Russia-Ukraine WarRussia Fires Scores of Missiles While Ramping Up Winter Offensive

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia targeted Ukraine’s already battered infrastructure with drones, rockets and cruise missiles on Friday, raining fire on cities around the country as President Volodymyr Zelensky wrapped up a push in Europe for more, faster support from Kyiv’s allies.

On the ground, Russia has been ramping up the pace of its winter offensive, Ukrainian officials say, pouring troops and equipment into eastern Ukraine to try to swallow up new territory as the first anniversary of the war approaches and Kyiv waits for more powerful weapons from the West.

Military analysts have said that Russia has made small tactical gains over the past week — often at great cost — but as of Friday morning there was no evidence of a major breakthrough despite the heavy fighting.

The Ukrainian Air Force described Friday’s assault as a “massive attack” and said that it had involved 71 cruise missiles and seven Iranian-made drones. Ukraine said in a statement that it had shot down 61 of the cruise missiles and five of the drones.

Ukrainian officials maintained that two of the Russian missiles had crossed the airspace of Romania, a NATO country, even as Bucharest rejected the claim. Mr. Zelensky, who repeated the assertion, condemned the attacks and used the episode as an opportunity to rally his country’s allies.

“Their targets were civilians, civilian infrastructure,” Mr. Zelensky, who was traveling back to Ukraine after a stop in Poland, said in a video statement. He added: “This is terror that can and must be stopped — stopped by the world.”

Since October, Russia has launched more than a dozen major strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities, as well as many smaller attacks, in a campaign to impair the power supply and leave civilians without power, heat and light during the winter.

The full extent of the damage of the strikes on Friday was not immediately clear, but energy infrastructure was hit in six regions of the country, according to Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Galushchenko.

“Emergency shutdowns have been introduced in many regions,” he said in a statement, adding that energy workers were racing to restore supply. The state-owned power utility, Ukrenergo, confirmed damage to several high-voltage infrastructure sites in the eastern, western and southern regions of Ukraine.

Over Kyiv, the capital, Ukrainian fighter jets raced across the sky to intercept inbound missiles, and air defense systems thundered. Ten missiles were shot down over the city, and power transmission lines were damaged, according to the mayor, Vitali Klitschko. He said engineers were working to restore the lines.

Russia also launched a large attack of nearly three dozen S-300 anti-aircraft missiles from Belgorod in Russia and the occupied city of Tokmak in southern Ukraine, toward targets in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s air defense system cannot shoot down the anti-aircraft missiles, the Air Force said.

In southern Ukraine, Anatolii Kurtiev, the secretary of the Zaporizhzhia City Council, said that at least 17 missile strikes had been reported in less than an hour. It was the highest rate of missile attacks the city has encountered since the start of the full-scale invasion nearly a year ago, he said. The extent of the damage and number of casualties were not yet known, he said early Friday in a statement.

Four missiles were also shot down around the southern city of Kryvyi Rih, including three within the city limits, the local authorities said.

In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, at least 10 explosions were reported overnight, Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the regional administration, said in a statement. They appeared to be aimed at critical infrastructure, but the scale of the damage was not immediately clear.

Mr. Zelensky this week made a whirlwind European visit — only his second trip outside the country since the war began — pleading in London, Paris and Brussels for more and heavier weapons to fend off Russia’s new offensive.

KYIV REGION, Ukraine — When air-raid alarms sound, most Ukrainian soldiers and civilians move to take shelter in hallways, basements or bunkers.

But air defense soldiers, who are deployed in a ring around the capital, Kyiv, seek wide open spaces, such as farm fields or meadows. They head out in four-wheel-drive trucks, searching for 360-degree views, as a radar station sweeps the sky for incoming drones, cruise and ballistic missiles.

“As soon as my station registers something, we see it in the system” on a computer map, said Capt. Andriy, a radar operator, who, like other members of his team, asked to be identified only by first name and rank. The coordinates are shared automatically with Ukraine’s air defense forces across the country.

Ukraine operates sophisticated, Western-provided air defense weapons, including German-made IRIS-T missiles and American and Norwegian NASAMS. But it also relies on mobile groups in trucks mounted with machine guns and carrying soldiers bearing shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

On Friday, those forces were on high alert. One group in the region around Kyiv drove into a field to be ready to shoot at drones or cruise missiles if needed, but no targets came within range.

“This morning three ballistic missiles flew by us, but they were too far to shoot down,” said Captain Andriy. He operates the radar for his air-defense group and uses a tablet computer showing missiles in flight throughout Ukraine, including those that might pass his machine gunners.

The small, mobile groups are mostly deployed against Iranian-made Shahed-136 attack drones, which arrive with the distinctive sound of a lawn mower. “Lately, they fly Shaheds at night,” Captain Andriy said. “It’s easy to locate them, but how can we shoot them down when we cannot see them?”

A private who operates the group’s .50 caliber, truck-mounted machine gun, was on duty in a snowy field on Friday through the pre-dawn hours after repeated air-raid warnings sounded. “I was cold all night and all day,” he said.

Another private, Oleksandr, was at the ready with a shoulder-fired missile. “I was on duty since midnight,” he said. But “I didn’t down anything.” Of the missiles streaking in toward Kyiv, he said, “they were too far away from me.”

Ukraine’s Air Force said it had shot down 61 of the 71 missiles Russia fired at Ukrainian cities and infrastructure sites on Friday. It said that at least one of the missiles was downed by a shoulder-fired missile launched by a small, mobile group of soldiers in southern Ukraine.

“We are learning,” Pvt. Oleksandr said. “We shoot down more these days.”

WASHINGTON — President Biden will visit Poland later this month for the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demonstrate the durability of the U.S. commitment to stand up to Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression.

Mr. Biden will make a three-day visit starting on Feb. 20, White House officials said on Friday, and is set to meet with President Andrzej Duda of Poland and leaders of other NATO allies.

“President Biden will deliver remarks ahead of the one-year anniversary of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, addressing how the United States has rallied the world to support the people of Ukraine as they defend their freedom and democracy, and how we will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary.

White House officials declined to say whether Mr. Biden planned to make a visit to Ukraine while he was in the area as a way of underscoring American support for President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Moscow’s renewed assault on Ukraine’s infrastructure directly or indirectly disrupted operations at all four of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, the United Nations nuclear watchdog said on Friday, in a somber illustration of how vulnerable the facilities remain in the face of Russia’s war.

The watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said “instability in the electrical grid from the shelling” caused a reactor unit at the Khmelnytskyi plant in western Ukraine to shut down, and that the power output at the Rivne and South Ukraine plants was reduced as a precautionary measure.

At the fourth plant, Zaporizhzhia, this week’s “increased military activity” delayed a planned rotation of I.A.E.A. experts, the agency said. The agency has established a permanent presence at all of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities in hopes of reducing the risk of a nuclear accident.

The Zaporizhzhia plant, which has been shut down and is controlled by Russia, has faced significant damage from frontline fighting. The I.A.E.A.’s diplomatic effort to establish a demilitarized security zone around the plant has been slow going, though the leader of the agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said he remained “hopeful” after talks in Moscow this week.

The situation around the Zaporizhzhia plant, which is Europe’s largest nuclear complex, remained “volatile and unpredictable,” Mr. Grossi said in a statement. “The postponement of the planned rotation demonstrates all too clearly the need for urgent measures to protect the plant and the people working there,” he said.

The I.A.E.A. said all safety systems at the Khmelnytskyi plant, where a reactor was shut down on Friday, worked as expected. Still, the disruptions at Ukraine’s three operational plants, a significant source of the country’s power supply, worsened the difficulties the crippled energy grid already faced from months of relentless Russian attacks.

Friday’s renewed onslaught on the power plants, high-voltage facilities and transmission systems across the country triggered emergency power outages, according to Ukrenegro, the state-owned power utility. Damage assessments and restoration efforts were underway, it added.

The war is at a possible turning point after months of slow-moving fighting. The New York Times mapped out what the critical next few months could look like: Where Russia and Ukraine are preparing to attack, what they want and what could stand in their way.

The War’s Violent Next Stage

Both sides are preparing to attack after months of slow-moving fighting. Russia is moving first. Here’s how each side is trying to shape the critical next few months in Ukraine.

A group of about 30 sports ministers and government officials, including representatives of some of the most prominent countries in the Olympic movement, said on Friday that they planned to call on the International Olympic Committee “in the coming days” to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from international sports as long as their nations are engaged in the war in Ukraine.

The meeting came as Olympic leaders have been discussing the possibility of permitting individual athletes from Russia and Belarus to return to international competitions, including the Olympics, as so-called neutral participants.

The prospect of a demand from dozens of nations for the I.O.C. to put the brakes on such a plan is part of a growing campaign to make Russia and its ally Belarus pariahs in global sports. The movement has been led by Ukraine and a group of its neighbors, joined by Baltic nations and Norway, but Friday’s meeting also included representatives from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Canada.

Ukrainian officials said last week that they would continue to press for Russia’s sporting isolation, and on Friday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, addressed the sports gathering and urged nations to band together to “safeguard the Olympic movement.”

“The International Olympic Committee needs honesty,” Zelensky said. “Honesty it has unfortunately lost.”

The British government, which hosted Friday’s meeting, said in a statement that it was “coordinating a collective statement towards the I.O.C.” that it expected to publish “in the coming days.”

“There is danger here that the world wishes to move on and back to business as usual,” Britain’s culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, said in the statement. “However, the situation in Ukraine has not changed since the I.O.C.’s initial decision last February on banning Russian and Belarusian athletes from competition.”

In the days following the Russian invasion, the I.O.C. recommended that international sports federations prohibit athletes from Russia and Belarus from participating to pre-empt national governments from interfering in sports. It also recommended prohibiting teams representing those countries from participation and not allowing those countries to host any events.

As long as Russia continues its war in Ukraine, she said, “Russia and Belarus must not be allowed to compete on the world stage or be represented at the Olympics.”

While notable in suggesting growing support for Ukraine among Olympic nations, the campaign to bar Russia lacks for now a clear threat of consequences — namely any vows to boycott next year’s Summer Olympics or any other international sporting events.

In the case of the United States, at least, the door was left open for continuing discussions on the matter. The U.S. representative at the meeting, Lee Satterfield, an assistant secretary of state for education and cultural affairs, reiterated the country’s previous statements on the participation by Russian and Belarusian athletes.

Last week, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the United States had supported removing Russia’s and Belarus’s sport governing bodies and their representatives from international sports federations. But when sports organizations like the I.O.C. allow those athletes to compete, “it should be absolutely clear that they are not representing the Russian or Belarusian states,” she said.

Ms. Satterfield’s comments were relayed by a spokesman for the State Department, who added that the government would continue to consult with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and seek “greater clarity” from the I.O.C. regarding any plans to allow Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete.

While the U.S. has provided tens of billions of dollars’ worth of support for Ukraine, more than any other country, joining any calls for a boycott would be complicated because Los Angeles will host the next Summer Games, in 2028.

Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

Romania, a NATO member, said on Friday that a Russian missile had come within 22 miles of its border but that it did not cross into the country’s territory, countering a claim made by the Ukrainian military.

Ukraine’s top military commander had said earlier in the day that two Russian missiles crossed into the airspace of Moldova and Romania before entering Ukraine and being directed at targets in the country.

Although Russian missiles have been reported over Moldovan air space during the war, it would have been the first such instance of a Russian missile entering Romanian airspace. Such a violation would risk inflaming tensions between NATO and Moscow.

Romania’s defense ministry said in a statement that when a missile was detected near the north of the country’s territory, two of its fighter jets that were conducting drills under NATO command were redirected to the area, but that they resumed their original mission once the situation became clear.

Even after the Romanian statement, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine repeated the claim that Russian missiles had flown through Romania’s airspace in addition to Moldova’s and said it was “proof that terror does not know and will never know any borders.”

“These missiles are a challenge to NATO’s collective security,” he said in a video message released on Friday afternoon.

Several hours later, Ukraine’s Air Force continued to insist that radar data would show two Russian missiles crossing into Romanian airspace. “There is radar data — there are means of objective control,” Yuriy Ihnat, the Air Force spokesman, said at a news conference. “Undoubtedly, NATO member countries were watching this situation,” he said, adding that he believed more information would emerge to confirm Ukraine’s account of the events.

NATO declined to comment on the episode. Moldova’s foreign ministry confirmed that the missiles had passed over its airspace, and said it had summoned the Russian ambassador to discuss the incident. “We strongly reject the recent unfriendly actions and statements in relation to the Republic of Moldova, which is absolutely unacceptable by our people,” Daniel Voda, a spokesman for the ministry, said in a statement,

The missiles involved in the incident were part of a broader Russian assault that featured dozens of drones, rocket and cruise missiles aimed at critical Ukrainian infrastructure across the country.

Russia has previously fired drones and missiles over Moldova into Ukraine, prompting diplomatic protests from the government there. Debris from a Russian missile shot down by Ukrainian air defenses landed in a border village in Moldova in October.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly a year ago, there has been concern that the conflict could escalate either by design or by accident.

In November, when an explosion in Poland near the Ukrainian border killed two people, Ukrainian officials were quick to claim that it was the result of a Russian rocket. When it was determined to instead be a Ukrainian air-defense missile, fears eased over the prospect that NATO would become more deeply embroiled in the war.

Western officials also made the findings of that investigation public, given that Russia and NATO both say that they do not want to engage in a direct war with each other. Although NATO members have sent military aid to Ukraine, both sides also have made some effort to keep the war from spilling over into neighboring countries.

On Friday, Valery Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, said in a statement that two Kalibr cruise missiles fired from the Black Sea had crossed into Moldovan airspace at 10:18 a.m. and then crossed Romanian airspace 15 minutes later. He said the missiles had then made their way back into Ukraine after crossing at a juncture where the three countries’ borders meet.

Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting.

President Biden welcomed Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at the White House on Friday for a summit that was mostly about areas of cooperation between the countries. But when it comes to Ukraine, the two leaders disagree.

While Mr. Lula has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has also suggested in the past that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and NATO share some blame for the war, and he has refused to sell weapons to Ukraine in an effort to maintain neutrality.

Instead, Mr. Lula wants to try to help mediate peace in the conflict, while Mr. Biden is far more supportive of Ukraine, with little expectation that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has any interest in peace.

“We need to find interlocutors who can sit with President Putin to show him the mistake he made to invade Ukraine’s territory, and we have to show Ukraine that they need to talk more so we can enda this war,” Mr. Lula said in an interview with CNN broadcast on Friday.

In the interview, Mr. Lula said that he would not sell weapons or ammunition to Ukraine to avoid getting involved. “I don’t want to join the war,” he said. “I want to end the war.” He added that in his meeting with Mr. Biden, “I don’t know what he’s going to say to me, but what I’m going to say to him: It is necessary to build a set of countries to negotiate peace.”

John Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, said in a separate interview with CNN that the U.S. government believed Mr. Lula’s view did not reflect the current state of the war. “We don’t see any impetus right now to get to the negotiating table,” he said, “so that’s why we are focused on making sure Ukraine has everything they need to be successful on the battlefield, so if and when President Zelensky says, ‘I’m ready to sit down,’ he can do so with some wind at his back.”

Mr. Kirby said that the White House would continue to push for support for Ukraine, but that it respected sovereign nations like Brazil to make their own decisions. “The whole issue at stake in Ukraine, when you get right down to it, is about sovereignty,” he said. “How hypocritical would it be for the United States, in that sort of frame, to be browbeating or tussling with other countries to give more, do more, say more?”

Neither leader raised the issue of Ukraine when news cameras were in the Oval Office, saving any discussion of it for private meetings.

Brazil’s position on the Russia-Ukraine war is complicated by its reliance on Russia for about a quarter of its fertilizer imports, which are crucial to its enormous agriculture industry.

Brazil is Russia’s largest buyer of fertilizer. In 2019, Brazil spent roughly $1.9 billion on chemicals from Russia. Fertilizer is big business for Russia, but is still dwarfed by its oil and gas exports.

Political analysts have said that if disagreement over Ukraine becomes a major part of the talks, it has the potential to spoil a summit that should be an easy foreign-policy win for both countries.

“Even though these are two leaders with a lot in common, their underlying world views and national interests are quite different, and Ukraine is a big one,” said Brian Winter, a writer and analyst who tracks Latin America for the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, a group that pushes free trade in the Americas. “Primarily because of that issue, I do think there’s potential for both sides to walk away from this meeting with a somewhat sour taste.”

Peter Baker contributed reporting.

The pro-Western prime minister of Moldova, a troubled Eastern European nation that borders Ukraine, resigned on Friday, buffeted by a severe energy crisis, soaring inflation and errant missiles as a result of the war raging next door.

Natalia Gavrilita, an economist, had been prime minister since 2021, when she took charge of the government after elections gave a strong majority in Parliament to pro-Western politicians. Officials and analysts said that her departure would not push the former Soviet republic back into Moscow’s orbit or change its aspirations to join the European Union.

“This is not a crisis, just a normal reshuffle of the government,” Nicu Popescu, Moldova’s foreign minister, said in a telephone interview. He said that a “big part” of the prime minister’s team would stay in their jobs.

More important in deciding Moldova’s direction is the country’s president, Maia Sandu, a Harvard-educated former World Bank official who was elected to a four-year term in 2020 on a platform of aligning the country, Europe’s poorest, closely with the West. The incumbent president she defeated, Igor Dodon, had been openly endorsed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Ms. Sandu’s allies dominate Parliament, which is likely to approve any new prime minister she nominates. She tapped Dorin Recean, a former interior minister of Moldova, as the new government leader later on Friday.

Russia, infuriated by Moldova’s Westward tilt under President Sandu, has sought to reverse that course by choking off supplies of natural gas and stoking public discontent through local allies like Ilan M. Shor, a convicted fraudster and fugitive billionaire who has used his money to pay street protesters.

Along with economic problems exacerbated by an energy squeeze across Europe as the continent pushes to wean itself off Russia’s fossil fuels as punishment for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, Moldova has been unsettled over the past year by wayward Russian rockets landing on its territory.

On Friday, shortly before Ms. Gavrilita announced her resignation, a Russian missile fired from the Black Sea flew over Moldova on its way to Ukraine, the latest in a series of violations of Moldovan air space.

Announcing her decision at a news conference on Friday, the departing prime minister said that her government had faced an unexpected cascade of “crises caused by Russian aggression in Ukraine.” But Ms. Gavrilita said: “I believe that we will be able to make it through all the difficulties and challenges.”

The United States announced on Friday that it would impose sanctions on five current and former Bulgarian officials, including former finance and energy ministers, accusing them of corruption that undermined the country’s democracy and helped keep it dependent on Russian energy.

The Treasury Department’s action was taken in support of Bulgaria as a NATO ally “in its fight against both entrenched corruption and Russian influence,” the department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Brian E. Nelson, said a statement.

Bulgaria long had a close relationship with Russia, the world’s third-largest producer of oil, and was heavily reliant on its natural gas exports, but their relations deteriorated after Bulgaria joined Western nations in opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Corruption and Russian involvement in Bulgaria’s energy sector was a particular focus of the Treasury’s action on Friday. Among those the sanctions targeted is Rumen Stoyanov Ovcharov, a former member of Bulgaria’s Parliament who served as the country’s energy minister in the late 1990s and mid-2000s.

Mr. Ovcharov “repeatedly engaged in corrupt energy contracts with Russian energy companies,” the Treasury Department’s statement said. He and two former chief executives of Bulgaria’s only nuclear power plant, Aleksandar Hristov Nikolov and Ivan Kirov Genov, accepted bribes and profited from diverting the plant's contracts to their own business interests in arrangements that continued through at least 2020, according to the Treasury.

Nikolay Simeonov Malinov, a Bulgarian politician who leads a pro-Russian lobby group known as the Russophiles National Movement, was sanctioned for judicial bribery. Mr. Malinov was barred from international travel after being charged with spying for Russian-backed interests in 2019. The Treasury said he had bribed a Bulgarian judge to allow him to travel to Russia to personally receive from President Vladimir V. Putin a medal and an award of 2.5 million Russian rubles, about $40,000 at the time.

Vladislav Ivanov Goranov, a former finance minister of Bulgaria, was also placed under sanctions for corruption, as were several entities controlled by him and Mr. Malinov, including the Russophiles National Movement.

All the sanctions were imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows the United States to punish foreign officials with economic penalties for corruption and human rights violations. The United Kingdom on Friday imposed sanctions on three Bulgarians accused of corruption whom the U.S. had penalized in 2021.

A secret pardon granted by President Vladimir V. Putin to a Russian prisoner who fought in Ukraine shows that the former inmate received clemency on the day he left jail to join the war, an act that rights activists say short-circuits the existing legal process.

The document, a copy of a prison release certificate reviewed by The New York Times, is the first published evidence of what activists say is a mass pardon campaign instituted by the Kremlin to entice tens of thousands of prisoners to enter battle.

Such recruits became a crucial component of Russia’s war effort in recent months. The Wagner mercenary group has used such fighters to unleash waves of suicidal attacks intended to wear down Ukrainian positions along the heavily fortified eastern front, where Russian forces have been making slow gains, including on the key city of Bakhmut.

The founder of the mercenary group, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian businessman who is an ally of Mr. Putin’s, appeared in prison recruitment videos last year, promising freedom for those who signed on. In early January, Wagner began releasing videos of former inmates receiving what appeared to be pardon papers after finishing their contracts. Analysts and rights activists said the videos were an effort to raise Wagner’s flagging recruitment numbers. (Mr. Prigozhin said on Thursday that Wagner would no longer recruit fighters in Russian prisons, though he did not specify why.)

The pardon videos immediately raised questions about whether the recruiting was circumventing the legal process. Existing pardon rules typically required an extended consultation process among multiple government agencies. And only Mr. Putin, as president, can pardon prisoners. In 2021, he pardoned just six people, according to the Kremlin.

The prison release certificate reviewed by The Times was issued by Russia’s Justice Ministry. It says that the inmate was freed in late August by “a pardon decree issued by the president of the Russian Federation.”

The former prisoner received the certificate this month while recuperating from a mine injury in an infirmary in southern Russia. The Times redacted his personal details to protect him against retaliation.

The Times obtained the certificate from Yana Gelmel, a Russian prisoner’s rights lawyer. The inmate’s mother had previously confirmed to The Times his identity and Wagner contract. His personal details and prison sentences also match those found in Russia’s publicly available legal database.

Ms. Gelmel said the issuing of such certificates dealt a major blow to the vestiges of legality in Russia by erasing the rights of crime victims to compensation.

“They can kill a man, they can rob, and then they can go to war and walk free,” she said of former inmates who had received pardons. “This is complete impunity.”

The Kremlin has not published any pardon decrees this year, but Mr. Putin’s spokesman and pro-government rights campaigners have implied in recent weeks that Wagner fighters’ legal statuses could be a state secret.

“All these decrees are closed,” Eva Merkacheva, a member of Russia’s Kremlin-allied Human Rights Council, told the state news media in January. “We can’t see them.”

Russia announced on Friday that it would cut its oil production next month by 500,000 barrels a day, or about 5 percent of its output — Moscow’s first substantive response to a wave of recently imposed sanctions on the country’s oil trade.

Oil prices jumped on the news, and by late afternoon in Europe the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, was 2.5 percent higher on the day, around $86.30 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate rose similarly, briefly rising above $80 a barrel.

A rise in price may be exactly what Russia is seeking. The world’s third-largest producer of oil, Russia has been forced to sell its crude at a significant discount, estimated to be as much as 50 percent, to attract new buyers in Asia to make up for embargoes imposed in the European Union and elsewhere.

The cutback in production was announced by Alexander Novak, a deputy prime minister and Russia’s point man on energy. His statement was combative, repeating a refrain from Russian leaders that “we will not sell oil to those who directly or indirectly adhere to the principles of the price cap,” he told reporters, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

But analysts said it appeared that Russia, which has done surprisingly well at maintaining production in recent months, was worried about the loss of oil revenue from restrictions placed on Russia’s oil trade by Western sanctions, including a price cap of $60 per barrel imposed in December.

“Russia might be feeling that more and more countries are going to start attempting to use the price cap scheme,” said Felix Todd, an analyst at Argus Media, a pricing data firm.

Last summer, 1,704 TikTok accounts made a coordinated and covert effort to influence public discourse about the war in Ukraine, the company said on Thursday.

Nearly all the accounts were part of a single network operating out of Russia that pretended to be based in Europe and aimed its posts at Germans, Italians and Britons, the company said. The accounts used software to use local languages that amplified pro-Russia propaganda, attracting more than 133,000 followers before being discovered and removed by TikTok.

TikTok disclosed the networks on Thursday in an in-depth report that examined its handling of disinformation in Europe, where it has more than 100 million users, noting that conflict in Ukraine “challenged us to confront a complex and rapidly changing environment.”

Ukrainian forces on Friday battled advancing Russian forces in the pine forests near the city of Kreminna in eastern Ukraine and held increasingly precarious defensive positions in the frozen trenches and battered buildings around the ruined city of Bakhmut, according to Ukrainian officials and military analysts.

The pace of Russian operations continued to intensify, but Britain’s defense intelligence agency said that Kyiv was managing to broadly hold its defensive lines despite the onslaught.

Over the course of a year of fighting, Russian attempts to advance have rarely resulted in swift gains, instead playing out over weeks of grueling combat. As it adds more tanks, artillery and air support to a winter offensive that Ukrainian officials say is aimed at securing control of the entire Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, Moscow is once again trying to grind out territorial gains.

Some of the toughest fighting over the past week has been in an area around the city of Kreminna, a small but vital pocket of land in Donbas. There was no indication of any letup on Friday.

“It is quite difficult for our fighters, but they control the situation,” Serhiy Haidai, the head of the Luhansk regional military administration, said in a statement on Friday about Ukraine’s efforts to repel the Russian assault.

The Russian push in Kreminna also signaled that Moscow was trying to stretch Ukrainian forces, which have been straining to hold off Russia’s advance on Bakhmut, 30 miles to the south.

Russia continued to make slow progress in its effort to cut off Ukrainian troops defending the city of Bakhmut, Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Friday. Bakhmut is a key target for Moscow, which sees it as important to its goal of driving farther west and attacking the Ukrainian stronghold at Kramatorsk.

As Ukrainian soldiers held their positions in trenches spread across hundreds of miles, Kyiv said its forces continued to target Russian staging areas deep behind the front line in an attempt to disrupt Moscow’s ability to sustain its campaign.

For eight months, the village of Levkivka in eastern Ukraine was under occupation by Russian troops, who cut off roughly 300 residents from the outside world. There was no running water or power, and Russian soldiers would often snatch their cellphones and stomp on them, fearful that locals would betray their locations, residents said. The only medical care was provided by two village nurses, who braved the constant shelling to make house calls with limited supplies and medicine.

Ukrainian forces recaptured Levkivka in September, but medical care is still hard to come by. A truck, provided by the United Nations Population Fund and staffed with doctors from the city of Kharkiv, is seeking to change that. The vehicle travels around the region, part of a continuing Ukrainian government effort to bring a semblance of normalcy to once occupied villages in the east.

Levkivka, a village of tidy homes along the Siversky Donets River, is in a region mangled by vicious fighting. The carcasses of tanks and armored vehicles litter the rolling farm fields. Whole villages have been simply wiped out, with piles of brick and charred wood where houses once stood.

While the war is not far from people’s minds, most in the village are preoccupied with more quotidian concerns like renewing drug prescriptions and dealing with their hypertension and diabetes.

KHERSON, Ukraine — The little green van sped down the road, the Russian forces just across the river. Inside, Halyna Luhova, the mayor of Kherson, cradled a helmet in her lap and gazed out of the bulletproof window.

When the first shell ripped open, directly in the path of the van, maybe 200 yards ahead, her driver locked his elbows and tightened his grip on the wheel and drove straight through the cloud of fresh black smoke.

“Oh my god,” Ms. Luhova said, as we raced with her through the city. “They’re hunting me.”

The second shell landed even closer.

She’s been almost killed six times. She sleeps on a cot in a hallway. She makes $375 a month, and her city in southern Ukraine has become one of the war’s most pummeled places, fired on by Russian artillery nearly every hour.

But Ms. Luhova, the only female mayor of a major city in Ukraine, remains determined to project a sense of normality even though Kherson is anything but normal. She holds regular meetings — in underground bunkers. She excoriates department heads — for taking too long to set up bomb shelters. She circulates in neighborhoods and chit-chats with residents — whose lives have been torn apart by explosions.

Kherson, a port city on the Dnipro River, was captured by Russian forces in March; retaken by Ukrainian forces in November; and now, three months later, lies nearly deserted. Packs of out-of-school children roam the empty boulevards lined with leafless trees and centuries-old buildings cracked in half.

Russia continued to shell the city over the weekend, with projectiles striking a cinema and concert hall, warehouse facilities, houses and an area near the regional administration building, the local authorities said on Monday. Three civilians were killed over the past day, the regional administration said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.

Ms. Luhova sees her job defined by basic verbs: bury, clean, fix and feed. Of the 10 percent or so of Kherson’s original population of 330,000 who remain, many are too old, too poor, too stubborn or too strung out to flee.