As shelling increases in Ukraine, Russia fires missiles in a blunt warning

As shelling struck towns in eastern Ukraine Saturday, and civilians boarded buses in a chaotic evacuation, Russia engaged in a dramatic display of military theater, test-firing ballistic and cruise missiles in a reminder to the West that a conflict over Ukraine could quickly escalate.

In eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists have asserted, without evidence, that Ukraine was planning a large-scale attack, separatist leaders urged women and children to evacuate and able-bodied men to prepare to fight.

Western leaders derided the notion that Ukraine would launch an attack while surrounded by Russian forces, and Ukrainian officials dismissed the claim as “a cynical Russian lie.” But the ginned-up panic was a disturbing sign of what the United States has warned could be a pretext for a Russian invasion. President Joe Biden declared Friday that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had already decided to invade Ukraine.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, flew to Munich Saturday to shore up Western support for his threatened nation.

Western leaders there displayed a united front and issued repeated calls for a diplomatic resolution. Vice President Kamala Harris called the crisis “a defining moment” for European security and the defense of democratic values.

But Putin sent his own message, presiding over tests of nuclear-capable missiles as part of what Russia insists are nothing more than military exercises around Ukraine and not the precursor to an invasion.

Tensions between the United States and Russia have not been this high since the Cold War, and Russia’s nuclear drills Saturday appeared carefully timed to deter the West from direct military involvement in Ukraine.

In Munich, Harris warned that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States and its allies would target not only financial institutions and technology exports to Russia, but also “those who are complicit and those who aid and direct this unprovoked invasion.”

“Russia continues to claim it is ready for talks, while at the same time it narrows the avenues for diplomacy,” she said. “Their actions simply do not match their words.”

Zelenskyy, who flew to Munich for a few hours despite U.S. concerns that he not leave the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, impatiently pressed Western leaders to take stronger action now.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked. “We don’t need your sanctions after” the economy collapses and “parts of our country will be occupied.”

He made clear that Ukraine would continue to seek membership in NATO, and blamed the West for not being honest about whether it really would welcome Ukraine into the alliance.

“We are told the doors are open,” he said. “But so far, the strangers are not allowed. If not all members are willing to see us, or all members do not want to see us there, be honest about it. Open doors are good, but we need open answers.”

In Ukraine, shelling escalated in the east, where Russia-backed separatists have battled government forces in the past few days.

Artillery fire picked up along the entire length of the front line, the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs said Saturday. The shelling was roughly double the level of the previous two days, the ministry said.

The Ukrainian military said two soldiers had been killed and five wounded in fighting in the area.

Several intense artillery barrages targeted a pocket of government-controlled territory around the town of Svitlodarsk, a spot that has worried security analysts for weeks for its proximity to dangerous industrial infrastructure, including storage tanks for poisonous gas.

Residents of the breakaway region of Luhansk, who said both sides had been shelling in recent days, were fearful of the escalation.

“I have a small baby,” said Nadya Lapygina, whose town, Staryi Aidar,was hit by artillery and mortar fire. “You have no idea how scary it is to hide him from the shelling.”

There were also alarming signs of what U.S. officials described as possible precursors to a pretext for a Russian invasion. Leaders of Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine issued a call Saturday for all men in the territory they control to register to fight.

The separatists, viewed by the West as Russian proxies, called Friday for 700,000 women and children to evacuate the region, claiming that Ukrainian government forces were planning a large-scale attack.

On Saturday, Denis Pushilin, leader of one pro-Russia separatist region, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, called on all able-bodied men to be prepared to fight.

“I appeal to all men of the republic who are able to hold weapons in their hands, to stand up for their families, their children, wives and mothers,” he wrote on social media.

The Ukrainian government denied any plans for an attack, and the United States dismissed the accusation as a lie intended to give Russia a pretext for launching an invasion.

So did the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who dismissed Russian claims of a “genocide” being committed by Kyiv in the eastern Donbas region as “really ridiculous, to be very clear on that.”

A Russian move into Ukraine would be a “grave mistake” that would prompt immediate and heavy “political, economic and strategic” consequences, Scholz said at the Munich Security Conference. “Nothing justifies the deployment of well over 100,000 Russian soldiers around Ukraine. No country should be another’s backyard.”

Similar warnings were uttered by Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She promised a serious package of financial and economic sanctions against Moscow in case of any aggression, which “may cost Russia a prosperous future.”

Even Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in a striking comment of some distancing from Russia, said that the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of every country should be safeguarded. “Ukraine is no exception,” he said in a virtual appearance at the Munich conference. But he also urged the United States to stop making “hyperbolic warnings” about Russian intentions.

The separatist warnings of an impending attack led to real scenes of chaos at bus depots in eastern Ukraine.

Inna Shalpa, a resident of the separatist-held town of Ilovaisk, in the Donetsk region, had no idea where the Russian bus she and her three children boarded was headed, but she was ready to accept the uncertainty to flee an expected war.

“We were mostly worried about the children,” Shalpa, 35, said in the middle of a frantic effort to distribute refugees among buses, parked in front of the first Russian railway station on the other side of the border.

On Friday, Putin ordered the government to pay $130 to every refugee, and the Russian region of Rostov, which has several crossing points with the separatist areas, declared a state of emergency.

By Saturday, several thousand people had fled the separatist regions of Ukraine and crossed into Russia.

The Russian missile tests, of three ballistic and cruise missiles, were designed to make a media impact. Putin watched the display from a Kremlin command center, accompanied by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, whose government has brutally suppressed dissent after a contested election and is considering letting Russia base some of its nuclear arsenal on its territory.

The test was technologically unremarkable, with videos issued by Moscow showing a fighter jet releasing a cruise missile from the air, a mobile-launch vehicle shooting off an intercontinental ballistic missile and a hypersonic sea-launched missile.

While the weapons demonstrated Saturday have been shown before, two of the three were designed to evade U.S. missile defenses. The Kremlin said the test was designed to show off Russia’s “triad” — launches from the ground, air, and sea — which mirrors the array of weapons in the U.S. arsenal.

The heightened sense of urgency expressed by Washington was not immediately apparent in Kyiv, despite Biden’s having explicitly identified the capital city as a Russian target. The idea of Russian forces storming what is currently a calm and peaceful city was hard for many people there to imagine.

“Russia will do something,” Sofiya Soyedka, 32, a Kyiv resident, said just after Biden’s dire warning Friday.

But invade Kyiv? “No way,” she said.

Some of the officials gathered in Munich also expressed doubts, suggesting that Putin may prefer a longer squeeze on Zelenskyy and Ukraine, creating provocations and anxiety and continuing to damage the Ukrainian economy. Such tactics, they suggested, would make it harder for the Europeans to inflict harsh sanctions on Russia and could damage the trans-Atlantic unity on this issue that U.S. and European diplomats have so painfully constructed.

Biden’s televised speech Friday evening was the first time that the president had said he considered, based on intelligence and troop movements, that Putin had decided on a major invasion of Ukraine “in the coming week, in the coming days,” adding that “we believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”

U.S. officials said Biden’s assessment was based in part on new intelligence showing that nearly half of the 150,000 Russian forces had moved out of staging and into combat formation, and could launch a full-scale invasion within days.

The force includes 120 to 125 battalion tactical groups, up from the mid-80s earlier in the month. And some of the forces are Russian reservists who would make up an occupation force after an invasion, said the officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss government assessments.