What Happened on Day 14 of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

“It’s potentially apocalyptic,” said Graeme Smith, a senior consultant for the International Crisis Group. “A huge surge in food prices could really tip Afghanistan over the edge.”

More than half of Afghanistan’s population is currently not eating enough, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency. And one of the worst droughts in years has exacerbated Afghanistan’s hunger crisis. But the problem is not so much a lack of food as it is the ability to pay for it.

Fluctuating border restrictions, ever-rising import costs and a cash shortage spurred by U.S. sanctions on the new Taliban government, have, in some cases, doubled or tripled the price of basic necessities in Afghanistan in the past year.

Aqa Gul, an international trader based in Kabul, said that following Russia’s invasion, the prices of certain imported items such as milk biscuits and soap have climbed 10 percent. Nooruddin Zaker Ahmadi, the director of Bashir Nawid complex, a large import company in Afghanistan, said cooking oil prices have gone up 40 percent because of the war in Ukraine. Fuel prices have also climbed.

The price hike on basic commodities has been especially alarming at the World Food Program, which hopes to deliver cash, wheat and other necessities to the approximately 23 million Afghans in need of some kind of food assistance.

But with the increasing cost of essentials such as wheat and cooking oil, the W.F.P. will likely need an additional several million dollars on top of its $1.6 billion funding shortfall, from donors, said Hsiaowei Lee, the U.N. agency’s deputy country director for Afghanistan.

Safiullah Padshah and Najim Rahim contributed reporting.

“Destroyed hospitals. Destroyed schools, churches, houses. And all the people killed. All the children killed,” Mr. Zelensky said.

“The air bomb on the maternity hospital is the final proof. Proof that the genocide of Ukrainians is taking place.”

In the hours after the attack, videos of the aftermath have spread around the world. They showed rescue workers attending to pregnant women caught in the blast as others searched frantically for children feared buried in the rubble.

“Europeans. You won’t be able to say that you didn’t see what happened to Ukrainians, what happened to Mariupol residents,” Mr. Zelensky said. “You saw. You know.”

Repeated efforts to bring relief to the city have failed and evacuation efforts collapsed under the fire of what Ukrainians say is Russian artillery. Mr. Zelensky said they would try again on Thursday.

“We are preparing six corridors,” he said. “We pray that people will be taken out of Mariupol” and other cities, he said.

About 35,000 people were evacuated on Wednesday through only three of six agreed upon corridors.

Both Russia and Ukraine appear to have softened their stance in recent days, raising hopes that a cease-fire might just be possible.

The Kremlin has narrowed its demands to focus on Ukrainian “neutrality” and the status of its occupied regions, and signaled that President Vladimir V. Putin is no longer set on regime change in Kyiv.

On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelensky has suggested that he is open to revising his country’s constitutionally enshrined aspiration to join NATO, and even to a compromise over the status of Ukrainian territory now controlled by Russia.

Mr. Zelensky said on Wednesday that he expected Mr. Putin to eventually cease hostilities and enter negotiations after watching his forces encounter fierce resistance in Ukraine. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Russian troops have been killed during the two-week invasion, a U.S. official said on Wednesday, up sharply from an estimate of 3,000 just days ago.

“I think he sees that we are strong,” Mr. Zelensky told Vice News during an interview in Kyiv. “He will. We need some time.”

The talks on Thursday will be held in the Turkish city of Antalya, in a coastal region that has for years been a popular destination for Russian tourists.

Turkey is a more neutral location than Belarus, where the first three rounds of talks have been held. Mr. Erdogan has stopped short of imposing sanctions against Russia over the invasion, but his country is a NATO member that has provided Ukraine with lethal armed drones.

Yet the Russian and Ukrainian demands are still far apart.

The Kremlin said this week that it would halt military operations if Kyiv were to enshrine a status of neutrality in its constitution and recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the independence of two Russia-backed separatist territories eastern Ukraine. That is still far from what Mr. Zelensky has said he would be willing to accept. Russia’s position could also puncture Mr. Putin’s image at home, opening him up to criticism that he waged a costly war for limited gain.

Even if Russia and Ukraine were to agree on a cease-fire, it would not necessarily mean the end of the war. Analysts caution that both sides could use it to build up strength ahead of a further escalation.

Mr. Kuleba said on Wednesday that his expectations for the talks in Turkey were low.

As Mr. Kuleba meets Mr. Lavrov, Vice President Kamala Harris will meet in Warsaw on Thursday with President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, a NATO ally on Ukraine’s western border. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, who is visiting Poland this week, will also attend.

The United States and its NATO allies are trying to find ways to help Ukraine defend itself without getting pulled into a wider war against Russia. In a sign of how difficult that is proving, the United States and Poland publicly disagreed this week over proposals for sending Soviet-era fighter jets into the country.

Gen. Tod D. Wolters, the head of U.S. European Command, said in a statement early Thursday that the United States had “no plans to facilitate an indirect or third party transfer of Polish aircraft” to Ukraine.

Providing more air-defense systems and anti-tank weapons to Ukraine is the most effective way to support the country’s military, General Wolters said, and Ukrainian air defenses have been limiting the effectiveness of Russia’s significant air capabilities.

Transferring fighter jets from Poland to Ukraine would “not appreciably increase the effectiveness of the Ukrainian Air Force,” he added. It could also be “mistaken as escalatory and could result in Russian escalation with NATO.”

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia is expected to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, in Turkey, in the highest-level talks between the two countries since the war began on Feb. 24. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose top diplomat has held a total of 10 calls with Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Kuleba since the start of the war, said on Wednesday that the meeting could “crack the door open to a permanent cease-fire.”

Leading up to the meeting, both sides have softened their public positions, though they remain far apart. Russia has narrowed its demands to focus on Ukrainian “neutrality” and the status of its Russian-occupied regions, and declared on Wednesday that Russia was not seeking to “overthrow” Ukraine’s government. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Tuesday suggested he was open to revising Ukraine’s constitutionally enshrined aspiration to join NATO, and even to a compromise over the status of Ukrainian territory now controlled by Russia.

“The changes are noticeable,” Ivan Timofeev, the director of programs at the government-funded Russian International Affairs Council, said of the evolution in Russia’s negotiating position. “This position has become more realistic.”

The Kremlin’s position now, according to comments this week by its spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, is that Ukraine must recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the independence of the Russian-backed, separatist “people’s republics” in the country’s east and enshrine a status of neutrality in its constitution. That is still far from what Mr. Zelensky has said he would be willing to accept — and it could also puncture Mr. Putin’s strongman image at home, opening him up to criticism that he waged an enormous war for limited gain.

“Regarding NATO, I have cooled down regarding this question a long time ago, after we understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday.

Ukraine was also willing to discuss how the breakaway territories “will live on,” Mr. Zelensky added. “What is important to me is how the people in those territories are going to live who want to be part of Ukraine. The question is more difficult than simply acknowledging them.”

With Russia escalating its bombardment of Ukrainian cities in recent days, there are few signs on the ground that the Kremlin is ready to back down. For Mr. Putin, analysts say, the fate of Ukraine is fundamental to how he sees his legacy: that of a leader who reunited what he claims are historically Russian lands that were divided by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early days of the conflict, he repeatedly called on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms and negotiate, apparently expecting Ukrainians to rally to Russia’s side.

But Ukraine’s fierce resistance, and the West’s unity in imposing crushing sanctions, has revealed that Mr. Putin greatly miscalculated. Now, Mr. Timofeev says, the Kremlin must choose “between the lesser of two evils”: either accept a compromise that could keep a pro-Western government in Kyiv, or fight on, risking enormous casualties both in the Russian army and among Ukrainians.

“He has a clear plan right now to brutalize Ukraine. But to what end?” U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Wednesday. “What is his endgame?”

The best option, Mr. Blinken said, was to maintain extreme pressure on Russia and hope that Mr. Putin “will decide to try to finally cut the losses that he’s inflicted on himself and inflicted on the Russian people.”

The United States has avoided engaging at a high level with the Kremlin since the war began, after an intense diplomatic push by Mr. Blinken and President Biden in the months before the invasion. Instead, amid the fighting, some American allies have stepped up their own efforts to halt the war — in particular, Israel and Turkey, which both have close ties to Russia as well as to Ukraine.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett flew to Moscow last Saturday on an urgent mission to see Mr. Putin, making the trip even though it was the Jewish Sabbath. He spoke to Mr. Putin by phone Tuesday, their fifth conversation since the war began.

Israeli officials believe that Mr. Bennett is in a unique position to communicate messages between the two sides because Israel is one of the few countries with a relatively functional relationship with both Kyiv and Moscow. Israel coordinates with Russia over its military activity in Syria and wants to protect the Jewish minorities in both Russia and Ukraine.

In a separate effort, Turkey is also trying to facilitate talks between the two sides. Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, has spoken to Mr. Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, four times and to Mr. Kuleba, his Ukrainian counterpart, six times since the outbreak of war.

Turkey is a NATO ally, has provided Ukraine with lethally effective armed drones and has strong cultural ties to the Crimean Tatar minority in Russian-occupied Crimea. But Mr. Erdogan has also formed a strong personal bond to Mr. Putin and, unlike other NATO leaders, has stopped short of imposing sanctions against Russia over the invasion.

“Turkey’s key position that it is able to talk to both parties is appreciated in the whole world,” Mr. Erdogan said on Wednesday, ahead of the talks between Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Kuleba. “I hope this meeting will crack the door open to a permanent cease-fire.”

A cease-fire would bring relief to the Ukrainian public but it would not necessarily mean the end of the war. Instead, analysts cautioned, both sides could use it to build up strength ahead of a further escalation in the fighting.

“For Ukraine, they would use it to get some civilians into safety but also continue receiving resupply from the West,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director in Ankara, Turkey, of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “I am afraid both sides would use such a cease-fire to boost their offensives.”

Russian and Ukrainian officials have already held three rounds of talks in Belarus since the start of the war, clashing over issues such as limited cease-fires and civilian evacuations that could help clear the way for a broader settlement. Mr. Peskov described Thursday’s meeting of foreign ministers, which will take place in the Turkish resort of Antalya, as “a very important continuation of the negotiation process.”

“The Russian position has been formulated and relayed to the Ukrainian negotiators,” Mr. Peskov said. “We are interested in having new rounds of contacts as quickly as possible.”

On Monday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said that the Biden administration supports the diplomacy with Mr. Putin by other foreign leaders, including Mr. Bennett, so long as those leaders also engage with Ukraine’s government. She added that the United States also speaks to Mr. Putin’s interlocutors “before and after all of these conversations.”

Mr. Biden spoke jointly about Ukraine on Friday with President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, along with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain. The White House said that Mr. Macron and Mr. Scholz discussed their recent conversations with the Russian leader.

As for a direct call between Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin, Ms. Psaki said that “now is not the moment,” given the Russian leader’s “brutal, horrific” invasion.

“But that doesn’t mean he will never,” she added. “We assess that as time goes on.”

Samuel Charap, a former U.S. State Department official and a Russia analyst with the Rand Corporation, said the United States has not prioritized diplomacy over economic and military pressure against Mr. Putin.

“I assume that’s because up to this point they think it’s a dead end, and there’s no convincing the Russians to change their immediate war aims,” Mr. Charap said, warning that the approach could limit the possibilities for a diplomatic endgame. “In Putin’s view, the president of the United States is the only interlocutor who matters.”

He added that direct channels of communication have inherent value even if an agreement looks unlikely, because they can set the stage for later negotiations, avoid misinterpretations and potentially help assuage Mr. Putin’s most paranoid beliefs, including that the West is trying to engineer his overthrow.

“Putin’s policies and views might be changing, and the only way you can find that out is by talking to him,” Mr. Charap said.

Anton Troianovski reported from Istanbul, Patrick Kingsley from Chisinau, Moldova, and Michael Crowley from Washington. Safak Timur and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Carlotta Gall from Lviv, Ukraine.

Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said on Wednesday that since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, the world’s attention has been understandably focused on the eastern part of the country where the conflict is raging.

Mr. Chapagain said that in western Ukraine, humanitarian supplies were crossing the border from neighboring countries successfully. But he warned that the wave of people fleeing there was putting an increasing strain on transport networks, medical facilities and local economies.

“We need to pay more attention to the people who have fled to the western part of Ukraine,” he said. “They are coping but I think it will start getting tougher and tougher in the coming days.”

While Ukrainians have shown notable resilience and solidarity in the wake of the invasion, he said it was imperative for aid groups to support western Ukraine to help assure that communities receiving refugees were not overwhelmed. He cautioned that hospitality in local communities could erode over time if they did not have sufficient resources.

The U.N. refugee agency estimated that at least one million people had been displaced by recent fighting, while acknowledging that millions more were stranded in areas besieged by the invasion.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, around 734,000 people were displaced in the country by a secessionist conflict that began in 2014 in the eastern regions of Donbas and Crimea, according to the agency’s figures.

The Red Cross is sending between five and 10 trucks across the border from Poland each day with supplies of food, medicine and bottled water. But Mr. Chapagain said the effort is too “small” when considering the needs of the millions of people who have been scattered across wide swaths of the country.

And then, late last month, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the fighting quickly moved toward Kyiv. It wasn’t long before artillery shells were crashing into their neighborhood. One night, a shell hit their building, prompting Ms. Perebyinis and the children to move to the basement. Finally, with her husband away in eastern Ukraine tending to his ailing mother, Ms. Perebyinis decided it was time to take her children and run.

They didn’t make it. Ms. Perebyinis, 43, and her two children, Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9, along with a church volunteer who was helping them, Anatoly Berezhnyi, 26, were killed on Sunday as they dashed across the concrete remnants of a damaged bridge in their town of Irpin, trying to evacuate to Kyiv.

Their luggage — a blue roller suitcase, a gray suitcase and some backpacks — was scattered near their bodies, along with a green carrying case for a small dog that was barking.

They were four people among the many who tried to cross that bridge last weekend, but their deaths resonated far beyond their Ukrainian suburb. A photograph of the family and Mr. Berezhnyi lying bloodied and motionless, taken by a New York Times photographer, Lynsey Addario, encapsulates the indiscriminate slaughter by an invading Russian army that has increasingly targeted heavily populated civilian areas.

The family’s lives and their final hours were described in an interview by Mr. Perebyinis and a godmother, Polina Nedava. Mr. Perebyinis, also 43, said he learned of the death of his family on Twitter, from posts by Ukrainians.

Breaking down in tears for the only time in the interview, Mr. Perebyinis said he told his wife the night before she died that he was sorry he wasn’t with her.

“I told her, ‘Forgive me that I couldn’t defend you,’” he said. “I tried to care for one person, and it meant I cannot protect you.”

“She said, ‘Don’t worry, I will get out.’”

After she didn’t, he said he felt it was important that their deaths had been recorded in photographs and video. “The whole world should know what is happening here,” he said.

The Perebyinis family had already been displaced once by war, in 2014, when they were living in Donetsk in the east and Russia fomented a separatist uprising. They moved to Kyiv to escape the fighting and started rebuilding their lives. When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine last month, they could hardly believe it was happening again, Mr. Perebyinis said.

Ms. Perebyinis’ employer, SE Ranking, a software company with offices in California and London, had encouraged employees to leave Ukraine immediately once the fighting started. It had even rented rooms for them in Poland, Mr. Perebyinis said. But his wife delayed her departure because of uncertainty over how to evacuate her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

A colleague at work, Anastasia Avetysian, said that SE Ranking had provided emergency funds for employees to evacuate and that Ms. Perebyinis, as the chief accountant in Ukraine, had been busy in her final days disbursing them.

“We were all in touch with her,” Ms. Avetysian said in a telephone interview. “Even when she was hiding in the basement, she was optimistic and joking in our group chat that the company would now need to do a special operation to get them out, like ‘Saving Private Ryan.’”

But behind the jokes was a period of waiting and intense worrying, Mr. Perebyinis said. His son, Mykyta, started sleeping during the day and staying up all night, keeping a vigil over his mother and sister. When there were sounds of fighting, he woke them up and all three would move into a corridor, away from the windows. “My son was under a lot of stress,” Mr. Perebyinis said.

Last Saturday, after two days in the basement, they made a first attempt at evacuating. But as they were packing up their minivan, a tank rolled by on the street outside. They decided to wait.

The next day they were up and moving by about 7 a.m. Tetiana Perebyinis had discussed the plan in minute detail with her husband. She and her two children and her mother and father, who lived nearby, would join a church group and try to evacuate toward Kyiv, and then get somewhere safe from there.

They drove as far as they could in Irpin, but then Ms. Perebyinis was forced to abandon the minivan. They set out on foot toward a damaged bridge over the Irpin River.

To escape, they were forced to cross a hundred yards or so of exposed street on one side of the bridge. As Russian forces fired into the area, many tried to seek cover behind a brick wall.

Mr. Berezhnyis, the church volunteer, who had earlier evacuated his own family but had returned to help others, was with Ms. Perebyinis and her children when they began to dash toward the other side.

Through the night, Mr. Perebyinis had tried to monitor his wife’s location using a locator app on their phones. But it showed nothing: the family was in a basement, without cell reception.

Around dawn, he said, he saw one ping, showing them at their home address. But nothing showed them moving. Cellphone coverage had become too spotty in the town.

The next ping of a location on Mr. Perebyinis’ phone came around 10 Sunday morning. It was at Clinical Hospital No. 7 in Kyiv. Something had gone wrong.

He called his wife’s number. It was ringing, but nobody answered. He called his children’s phone numbers, with the same result.

A half-hour or so later, he saw a post on Twitter saying a family had been killed in a mortar strike on the evacuation route out of Irpin. A short time later, another Twitter post appeared, with a picture. “I recognized the luggage and that is how I knew,” he said.

When the mortar shell hit, the family and Mr. Berezhnyi were about 12 yards away from the crater left by the mortar. They had no chance. The explosion sent out a spray of hundreds of jagged, metallic shrapnel shards. Their bodies slumped onto the muddy street beside a monument to World War II dead from Irpin. A plaque on the monument read: “Eternal memory to those who fell for the fatherland in the Great Patriotic War.”

Ms. Perebyinis’s parents were behind the mother and children and were unharmed. They are now staying with Ms. Nedava, the godmother. The following day, a snowstorm blew over Kyiv. The suitcases, one of which had been knocked open by the explosion or later opened by passers-by, lay covered in snow on the street beside blood stains. It held only clothes: a pink child’s tank top, sweatpants, yellow and blue child-size socks, apparently for Alisa.

When asked to describe his wife, Mr. Perebyinis slumped in his chair. Ms. Nedava offered that she had a “light” spirit, was often joking and cheered up a room.

Over their long marriage, Mr. Perebyinis added, “We refurbished three apartments and never argued once.”

Mr. Berezhnyi had moved his wife to western Ukraine but had returned to Irpin to help with the evacuation organized by his church, the Irpin Bible Church, the pastor, Mykola Romaniuk, said in a telephone interview.

When the mortar strike began, with shells landing first a few hundred yards away, Mr. Romaniuk said other church volunteers saw Mr. Berezhnyi run to help Ms. Perebyinis. “He took her suitcase and they started running,” he said.

Mr. Berezhnyi, Pastor Romaniuk said, was quiet and generous. “He was the kind of friend who is ready to help with no words needed,” he said. “I do not know how God can forgive such crimes.”

In mid-February, before the war started, Mr. Perebyinis had traveled to his hometown, Donetsk, in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, to care for his mother, who was sick with Covid-19. After hostilities began, the crossing point closed and Mr. Perebyinis was trapped in the East.

To return to Kyiv from separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine after the death of his family, Mr. Perebyinis traveled into Russia and flew to the city of Kaliningrad, to cross a land border into Poland. At the Russia-Poland border, he said, Russian guards questioned him, took his fingerprints and seemed ready to arrest him for unclear reasons, though he was eventually allowed to travel on.

He said he told them: “My whole family died in what you call a special operation and we call a war. You can do what you want with me. I have nothing left to lose.’’

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Lviv, Ukraine.

At least 38 businessmen or officials linked to Mr. Putin own dozens of properties in Dubai collectively valued at more than $314 million, according to previously unreported data compiled by the nonprofit Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Six of those owners are under sanctions by the United States or the European Union, and another oligarch facing sanctions has a yacht moored there.

The Emirati stance is exposing tensions between the United States and several of its closest Arab allies over their reluctance to oppose the Russian invasion. Asked for solidarity in a moment of crisis, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, like the United Arab Emirates, have instead prioritized relations with Moscow.

These Ukrainian women have chosen to face the dangers and privations of war for various reasons: Some are going in to rescue relatives, others to assist in the defense of their country. Still others simply want to get back to their homes after being stranded abroad when Ukrainian airspace initially closed as a result of the fighting.

New York Times reporters spoke with a number of women getting ready to board an eastbound train at the Polish-Ukrainian border to find out what motivated them to take such a risk.

Ms. Holubka is trying to establish a sense of normalcy for the children: Evelin, 15, Kevin, 13, Denisz, 11, Erik, 9, and Szofi, 2. She has been cooking, going for dog walks with them, and, on a recent day, she sliced a cake for Denisz’s 11th birthday. Their adjustment to their new life has been made somewhat easier by the fact that they have ethnic Hungarian roots and speak Hungarian.

The Hungarian government has joined Poland and other East and Central European countries in opening the door to Ukrainian refugees. Human rights advocates have noted that Hungarians’ warm embrace of Ukrainians offers a stark contrast to the refugee crisis in 2015, when Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a right-wing populist, demonized an influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, most of whom were fleeing civil war or other conflicts.

“There is no water, no heating, no gas,” Ms. Levinchuk, 28, who made it safely to a city in western Ukraine after 30 hours of driving, said in a video call on Wednesday. “And they are collecting snow, melting the snow and boiling the snow.”

It has been seven days since Russian forces encircled the city, an important port on Ukraine’s southern coast, and began to lay siege to the roughly half a million people living there. Most communications with the outside world were severed, leaving primarily those with access to satellite phones to alert Ukraine and the rest of the world to the increasingly dire state of affairs.

Having failed to defeat the Ukrainian army in the war’s first weeks, and encountering stiff resistance in major cities like Mariupol, Kharkiv and Kyiv, Russian commanders appear to be resorting to their tactics in previous wars in Chechnya and Syria: flattening cities with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower.

A video uploaded to Facebook on Wednesday evening showed the center of Mariupol after an aerial bombardment. It looked like a wasteland, with tree branches singed, windows blasted out of entire apartment blocks and a destroyed maternity hospital.

Efforts to negotiate a cease-fire to give civilians a chance to escape have failed repeatedly. For three days, the prospect of relief reaching the city though a “humanitarian corridor” fell apart in a hail of mortar and artillery fire.

The fighting around the city has been some of the most intense of the war, residents who managed to escape the conflict say.

“There was shelling all the time,” said Juliia Diderko, a 33-year-old journalist from Mariupol who slipped out of the city just after it was encircled by Russian soldiers. “There was bombing. If anyone can help, please do this. Please do this right now. Because people are dying.”

Residents are doing what they can to survive, for themselves and others in need, Ms. Levinchuk said. Trees are being cut down and food is being prepared outside, because there is no electricity or gas.

“All the neighbors, they are helping each other, sharing the food and the water if they have it,” added Ms. Levinchuk, “and people are trying to survive like this.”

The American Nuclear Society, a professional group, agreed. “The loss of power is a serious matter but it does not pose a threat to the public,” it said in a statement.

But officials warned that the situation around the plant, where there was an explosion and fire at one of the reactors in 1986, was still of grave concern.

The plant has not produced electricity since the last of its four reactors was shut down in 2000, but if its generators stopped working, that could affect the operations to store the large quantities of radioactive nuclear waste there.

Since the plant was captured by Russian forces not long after the invasion began last month, the I.A.E.A. has said that there have been interruptions in the feed of data it receives automatically from radiation monitors and other sensors at the plant.

A full loss of power would cut that feed completely, leaving the agency’s experts with little knowledge of what is going on there, except what could be gathered using portable devices. On Tuesday, the I.A.E.A. said it had lost communications with its sensors at the plant.

The most hazardous waste at Chernobyl is found in two locations.

As is common practice in the nuclear power industry, used fuel from all four reactors is stored in pools of water that dissipate the heat produced as the fuel decays radioactively. When fuel is newly removed from a reactor, there is a lot of decay and thus a lot of heat, so plants need power to run pumps that circulate the storage water to remove excess heat.

The I.A.E.A. has said that the used fuel assemblies at Chernobyl — there are more than 20,000 of them — are old enough and decayed enough that circulating pumps are not needed to keep them safe.

“The heat load of the spent fuel storage pool and the volume of cooling water contained in the pool is sufficient to maintain effective heat removal without the need for electrical supply,” the agency said.

The other main source of nuclear waste are the ruins of the destroyed reactor itself. An estimated 200 tons of fuel remain there, in a lava-like mix with molten concrete, sand and chemicals that were dumped on the reactor during the disaster. This mixture is found throughout the remains of the reactor. Some parts of it are completely inaccessible and have only been studied by boring into them.

A functioning reactor requires pumps that circulate water around the core, keeping it cool and moderating the nuclear reaction to avoid a meltdown. There is no cooling water in the chaotic, jumbled remains of the reactor, so the loss of power would not affect them.

But in recent years there have been incidents in which nuclear reactions have started spontaneously in pockets of these fuel-containing materials, leading to spikes in radiation levels. Without monitoring — of humidity in addition to radiation levels — workers would not know if any new incident was occurring.

Since 2017, the destroyed reactor has been covered by a large arched structure, intended to confine the waste and safeguard against any release of radiation. The structure is also meant to allow the work of removing waste to long-term storage.

The facility was only granted an operating license by Ukraine’s authorities last year, so that work had only just begun, and will take decades to complete. There are several large cranes and other specialized equipment to allow crews to work safely. Without power, most if not all of that work could not proceed.

On Wednesday, Russia’s Energy Ministry said that Belarus, whose border is not far from the Chernobyl zone, was working on restoring the power supply of the complex from its own grid.

William J. Broad and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

The extent of the casualties was not immediately clear. It was also not clear whether the hospital was fully operating at the time of the strike or had been evacuated to some degree. The strike was another apparent instance of Russia’s siege tactics hitting civilian infrastructure in Ukrainian cities, leading to what officials have called a humanitarian crisis in Mariupol.

For days, heavy Russian bombardment has cut residents off from power, water and heat in Mariupol, a strategic port city. The city is part of a vital stretch of terrain that Russia is trying to capture in an apparent attempt to link Russian-backed separatist enclaves in the southeast with Crimea, the southern peninsula Russia seized in 2014.

Russia and Ukraine had agreed to a limited cease-fire on Saturday morning only to see it collapse within hours under Russian shelling.

The Ukrainian government blamed Russia for the hospital strike, and witnesses and a local news outlet claimed that it had been caused by bombs dropped by Russian warplanes.

The strike sprayed shrapnel and blew out the windows of several buildings at City Hospital No. 3, the videos showed. One crater in a courtyard between the buildings appeared to be more than 10 feet deep.

Witnesses and open source information from Wikimapia identified the buildings as a children’s clinic, an ophthalmology department and a maternity ward.

“Planes attacked the maternity ward. That’s Russians for you,” a man filming one of the videos says.

The hospital appeared to be just one of several places in central Mariupol devastated by the bombing raid. Another video filmed on University Street, two blocks east, showed heavy damage, including blown out windows, to the Mariupol City Council building and Pryazovskyi State Technical University.

Some of the footage appeared to be taken by members of Ukraine’s territorial defense forces and the local police.

Hours before the strike, Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, claimed in a news conference that Ukrainian fighters had removed patients and set up combat positions in a maternity ward in Mariupol. She did not specify which maternity ward she was referring to, but video from the scene showed patients being escorted out of the complex following the attack.

The promise not to send conscripts to fight in Ukraine has been one of Mr. Putin’s key stances since the start of the war nearly two weeks ago. The deployment of often young and poorly trained conscripts in the wars in Afghanistan and in Chechnya was among the main factors that turned public opinion against those military operations.

In its statement, the Defense Ministry said that practically all conscripts had now been pulled out of Ukraine and that “comprehensive measures are being taken to prevent conscripts from being sent into combat areas and to release captured servicemen.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said in response to the Defense Ministry announcement that Mr. Putin had made an order to “exclude the participation of conscripts in the fulfillment of all tasks on the territory of Ukraine” and that he received a report that this order “had been fulfilled.”

Mr. Putin ordered the military prosecutor’s office to conduct a check and “punish those responsible for not fulfilling that instruction,” Mr. Peskov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

“In Mariupol, now, there is no drinking water at all,” said the man, who was not identified for safety reasons. “People are looking for different sources of water from the ground, like springs in the park.”

Some are collecting snow melt from their roofs and finding wood for cooking, he said. Older residents, people with disabilities and people with children are particularly struggling, he said.

“So humanitarian, humanitarian disaster here in Mariupol continues,” he said.

Some of the devastation wrought on civilian infrastructure by the Russian advance was visible in satellite imagery collected by the U.S. company Maxar Technologies on Wednesday. Those images revealed the destruction of multiple shopping centers, and fire damage at an apartment building likely caused by shelling.

This new imagery also shows several single story family homes damaged or destroyed. Videos posted to social media on Tuesday gave a ground level view of that same location.

Assessing the situation in the city has not only been hampered by communications outages but by cloudy skies, which prevented satellites from capturing clear images of the area — until Wednesday.

While the imagery does not appear to show widespread destruction throughout the city, satellite images might not always capture the full impact from shelling, such as damage to the sides of buildings.