Pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin mounted on the battlefield and in the halls of global power as Ukrainian troops pushed their counteroffensive Saturday to advance farther into Ukraine’s partly recaptured northeast.
At a high-level summit in Uzbekistan, Putin vowed to press his attack on Ukraine despite recent military setbacks but also faced concerns by India and China over the drawn-out conflict.
“I know that today’s era is not of war,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Russian leader in televised comments as they met Friday in Uzbekistan.
“We discussed this with you on the phone several times, that democracy and dialogue touch the entire world.”
At the same summit a day earlier, Putin acknowledged China’s unspecified “questions and concerns” about the war in Ukraine while thanking Chinese President Xi Jinping for his government’s “balanced position” on the conflict.
The hurried retreat of Russian troops this month from parts of a northeast region they occupied early in the war, together with the rare public reservations expressed by key allies, underscored the challenges that Putin faces on all fronts.
Both China and India have maintained strong ties with Russia and had sought to remain neutral on Ukraine. Xi, in a statement, expressed support for Russia’s “core interests” but also wanted to work together to “inject stability” into world affairs.
Modi said he wanted to discuss “how we can move forward on the path of peace,” adding that the biggest concerns facing the world are the problems of food security, fuel security and fertilizers.
“We must find some way out and you too must contribute to that,” Modi stressed in a rare public rebuke.
The comments cast a shadow over a summit that Putin had hoped would burnish his diplomatic status and show he was not so internationally isolated.
On the battlefield, Western defense officials and analysts said Saturday that Russian forces were apparently setting up a new defensive line in Ukraine’s northeast after Kyiv’s troops broke through the previous one. The British Defense Ministry said the new front line likely is between the Oskil River and Svatove, 150 kilometers (90 miles) southeast of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
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The new line emerged after the Ukrainian counteroffensive punched a hole through the war’s previous front line, allowing Kyiv’s soldiers to recapture large swaths of land in the northeastern Kharkiv region that borders Russia.
After the Russian troops retreated from the city of Izium, Ukrainian authorities discovered a mass grave site, one of the largest so far discovered.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says more than 440 graves have been found at the site but that the number of victims is not yet known.
Zelenskyy said the graves contained the bodies of hundreds of civilian adults and children, as well as soldiers, and some had been tortured, shot or killed by artillery shelling. He cited evidence of atrocities, such as a body with a rope around its neck and broken arms.
Ukrainian forces, in the meantime, are crossing the Oskil River in the Kharkiv region and have place artillery there, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Saturday.
The river, which flows south from Russia into Ukraine, had been a natural break in the newly emerged front lines since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive about a week ago.
“Russian forces are likely too weak to prevent further Ukrainian advances along the entire Oskil River,” the institute said. Videos circulating online Saturday indicated that Ukrainian forces were continuing to retake land from Russian forces in the country’s embattled east, although their veracity could not be independently verified.
One video showed a Ukrainian soldier walking past a damaged building then pointing at a colleague hanging the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag over a mobile phone tower. The soldier identified the seized village as Dibrova, just northeast of the city of Sloviansk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
Another video showed two Ukrainian soldiers in what appeared to be a bell tower, with one saying they had retaken the village of Shchurove, just northeast of Sloviansk. The Ukrainian military and the Russians did not comment on the two villages.