Russian Invasion of Ukraine: What Happened on Day 101 of the War in Ukraine (Published 2022) (2024)

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Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, responded with a scathing post on social media.

“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it,” Mr. Kuleba wrote. Instead, he argued, peace and the saving of lives could best be achieved by Russia being “put in its place.”

The exchange comes as the war has settled into what seems increasingly destined to be a slog.

The Ukrainians and Russians both claimed Saturday to be inflicting decisive losses against one another in the battle for Sievierodonetsk, the last major city in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine still under Ukrainian control.

But the fighting was not limited to that town. A senior Ukrainian official claimed on Saturday that the country’s troops had reached a milestone in grinding down the Russian invasion force in eastern Ukraine. Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky, posted on the social networking site Telegram that most of a large Russian military unit had been destroyed in heavy fighting over the past weeks.

“Almost the entire 35th All-Russian Army was destroyed,” he wrote.

Mr. Yermak’s claim was supported by commentary from a Russian military blogger cited in a report by the influential Institute for the Study of War. Incompetent Russian commanders had failed to prepare troops for combat in a forested area near the city of Izium, the report said.

The claim of the routing of the Russian unit could not be independently verified.

Ukrainian soldiers interviewed over the past week have described fierce fighting in the forests around Izium, a strategic city that Russia is using as a base for attacks south toward the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Ukrainian forces are also taking heavy losses, 60 to 100 fatalities a day, Mr. Zelensky said recently.

The British Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russia’s recent use of airstrikes and artillery fire has been a factor in its limited success in Ukraine’s east, a contrast with its largely ineffective air attacks earlier in the war. The Russian reliance on long-range strikes has probably depleted the country’s stock of precision-guided missiles, leading to more use of unguided munitions that can cause substantial civilian casualties, the ministry said.

Also on Saturday, an air-launched cruise missile hit the Odesa region on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Odesa city officials said on Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.

And Russian and Ukrainian officials traded blame for the burning of the main temple of the All Saints hermitage, a 16th-century monastery in eastern Ukraine that is considered one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers.

The increasing terror from the sky came a day after Ukraine, on occasion of the 100th day of the war, took stock of its successes in holding back and in key places repelling the invasion by Russia, which had sought to quickly conquer the capital, Kyiv, and topple the government. Mr. Zelensky insisted “victory will be ours” and announced that 50 foreign embassies had resumed activities in the capital.

But on the 101st day, Ukraine faced anew the harsh realities on the ground, and increasingly from overhead.

Russia’s airstrikes provided cover to their troops engaged in the bitter fighting in the contested city of Sievierodonetsk.

And Russian troops continued to target the last remaining bridge into Sievierodonetsk to keep Ukraine from moving in reinforcements, food and medicine into a city that has become the main theater of war and the focus of Russia’s war machine. Despite its early and devastating setbacks, Russia has come to occupy a fifth of the country.

The intensity of the Russian attack and frequency of Russian reinforcements to Sievierodonetsk led to predictions that the city would soon fall. But Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk province, who recently had a dour prognosis for the city’s survival, told Ukraine’s national television that Ukrainian troops had retaken 20 percent of the territory they had lost, adding that it was “not realistic” the city would fall in the next two weeks.

As Ukrainian forces try to take back territory in the East, its State Emergency Services of Ukraine has removed 127,393 explosive devices, with the efforts focused mostly on urban areas in the Kyiv, Sumy and Zhytomyr regions that were occupied by Russia early in the war, according to a report by the United Nations Development Program.

Russia’s retreat from those areas has made them more accessible for clear-up operations, the report said, adding that Ukrainians had covered an area of more than 28,714 square kilometers (more than 11,000 square miles) but that it could take years to clear all of the mines in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have also launched a counteroffensive near the occupied city of Kherson in the country’s south.

But a punishing, costly and tragic military stalemate is increasingly foreseen by experts. Ukraine has been outgunned, but will soon receive long-range M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, commonly known as HIMARS, from the United States. The exchanges of evermore lethal firepower will likely add to the many millions of people who have already been displaced, a death toll of at least 4,000 civilians and a Ukrainian economy already in tatters with roughly $100 billion in losses.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Friday that Russia would continue what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine until “all goals have been attained.”

But one thing Russia had already achieved was international isolation and a solidifying of the Western alliance against it. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, met Friday with Prime Minister Sanna Marin of Finland in Washington about the country’s application to the military alliance. He has advised allies to be prepared for “the long haul” and warned this week that the conflict had become a “war of attrition.”

On Saturday, an American warship, the U.S.S. Kearsarge, was moored in Stockholm, Sweden, with 26 warplanes and 2,400 Marines and sailors aboard, a symbol of the protection that NATO membership would offer Sweden and Finland, both of which are seeking to join.

As the battle lines become more entrenched between Russia and the West, experts predict Russian cyberattacks, global disinformation campaigns and a potential food crisis prompted by a Russian naval blockade. Ukraine is one of the world’s leading exporters of grain and cooking oil, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has been accused by Western leaders of trying to leverage its control of those supplies to gain relief from sanctions.

And those sanctions continued to be felt. On Friday, Marriott became the latest multinational to suspend operations in Russia, where it had operated for 25 years. The hotel chain said restrictions set by Western governments made it impossible to keep going.

Ukraine’s fighting has for now preserved its statehood, but what that state would eventually look like is another matter. Russia’s strategy is essentially to pulverize specific areas with seemingly indiscriminate artillery shelling, killing or forcing to flee whoever is there before rolling in to stake the territory for Moscow.

It is a brutal way of waging war that some experts have compared to World War I and Ukrainian officials have called “medieval.” Craters from bombs and artillery shells gouge fields. Farmers collect rocket casings from cluster bombs in their barns.

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kramatorsk, Ukraine and Jason Horowitz from Rome. Cassandra Vinograd and Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting from London, Carlotta Gall from Kramatorsk, Helene Cooper in Stockholm and Alexandra E. Petri from New York.

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Ukraine aims to restart soccer leagues on its own soil in August.

Pavelko said he had spoken with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine “about how football has a very big power to help people think about the future, because now people, of course, are not in a good mind-set.”

The 2021-22 Ukrainian Premier League season was halted in February after the Russian invasion and was ultimately canceled. In the early days of the war, there was fighting and airstrikes throughout the country, including around the capital, Kyiv. Now that the war has surpassed 100 days, most of the fighting and shelling is taking place in the far eastern regions of the country. Kyiv and other cities have been able to restore some semblance of normalcy.

Players on the men’s national team, meanwhile, have assembled for a World Cup qualifying game in Wales. After beating Scotland on Wednesday, they now face Wales, with the winner advancing to the World Cup in Qatar in November. That deciding match is on Sunday.

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A U.S. warship arrives in Stockholm for military exercises, and as a warning.

In this perennially neutral country that is suddenly not so neutral, the U.S.S. Kearsarge, which showed up just two weeks after Sweden and Finland announced their intention to seek membership in NATO, is the promise of what that membership would bring: protection if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia turns his ire toward his Nordic neighbors.

But the ship is also a warning to Sweden and Finland of their own potential obligations should a conflict arise, as Gen. Mark Milley, America’s most senior military commander, made clear during a visit Saturday.

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Russia and Ukraine exchange the bodies of 320 fallen soldiers after talks.

Previously, Ukrainian officials had said that Russia had been reluctant to discuss repatriating its dead. Ukrainian soldiers have been tasked with recovering the bodies of Russian soldiers and placing them in refrigerated railway cars in several cities, among them Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro.

After the Ukrainian Army successfully counterattacked Russian forces and pushed them further away from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, two soldiers began gathering remains in the area. As residents returned to Kharkiv and surrounding villages, some have found the bodies in their homes or have stumbled across them elsewhere.

The two soldiers running the recovery, who both declined to be identified, said that many of the bodies had been lying in the open for a month or longer before they found them. The pair works to identify the soldiers by their faces, tattoos and belongings. They also take a DNA swab from each corpse to determine whether any soldiers believed to be involved in war crimes are among them.

One of the soldiers on the recovery duty said that identifications were possible about half of the time, with the remainder of the corpses being too deteriorated.

Russia has not released casualty figures for its troops since late March, when it said 1,351 soldiers had died. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that his officials believe that at least 30,000 Russian troops have been killed. Recently a British intelligence assessment put the estimated Russian losses at half that number.

Ukraine, similarly, has not disclosed data on its military casualties, but Mr. Zelensky has said that as many as 100 servicemen might be dying daily in the brutal fighting in the eastern Donbas region. U.S. intelligence agencies estimated in mid-April that between 5,500 to 11,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.

Four foreign soldiers were killed fighting for Ukraine, the international legion says.

“We wish to remember and honor our fallen brothers,” the legion said in a Facebook post. “They chose to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

On Friday, the French foreign ministry confirmed news reports that a French citizen had been killed in combat in Ukraine. Dutch media reported on the death of a citizen in early May, while Australia’s government in late May confirmed that an Australian man had been killed in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government has declined to say how many foreign volunteer fighters there are in the country, but there are believed to be several thousand. Most of the volunteers are fighting with groups other than the International Legion, which has recently become more selective in recruiting members, taking only those with combat experience.

In early May, Ukrainian officials confirmed an American, a Briton and a Dane had been killed fighting with the International Legion.

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Ukraine rebuffs Macron’s call to ‘not humiliate Russia.’

“We must not humiliate Russia, so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means,” Mr. Macron, who has tried to position himself as the world’s chief negotiator with the Kremlin, said in the interview, published late Friday. “I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power.”

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, responded with a scathing post on social media.

“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it,” Mr. Kuleba wrote. Instead, he argued, lives would be saved and peace restored if nations focused “on how to put Russia in its place.”

For months, Mr. Macron has waged a diplomatic campaign to jump-start cease-fire or peace talks between Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. As other leaders have distanced themselves from Mr. Putin since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Macron has spoken to him repeatedly by phone and has flown to meet him in Moscow.

He has also spoken with Mr. Zelensky, but while he has expressed Europe’s commitment to send military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, he also ruled out seeing Ukraine join the European Union in the near future.

Mr. Macron’s remarks to the French newspapers, published late Friday, echoed similar comments he made in May, when he said neither side should be humiliated or excluded as Germany was in the aftermath of World War I.

Delegations from Ukraine and Russia met for peace talks in Istanbul early in the war, but those efforts stalled weeks ago and show little hope of restarting as the fighting has turned into a slow and artillery-focused war of attrition.

Ukraine has cleared more than 127,000 explosives since Russia invaded, the U.N. says.

Most of the efforts to remove unexploded mines, rockets, bombs and artillery shells undertaken by Ukraine’s State Emergency Services have been focused on urban areas in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Zhytomyr regions, according to the report which was issued on Wednesday. It added that the emergency service had covered an area of more than 28,714 square kilometers (more than 11,000 square miles).

The United Nations has said that it could take years to clear all of the mines in Ukraine. Antipersonnel land mines often kill and maim civilians long after hostilities have ended. Ukraine is one of the 164 nations that signed a 1997 treaty banning their use. The United States and Russia have refused to join it.

The United Nations estimates that more than 12 million Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country on Feb. 24. They’ve had to “move across a landscape littered with unexploded rockets, bombs, and land mines,” according to the HALO Trust, a British American charity that clears land mines and other explosive remnants of war to help countries recover after conflicts.

Ukrainian officials have been warning residents of the dangers of explosives since reports emerged that retreating Russian forces left buried land mines and jury-rigged bombs across large parts of the country.

According to Human Rights Watch, Russian forces also have used a new type of antipersonnel mine in the eastern Kharkiv region equipped with sensors that can detect people walking nearby. When the mine senses a person, it launches a small warhead that is lethal up to 50 feet away.

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Russia increases its use of air power to support its fight in the Donbas region, an intelligence report says.

President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces have made the heavily industrial Donbas region, which borders Russia, the focus of his military campaign after Russian forces failed to seize the capital Kyiv, early in the conflict.

That came in part because of Moscow’s inability to destroy Ukraine’s air defense systems.

In the war’s second phase, however, Russia has deployed air power to support guided and unguided missile strikes in what the British intelligence report on Sunday called its “creeping advance.”

“The combined use of air and artillery strikes has been a key factor in Russia’s recent tactical successes in the region,” the report said. It noted that the increased use of unguided munitions has “almost certainly” caused civilian casualties.

Sievierodonetsk is in the Luhansk region of the Donbas. The head of the Ukrainian military administration there, Serhiy Haidai, said Saturday that a mother and child were killed in the past day’s fighting, the latest casualties in a battle from which the vast majority of the city’s population has fled. Mr. Haidai did not offer details on how they were killed.

Though the Donbas, where it has held territory since 2014, is Russia’s strategic priority, the front line stretches hundreds of miles from the Russian border north of the country’s second largest city, Kharkiv, to the city of Mykolaiv on the Black Sea. That distance and the expanse of the fighting is putting pressure on Ukraine’s government, whose forces risk being stretched thin.

Russian forces poured “intense fire” on Ukrainian positions in villages north of the city of Kharkiv, the Ukrainian defense ministry said on Saturday.

Further south, in Donetsk Province — which together with Luhansk makes up the Donbas — Russian forces shelled three villages near the city of Sloviansk and attempted an assault on another, the defense ministry said.

And a cruise missile, fired from a plane by Russian forces, hit the Odesa region on the Black Sea coast early Saturday morning, Odesa city officials said on Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.

Fire engulfs wooden temple at a revered monastery in eastern Ukraine.

An official with Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, Anton Gerashchenko, posted photos and video on Twitter of the All Saints hermitage in flames on Saturday. His hashtag —#RussianWarCrimes — made clear whom he blamed for the fire. Mr. Gerashchenko had warned on Friday that the site was being shelled by Russian forces.

Later in the day, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russian artillery had struck the monastery and destroyed the hermitage. It was not the first time the Kremlin had tried to destroy the site, he said.

“It was first destroyed during the Soviet era,” Mr. Zelensky said in a statement. “Later it was rebuilt. And now the Russian army set it on fire.”

Shelling killed four people at the monastery earlier this week, Mr. Zelensky said, stressing that the monastery had no military significance but had served as a shelter for some 300 individuals fleeing the fighting.

But Russia’s defense ministry on Saturday accused withdrawing “Ukrainian nationalists” of setting fire to the wooden building with “incendiary munitions.” It said in a statement that Russian forces were not carrying out combat operations in the area and had not shelled the historical site.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church said it did not have information on any casualties.

The Svyatogorsk Lavra is built into a high bank of the Seversky Donets River in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which is at the heart of a fierce battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces for control of the Donbas. Donetsk and the neighboring province of Luhansk make up the Donbas.

Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting.

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A farmer holds on, a fraying lifeline for a besieged corner of Ukraine.

“We are surrounded on all sides,” said Mr. Chaplik, 55, a dairy and livestock farmer. “It is the second month without light, without water, without gas, without communication, without the internet, without news. Basically, horror.”

“But people need to eat,” he said. “I am a businessman. So I am doing my job.”

Mr. Chaplik owns about 75 acres of land near the city of Sievierodonetsk, where Russian and Ukrainian troops have been battling for control in heavy street fighting in recent days. The countryside around his farm is under almost constant bombardment by Russian forces trying to encircle the easternmost Ukrainian forces and lay siege to Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.

The roar of multiple rocket launcher systems being fired south of the farm rattled the windows and doors of his home. “Don’t worry, those are Ukrainian,” he said as he gave a tour of his farm. “Here, thank God, the guys are holding firm.”

But the war has come dangerously close. Craters from bombs and artillery shells scar his fields. Leaning against the wall of one of his barns stood the casings of a dozen rockets that Mr. Chaplik had collected from around the farm. The rockets delivered cluster bombs, he said, which still littered his hayfields.

“They want to be eating grass,” he said as he walked down the stalls of his 35 dairy cows. “But I cannot let the cows loose on this grass because of these bombs, and I am scared they will fall in the bomb craters.”

Mr. Chaplik is a fraying connection to the world for his increasingly isolated village, which he asked not be named so it would not suffer retribution from Russian troops. At considerable risk to himself, he provides vital supplies and information, and keeps producing food as best he can.

Many other farmers have left the area but he said he could not. “I can’t leave the people,” he said. “If I leave, I will not be able to return to the village, I will not be able to look people in the eye.”

But as the war has crept closer, he has had to shrink his business while trying to keep the farm producing and workers fed and paid. With utilities cut off, he runs the milk machines on generators, but can only operate his refrigerators for 12 hours a day.

“We used to make nearly 100 different milk products,” he said. “I have a two-years-old Parmesan cheese. I made unique products that no one else was making, sour cream, cream, mozzarella, burrata.”

But without electricity he has had to cut down on production. There was a shortage of containers, he added. He removed two cheeses with moldy rinds from a fridge. “They are no good,” he said.

He has moved his food production operations to several different parts of the country, placing part of his dairy production in the nearby market town of Bakhmut, where he already has an organic meat and dairy shop, and relocating his meat production plants to the relatively safe cities of Dnipro and Lviv.

His family has moved, too. His wife is a teacher and two of his children are university students, so they needed to go somewhere with the internet to be able to keep working, he said. They were calling him daily, pleading with him to join them, but he said he still had work to do.

His work force has contracted, as many villagers left with their families for safer parts of the country. “I have fields and machines and diesel but I do not have the workers,” he said. But he pulled together the 10 workers who remained, so they now live and eat together.

Two teenage girls were mucking out the cow stalls. “They are the daughters of my workers. They are children, but I have no workers,” he said.

A pensioner, Lyudmila, 68, has stepped in to run his shop in the village.

“Did you get cucumbers?” she called out, as Mr. Chaplik unloaded bottled water and fresh vegetables from his van.

“Without him we would be lost,” she said. Villagers could not travel to the market, and prices there were much higher anyway, she said.

But the strain shows on Mr. Chaplik’s face. He looks like he has not slept in days. He complained of toothache and a twitch around his eye. One of the hardest things, he said, was fielding the panicked telephone calls from relatives trying to reach the villagers who have remained behind. The cellphone service in the village has been knocked out but they know that Mr. Chaplik drives into town every day to the market, where cell service continues, and they bombard him with calls.

“My nerves are cracking,” he said, as he declined another phone call. “I am working 14 to 15 hours a day. Physically I am tired.”

So now he is arranging for his son to bring in a mobile antenna, so the villagers can be in touch with their relatives.

He sees more problems on the horizon. The war has disrupted farming and food production to such an extent that people in eastern Ukraine could go hungry in coming months, he warned.

The potatoes are already planted, which will provide food for the villagers, he said, but meat and milk will become scarce.

“If I do not prepare feed for my cows they will die this winter,” he said. “I cannot cut the hay because of the cluster bombs in the fields and I need 12,000 bales of hay and I do not have the workers.”

And as he follows the progress of the war, and the steady advance of Russian troops, he said it was likely that they would seize control of the village and he would lose the farm that he built up over more than 20 years.

Separatist forces backed by Russia seized the area in 2014 but were pushed back after a few months. But this time he said he did not expect President Vladimir V. Putin to stop. The Russian leader wants to seize a swath of the country from the city of Kharkiv in the northeast to Odessa in the southwest, he said.

“He will not calm down,” he said. “He will fight for a year, two, three, until he reaches his goal.”

Mr. Chaplik has been slaughtering his pigs, so only one remains, slumbering in his pen. The newborn calves will have to be slaughtered too, he said. “It’s a shame.”

If the Russians came, he added, he would have to leave his guard dogs, six German shepherds. “I could not bear to put them down,” he said. “I will let them loose.”

If the shells came too close, he would take his workers and leave, he said. “I will start anew,” he said. “Give me a little piece of land, in Ukraine, in the United States, wherever. I can build a great business again.”

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Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine has been battling to hang on in Sievierodonetsk, underscoring the government’s determination to resist Russia’s onslaught until the arrival of heavier weapons from the West that could potentially help turn the war in its favor.

On Friday, Ukrainian troops were moving heavy guns and howitzers along the roads toward the front line, pouring men and armor into the fight as Russian artillery targeted Ukrainian guns.

Russia has increasingly turned to airstrikes, both with guided and unguided missiles, in the Donbas to support its “creeping advance,” according to the British Defense Ministry. The combination of Russia’s recent use of airstrikes and artillery fire has been a factor in its small gains in Ukraine’s east. Earlier in the war, by contrast, its use of air power was restricted by its failure to destroy Ukraine’s air defense systems around the capital, Kyiv.

As the war logged its 101st day, the length of the front was a sign of the grinding battles likely to lie ahead. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, warned this past week that the conflict had become a “war of attrition” and advised allies to be prepared for “the long haul.”

In other developments:

• President Emmanuel Macron of France said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia must not be “humiliated” if there was to be hope for diplomacy to end the war. His remarks drew a scathing rebuke from Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba.

• A fire engulfed the wooden All Saints hermitage at a revered 16th-century monastery in eastern Ukraine, with Russian and Ukrainian officials trading blame for who was responsible. The Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra is seen as one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers.

• An air-launched cruise missile hit the Odesa region, on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, early Saturday morning, Odesa city officials said on Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.

• Marriott said it was suspending operations in Russia after determining that restrictions set by Western governments would make it impossible for the company to operate or franchise hotels there. Marriott, which said it had been operating in Russia for 25 years, joins a long list of multinational companies pulling out of the country amid sanctions.

• Ukraine has cleared more than 127,000 explosive devices from its territory since Russia invaded in late February, according to a United Nations report.