Mediaboss Marketing

Russias war on Ukraine has entered a fourth week, as increasingly harsh rhetoric from Western powers towards Russian President Vladimir Putin fails to stop attacks in several cities.

It is near impossible to verify how many civilians have been killed so far. According to the United Nations, more than 600 have died but the real figure is feared to be higher.

Reports say thousands of soldiers on both sides have also died.

Meanwhile, Russia-Ukraine talks aiming for a peaceful solution continue as reports grow of Russias military becoming bogged down.

How might the situation develop from here? Here are five scenarios:

Ukrainian forces are still resisting Russias invasion, inflicting serious equipment and human losses.

Crucially, they repelled an attempt by paratroopers to seize the capital Kyiv in the opening days of the conflict and have since withdrawn to defensive positions that have enabled them to keep control over all strategic cities.

Although Russia has long claimed it has air superiority, Ukraines air defences appear to be still working, while Western countries are pouring in portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.

The Russian invasion has largely stalled on all fronts, an update from the UK defence ministry said on Thursday.

But in an interview with Al Jazeera, Frank Ledwidge, senior lecturer in military capabilities and strategy at the University of Portsmouth, said Whats happened here is that the Russian attack has, in military terms, culminated.

Theyve gone as far as they can with the logistics and weaponry they brought into the country that doesnt necessarily mean its stalled, he said.

What were seeing now is whats called an operational pause as they start to get, in colloquial terms, their act together, which they have not had largely due to very poor planning assumptions in the early part of the campaign.

So theyd be working frantically to try to get weapons and get their planning sorted out and to understand where does it go next. And of course, Ukrainians have a say in that, which is why we are starting to see counterattacks by Ukrainian armed forces that seem to be having some effect.

United States intelligence estimates that 7,000 Russian troops have died, The New York Times reported although experts say that all such claims should be treated with caution.

US President Joe Biden announced a massive new package of military aid for Ukraine on Wednesday, including 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones and thousands more missiles.

Ukrainian military resistance comes at a high civilian cost, however, with thousands dead and towns devastated such as Mariupol and Kherson.

Negotiators from both sides began talking just days after the war started, first on the Belarus-Ukraine border, then in Turkey and later in Kyiv.

Mounting battlefield losses and crippling Western sanctions on the Russian economy could be pushing Putin to seek a face-saving way to end the conflict.

Ukraine may be able to compel the Russians to make a choice: to persist and suffer irreparable losses, or desist and achieve some compensatory peace, AFP news agency quoted Rob Johnson, a warfare expert at the University of Oxford, as writing this week.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that the two sides were close to agreeing on a deal that would see Ukraine accept neutrality modelled on the status of Sweden and Austria.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has already publicly acknowledged that his country will not join the Western NATO military alliance a key demand from the Kremlin.

But though the chances of a deal have grown significantly in recent days, there is no sign of a ceasefire and Ukraine wants a full Russian withdrawal and security guarantees about its future.

Some Putin critics suspect that the diplomacy is a smokescreen.

Reminder that to Putin ceasefire just means reload, dissident Russian politician and former chess champion Garry Kasparov wrote on Twitter.

Putin is tightening his grip over Russian society. A crackdown on independent media and foreign news providers has cemented the dominance of the ultra-loyal Russian state media.

Thousands of anti-war demonstrators have been arrested, while a new law threatens up to 15 years in jail for spreading fake news about the army.

There are signs of cracks in the ruling elite, with some oligarchs, MPs, and even private oil group Lukoil calling openly for a ceasefire or an end to the fighting.

A Russian editor held up a sign saying No War during a prime-time news broadcast on state TV this week.

Though not seen as likely at this stage, the possibility of Putin being brought down in a popular backlash or even a palace coup cannot be ruled out.

His personal security is very good and it will be very good until the moment it isnt, said Eliot A Cohen from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think-tank.

Thats happened numerous times in Soviet and Russian history.

Given Russias superior weapons, air power and indiscriminate use of artillery, Western defence analysts say its forces are capable of grinding forward.

A senior European military official cautioned on Wednesday against underestimating their ability to replenish and adapt their tactics.

They appear to have logistical and morale problems, with diesel and even engine lubricants in short supply, the official said.

But you need to keep it in perspective. All of that does not change the superiority of the Russian military, he said.

Moscow is openly recruiting mercenaries from Syria to supplement its forces, while also using the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian private security company.

But even if they captured strategic cities such as Kyiv or the southern port of Odesa, Putin would then face the challenge of occupying them.

Russia has a border with three former Soviet states that are now members of the US-led NATO military alliance, which considers an attack on one member to be an attack against all.

Putins nostalgia for the Soviet Union and his pledge to protect Russian minorities who are found in the Baltic States has left an open question about his territorial ambitions.

Few expect Putin to openly attack a NATO member, which would run the risk of a nuclear attack, but analysts have warned about provocations that stop short of sparking a war.

Putin has ordered Russias nuclear deterrent forces onto high alert and Foreign Minister Lavrov has also warned that World War III can only be a nuclear war.

Western analysts say such warnings should be taken as posturing to deter the US and Europe from considering ideas such as a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

See the original post here:
Where is the Russia-Ukraine war heading? Five scenarios - Al Jazeera English

Ukraine?s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy delivers a video address to senators and members of the House of Representatives gathered in the Capitol Visitor Center Congressional Auditorium at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., March 16, 2022. REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger/Pool

Register

LVIV, Ukraine, March 17 (Reuters) - Ukraine's president has not altered his stance that his country's borders must be recognised as the frontiers it had at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, an aide said on Thursday.

The comments by political adviser Oleksiy Arestovych appeared designed to douse any talk of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy allowing border changes to secure a deal with Russia to end its invasion of its neighbour. read more

Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and Russia has recognised declarations of independence by the self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in the Donbass area of eastern Ukraine which rose up against Kyiv's rule.

Register

Those two regions and Crimea were part of Ukraine when it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and continue to be recognised by the United Nations as part of Ukraine.

Zelenskiy has said repeatedly that he will not compromise on his country's "territorial integrity." read more

"His main position has not changed," Arestovych said on national television. "We will never give up our national interests."

Another presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, outlined Ukraine's position in an interview with Polish media.

"One of the key issues (for a peace agreement) remains how to resolve territorial issues in the occupied Crimea and Donbass," Podolyak said in a copy of the interview released by the Ukrainian presidency.

"Regarding the occupied territories, Ukraine's position remains unchanged: the country's borders cannot be changed. However, I believe that we must be sober in our judgments. De jure, Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk remain part of Ukraine, but we do not de facto control them, the Russian administration works there."He said efforts were being made to find "a legal formula" but did not say what this would entail.

Podolyak also hinted at increased signs of readiness to compromise by Russia, which calls its military actions a "special operation" that is not designed to occupy territory but to demilitarise and "denazify" Ukraine.

"I can say that the Russian delegation has softened sharply recently. Now they judge the world more objectively and behave very correctly. There is no rudeness or rudeness inherent in the Russian government. Of course, their world view is distorted by their own propaganda," Podolyak said.

Register

Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Writing by Alessandra Prentice, Editing by Timothy Heritage

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

See the original post:
Ukraine says it stands firm on recognition of 1991 borders - Reuters

Russias invasion of Ukraine has forced the American left to fight on two fronts. Critics of American foreign policyand I number myself among themare making an urgent case against escalation, or the United States allowing itself to be drawn into open conflict with Russia. But instead of engaging our arguments on their merits, some people in the center and on the right are singling out versions of leftist anti-war sentiment, no matter how atypical, for ridicule.

A case in point: In late February, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) released a position statement on Russias invasion of Ukraine. The short, five-paragraph letter instantly inspired outrageprimarily because of a single sentence in its fourth paragraph. After condemning Russias invasion and urging diplomacy, de-escalation, and an immediate cease-fire, the statements authors added that the DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict. Further remarks about American obligations toward refugees and preparing for a long-term response to this crisis followed, but so far as the majority of the reading public was concerned, the DSA might as well have said nothing else at all. Backlash followed swiftly.

Per the New York Post, the DSA had blame[d] US imperialism for the invasion; the article acknowledged that the organization had specifically condemned Russia for the brutal invasion only after a break punctuated by a prominent picture of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the groups most notable public member. Fox News had a field day with the Squad connection, and, evidently fearing that the Democratic Party might be wrongly associated with the groups statement, White House Rapid Response Director Mike Gwin quote-tweeted a link to the release with a curt dismissal: Shameful. On the left, the statement drew both defenses and condemnation. So significant was the controversyespecially relative to the scant power represented by the release itselfthat it wound up with its own congressional denunciations and write-up in The New York Times.

Read: The war in Ukraine is just beginning

For an onlooking lefty dove, the most obnoxious aspect of the entire controversy was that it replaced a policy conversation with a moral conversation. The DSA statement expresses a series of leftist positions on American foreign policy specific to Russias invasion of Ukraine: The United States ought to prioritize de-escalation, support all efforts at a diplomatic resolution, and accept any and all refugees who need shelter in the wake of the crisis. The clause calling for the U.S. to withdraw from NATO links to a 2021 position statement from the DSA on that issue, which is a long-runningand orthogonalleftist concern. (For leftist critics of NATO, American membership has long represented wasteful, warlike spending at home and a history of failed military campaigns putatively undertaken on behalf of liberal democracy abroad.) One need not affirm that wider viewpoint to affirm the groups immediate policy proposals regarding the conflict at hand.

Of course, that argument barely had the opportunity to surface. Instead, most debate concerned whether the DSA had wrongly blamed the United States for Vladimir Putins attack on innocent civilians in Ukraine, and whether, as Gwin suggested, the group ought to be ashamed of that sort of blithe sedition. The tone of it all took me back to the pinched, stentorian discourse of the deep pandemic, when scores of articles sought to establish who, exactly, was to blame for this pathogen and its history-warping impact: the Chinese government? Reckless American bureaucrats? Maskless anti-vax extremists? Their office-holding, right-wing enablers? Open borders? Pangolins?

As it turns out, no decisive verdict on the moral debt owed by any one of those parties was necessary to make progress against COVID-19. Mainly, we needed vaccines that worked and a reliable method of distributing them. Figuring out who will answer to God for COVID-19 at the end of all things was not a part of that equation, just an entertaining distraction.

And so it goes with Russia, Ukraine, and the American lefts campaign against war. But the entertaining distraction isnt the DSAs position on U.S. withdrawal from NATO, or even assigning blame for Russias invasion of Ukraine; its Americas recapitulation of its long-standing certainty that the left is unserious, risible, ridiculous, and dismissable when it comes to matters of war and peace, and (one gathers via heavy implication) likely everything else. Some call it hippie punching. Its an American classic.

Read: Nine books to read to understand the war in Ukraine

Perhaps boisterous critics of the DSAs statement were hoping its anti-war position would meld with its remarks on NATO and U.S. imperialism in the minds of the public, then be banished together as twin heresies. But the leftist position that American military intervention in Ukraineas in, for instance, directing American and NATO forces to shoot down Russian planes flying over Ukraineis unwise and unwanted by the electorate remains credible and well attested in the mainstream. Since the beginning of Russias incursion into Ukraine, Senator Bernie Sanders has led the left with calls for sanctions, emergency preparations for refugee resettlement, and stalwart hope for a diplomatic resolutionjust as DSA didas well as a green-energy shift away from the oil and gas that fund Russias military. Rather than clash with hawkish members of Congress who would prefer escalation, Sanders has limited his remarks to what aid to Ukraine ought to look like: swift, decisive, humanitarian, without the heedless sacrifice of blood and treasure for no clear benefit that has marked the American experience of war abroad for the past 20 years.

Nor does the anti-war position mean, as some critics are wont to suggest, abandoning Ukraine. In his address to Congress on Wednesday morning, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made several requests of the United States that are perfectly compatible with a leftist vision of American foreign policy. He asked, for instance, that the United States target all Russian politicians currently holding office with economic sanctions, and that all American companies immediately stop doing business with Russia; though each measure would certainly have unfortunate consequences for ordinary Russians, who are not at fault for Putins war, their effects would likely be less devastating than an outright military conflict between the two superpowers. Zelensky also urged Americans to continue our efforts to cut off the flow of U.S. dollars into Russiawhich underscores the crucial necessity of an energy transition that could help wean this country off of Russian oil and gas, something the left supports wholeheartedly. And he hoped for humanitarian aidwhich the United States should deliver with neither limitation nor delay.

There were things Zelensky wanted that he himself seemed to know he could not reasonably expect to receive: He acknowledged that a no-fly zone over Ukraine, for example, might well be too much to ask. Instead, he proposed that the United States and its allies continue to arm Ukraine, possibly with aircraft, a move the Biden administration recently vetoedand not without good reason. Although there may be no rational distinction between forms of American aid to Ukraine that are not viewed by Putins regime as provocations and forms of aid that are viewed as such, there is nevertheless a political distinction between the two: One carries relatively little risk of escalating a conflict between two nuclear powers and the other carries a substantially heightened risk of the same. Thus the Biden administration ought to continue to take care to offer maximal support to Ukraine without triggering a Russian response that would intensify conditions on the ground and potentially make an already cataclysmic situation that much more hellish.

In an announcement following Zelenskys address Wednesday, Biden promised another $800 million in aid to Ukraine, while renewing his vow not to join the conflict militarily.

Though certain politicians have pressed Biden to risk more intervention than he seems willing to venture, the president has thus far remained steadfast in his decision not to send troops to Ukraine and is still holding out against demands to enforce a no-fly zone. Putins savagery in Ukraine is despicablea despotic onslaught that has already put babies and children in frozen graves. What Biden appears to suspect is that military intervention will only furnish the pits with further corpses. For him, as for Sanders, as for the DSA, as for me, as for plenty of war-weary Americans, the nuclear stakes are too high, the possibility of world war too imminent, the likelihood of success far too remote. Theres nothing ill-considered or naive about that.

Go here to see the original:
The Left Has Good Answers on Ukraine - The Atlantic

We have a formula that we put on the negotiating table the Ukrainian model of security guarantees. It assumes that there will be no bilateral agreement between Russia and Ukraine. There will be a multilateral agreement, a package agreement in which a number of countries will take part their number is still being discussed. Five or seven countries, Podolyak said in the detailed interview.

!function(e,t,r){let n;if(e.getElementById(r))return;const a=e.getElementsByTagName(script)[0];n=e.createElement(script),n.id=r,n.defer=!0,n.src=https://playback.oovvuu.media/player/v1.js”,a.parentNode.insertBefore(n,a)}(document,0,oovvuu-player-sdk);

NATO overestimates Russias military abilities, he said, about the security alliances reluctance to close the air space over Ukraine. Close the sky, let civilians stop dying, let [Russia] prove that it knows how to fight, not bomb peaceful cities. Thats all we want. Close the sky let the guys come down to earth in the end!

Asked if nuclear powers UK and France would be part of this proposed new union, he said: Unfortunately, today it is impossible to predict how Russian political elites make decisions. Therefore, if Ukraine manages to form this new union, we want it to accurately respond to all modern risks. After all, we will be in its centre as a country that has come under attack.

He said several countries were interested in this alternative union, including the United States.

Polodyak said Ukraine was optimistic that Russia was ready to work towards a compromise after 21 days of its special operation that had, against its military planners expectations, come up against Ukraines resistance.

We really see a desire to come up with some kind of compromise draft of agreements I dont say peace agreement yet. They, of course, did not expect the reputation that Russia will acquire in the world, that negative assessment, that single package [of sanctions] that is being introduced against them. All this brings them back to real politics, he said.

So, the main thing is that for us it is fundamentally not just a peace agreement, this does not suit us.

He said Ukraine was negotiating key basic points that would be included in any agreement with Russia: a ceasefire, an immediate withdrawal of troops and the signing of an agreement in which there will be security guarantees and where a number of countries will act as guarantors. And within the framework of this package there will be an agreement with the Russian Federation that it also undertakes to guarantee Ukraine that there will be no next wars. And Russia will have to understand the risks it will face next. Without this, it is pointless to end the war.

Asked if Ukraine was prepared to let go of Luhansk and Donetsk, and Crimea, Polodyak said:

This is the [Russian] negotiating position. For us, the territorial integrity of Ukraine is unshakable. For us, de jure, these territories are the ARC [Autonomous Republic of Crimea] and ORDLO [Separate districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions]; we dont know what LDNR is. For us, these territories legally remain part of Ukraine. But we temporarily lost effective control over them, and now the Russian administration is there. This is the status quo, I am ready to name it, but we cannot yet voice our positions at the negotiations, I repeat once again. Unlike the Russians, we stick to the agreements.

Civilians are continuing to bear the brunt of the war.

People sheltered at the Drama Theatre in Ukraines southern port city of Mariupol are being rescued alive from the rubble. The Kyiv Independent reported that 130 survivors had been rescued alive until late on Thursday.

Ukrainian authorities had said Russia bombed the theatre to ruins on Wednesday. They said upto 1,000 civilians, including women and children, were in the theatres bomb shelter when the Russian air strike took place. Reports suggest that the shelter might have withstood the attack.

Russian forces are bombarding Mariupol relentlessly. Briefing the Security Council on Thursday, Rosemary DiCarlo, the Under-Secretary General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, said many residents of the city who have been unable to evacuate from the southeastern port city lack food, water, electricity, and medical care.

There will be no winners to this senseless conflict, she said, noting that the situation in the city was so bad that uncollected corpses lie on city streets.

Raouf Mazou, UNHCRs Assistant High Commissioner for Operations, said that in less than three weeks, the number of those fleeing Ukraine into neighbouring countries has risen from 520,000 to over 3.1 million.

Poland has become one of the largest refugee-hosting countries in the world, with close to 2 million refugees from Ukraine. Another 490,000 people have fled to Romania; 350,000 to Moldova; 280,000 to Hungary; and 228,000 to Slovakia, while others have moved to Russia or Belarus.

With the current pace of refugee outflows, the capacities of the neighbouring countries are being tested and stretched, he said, calling for more support.

Poland warned last week that its systems were near collapse and that it could not take anymore refugees.

Neither the city nor the government can now cope with the wave of refugees from Ukraine, said Warsaws mayor, Rafa Trzaskowski, after a meeting of the Union of Polish Cities. It is necessary to implement a system of European and international aid.

Czech Republic Prime Minister Petr Fiala said on Thursday that 270,000 refugees from Ukraine had crossed the border over the last three weeks, and that his country is at the very limit of the number of refugees it is able to absorb without major problems.

Sweden announced earlier this week that it would reintroduce border controls due to the massive influx of Ukrainian refugees. In a press release on March 15, the Minister for Infrastructure Tomas Eneroth said the government assesses that the situation may become so serious that it might be necessary to take immediate measures to maintain law and order and safeguard national security.

I will be back on Monday with the next update.

Read the rest here:
Ukraine war update, March 18: Biden and Xi will speak, Ukraine moots new security union - The Indian Express

LONDON Diplomatic activity quickened on multiple fronts Monday as Russias war on Ukraine entered an uncertain new phase, with President Vladimir V. Putins forces widening their bombardment of Kyiv and other cities, hundreds of civilians escaping the devastated port of Mariupol, and the United States warning China over its deepening alignment with an isolated Russia.

There were no breakthroughs, either at the negotiating tables or on the battlefield. But as the human cost of the war continued to mount, the flurry of developments suggested that people were groping for a way out of the crisis or, failing that, for ways to prevent it from mutating into a wider proxy war.

In Rome, President Bidens top national security aide, Jake Sullivan, met with a top Chinese foreign affairs official, Yang Jiechi, to try to peel away one of Mr. Putins few potential allies, after reports denied by Moscow and Beijing that Russia had sought military aid from China, and that Chinese leaders were open to such a request. Mr. Sullivan, a Biden administration official said, had expressed deep concerns about Chinas alignment at this time.

Ukrainian and Russian officials held another round of direct negotiations, adjourning without signs of progress, though they agreed to meet again on Tuesday. The negotiations unfolded against a backdrop of thunderous Russian artillery strikes that led the secretary general of the United Nations, Antnio Guterres, to declare Ukraine was being decimated before the eyes of the world.

An uncharacteristically angry Mr. Guterres accused Russia of attacking 24 health facilities and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without water or electricity. Having once predicted there would be no war in Ukraine, he now warned there could be a calamitous cascade of world hunger and food inflation because Ukraine is one of the worlds foremost grain producers.

The impact on civilians, Mr. Guterres said, was reaching terrifying proportions.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine plans to address the U.S. Congress on Wednesday in a virtual speech that could increase pressure on the Biden administration to send fighter jets to Kyiv.

In one of dozens of episodes of violence in Ukraine, a missile slammed into an apartment block in a once-tranquil Kyiv neighborhood just after dawn on Monday, when many residents were asleep. They had become accustomed to the percussive noise of shelling after more than two weeks of Russian bombardment, but never thought their building would be hit.

We do not have a military target near us, said Yuriy Yurchik, 30. We did not think we ourselves would be a target.

Yet amid the drumbeat of horror, there were also glimpses of resilience. Hundreds escaped Mariupol by car, according to the local government, even as a convoy of vehicles carrying food, water and medicine tried to find a safe path through the battle that has been raging around that southeast port city almost since the war began. Relatives of those still living in Mariupol said fleeing seemed to offer the best, perhaps only, chance for survival.

I do not believe the humanitarian convoy will be a big help, said Oleksandr Kryvoshapro, a humanitarian activist whose parents were in Mariupol. Too many people are still there. And this once beautiful, big and constantly developing city is now completely destroyed. It is not possible to live there anymore.

An estimated 400,000 people are trapped in Mariupol, which is entering its second week without heat, food or clean water. Attempts to reach the city and evacuate people have failed day after day amid heavy fighting. The convoy en route Monday was carrying 100 tons of relief supplies, officials said.

Russia has been laying siege to the city, a major industrial hub on the Azov Sea, creating a humanitarian catastrophe that led the International Committee of the Red Cross to issue an urgent appeal for a cease-fire to assist the hundreds of thousands of people with no access to clean water, food or heat.

Dead bodies, of civilians and combatants, remain trapped under the rubble or lying in the open where they fell, the I.C.R.C. said.

Casualty figures are difficult to confirm in the conflict. The United Nations has estimated that at least 596 civilians have been killed, but that figure is considered low because of the organizations inability to gain access to all areas of fighting. Ukrainian officials have said more than 2,500 people have died in Mariupol alone.

Particularly striking was the death of a pregnant woman who had been photographed clutching her belly as she was carried on a stretcher from a blasted-out maternity hospital that had been attacked.

The split-screen images of slow-moving diplomacy and sudden, brutal attacks on many civilian targets underscored the challenges of finding an acceptable off-ramp for Mr. Putin, even after a campaign that, by nearly all accounts, has gone far worse for Russia than expected.

The Kremlin, confronting a remarkably determined Ukrainian resistance and heavy losses on the battlefield, vowed to carry out its subjugation of the country in full and on its original schedule. (It is unclear what that schedule is, though Russia denied, until just before the invasion, that it had any plan to send troops into Ukraine.) Russian officials have tried to portray their militarys failure to capture most major cities in Ukraine as an act of restraint.

Responding to Western claims that Russian forces were making slow progress in large cities, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that Mr. Putin had ordered Russian troops to refrain from storming large cities including Kyiv before the Feb. 24 invasion. The reason, he said, was that armed clashes in urban areas would inevitably lead to big losses among civilians. But he added that the cities are already practically encircled anyway.

Interpreting Mr. Peskovs statements was difficult, but they did not appear to foreclose the possibility of a negotiated settlement.

On Monday, Mr. Putin spoke again with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel, continuing Israels efforts to mediate. The 90-minute call focused on the possibility of a cease-fire, a senior Israeli official said, and followed a call between Mr. Bennett and President Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday evening.

The prospect of Chinas involvement in support of Russia, however, raises the risks of a conflict that has already threatened to pull in the West. It would blunt the impact of a trans-Atlantic campaign to isolate Russia, relieving some of the economic pressure on Mr. Putin and giving him a potential supplier of weapons to counteract those flowing in to Ukrainian troops from the United States and other NATO countries.

It really risks making Ukraine a proxy conflict in what could be a broader geopolitical competition between China and Russia on the one side with the U.S. and its allies on the other, said Evan S. Medeiros, a professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University and former China policymaker in the Obama administration.

Mr. Sullivans seven-hour meeting with Mr. Yang had been scheduled long before the invasion, but it came one day after American officials told reporters about the request from Moscow for assistance from Beijing a test of a new commitment to work together pledged by Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping at the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics last month. American intelligence agencies learned of the Russian request in recent days.

It appears the request may include drones, secure communications and financial support, American officials said, though the details are unclear. The United States told allies in diplomatic cables that China had given a positive signal to Russia, a European official said on Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the exchanges, which were first reported by the Financial Times.

Mr. Sullivan was direct about those concerns and the potential implications and consequences of certain actions, an administration official said. But the official refused to give specifics about the exchange with Mr. Yang, a former Chinese ambassador to the United States.

China, which has urged a peaceful resolution to the conflict and has maintained good relations with Ukraine, has denied receiving any request for help from Moscow. But with much of the rest of the world cutting off trade, financial transactions and other economic interactions with Russia, which threatens to plunge the country into default, Mr. Putin is clearly counting on his relationship with Mr. Xi to help him resist the overwhelming economic pressure and to perhaps emerge as a critical military ally.

Clearly, the leak of the intelligence that Russia sought Chinas help was designed to pressure both sides. It was humiliating for Mr. Putin, who is enormously sensitive to suggestions that he is the junior partner in the relationship between Moscow and Beijing.

But it also places China in a hard spot. Just before Russias invasion, Chinas foreign minister, Wang Yi, left no doubt that Beijing opposed military action. The sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of any country should be respected and safeguarded, he said. Ukraine is no exception.

If China provided military or economic support, it would be violating that principle and risk being associated with the carnage now underway. The White House has made clear it would respond to any effort to bail out Russia.

Support of any kind, said Mr. Bidens spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, there would be consequences for that.

Mark Landler reported from London, and David E. Sanger from New York. Reporting was contributed by Carlotta Gall from Kyiv, Ukraine, Marc Santora from Lviv, Ukraine, Eric Schmitt, Edward Wong and Julian Barnes from Washington, Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, Anton Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul, Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva, and Richard Prez-Pea, Farnaz Fassihi and Rick Gladstone from New York.

Read this article:
What Happened on Day 19 of Russias Invasion of Ukraine - The New York Times