Live Updates: Ukraine-Russia War – The New York Times

Russian officials dismissed Mr. Biden’s pointed statement about Mr. Putin’s future, with Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, telling reporters that the leader of Russia was “elected by the Russians” and “not for Biden to decide.”

Mr. Biden’s remark, in the closing lines of his speech, was quickly examined for signs of whether it was a considered declaration that the United States sought Mr. Putin’s ouster. Some analysts described it as undermining Mr. Biden’s diplomacy on the trip and potentially giving Mr. Putin grounds to extend the war. Others described it as an off-the-cuff expression of Mr. Biden’s exasperation that Mr. Putin, whom he recently called a “war criminal,” could lead Russia.

Mr. Biden’s trip began in Brussels and ended with an effort to bolster Poland, a NATO ally on Ukraine’s western border that has felt immediate strains from the war, taking in more than half of the 3.7 million people who have fled Ukraine over the past month. Mr. Biden met with a few of them on Saturday, after which he called Mr. Putin a “butcher.”

He also met with the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, describing the commitment to collective defense under NATO as “sacred.”

Just hours before Mr. Biden’s speech, a Russian missile struck Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, about 50 miles from the Polish border, that has been relatively untouched by the war. That attack appeared to undercut an assertion by the Russian military that it was shifting its focus to securing the eastern Donbas region.

In other developments:

• President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine criticized European leaders in an evening speech, saying they had fallen short of providing Ukraine with planes, tanks and other weaponry that could help the country defend itself against the Russian invasion.

• Tensions flared in another former Soviet region as Azerbaijani forces launched drone strikes against the army of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region that is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan but claims independence and is closely allied with Armenia.

“We heard three big explosions, and everything started to shake and fall off the shelves,” said Ms. Tatarin, 42. She ran to her nearby home, where her three children were sheltering.

“There was a lot of fog and it was all just black,” she said. “My 7-year-old daughter was shaking and vomiting for most of the night,” she added, as tears welled in her eyes. The roof of the store had cracked and she was worried that it could cave in.

Since the war began, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have fled west to Lviv, trying to escape the worst of the fighting, which was concentrated in the east. Until Saturday, the only local target that had been hit was an airplane repair factory near the city’s airport. Before that, the closest incident had been at a military training base near Yavoriv, more than an hour’s drive away.

By early Sunday morning, most of the fires in Lviv had been extinguished. The local authorities said the missiles had been fired from Sevastopol, a port on the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014. The attacks on Saturday evening came as President Biden was visiting Poland, across the border. Lviv is about 35 miles from Poland.

“I think with these strikes the aggressor wants to say hello to President Biden,” Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadoviy, said on Saturday night.

Russia’s defense ministry said on Sunday that its military had struck 67 “military objects” in Ukraine in the past 24 hours. It said it had destroyed a military installation in Lviv that helped upgrade and modernize missile systems, radar stations and electronic warfare equipment.

“It is one thing to see the war on television and it is another thing to experience it and feel that it is much closer right now,” said Yuliya Kuleba, 38, another Lviv resident living close to the oil storage site. “We are worried for our kids.”

Ms. Kuleba said that the soil in her yard, where she had planted vegetables, was covered in oil. She said she hoped that this would be the last missile strike and that the oil would be cleaned away soon.

Ms. Tatarin was inconsolable. She showed a video of her daughter Vitalina asking Russian troops not to attack children. The young girl held a heart-shaped piece of paper which she had colored in with yellow and blue, the colors of the flag of Ukraine.

Ms. Tatarin said her pro-Russian mother-in-law, who lives in Crimea, from which the missiles were fired, now sees her son as a “traitor” and believes he was “brainwashed” by his wife.

“We are totally alone now, my husband and I,” she said. “And each air raid siren stops my breath.”

Mr. Zelensky renewed his public appeal to NATO for military equipment, saying he wanted “1 percent” of the alliance’s tanks and planes.

“We did not ask for more, and we do not ask for more,” he said. “And we have already been waiting for 31 days.”

Mr. Zelensky said he had spoken with the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, and that his ministers of defense and foreign affairs had met with officials from the United States, including President Biden, to discuss the need for more military equipment.

The price of security, Mr. Zelensky said, was planes, tanks, missile defense systems and anti-ship weaponry.

“This is what our partners have that is covered with dust at their storage facilities,” he said.

Mr. Zelensky opened his remarks by hailing the bravery of citizens in Slavutych, who unfurled the Ukrainian flag in front of city hall and chanted, “glory to Ukraine,” before occupying Russian soldiers. “We were all with you — on your streets, in your protest,” he said.

He closed with a rebuke of Russian shelling near Kharkiv that damaged a Holocaust memorial, likening Russia’s assault on nonmilitary targets to the strategies employed by Nazi Germany.

Thousands of Jews had been executed at the site of the memorial during World War II, Mr. Zelensky said. Now, he said, Russia was committing “a crime against history.”

On its face, he appeared to be calling for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to be ousted for his brutal invasion of Ukraine. But Mr. Biden’s aides quickly insisted that the remark — delivered in front of a castle that served for centuries as a home for Polish monarchs — was not intended as an appeal for regime change.

Whatever his intent, the moment underscored the dual challenges Mr. Biden faced during three extraordinary summit meetings in Belgium and an up-close look at the war’s consequences from Poland: keeping America’s allies united against Mr. Putin, while at the same time avoiding an escalation with Russia, which the president has said could lead to World War III.

To achieve his first goal, Mr. Biden spent much of the trip drawing the world’s attention to Mr. Putin’s atrocities since he started the war on Feb. 24. He urged continued action to cripple the Russian economy. He reaffirmed America’s promise to defend its NATO allies against any threat. And he called Mr. Putin “a butcher,” responsible for devastating damage to Ukraine’s cities and its people.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Mr. Putin’s fate was not in the hands of the American president. “It’s not for Biden to decide,” Mr. Peskov told reporters after Mr. Biden finished speaking. “The president of Russia is elected by the Russians.”

Even as he made it his mission to rally his counterparts, Mr. Biden and his aides were determined to avoid taking actions that Mr. Putin could use as pretexts to start a wider, and even more dangerous conflict.

“There is simply no justification or provocation for Russia’s choice of war,” Mr. Biden said earlier in his speech Saturday night. “It’s an example one of the oldest human impulses — using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control.”

In closed-door discussions at NATO and with the leaders of more than 30 nations, Mr. Biden repeatedly vowed not to send American troops into combat against Russia. And despite desperate pleas for additional help from Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, Mr. Biden remained opposed to using NATO or U.S. fighter jets to secure the country’s airspace from Russian attacks.

Mr. Biden’s trip, which began Wednesday, came at a pivotal moment for his presidency and the world, amid the largest war in Europe since 1945 and a mushrooming humanitarian crisis. Both are testing the resolve and cooperation within the NATO alliance after four years in which former President Donald J. Trump cast doubt on its relevance and pushed a policy of America First isolationism.

For most of his foray abroad, Mr. Biden succeeded in staying on message, according to veteran foreign policy watchers — a reality that made his last-minute comment about Mr. Putin’s future even more striking.

“That message of unity is exactly what Putin needs to hear to convince him to scale back his war aims and end the brutality,” Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s what Ukrainians need to hear to encourage them to keep up the fight. And it’s what Europeans need to hear to steady their nerves and reassure them that the United States is fully committed to their defense.”

And yet, the president ended his trip on Saturday and returned home with few concrete answers about how or when the war will end — and grim uncertainty about the brutal and grinding violence still to come.

A top Russian commander on Friday appeared to signal that Moscow was narrowing its war aims, saying that capturing Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and other major cities was not a priority. Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi, the chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Russian military’s General Staff, said in a public statement that the military would instead concentrate “on the main thing: the complete liberation of the Donbas,” the southeastern region that is home to a Kremlin-backed separatist insurgency.

Administration officials say a Russian withdrawal to Donbas would amount to a remarkable failure for Mr. Putin, who has drawn international scorn for his invasion and has plunged the Russian economy into disarray under the weight of global sanctions.

If Mr. Putin decides to limit the scope of the fight, it would pose new diplomatic challenges for Mr. Biden, who has used the horror of all-out war to rally the world against Russia’s aggression. That could prove more difficult if Mr. Putin decided to move some of his forces back — whether as a real retreat or a strategic feint.

For the moment, however, large portions of Ukraine remain under siege while the country’s forces have mounted a fierce resistance.

On Saturday, even as Mr. Biden prepared to deliver his speech, Russian missiles slammed into Lviv, a city in western Ukraine not far from the Polish border. The missiles hit at or near what is believed to be an oil storage facility, and thick black smoke billowed over the city. At least five people were injured.

Mr. Putin’s thinking remained murky as Mr. Biden boarded Air Force One on Saturday night for the flight back to Washington, complicating his administration’s calculus as it looks for ways to keep the pressure on Russia without going too far.

It all adds up to a tricky task for Mr. Biden, who came into office determined to end America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan and now faces the challenge of managing the response to another war.

He has received high marks — even from Republicans — for sending more than $2 billion in military and security aid to Ukraine, bolstering its ability to fight off Russian forces. And he has joined European leaders in imposing crippling sanctions on the Russian economy, putting immense pressure on the Russian leader’s most ardent backers.

During Mr. Biden’s visit to Brussels, NATO announced the redeployment of additional forces to member countries closest to Russia, an effort that Mr. Biden said would deliver a message of resolve to Mr. Putin.

The president also announced $1 billion in humanitarian aid for Poland and other nations who have taken in 3.5 million people fleeing the fighting in Ukraine. Mr. Biden said the United States would open its borders to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

“Visible American leadership is no longer taken for granted in Europe,” said Ian Lesser, the executive director in Brussels for the German Marshall Fund. “In this sense, the president’s trip has made a significant impression.”

But the president also drew criticism from Mr. Zelensky, for refusing to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

“Their advantage in the sky is like the use of weapons of mass destruction,” Mr. Zelensky told Mr. Biden and the leaders of other NATO countries during their closed-door meeting on Thursday. “And you see the consequences today. How many people were killed, how many peaceful cities were destroyed.”

Mr. Biden faced the limits of European action when he put to his allies the question of curtailing Russia’s ability to profit from the sale of its oil and gas. Europe gets a large percentage of its energy from Russia, and Mr. Biden once again found a deep reluctance to making any decision to cut off that lifeline.

Instead, the president announced a longer-term plan to help wean Europeans off the use of Russian fuel.

Jeremy Bash, who served as a top adviser at both the Pentagon and the C.I.A. under former President Barack Obama, called Mr. Putin’s war a “a geopolitical earthquake” and a “once-in-a-generation contest” that has forced Mr. Biden to adapt quickly to a rapidly changing security and diplomatic world.

“President Biden is now a wartime commander in chief waging four wars at once,” Mr. Bash said on Saturday. “An economic war, an information war, likely a cyber war, and an unprecedented indirect military war against Putin. And so far, Putin has been unable to achieve a single one of his objectives.”

Several of the administration’s most ardent supporters in the foreign policy world quickly chided the president for seeming to seek Mr. Putin’s removal. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, called it a “bad lapse in discipline that runs risk of extending the scope and duration of the war.”

While American officials still insist their goal is not regime change in Moscow, even the president’s top national security advisers have made clear they want Mr. Putin to emerge strategically weakened.

“At the end of the day, the Russian people are going to ask the more fundamental question of why this happened and how this happened,” Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One on Friday, before the president’s speech. “And we believe that, at the end of the day, they will be able to connect the dots.”

Mr. Sullivan added: “These are costs that President Putin has brought on himself and his country and his economy and his defense industrial base because of his completely unjustified and unprovoked decision to go to war in Ukraine.”

Norbert Röttgen, a center-right representative who headed the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee for several years, was among those who rose to their feet. “Putin captured us,” he said. “The voice was quite soft, in German, a voice that tempts you to believe what is said to you. We had some reason to think there was a viable perspective of togetherness.”

Today, all togetherness shredded, Ukraine burns, bludgeoned by the invading army Mr. Putin sent to prove his conviction that Ukrainian nationhood is a myth. More than 3.7 million Ukrainians are refugees; the dead mount up in a month-old war; and that purring voice of Mr. Putin has morphed into the angry bark of a hunched man dismissing as “scum and traitors” any Russian who resists the violence of his tightening dictatorship.

His opponents would meet an ugly fate, Mr. Putin vowed this month, grimacing as his planned blitzkrieg in Ukraine stalled. True Russians, he said, would “spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths” and so achieve “a necessary self-purification of society.”

This was less the language of Kant than of Fascist nationalist exaltation laced with Mr. Putin’s hardscrabble, brawling St. Petersburg youth.

Between these voices of reason and incitation, between these two seemingly different men, lie 22 years of power and five American presidents.

Did the United States and its allies, through excess of optimism or naïveté, simply get Mr. Putin wrong from the outset? Or was he transformed over time into the revanchist warmonger of today?

The Azerbaijani forces installed a surveillance post, the Russian ministry said, adding that it had called for troops to be withdrawn from the area. The ministry said the events had occurred on Thursday and Friday.

Azerbaijan went to war and emerged victorious over Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh in the fall of 2020, recapturing some of the territory it had lost during a war that followed the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s.

Russia did not take sides in that fight, but President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia brokered an agreement to end the conflict. He also sent about 2,000 peacekeeping troops to the area, demonstrating Russia’s role as a potent arbiter in the Caucasus region, which has been plagued by conflicts and volatility.

But with Mr. Putin preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, the most audacious foreign policy move of his 21-year tenure at the helm of Russia, foreign policy experts said other powers in the region might treat the situation as a window of opportunity.

Azerbaijan’s defense ministry disputed Moscow’s version of events. The ministry said in a statement that “illegal” Armenian armed units attempted an act of sabotage but had to retreat after “immediate measures” were applied.

The statement reiterated Azerbaijan’s commitment to a three-way deal it signed with Armenia and Russia in November 2020 to end the military conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region after more than a month of bloodshed.

Arayik Arutyunyan, the head of the Nagorno-Karabakh republic, said he had declared martial law, without mentioning Azerbaijan and specifying the reasons. In a meeting with military attachés, Levon Ayvazyan, an Armenian military official, accused Azerbaijan of violating previous agreements, saying that so far “negotiations have not yielded positive results.”

On Friday, Jalina Porter, deputy spokeswoman at the U.S. State Department, said that the United States was “deeply concerned about the movement of Azerbaijani troops in Nagorno-Karabakh.” In response, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said such an entity did not exist and that Azerbaijan “is on its sovereign territories.”

The interim government that follows this pro-Western revolution eventually signs a trade agreement with the European Union that is seen as a first step toward membership in the bloc.

April 2014 — Russia invades and then annexes the Crimean Peninsula. Secessionists in eastern Ukraine, backed by Russia, declare themselves independent, as the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, and go to war against Ukraine.

The secessionist war continues in the eastern region known as Donbas. It then spreads west. Roughly 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians eventually die in the conflict. The front lines have barely shifted for years.

2014 and 2015 — Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany sign a series of cease-fire agreements known as the Minsk Accords. Many view these accords as ambiguous.

April 2019 — A former comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, is elected by a large majority as president of Ukraine on a promise to make peace with Russia and restore Donbas to the country.

2021-2022 — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia seeks to prevent Ukraine’s drift toward the United States and its allies. Mr. Putin demands “security guarantees,” including an assurance by NATO that Ukraine will never join the group and that the alliance pulls back troops stationed in countries that joined after 1997.

Many Russians view the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, as the birthplace of their nation and cite the numerous cultural ties between the two countries.

Here is a brief recap of their relations in the 20th century:

1918 — Ukraine declares independence from Russia during a conflict fought by multiple countries and armies over several years. Its independence and sovereignty receive international recognition at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Soviet forces later overthrow independent Ukraine. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is founded in 1921, and Ukraine is subsumed into the Soviet Union the following year.

1932 and 1933 — A famine caused by Stalin’s policy of collectivization kills millions of people, mainly ethnic Ukrainians in a republic that is known as the bread basket of the Soviet Union. The disaster is known as the Holodomor, from the Ukrainian word for famine.

1939-1944 — The Soviet Union annexes what is now western Ukraine from Poland and Romania. Later, Nazi Germany and the Axis powers invade the Soviet Union and occupy Ukraine, which suffers enormous devastation.

1991 — Ukraine declares independence, a move endorsed in a referendum by 92 percent of voters. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus sign an accord recognizing that the Soviet Union has dissolved. Ukraine begins a transition to a market economy, and comes into possession of a significant stockpile of nuclear weapons that had belonged to the Soviet Union.

1994 — Under the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gives up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for a commitment from Moscow “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

“I think with these strikes, the aggressor wants to say hello to President Biden who is in Poland, 70 kilometers (43 miles) from Lviv, mayor Andriy Sadoviy said at a news conference as an air raid siren sounded overhead. “The threat is very serious.”

The attack came as President Biden was in Warsaw wrapping up a visit to Europe intended to bolster unity over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Biden said the United States treated its duty to defend NATO allies as “a sacred obligation.”

It also came the day after Russian officials said they would be focusing their efforts on eastern Ukraine, where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting for eight years.

“The strikes are very clearly aimed at infrastructure,” said Mr. Sadoviy. “The destruction is serious,” he added, noting that a kindergarten was damaged.

Maksym Kozytsky, chairman of the Lviv regional administration, said in a post on Telegram that three more explosions detonated several hours later, around 7 p.m. local time. She urged residents to remain at home and seek shelter. Given the location of the second strike, local residents said they believed a tank factory was targeted.

On March 18, missiles hit a factory near the city that repairs warplanes near the city’s airport on Mar. 18, but Lviv, home to 700,000 people before many of them fled the war, has otherwise been spared the airstrikes and missile attacks that have pounded other Ukrainian cities. About 400,000 displaced Ukrainians are now in the Lviv region, Mr. Kozytsky said Thursday.

Photographs of the projectiles in flight taken by news photographers appeared to show cruise missiles with their telltale wings.

“The sooner we receive quality weapons and systems for air defense the safer we will be,” said Mr. Sadoviy, urging Western countries to donate more weapons.

Some residents said the strikes had raised fears about what had up to now been a relatively peaceful place to live. “They’ve started here now, I don’t know how well we can manage our business further,” said Andriy, 39, who owns a construction business but did not want to share his last name because of concerns for his security.

“Seems like the situation in the city will start to change from now on, that everything will start to lock down soon.”

“In this battle, we need to be cleareyed,” Mr. Biden said in front of a crowd waving Polish, Ukrainian and American flags. “This battle will not be won in days or months, either. We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead.”

Mr. Biden used the speech to bolster a key NATO ally on Ukraine’s western border that has served as a conduit for Western arms and has absorbed more than 2 million refugees fleeing the violence, more than any other country in Europe. And he sought to prepare the public, at home and abroad, for a grinding conflict that could drag on for weeks, months or longer.

Just hours before the event, missiles struck the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, about 50 miles from the Polish border, extending Russia’s monthlong assault on major cities and civilian populations — and undercutting Russian statements a day earlier suggesting Moscow might be scaling back its goals in the war.

While declaring that “the Russian people are not our enemy,” Mr. Biden unleashed an angry tirade against Mr. Putin’s claim that the invasion of Ukraine is intended to “de-Nazify” the country. Mr. Biden called that justification “a lie,” noting that President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is Jewish and that his father’s family was killed in the Holocaust.

“It’s just cynical,” Mr. Biden said. “He knows that. And it’s also obscene.”

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Biden’s apparent call for the ouster of Mr. Putin was one of the off-the-cuff remarks for which he is known or a calculated jab, one of many in the speech. But it risks confirming Russia’s central propaganda claim that the West, and particularly the United States, is determined to destroy Russia.

The White House immediately sought to play down the remark. “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official told reporters. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Mr. Putin’s fate was not in the hands of the American president. “It’s not for Biden to decide,” Mr. Peskov told reporters. “The president of Russia is elected by the Russians.”

Experts were divided on whether Mr. Biden’s remark was intended to signal he believed Mr. Putin should be ousted, a political escalation that could have consequences on the battlefield.

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet that the White House’s attempt to walk back the president’s comment was “unlikely to wash.”

“Putin will see it as confirmation of what he’s believed all along,” he wrote. “Bad lapse in discipline that runs risk of extending the scope and duration of the war.”

Mr. Biden’s statement that Mr. Putin could no longer remain in power could be perceived “as a call for regime change,” said Michal Baranowski, a senior fellow and director of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund, a nonpartisan policy organization. But he said he did not read it that way, and that Mr. Putin was unlikely to, either. “I think just what President Biden was saying is, how can such a terrible person be ruling Russia?” said Mr. Baranowski. “In that context, I don’t think it will lead to any escalation with Russia.”

Earlier in the day, Mr. Biden stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, and assured him that the United States considered its support for NATO to be a “sacred obligation.”

“America’s ability to meet its role in other parts of the world rests upon a united Europe,” Mr. Biden said.

While Poland’s right-wing, populist government has been embraced by Washington and Brussels as a linchpin of Western security, it has provoked quarrels with both in the past. Mr. Duda, however, thanked Mr. Biden for his support, saying that Poland stood ready as a “serious partner, a credible partner.”

At a stadium in Warsaw, Mr. Biden met with Ukrainian refugees in his first personal encounter with some of the civilians ensnared in a catastrophic humanitarian crisis caused by weeks of indiscriminate Russian shelling of Ukrainian cities and towns.

After speaking with the refugees, including several from the city of Mariupol, which has been flattened by Russian shelling, Mr. Biden called Mr. Putin “a butcher.”

That comment also prompted a retort from Mr. Peskov, who told TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency, that “such personal insults narrow the window of opportunity” for bilateral relations with the Biden administration.

Mr. Biden also met with Ukrainian ministers in his first in-person meeting with the country’s top leaders since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24, part of what American officials hoped would be a powerful display of the United States’ commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty.

“We did receive additional promises from the United States on how our defense cooperation will evolve,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, told reporters, the Reuters news agency reported.

But Mr. Biden gave no indication that the United States was willing to budge from its previous rejection of Ukrainian requests to establish a no-fly zone over the country or to provide it with the MIG-29 warplanes that Poland offered some weeks ago.

As Mr. Biden visited Poland, two missiles struck Lviv, rattling residents who ran into underground shelters as smoke rose into the sky. Lviv’s mayor said a fuel storage facility was on fire, and a regional administrator said five people had been injured.

Although Russian missiles hit a warplane repair factory near Lviv on March 18, the city, which had 700,000 residents before many of them fled the war, has otherwise been spared the airstrikes and missile attacks that have hammered other Ukrainian population centers.

Mr. Biden ended his trip one day after a senior Russian general suggested that the Kremlin might be redefining its goals in the war by focusing less on seizing major cities and instead targeting the eastern Donbas region, where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years.

Mr. Biden’s administration was quietly exploring the implications of the statement by the Russian general, Sergei Rudskoi, which indicated that Mr. Putin might be looking for a way out of the brutal invasion he launched with confidence and bravado a month ago.

Western intelligence agencies have in recent weeks picked up chatter among senior Russian commanders about giving up the effort to take Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and other key areas in the north and west of the country, according to two people with access to the intelligence. Instead, the commanders have talked more narrowly of securing the Donbas region.

Military analysts have cautioned that General Rudskoi’s statement could be intended as misdirection while Russian forces regroup for a new offensive.

Only weeks ago, Mr. Putin threatened to fully absorb Ukraine, warning that, “The current leadership needs to understand that if they continue doing what they are doing, they risk the future of Ukrainian statehood.”

In the latest instance of nuclear saber-rattling, Dmitri A. Medvedev, the vice chairman of Russia’s Security Council, restated Moscow’s willingness to use nuclear weapons against the United States and Europe if its existence was threatened.

“No one wants war, especially given that nuclear war would be a threat to the existence of human civilization,” Mr. Medvedev told Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency in excerpts from an interview published on Saturday.

Hoping to rally his country and encourage negotiations with Moscow, Mr. Zelensky said that the success of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that began two weeks ago was “leading the Russian leadership to a simple and logical idea: Talk is necessary.”

For the moment, large portions of Ukraine remain a battleground in what has increasingly come to resemble a bloody stalemate between the smaller Ukrainian army and Russian troops that have struggled with logistical problems.

On Saturday, Russian forces entered the small northern city of Slavutych, near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where they seized the hospital and briefly detained the mayor, a regional military official said.

In response, dozens of residents unfurled the Ukrainian flag in front of city hall and chanted, “glory to Ukraine,” prompting Russian troops to fire into the air and throw stun grenades, according to videos and the official, Oleksandr Pavliuk.

Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger reported from Warsaw and Michael Levenson from New York. Reporting was contributed by Megan Specia from Krakow, Poland, Anton Troianovski from Istanbul, Valerie Hopkins from Lviv, Ukraine, Eric Schmitt from Washington and Apoorva Mandavilli from New York.