Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Ukraine News: In Reclaimed Towns, Ukrainians Recount a Frantic Russian Retreat (Published 2022) (2024)

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Here’s the latest on the war in Ukraine.

One resident, Oleksandr Kryvosheya, said that he had overheard Russian soldiers yelling at their commanders on a radio in an armored personnel carrier parked in the courtyard of his apartment block. “You left us behind, you got out,” the soldiers protested, Mr. Kryvosheya said.

“If they came to fight, if they came to build this new Russia, why didn’t they stay and fight in Balakliya?” he said in an interview on Tuesday.

As the Russian defenses around the town collapsed, residents said, soldiers ran for whatever transport they could, leaving behind ammunition and weapons along with personal items in apartments where they had quartered.

“Trucks drove through the city honking, and they climbed on and left,” said Igor Levchenko, a retiree, describing the Russian Army’s withdrawal after more than six months of occupation. “They didn’t have a fighting spirit. They were afraid.”

The testimony of the town’s residents aligned with reports from other recently retaken villages in the Kharkiv region, where Ukraine has routed Russian forces, and towns that are still occupied in the south. The accounts shed a harsh light on apparent morale and communications breakdowns within Russian occupying forces that could have broad implications for the course of the war, should units elsewhere be afflicted with similar problems.

Some witnesses described the Russian troops as increasingly ill-disciplined, unpredictable, anxious and, in some cases, simply scared.

The morale of Russian troops is just one factor in Ukraine’s calculus about whether it can extend its gains in two campaigns, in the east and the south, without overstretching its own forces. But it could prove critical, as it did over the last week, when Russian forces deserted their positions and gear en masse and Ukrainian forces swept into dozens of villages and towns.

Around 150,000 people in some 300 communities in northeastern Ukraine are living in areas reclaimed from Russian control, Hanna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense, said Tuesday.

Even after the lightning offensive, Russia still holds vast swaths of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine and outguns the Ukrainians with artillery and tanks. Russian troops have increased shelling in some areas, including on the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut, in the east, where both sides are deeply dug in. And the particular woes of units in the north may reflect a Ukrainian strategy of striking first where the Russians were weakest.

In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Malyar said that the Ukrainian Army was prepared to react “dynamically” to various situations, suggesting that its plans are not relying wholly on collapsing Russian morale.

“The Ukrainian Army is more motivated because we are fighting a just war, we are fighting for our land,” she said. “When Russian soldiers arrive here they realize they have been deceived by Russian propaganda.”

Still, a visit by journalists to the recaptured areas, organized by the Ukrainian police, turned up signs of what military analysts have said are worsening shortages of qualified troops in Russia’s military, which has increasingly relied on a motley array of soldiers.

In the newly recaptured village of Verbivka, made up of a few isolated streets and brick homes surrounded by a sea of farm fields, a crowd of residents turned up to meet the police buses. Some cried, expressing both happiness and shock at the quick turn in fortunes.

They described Russian soldiers beating a hasty retreat.

A hundred or so soldiers had occupied the village from the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic, one of the two Russia-backed separatist groups that rebelled in 2014, residents said.

Put on occupation duty in what had been a rear area for the Russians, the troops were ill-equipped, lacking even their own vehicles. They had been dropped off by buses, residents said.

Iryna Derevyanka, a schoolteacher, said one soldier had told her he was only fighting “to earn money.” The occupiers made little effort to sway residents with the ideology of expanding Russia’s borders, she said.

The soldiers quartered in homes of residents who had fled, typically about half a dozen men to a house, and drove in cars commandeered from locals. “They lived comfortably, taking whatever they wanted,” she said.

Confronted with an unexpected fight as the Ukrainian Army advanced, the soldiers seemed surprised, she said, as they had made no special preparations either for defense or retreat. In the panicky moments as they fled, some changed into looted civilian clothes.

Vitaly Bychok, a welder, said he had seen Russian military jackets hanging on a fence after soldiers changed into street clothes, in an effort to slip away disguised as fleeing civilians.

“They ran into the houses and changed into whatever clothes they could find,” he said. “They ran where they could, in small groups.”

The counterattack on the village was not without cost for the residents. About two dozen civilians were wounded by shrapnel from Ukrainian shelling, said Larisa Khrantsova, a clerk in the village store. “I heard people screaming in the streets,” she said.

But she said she understood the risks the Ukrainians had undertaken in the attack.

“How else could we get them out?” she said.

In the hours after the battle, the village was eerily silent.

“When they left it became quiet, and it was so scary I cannot describe it,” said Olha, an employee of an electrical company who asked that her last name not be published out of safety concerns. “We were scared that this silence would bring something horrible.”

The Russian soldiers, she said, were young and inexperienced. “They were silly, so young, children,” she said. “If they had surrendered, they would have survived.”

The soldiers’ lack of discipline extended to their treatment of civilians, residents said. If men expressed any displeasure with the Russian military’s presence, soldiers would hit them in the chest with a rifle butt, said Oleksandr, a retiree. “Many men had blue chests,” he said.

In the south, people who just escaped Russian controlled territory said some of the occupying troops seemed scared about the possibility of fighting off a Ukrainian advance.

“At the checkpoints, they seemed stressed out,” said Maksym Bratienkov, a beekeeper who fled a southern city, Berdyansk, for the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia. “All night they were moving military equipment around, like they were in a hurry. They were looking for partisans and going to parts of town they had never been to.”

Another resident who fled southern-occupied territory, Yevhen Kornienko, said Russian troops had been barging into homes more often recently. “Even the simplest check can now end very badly,” he said.

Mr. Kornienko, speaking in a shelter for displaced people in Zaporizhzhia, said Russian forces in his hometown, Hola Prystan, had grown increasingly brutal. He also said that in the past few days, Russian soldiers were looting more than ever, robbing townspeople at gunpoint of electronic equipment, cars, computers, even dresses.

“They are out of control,” he said.

Mr. Bratienkov, the beekeeper, said not all the Russian soldiers in his town had behaved badly. Some were from the mostly Muslim republic of Dagestan, he said, while others came from a Ukrainian separatist group, and were to be feared. “These guys are fanatics,” he said.

In Balakliya, the police on Tuesday exhumed two bodies of men they said had been shot in the final, panicky days before the Russian withdrawal. Working in a thick stench, officers zipped the corpses into body bags and loaded them into a hearse taking them for an autopsy. In the town and nearby areas, Ukrainian prosecutors say they have found a dozen or so bodies so far.

As elsewhere, Russian soldiers had taken to living in abandoned apartments.

Tatyana Morkolenko, another retiree, lived next door to a dozen or so Russian soldiers who had settled into three apartments in her building. They were quiet neighbors, she said, but didn’t appear disciplined. When she entered one apartment after they fled, she found empty beer bottles in the kitchen.

In their haste, Russian soldiers left a city police station in a state of chaos, with papers scattered about the floor along with personal items, like a mug and boots. A can of ham was set out on a table, a meal never enjoyed.

The floor was littered with papers trodden over with muddy boots, including letters and drawings sent from Russian schoolchildren to cheer up the soldiers.

Upstairs, laundry was drying on a clothesline and looped over chairs, including a pair of gray, striped boxer shorts.

“Look,” said Oleg Tertishin, a Ukrainian policeman who referred to the Russian soldiers by a derisive term commonly used in Ukraine. “There are the underwear of the orcs.”

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Balakliya, Ukraine, and Jeffrey Gettleman from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Balakliya, Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Oleksandr Chubko from Zaporizhzhia.

U.S. and others rebuke Russia’s claims of secret bioweapons in Ukraine.

Russia used its authority as a signatory of the treaty, first adopted in 1975, to convene the meeting to air its repeated unfounded claims that the United States was operating secret biological labs in Ukraine and other countries along Russia’s periphery. The United States has repeatedly denied that, saying that in reality it provided financial and technical assistance to dozens of countries, including at one point Russia itself, to protect biological security and public health.

The meeting in Geneva, which took place behind closed doors, ended on Friday without an official finding on the accusations, but delegates of 35 of 89 nations either dismissed the Russian claims or expressed support for the kind of research the United States and Ukraine were conducting, the State Department said in a statement.

Only seven nations expressed support for Russia: Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela.

China, whose leader, Xi Jinping, is to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia this week in Uzbekistan, stopped short of endorsing Russia’s claims. But its representative at the meeting, Li Song, said China was “deeply concerned” about the allegations and called for an independent international investigation of the United States’ activities involving biological research.

“My delegation believes that a series of specific questions raised by Russia have not yet received pointed response from the U.S.,” Mr. Li said, according to one of dozens of written statements posted by the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs.

The United States and other countries accused Russia of undermining the convention — and public health safety — by making unfounded claims about conducting nefarious activities under the cover of a treaty intended to ban biological weapons.

American officials noted that, until 2014, Russia itself participated in a Defense Department program that helped to dismantle old weapons programs and has since expanded to public health threats.

“These disinformation efforts are deeply cynical and serve only to harm international peace and security,” Poland said in a statement after last week’s meetings.

A number of other countries — including several that also have taken part in the Defense Department initiative, known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program — made noncommittal statements.

One of them, Turkey, a NATO ally, nonetheless took issue with one part of Russia’s allegation: that a Turkish-made drone was being configured to deliver the biological weapons supposedly under development in Ukraine. “Its technical specifications do not include any system or mechanism that can be used as biological weapons,” Turkey’s statement said of the drone, called the Bayraktar.

Although Russia faced broad criticism, it appeared unlikely to end its information campaign over the issue, signaling that it would continue to raise it at the United Nations General Assembly this month and at later sessions of the Biological Weapons Convention.

“No, it wasn’t a resounding success for Russia, but no one expected that it would be,” said Milton Leitenberg, an expert on the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program at the University of Maryland.

Even so, the effort gave the Russians a chance to claim there was no consensus. “It was exactly what the Russian government did it for,” Mr. Leitenberg said.

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Listen to ‘The Daily’: Is Ukraine turning the tide in the war?

As Russian forces retreat in north and south, Ukrainian officials say looting is intensifying.

Though not all claims by Ukrainian officials could be independently verified, Russian soldiers have been documented looting homes and shops in occupied villages since the start of the war. Russian troops ransacked citizens’ homes as they withdrew from Kyiv, and in the nearby town of Borodianka, the soldiers even shot the bust of a famous Ukrainian poet in the head.

Amid Ukraine’s recent breakneck offensive, Ukraine’s information war has also intensified, with Ukrainian officials seeking to make psychological as well as military gains on the battlefield and beyond.

According to a statement from Ukraine’s general staff on Facebook, published on Tuesday, members of the Russian military stole nearly 300 cars belonging to Ukrainians and loaded them with stolen loot before retreating from the Kharkiv region. The vehicles were seen driving toward the eastern province of Luhansk.

Ukrainians have reported similar pillaging in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south. In Pology, a city in the Zaporizhzhia province, “Russian occupiers break down the gates of private garages and take private cars from local residents,” the military’s statement said. In Nova Kakhovka, a city in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials say soldiers had been seen running off with appliances and furniture from temporarily abandoned settlements.

The statement underlined sagging morale among Russian soldiers, saying that “the level of morale and psychological state of the enemy’s personnel continues to decrease.” It added that soldiers have been recorded not returning to their military units after vacations and even injuring themselves to avoid fighting.

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Russia secretly gave at least $300 million to parties and officials worldwide, U.S. intelligence says.

“The Kremlin and its proxies have transferred these funds in an effort to shape foreign political environments in Moscow’s favor,” the document said. It added, “The United States will use official liaison channels with targeted countries to share still classified information about Russian activities targeting their political environments.”

The State Department document was sent as a cable to American embassies around the world on Monday to summarize talking points for U.S. diplomats in conversations with foreign officials.

Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, confirmed at a news conference on Tuesday that the findings on Russia were the result of work by U.S. intelligence agencies. He added that Russian election meddling was “an assault on sovereignty,” similar to Russia’s war on Ukraine. “In order to fight this, in many ways we have to put a spotlight on it,” he said.

The State Department cable and release of some of the intelligence findings amount to an initial effort by the Biden administration to use intelligence material to expose the scope of Russian interference in global political processes and elections, and to rally other nations to help combat it.

U.S. intelligence agencies have determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in favor of Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate who defeated Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. Its methods included the use of cyberoperations to spread online disinformation. U.S. intelligence officials also found that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized a campaign to try to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he ran for office against Mr. Trump in 2020.

The new document says that a range of Russian agencies and individuals carry out the global operations, including the Federal Security Service and other security agencies, as well as business figures.

The document named two men, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Aleksandr Babakov, both close associates of Mr. Putin, as involved in the influence or interference campaigns. In April, the Justice Department charged Mr. Babakov, who is also a Russian lawmaker, and two other Russian citizens with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions and conspiring to commit visa fraud while running an “international foreign influence and disinformation network to advance the interests of Russia.”

The Russians pay in cash, cryptocurrency, electronic funds transfers and lavish gifts, the document said. They move the money through a wide range of institutions to shield the origins of the financing, a practice called using cutouts. Those institutions include foundations, think tanks, organized crime groups, political consultancies, shell companies and Russian state-owned enterprises.

The money is also given secretly through Russian Embassy accounts and resources, the document said.

In one Asian country, the Russian ambassador gave millions of dollars in cash to a presidential candidate, the document said. U.S. agencies have also found that Russia has used false contracts and shell companies in several European countries in recent years to give money to political parties.

“Some of Russia’s covert political financing methods are especially prevalent in certain parts of the world,” the document said. It added, “Russia has relied on state-owned enterprises and large firms to move funds covertly across a number of regions including Central America, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and on think tanks and foundations that are especially active across Europe.”

As of last year, the document said, a Russian business figure was trying to use pro-Russian think tanks in Europe to support far-right nationalist parties. The document warned that in the coming months, Russia might use its “covert influence tool kit,” including secret political financing, across broad swaths of the globe to try to undermine the American-led sanctions on Russia and to “maintain its influence in these regions amid its ongoing war in Ukraine.”

Although U.S. intelligence agencies have been studying Russian global election interference and influence for years, the intelligence review was ordered by senior administration officials this summer, U.S. officials said. Some of the findings were recently declassified so they could be shared widely. The review did not examine Russian interference in U.S. elections, which intelligence agencies had been scrutinizing in other inquiries, a U.S. official said.

Officials say one aim of the U.S. campaign to reveal details about Russian political interference and influence is to strengthen democratic resilience around the world, a pillar of President Biden’s foreign policy. Administration officials are focused on ensuring that nations that took part in last year’s Summit for Democracy, which Mr. Biden held in Washington, can buttress their democratic systems. The administration plans to convene a second summit soon.

The State Department summary listed measures that the United States and partner nations could take to mitigate Russia’s political interference campaigns, including imposing economic sanctions and travel bans on known “financial enablers” and “influence actors.”

The department also recommended that countries coordinate intelligence sharing, improve foreign investment screening, strengthen investigative capabilities into foreign financing of political parties and campaigns, and enforce and expand foreign agent registration rules.

It said governments should also expel Russian intelligence officers found to be taking part in related covert financing operations.

The State Department said in the summary that it was urging governments to guard against covert political financing “not just by Russia, but also by China and other countries imitating this behavior.”

Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.

Photographs of a recaptured Ukrainian city show the remnants of Russian occupation.

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Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

The surprise blitzkrieg enabled Ukraine’s military to recapture hundreds of square miles of territory, strategic towns and abandoned weapons. Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said that some 150,000 people had been freed from Russian control in recent days.

And Ukrainian officials said morale was suffering among the Russian forces. Ukraine’s military high command claimed on Tuesday that Moscow had ceased sending new units into battle because many volunteers “categorically refuse the prospect of service in combat conditions.”

One resident of Balakliya, Oleksandr Kryvosheya, said that he had overheard Russian soldiers yelling at their commanders about being “left behind” over the radio of an armored personnel carrier parked in the courtyard of his apartment block.

“If they came to fight, if they came to build this new Russia, why didn’t they stay and fight in Balakliya?” Mr. Kryvosheya said.

As the Russian defenses around the town collapsed, residents said, soldiers ran for whatever transport vehicles they could, leaving behind ammunition and weapons along with personal items in apartments where they had quartered during more than six months of occupation.

“Trucks drove through the city honking, and they climbed on and left,” said Igor Levchenko, a retiree.

Russian morale is just one factor in Ukraine’s calculus about whether it can extend its gains to the east without overstretching its own forces. Russia still holds vast swaths of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine and the particular woes of units in the northeast may reflect a Ukrainian strategy to strike first where the Russians were weakest.

Ms. Malyar, the deputy defense minister, said in an interview in the newly recaptured village of Verbivka that the Ukrainian army was prepared to react “dynamically” to various situations, suggesting that its plans did not rely wholly on collapsing Russian morale.

“The Ukrainian army is more motivated because we are fighting a just war, we are fighting for our land,” she said.

Here are other developments:

• Russian shelling escalated sharply in Bakhmut, a key Ukrainian stronghold in the Donbas region, as Moscow’s forces sought to keep pressure on Ukraine in the east amid setbacks elsewhere.

• Armenia said that at least 49 service members had died in clashes with the Azerbaijani Army, the worst escalation of hostilities between the countries since a 2020 war over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The fighting heightened fears that Russia, an ally of Armenia, could find itself entangled in a second war in addition to its invasion of Ukraine.

• The strategy behind Ukraine’s recent advances began to take shape months ago during a series of conversations between Ukrainian and American officials about the way forward in the war, U.S. officials said.

• The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said it was investigating possible war crimes in a recently liberated northeastern village. Law enforcement officials said they had discovered the tortured bodies of four civilians in Zaliznychne, in the Kharkiv region.

After Ukraine’s success in the northeast, shelling remains intense in the nearby Donbas.

Ukrainian officials said their troops had captured at least two small towns at the edge of the Kharkiv and Donetsk provinces, an area close to where Russian forces had retreated recently after Ukraine’s offensive. But soldiers with knowledge of the fighting deeper into the region said Russian shelling on the front line, especially in the city of Bakhmut, a key Ukrainian stronghold in the Donetsk region, has only intensified.

On Tuesday, Russian forces tried once more to enter Bakhmut, according to one soldier who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information. Fighting continued there for much of the day, but it remained unclear if the Russian troops had made progress. Unverified videos posted to social media showed the center of Bakhmut shrouded in smoke.

In the larger eastern city of Kramatorsk, a former industrial hub of the Donbas where the prewar population numbered around 150,000, frequent shelling persists despite Russia’s staggering defeat in the northeast. The windows of its once bustling train station are boarded up, closed after a missile strike in April that killed more than 50 people there.

The recent Ukrainian victory has only made Hennadiy, a guard at the maternity ward of a hospital in Kramatorsk that was shelled on Sunday night, more wary. He said he was worried about what would come next in the war.

“It’s good they have repelled the Russian advance and have taken some land back,” said Hennadiy, who declined to provide his last name. He mentioned that Ukrainians were fast to make jokes about the Russian military’s incompetency. “But now,” he said, “the Russians are getting angrier and are starting to shell civilians more.”

“They haven’t shelled this place before,” he added, leaning against the multistory health care center that was partly destroyed. No one was injured in the attack, he said.

On Tuesday, between rain showers, the streets in Kramatorsk were mostly empty and quiet.

“If we can manage to win the war, then we’ll manage,” Hennadiy said. “I will be glad. My house will stay intact.”

Natalia Yermak reported from Kramatorsk, Ukraine.

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Ukrainians fleeing occupied areas say Russian soldiers are demoralized and dangerous.

Maksym Bratienkov, a beekeeper who made a harrowing, 150-mile escape from Russian-held territory on Tuesday, said he had passed through 16 checkpoints in southern Ukraine. And one thing stood out about the soldiers he saw there. “They’re nervous,” he said. “Real nervous.”

“I even heard some young Russian soldiers say: ‘I just hope the Ukrainians liberate this place soon so we can go home,’” said Mr. Bratienkov who escaped from the port city of Berdyansk and spoke on Tuesday from a shopping center parking lot in Zaporizhzhia that has been turned into a reception area for those fleeing Russian-held territory.

Interviews with a half-dozen people who recently fled Russian controlled towns in the south provide a snapshot of the conditions in those areas, and might not be indicative of the situation across all Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine. In some other places, like the northern city of Bakhmut, Russian troops seem to be fighting hard.

But the accounts from displaced civilians add weight to claims by the Ukrainian government that Russian forces are increasingly struggling with poor morale. The country’s military high command, without citing evidence, claimed on Tuesday that Moscow had ceased sending new units into battle because many volunteers “categorically refuse the prospect of service in combat conditions.”

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Hanna Malyar, said that some 150,000 people had been freed from Russian control in recent days. But 1.2 million people are still living in areas occupied by Russia, including half a million in the southern region of Kherson.

In Hola Prystan, a small southern river town near the city of Kherson, the Russian troops in charge seemed especially volatile, said several people who recently fled the area. Russian troops barge into homes more often and “even the simplest check can now end very badly,” said Yevhen Kornienko, who worked for an organic products company and fled with his family on Sunday.

Mr. Kornienko, who arrived the next day in the safety of Zaporizhzhia, a major industrial city under government control, said that Russian forces in his town had grown increasingly harsh in their treatment of civilians. People who didn’t register for a Russian passport or sign up their children for Russian school were often brutalized, he said. He didn’t do either, and several times Russian soldiers dragged him to an old administrative building and tortured him, he said.

He also said that in the past couple days, the Russian soldiers were looting more than ever, robbing townspeople at gunpoint for electronic equipment, cars, computers, even dresses.

“They are out of control,” he said.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.

Ukraine faces a difficult task in repairing the railway in areas it took back from Russia.

“Today I failed,” Mr. Kamyshin wrote. “It was a long, long day.”

Photographs he posted showed extensive damage and hazards, including an unexploded missile, broken tracks, a damaged grain silo, and country stations that were overgrown with weeds after going unused for months.

But the main problem in retaken territories, he wrote, will be land mines.

After hours of traveling, a team that included demining officers had to leave the train and walk along the tracks for more than six miles. Eventually, they turned back.

“Demining officers have to finish their job tomorrow,” he wrote. “And this rail remains unused, rusty, for few more days.”

Ukraine’s rail network has more than 12,000 miles of track and its trains have continued running since Russia invaded in February, a point of national pride.

The rail network was also involved in more of the bloodiest attacks of the war. More than 50 civilians died in April in a missile strike on a train station in the city of Kramatorsk, in the Donbas region of the east. Many were trying to leave by rail in the face of a Russian offensive.

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A new draft in Russia ‘is not being discussed,’ the Kremlin says.

The statement reflected the Russian government’s difficulty maintaining control over debate as recent defeats have brought increased criticism, including from usually supportive conservative and nationalist voices.

Russian political figures and commentators have been calling on Mr. Putin to get tougher in Ukraine by bolstering the Russian Army with recruits and by targeting Ukraine’s key civilian infrastructure.

“Russia has the right to plunge Ukraine into the stone age,” wrote Oleg Tsaryov, a pro-Russian former deputy of the Ukrainian Parliament who fled the country in 2014.

Others accused the Russian military leadership of poor strategy and coordination for the defeats, which have led Russia to yield hundreds of square miles of occupied territory within days. Some suggested the best course was now to sue for peace.

Though the Kremlin has taken measures to bring in more recruits, analysts say Mr. Putin has strained to avoid the sort of mass mobilization that helped fuel a backlash against previous conflicts such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

After the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government introduced a law that effectively bans all public discussion of the war that deviates from the official interpretation of events. So far, those charged or punished have mostly been pro-Western liberals.

On Tuesday, Mr. Peskov responded to the latest round of criticisms with a warning.

“The people are consolidated around the decisions that are made by the head of state,” he said. “As far as other points of view, critical points of view, as long as they remain within the law, this is pluralism. But the line is very, very thin — one must be very careful there.”