Russia carried out a wave of attacks across southern and eastern Ukraine overnight, in what it said was retaliation for Monday’s deadly explosion on the Crimean Bridge, which connects Russia to the illegally annexed peninsula. According to a Ukrainian official in the city of Odessa, which is home to a major grain port, part of the port’s infrastructure was damaged as Ukrainian air defenses downed missiles fired by Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it would be dangerous for Ukraine to continue exporting grain without Russian security guarantees, a day after Moscow withdrew from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, an international accord that allowed the export of grain from southern Ukrainian ports that Russia had blockaded. The deal has helped sustain critical food supplies and temper rising food prices around the world.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
Ukraine aims to sap Russia’s defenses, as U.S. urges a decisive breakthrough: Ukraine is making limited advances in its counteroffensive against Russian forces but has yet to employ the kind of larger-scale operations that American officials believe could enable a breakthrough, officials and analysts say. Now, questions are deepening among some of Ukraine’s chief backers about whether Kyiv can move fast enough to match a finite supply of munitions and arms, Missy Ryan, Isabelle Khurshudyan and Michael Birnbaum report.
Five weeks into the highly anticipated operation, Ukrainian forces are attempting to weaken Russian defenses by firing fusillades of artillery and missiles and sending small teams of sappers into the sprawling minefields that constitute their adversary’s outermost ring of defense. But the pace of progress, in three main areas along a 600-mile front line, has generated concerns in the West that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government may not deliver as powerful a blow as it could.
