities are "checking access to the shelters."

Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv's city military administration, said the country's main intelligence and security service, the prosecutor's office and the national police were investigating who's to blame.

"No one is handling this. Not Klitschko or anyone else," said Vadym, a resident who lives near Thursday's blast site and declined to provide his surname for fear of reprisal. "I don't know who decides this — they are passing the responsibility on to each other, and that's it."

Roughly seven minutes passed between the air raid siren, which first sounded at around 2:49 a.m., and the explosion outside the clinic, residents said. It was long enough for families to get dressed and make their way toward the basement.

The children's health clinic, known as Center of Primary Health Care No. 3 of Desnianskyi District, contains televisions, medicine and medical records. The building is usually locked in the middle of the night, but, for some reason, residents said, even the outdoor access to its basement was also locked. One woman, who declined to give her name, said she had to knock repeatedly to gain access to the shelter in recent days.

The watchman on duty Thursday morning was detained and tested for drug and alcohol consumption, said a police officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

For the residents of Desnianskyi district, a cluster of Soviet-style apartment blocks and small shops in Kyiv's eastern reaches, going to the shelter had been part of the same routine for most of May, as Russia relentlessly launched drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at the capital for much of the month.

Early Thursday morning, roughly a dozen people gathered outside the No. 3 clinic to take shelter in its basement. As they huddled, knocked and waited for entry, Ukrainian air defenses, bolstered by Western-supplied weapons such as Patriot missiles, only partially intercepted a Russian ballistic missile, knocking it off course but not destroying its warhead, the police officer said.

The munition tumbled out of the sky and landed just yards from the front door of the shelter, blasting a wide fan of shrapnel that extended hundreds of feet. The explosion shattered windows in nearby buildings and blasted doors off their hinges in the clinic, leaving behind a roughly 13-foot-wide crater.

"I saw from the balcony how it happened" said Ms. Sukhomlyn, describing the last moments of the mother and her child. "When the grandmother saw that they had approached the clinic, there was the blast. She ran out instantly and started to scream their names."

— Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

transcript

The United States has been working with Ukraine, and allies and partners around the world, to build consensus around the core elements of a just and lasting peace. A just and lasting peace must uphold the U.N. Charter and affirm the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence. A just and lasting peace requires Ukraine's full participation and assent. Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. As I’ve made clear by virtually every measure, President Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic failure. The Kremlin often claimed it had the second-strongest military in the world, and many believed it. Today, many see Russia's military as the second-strongest in Ukraine — its equipment, technology, leadership, troops, strategy, tactics and morale, a case study in failure, even as Moscow inflicts devastating, indiscriminate and gratuitous damage on Ukraine and Ukrainians. Russia is estimated to have suffered more than 100,000 casualties in the last six months alone, as Putin sends wave after wave of Russians into a meat grinder of his own making.

HELSINKI, Finland — Speaking from the capital of NATO's newest member, Finland, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Friday said that strengthening Ukraine's defenses against Russia was a "prerequisite" for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine and warned against the allure of short-term cease-fires that might play to Moscow's military advantage.

In a powerfully symbolic address at Helsinki's City Hall, Mr. Blinken also cataloged what he called the many "strategic failures" that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has suffered since launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

One of them, he said, was Finland's decision to break from decades of firm neutrality and join the NATO alliance, a blow to Mr. Putin, who calls NATO's expansion a grave threat to Russian security.

Although Mr. Blinken's speech, billed as an important overview of Washington's thinking about the war, broke little new ground, its delivery from a country that shares a more than 800-mile border with Russia that the NATO alliance is now committed to defending amounted to a victory lap likely to embarrass if not infuriate Mr. Putin.

Finland's official entry into NATO in April, Mr. Blinken said, was "a sea change that would have been unthinkable" before the war in Ukraine — and one that Mr. Putin had brought upon himself by invading his neighbor.

Mr. Blinken spoke at the end of a weeklong trip to Finland, Norway and Sweden that included meetings with NATO officials meant to highlight Western resolve against Russia and discuss the alliance's long-term relationship with Kyiv, which is seeking NATO admission and security guarantees. Sweden is also seeking to join NATO, over Turkish opposition that U.S. officials hope can soon be defused.

More broadly, Mr. Blinken argued in a 40-minute address in Helsinki, that Mr. Putin had unwittingly exposed and compounded the weakness of Russia's military, hobbled its economy and inspired NATO to become more united, and even larger.

But he also included cautionary notes about what he suggested would be a long and difficult road ahead for Kyiv, particularly amid what he predicted would be new worldwide calls for a halt to the fighting.

"Over the coming months, some countries will call for a cease-fire," Mr. Blinken said. "On the surface, that sounds sensible — attractive, even. After all, who doesn't want warring parties to lay down their arms? Who doesn't want the killing to stop?"

But a cease-fire that freezes current lines in place, with Russia controlling large parts of Ukrainian territory, he added, "is not a just and lasting peace. It is a Potemkin peace. It would legitimize Russia's land grab. It would reward the aggressor and punish the victim."

While saying that the United States and Ukraine would like to see an end to the war, Mr. Blinken warned that Mr. Putin appeared to have little interest in negotiating a conclusion to the fighting.

The Russian leader is "convinced he can simply outlast Ukraine and its supporters — sending more and more Russians to their deaths, and inflicting more and more suffering on Ukrainian civilians," Mr. Blinken said. "He thinks even if he loses the short game, he can still win the long game."

The United States would support a peace initiative "that helps bring President Putin to the table to engage in meaningful diplomacy," the secretary of state said, adding that such efforts must hold Russia accountable for atrocities and help pay for Ukraine's reconstruction.

Although Mr. Blinken said that a peace deal would have to "affirm the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence," he did not specify whether Russia would have to withdraw from all Ukrainian territory — including the strategic Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014 and which many analysts believe Mr. Putin will never surrender.

— Michael Crowley

As Ukrainian commanders gear up for a pivotal counteroffensive to push Russian forces back in Ukraine's war, 23-year-old Vadym, a military recruit from Kyiv, says he wants to be on its front lines, even if it means losing his life.

"We’re going to die, probably," Vadym said bluntly, as he trained on Friday at a military camp in Yorkshire, England. He was one of several hundred Ukrainians who volunteered for a five-week crash course in basic training, as what could be one of the bloodiest phases in the 15-month war is set to begin. Like other recruits, he asked to be identified only by his first name.

Vadym said his bleak view of his chances of survival was widely shared among his fellow recruits, all of whom are now halfway through the course.

"They want to fight, and being in hell on the front lines is part of it," Vadym said, his boyish face covered in camouflage paint. "I realized all the dangers. It just doesn't matter."

He stopped himself: "It does matter of course, but still, it is the price we pay."

It may still be weeks, if not months, before Vadym and others currently going through basic training find themselves in actual combat. The timing of Ukraine's promised counteroffensive has been kept a closely guarded secret, although Ukrainian leaders have said in recent days they are ready for it.

That young Ukrainians are enlisting now, in time to join a military operation that could slog on indefinitely, evokes comparisons to American men and women who signed up for military duty after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

There is, however, a key difference: The survivors of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan returned to a relatively safe homeland. The Ukrainians who crawled through muddy trenches and stormed a makeshift hotel in training exercises on Friday may be forced to fight for their country's territory against neighboring Russia for years to come.

And while Western forces generally spend years training, and many who enlist are professional soldiers who want to make the military a career, the Ukrainians have "a different mentality," said Second Lt. Jordan Turton, a British infantry officer who has been working with the recruits.

"Five weeks ago, one of them was a translator, one of them worked in sales, one of them was a barber," Lieutenant Turton said. "The overriding feeling is that they want to defend their country, to defend their loved ones, to defend their friends, their family."

The military exercises in Yorkshire's rolling green and yellow dales — not unlike the steppe of southeastern Ukraine where parts of the offensive are expected to unfold — were the latest in a mission that has trained almost 15,000 recruits over the last year.

It was carried out Friday by British and Norwegian troops who recently began showing the Ukrainian recruits how to disable drones — a nod at their growing importance on the battlefield, particularly in the trench warfare that has become a hallmark of the fighting between Russian and Ukrainian infantry.

Lieutenant Turton, who underwent his own basic training not too many years ago, said the Ukrainian recruits have been aggressively eager to learn.

"If I’m honest, in terms of looking back at this stage in my training, they’re far better than I was," he said.

Just a little over six weeks ago, one of the recruits, who gave only his first name, Ihor, was working as a stonemason in Lviv. He said his wife and two children were shocked when he announced he was going to volunteer for the war.

"And when they calmed down, they understood," said Ihor, who was born in 1990 — the last year Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. Even though democracy and other Western ideals have always been a part of his values, it was not until recent years that he began to see Russia as a threat, Ihor said through a translator.

"The Russian narrative states that we are brother nations," Ihor said. "But a brother doesn't come to a brother with a weapon in his hands."

— Lara Jakes reported from Yorkshire, England.

Aryna Sabalenka's day began with a routine demolition of Kamilla Rakhimova of Russia that propelled the world's second-ranked player, who is from Belarus, into the second week of the French Open as expected.

But then Sabalenka put herself, the tournament and tennis once more at the center of the debate over sports and the war in Ukraine by refusing to attend the mandatory post-match news conference. She said she had felt unsafe during a previous news conference this week when a journalist from Ukraine asked Sabalenka about her support of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, which has supported Russia's war against Ukraine.

"On Wednesday I did not feel safe in press conference," Sabalenka was quoted as saying at the beginning of a transcript of her statements following her 6-2, 6-2 win over Rakhimova. "I should be able to feel safe when I do interviews with the journalists after my matches. For my own mental health and well-being, I have decided to take myself out of this situation today, and the tournament has supported me in this decision."

Cédric Laurent, a spokesman for the French tennis federation, the F.F.T., which organizes this Grand Slam tournament, one that has been dominated by geopolitics from the start, said federation officials learned after Sabalenka's match that she would not participate in the news conference.

French Open officials approved Sabalenka's decision for Friday's match but said no decision had yet been made about her news conferences during the rest of the tournament.

Sabalenka's action came following two tense exchanges earlier in the week with Daria Meshcheriakova, a part-time journalist from Ukraine who works for Tribuna, a sports publication based in the country.

During the first exchange Meshcheriakova asked Sabalenka what her message to the world was about the war and why she had claimed that Ukrainian players "hate" her. Sabalenka denied having said that and then spoke as openly as she ever had regarding the war.

"Nobody in this world, Russian athletes or Belarusian athletes, support the war. Nobody," said Sabalenka, who lives in Miami. "How can we support the war? Nobody, normal people will never support it."

Three days later, after Sabalenka's second-round match, Meshcheriakova challenged her about a letter she supposedly signed in 2020 in support of Lukashenko, "in times when he was torturing and beating up protesters in the street," and about having participated in a New Year's celebration with him.

The letter that Sabalenka supposedly signed has not been made public, and her New Year's celebration with the Belarusian president has not been independently verified, though there are many pictures of Sabalenka and Lukashenko together. In an interview Friday, Meshcheriakova, who left Kyiv for the Netherlands 10 days after the war began when missiles landed close to her apartment and whose parents still live in Russia-occupied Luhansk, said she had learned of the letter and the New Year's celebration from prominent Belarusian journalists who had been forced to leave the country.

"It's true," Meshcheriakova said, "and you saw how she responded."

— Matthew Futterman

President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged on Friday that it was "impossible" for Ukraine to become a NATO member until the war with Russia ends, remarks that came a day after he made a forceful case urging European leaders to decide this summer on his country's bid to join the alliance.

Speaking at a news conference in Kyiv with President Alar Karis of Estonia, Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine would not drag any NATO countries into war, and therefore understood that receiving full-fledged membership into the Atlantic military alliance would not happen while the war rages.

"Not because we do not want to, but because it is impossible," Mr. Zelensky said, adding that Ukraine would still seek written security guarantees from its allies in the meantime.

NATO has promised since 2008 that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the alliance, which was formed around the notion of collective defense of Europe. Russia has vehemently opposed Ukraine's membership, with President Vladimir V. Putin casting the alliance's expansion as a central justification for the war.

Dmitri Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said on Friday that Russia would continue focusing on blocking Ukraine's potential membership and preventing NATO's "obvious advance" toward Russian borders, the state news agency Tass reported.

Several Western officials have cautioned in recent days that Ukraine's NATO membership bid is unlikely to be finalized as fast as Kyiv might like, for fear of inciting direct conflict with Russia.

At a gathering of European leaders in Moldova on Thursday, Mr. Zelensky urged the alliance to make a "clear" decision on Ukraine's accession when its leaders meet in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month. But President Emmanuel Macron of France reiterated that full NATO membership was "not immediately accessible" for Ukraine.

The British defense minister, Ben Wallace, echoed that position on Friday, telling Reuters that the "path is open" for Ukraine's NATO membership, but that "the best thing we can do to help Ukraine is now to help them defeat Russia."

In a speech on Friday delivered from the capital of NATO's newest member, Finland, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken noted that the road ahead for Ukraine would not be easy. But he said the West was committed to the country's long-term defense, and argued that Russia's efforts to weaken NATO had only backfired, saying, "NATO's door remains open to new members, and it will stay open."

— Anushka Patil

Ukraine's intelligence agency this week asked civilians to take down any outdoor webcams that record or livestream scenes from Ukraine, warning that Russia was exploiting the cameras to help guide its missile attacks in real time.

The Ukrainian intelligence agency, known as the S.B.U., said it was primarily concerned with "automatic video recording around residential and social buildings, road and transport, industrial and commercial facilities."

Cybersecurity experts have warned for years that webcams, including security cameras for homes and businesses, are often vulnerable to hacking. Access to such footage, whether it was hacked or on a public livestream, can help Moscow pinpoint targets, the S.B.U. has said.

Ukraine largely outlawed filming and distributing footage of its armed forces shortly after Russia's invasion last year, citing concerns about revealing military information, including troop positions.

It is not clear what prompted the S.B.U.'s public warning about street webcams more than a year later, but its request for civilians to take them down comes as the Ukrainian capital has faced relentless missile attacks in recent weeks that have forced its air defense systems into overdrive.

The morning after one of the largest aerial assaults, the S.B.U. detained six Kyiv residents who had shared footage showing Russian missiles being intercepted. U.S. officials said the May 16 assault damaged the highly advanced American-made Patriot air defense system.

The footage could have revealed the locations of Ukraine's air defense systems, the S.B.U. said, adding that "in a matter of minutes, these videos were picked up by numerous Telegram channels and Russian propaganda internet communities," including those controlled by Russian intelligence.

Similar footage was also captured by the webcams of "commercial entities" in the area and posted to YouTube by other users, the S.B.U. added, saying it had blocked some of those cameras from operating.

The IT Army of Ukraine, a pro-Kyiv group of hackers, subsequently launched a "cam bounty," asking people to report vulnerable webcams around the country and promising to block them. The group said it received over 300 messages about such cameras in two days.

The new request from the S.B.U. was "absolutely warranted," said Robert Lipovsky, a principal threat intelligence researcher at ESET, a cybersecurity firm that has helped Ukraine analyze Russian cyberattacks. Many internet-connected devices, such as smart home hubs, lack sufficient security protections, ESET has found, but webcams can be particularly exploitable. Cautions about the security and privacy risks they pose would be appropriate even during peacetime, Mr. Lipovsky said.

The cybersecurity director of the United States’ National Security Agency, Rob Joyce, warned in April that Russian hackers were tapping coffee shop security cameras and other public-facing webcams in Ukraine to gather intelligence on nearby aid convoys.

Monitoring such cameras doesn't necessarily even require hacking. Many websites make collections of unsecured video feeds from around the world easily accessible, and platforms like YouTube often host livestreams of cityscapes.

Live video streams did provide some strategic value to Ukraine toward the start of the war — webcams broadcasting scenes from Kyiv's Independence Square and young adults sharing daily life under invasion on TikTok Live played a novel role in drawing the world's attention to Russia's actions.

Cameras around the country have also documented atrocities committed by Russian forces, and the Ukrainian government has developed digital tools to allow civilians to easily record and submit evidence of war crimes. A New York Times investigation that identified the Russian military unit behind a massacre in Bucha relied in part on footage from security cameras along Yablunska Street, the quiet suburban road where the bodies of dozens of civilians were found.

Still, military doctrine almost always drives governments to try to control what information is recorded and shared during wartime, said Stéphane Duguin, the CEO of the CyberPeace Institute, which tracks cybersecurity threats during the war.

"If it's hyper-connected," he added, "it's creating a risk."

— Anushka Patil

About 2,500 people have been evacuated in Russia's Belgorod region after days of Ukrainian shelling and incursions, according to the local governor, underscoring the rapid transformation of parts of the country's western border into a war zone.

"The conditions are quite difficult," the governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app on Friday, adding that the evacuated residents were in temporary shelters in sport centers before being transported to regions further inside Russia.

Mr. Gladkov said in later posts that four people in the Belgorod region were killed by artillery shells on Friday, including two women who died after their car was hit near the town of Shebekino, about six miles from the Ukrainian border. A video posted by Russian military correspondents purporting to capture the aftermath showed a cloud of smoke rising near a column of passenger cars. It could not be independently verified.

The number of people evacuating could not be confirmed, but Belgorod residents who have traveled to Shebekino described the agricultural community of 40,000 on Thursday as a ghost town. They said many residents had left without waiting for an official evacuation after sheltering in cellars during hours of bombardment.

Anxiety in the Belgorod region has been rising since two paramilitary groups crossed the border last week and briefly held two villages in another part of the region.

The groups, Free Russia Legion and Russian Volunteer Corps, claimed in separate videos on Friday that they were fighting on the outskirts of Shebekino for the second day. The Russian authorities had said on Thursday that the insurgents had been turned back at the border. On Friday, spokesmen for the Russian Volunteer Corps and Free Russia Legion declined to comment on the Shebekino raid beyond saying the operation was continuing.

Both groups, which operate from Ukraine and are made up of anti-Kremlin Russian citizens, have claimed that they do not attack civilians and only target security installations.

Witnesses described widespread damage in the town, including to residential buildings, on Thursday. Video footage verified by The New York Times showed an apartment block in the town on fire.

The Russian Volunteer Corps on Thursday said that it had hit Shebekino's police station with a Soviet-designed Grad multiple rocket launcher, an artillery weapon designed to blanket a wide area with explosives.

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting.

— Anatoly Kurmanaev

Russia targeted Ukraine overnight into Friday with three dozen missiles and drones, many of them aimed at Kyiv, the Ukrainian military and local officials said, continuing a monthlong campaign that has terrorized the capital's residents and tested the limits of Ukrainian air defense systems.

All 15 missiles and 21 drones were shot down, according to Ukraine's Air Force Command, one day after three people were killed in a strike when they were unable to access shelter.

On Friday, Kyiv appeared to be spared deaths caused by debris from intercepted rockets. The city's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said there had been reports of smoldering rocket fragments and a lawn fire. An 11-year-old and a 68-year-old were injured in the Kyiv region, the country's prosecutor general said, and civilian homes and cars were damaged.

The attacks began with drones flying in from the south around 11 p.m. and were followed a few hours later by a wave of cruise missiles, according to the air force. The missiles were launched from strategic bombers over the Caspian Sea to Ukraine's southeast but appeared to maneuver to fly at Kyiv from the north, in an apparent attempt to confuse the city's air defenses, the air force said.

The Kyiv City Military Administration said the assault early Friday constituted the sixth wave of attacks on the city in six days. Earlier in the week, Russian forces launched three attacks on the Ukrainian capital in less than 24 hours, including a rare daytime strike.

The attacks have come at all hours of the day and in various forms, making it all the more challenging for residents to respond and take cover when they hear air-raid sirens.

In the predawn hours of Thursday, 10 ballistic missiles aimed at the city gave residents barely six minutes from when the alarms sounded until air defense systems began colliding with missiles overhead, the city's military administration said. Three people, including a woman and her 9-year-old daughter, were killed in that attack while trying to get into a locked shelter.

— Victoria Kim

It could take less than half as much time — just four to six months — to train Ukrainian fighter pilots to fly American-made F-16 warplanes as it took the Biden administration to allow it.

That assessment, from an internal U.S. Air Force document and a former NATO commander, may account only for a few pilots at a time, and applies only to those who have up-to-date flying experience on Ukraine's fleet of Soviet-era jets. But it means that Ukraine could have one of the last remaining sophisticated weapons that it says it needs to deter Russia sooner than initially envisioned.

For more than a year, the United States had balked at giving Ukraine the fighter jets, which the Biden administration feared might be used to strike Russian territory. The administration changed its stance recently, saying it supported training.

But while President Biden made it clear that he would allow the jets to be sent to Ukraine, he would not predict when they might be delivered. He called it "highly unlikely" that they would be part of the counteroffensive that Ukraine is expected to launch in coming weeks. American officials said the planes would help Ukraine defend itself against Russia in the long term.

Training Ukraine's pilots is a necessary first step for the country to begin receiving a jet that can outmaneuver most other warplanes, while also carrying almost any bomb or missile in the U.S. Air Force's arsenal.

— Lara Jakes

Find it, target it, shoot it.

The drill is the same for Ukraine's air defense crews as they work round the clock to combat the relentless barrage of missiles the Russians launch at Kyiv, mostly foiling the most intense bombardment of the capital since the first weeks of the war.

In the month of May alone, Russia bombarded Kyiv 17 times. It has fired hypersonic missiles from MIG-31 fighter jets and attacked with land-based ballistic missiles powerful enough to level an entire apartment block. Russian bombers and ships have fired dozens of long-range cruise missiles, and more than 200 attack drones have featured in blitzes meant to confuse and overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.

It presents a constant struggle for Ukrainian defenders. Russian assaults can be unrelenting. They come mostly at night, but sometimes in daytime hours, as they did on Monday. Yet overall, very little has penetrated the complex and increasingly sophisticated air defense network around Ukraine's capital, saving scores of lives.

"We have no days off," said Riabyi, the call sign of the 26-year-old "shooter" who is part of a two-person antiaircraft missile crew responsible for protecting just one patch of sky just outside Kyiv.

Ukraine's air defenses are a stitched-together patchwork of different weapons, many of them newly supplied by the West, protecting millions of civilians in Kyiv and other cities, and guarding critical infrastructure that includes four working nuclear power plants. Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, called it "a sort of a dog's breakfast" of systems.

There are hundreds of people like Riabyi, equipped with American-made surface-to-air Stinger missiles and other portable weapons. Many more are operating more complex launchers that have arrived recently, like the Patriot (American), NASAMS (Norwegian-American) and SAMP/T (French-Italian). Ukraine also uses German-made Gepard antiaircraft guns, and a mix of Soviet-era air defenses.

Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine's military intelligence agency, said the recent air raids aimed at the capital were a "massive and unprecedented" assault intended to exhaust air defense systems, strike a powerful symbolic blow at the heart of the ancient capital and sow terror.

President Volodymyr Zelensky once again thanked "the defenders of the sky" in his address to the nation on Tuesday night. The battle in the skies, he made clear, is as important as the bloody struggle being waged by soldiers on land.

Anna Lukinova contributed reporting.

— Marc Santora

WASHINGTON — The United States announced Thursday that it would stop providing key information about its nuclear arms to Russia, in retaliation for Moscow's decision to withdraw from the New START treaty.

The move has the potential of raising nuclear tensions, especially if Moscow continues to make nuclear threats against Ukraine or the West.

Biden administration officials said they did not believe that the suspension of the information swap would raise the risk of nuclear weapons being used in Ukraine, but they said the treaty had in the past helped the United States and Russia better understand how each country operated.

In February, Russia announced it would suspend participation in New START. For several months, the United States continued the notifications required under the treaty. But on Thursday, Washington said it would take the same actions as Russia has.

The State Department said that the United States would no longer allow the inspections of nuclear sites mandated by the treaty, would cease providing information about the movement of missiles or launchers, and would no longer provide key telemetry data about its intercontinental and submarine missile tests.

The announcement came ahead of remarks scheduled for Friday by Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, at the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group that promotes arms control policies, in Washington.

The United States said it would still notify Russia when it intends to conduct a test launch of missiles. Russia has also agreed to provide notification when it moves strategic bombers, and the United States said it would do the same.

Problems with New START's provisions began well before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February. New START inspections were halted during the coronavirus pandemic when travel restrictions prevented inspectors from getting into either country.

But as those restrictions lifted, Russia still denied U.S. inspectors access. (Russia accused the United States of also not allowing inspections, but U.S. officials have insisted they were ready to allow them as long as Russia did.)

— Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger