Russia-Ukraine War: Ukraine Battles for Control of Key Black Sea Peninsula (Published 2022) (2024)

After forcing Russian troops to retreat from the city of Kherson two weeks ago, Ukrainian special forces are now battling the Russians on the islands and in marshes to the southwest, trying to push them out of a strategically vital peninsula at the mouth of the Dnipro River where it meets the Black Sea.

The fighting is focused on the Kinburn Spit, on the east bank of the Dnipro River, the Ukrainian authorities said on Tuesday. For tourists who have visited the sliver of land, the spit is a place of rare natural beauty, but it could also prove pivotal to the next phase of the country’s war against Moscow.

Russia took control of the peninsula in June in one of its last notable advances in the south before it was forced onto the defensive by a sustained Ukrainian counteroffensive. Two weeks ago, the Kremlin ordered a retreat from the city of Kherson, on the west bank of the Dnipro, but military experts said it would fight tenaciously to keep control of Kinburn.

Control of the peninsula allows Russia to project force deeper into the Black Sea, guard routes to the ports in Mykolaiv and Kherson and protect its forces in Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. If Ukraine were to take Kinburn, it would put key Russian supply lines running north out of Crimea in easy range of Ukrainian weapon systems.

In addition, Russian forces on the spit can launch missiles at the port city of Odesa, around 40 miles to the west, as well as the city of Mykolaiv, a similar distance to the northeast, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a military research group. By the same token, military experts say that if Ukraine can seize the spit, it could outflank Russian forces still establishing defensive positions east of the Dnipro.

“This specific bit of sandy territory becomes hugely significant because it’s a door to the Southern Bug and the Dnipro and it’s a gate out into the Black Sea,” said Rory Finnin, an associate professor of Ukrainian studies at the University of Cambridge and the author of a book about Crimea’s history.

Vitaliy Kim, the head of the military administration in the Mykolaiv region, said on the Telegram messaging app on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces were making progress on the Kinburn Spit. Ukrainian forces control the town of Ochakiv, less than three miles to the north across the water and well within artillery range.

Russian military bloggers have claimed in recent days that Russian forces have repelled attacks on the cape, while the spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern military command, Nataliya Gumenyuk, told journalists, after the fall of Kherson, that the spit was the next objective.

At its tip, the Kinburn Spit is a strip of sand a few feet across, lapped by waves. Tourist guides speak of its sunsets and the area is known for its bird life — flamingos are sometimes sighted — and for its marshy woods. One is named after the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote about the area.

During the Crimean War, in 1855, the navies of Britain and France destroyed a Russian fortress on the peninsula, while a fierce battle took place there in 1787, as the Ottoman Empire tried to regain land lost to the Russian Empire.

Mr. Finnin argued that the current fighting over Kinburn was a sign that Russia’s retreat in the Kherson region made Moscow’s control of Crimea “hugely insecure.” Historically, the arid Crimean Peninsula and the more fertile land to the north have never been divided between competing powers for long.

“If they are able to claim the spit, it will have a lot of consequences for them in defeating Russia,” Mr. Finnin said of Ukrainian forces.

In late October, Russian news media showed images of concrete blocks that it said were being trucked to Kinburn for defensive fortifications. A few days later, a video circulated online that appeared to show the only Ukrainian amphibious assault ship reported to have survived the Russian invasion, the Yuri Olefirenko, launching rockets at Russian positions there. It was not possible to confirm the authenticity of the videos.

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian security officers raided a centuries-old Orthodox Christian monastery complex in Kyiv on Tuesday, saying they wanted to prevent its use as a center for pro-Russian, subversive activities. The agents scoured the sprawling complex aboveground looking for Russian saboteurs among the clerics and weapons amid the holy relics, even as pilgrims prayed in caves below where the monks are buried. Moscow condemned the move as an attack on the Russian Orthodox Church.

It was unclear if any arrests were made or illegal activity discovered, but the publicly announced search appeared designed to send a clear message: Priests who support the Kremlin’s goal of a “Russian world” that includes Ukraine will be found and perhaps punished.

The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, also known as the Monastery of the Caves, is a huge complex that is considered one of the holiest Christian sites for both Russians and Ukrainians. It is the headquarters of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had until recently been subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow.

The search was a vivid demonstration of the depth of mistrust toward the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which long pledged its loyalty to the Moscow Patriarch. After Russia’s invasion in February, the Ukrainian church’s leadership made a formal break, but government officials have spoken openly about suspicions that some clergy members are still loyal to Moscow.

Officers of Ukraine’s state security service said in a statement that together with the police and national guard it carried out “counterintelligence” activities in the monastery intended to “counter the subversive activities of the Russian special services in Ukraine.”

Sprawling along the Dnipro River in central Kyiv, the complex encompasses ancient churches, administrative buildings and caves where revered monks and saints are buried. It is considered the birthplace of monastic life in Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

The Reverend Hieromonk Ioan, a member of the Kyiv monastery, said that the clergy there simply wanted to pray in peace. He said that they were not loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate but did not shy way from the monastery’s close historic ties with Russia.

“We have certain relations with Russia, and it’s painful for us what is going on now,” he said in an interview outside the monastery after the raid. “Time will show how it will be in the future.”

“The most important is that the war is over — we are praying for that,” he said. “For the guilty to be punished and for us to live in peace and not to be afraid of tomorrow.”

Ukrainian security officials said in a separate statement that they had also raided two other monasteries, as well as the headquarters for a local diocese, all in western Ukraine.

The Ukrainian church has been slowly asserting itself since the country’s independence in 1991. It received formal autonomous status within the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2019. Since the war started, hundreds of churches have switched allegiance from the Moscow patriarchate to the Kyiv-based church.

Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, is a prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has characterized the war as a just defense of Russian nationalism and a crusade against the spread of liberal ideologies. Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, has urged Kirill not to “transform himself into Putin’s altar boy” and instead to work for peace.

Tuesday’s raid prompted a harsh reaction in Russia, with the Kremlin characterizing the move as further proof that Ukraine is “at war with the Russian Orthodox Church.”

“This can be regarded as another link in the chain of military actions against the Russian Orthodoxy,” said Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman.

Vladimir Legoyda, the spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, called the raid “an act of intimidation” against the only remaining institution “where people both in Russia and Ukraine sincerely pray for peace.”

Ukrainian security services said they had already arrested more than 30 Ukrainian priests working as Russian agents over the course of the war.

The leaders of the central branch of the Orthodox church in Ukraine made a formal break with the hierarchy in Moscow in April, widening a schism in a church that was already divided before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church said at the time that it disagreed with the position of Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has been a strong backer of President Vladimir V. Putin and the invasion, repeatedly blessing Russian military forces and avoided condemning attacks on civilians.

The church in Ukraine had been under the wing of the Moscow Patriarchate for centuries, and its departure markedly decreased the size of the patriarch’s flock because Ukrainians attend church in greater numbers than Russians.

But the church is increasingly an object of distrust in Ukraine, with government officials who once courted church leaders speaking openly about suspicions that some priests are collaborating with Moscow.

Before the announcement of the break with the hierarchy in Moscow, about half the 45 dioceses of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had already stopped mentioning Patriarch Kirill in their prayer services, the first step toward a formal rupture. Hundreds of Orthodox priests in Ukraine had signed an open letter demanding that Patriarch Kirill face a religious tribunal over the war.

Disputes within the church, which can last for centuries, revolve around complicated questions of doctrine and authority.

Each of the 15 branches of the Orthodox church enjoys significant sovereignty. The main spiritual guide for Eastern Orthodoxy, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople — Patriarch Bartholomew — holds much less authority than the pope, for example. The Moscow Patriarchate has sought to anoint itself as the true seat of Orthodoxy ever since Constantinople, now Istanbul, fell to Islamic invaders in 1453.

Ukraine has been a particular source of antagonism between the two hierarchs. In 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew granted independence, to a previously unsanctioned church in Ukraine, which had been subordinate to Moscow since 1686.

Afterward, the Russian church severed contacts with Bartholomew. More than half Ukraine’s parishes rejected the decision to grant independence to the Ukrainian church. Those parishes remained loyal to Moscow.

Local authorities in Crimea said Ukraine targeted the port city of Sevastopol with a drone attack on Tuesday.

It was unclear if any damage was done to the city or to Moscow’s Black Sea fleet, which is headquartered there.

“There is an attack with drones,” the Russian-installed governor of the Sevastopol region, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. “Our air defense forces are working right now.” He said that two drones had been shot down and that no civilian infrastructure had been damaged.

Mr. Razvozhaev said the drones appeared to be on a course to attack a power plant in the Balaklava district, just east of the city. He said the Russian Navy had repulsed a second group of three drones at sea. None of his statements could be independently verified.

It was the latest in a series of significant attempted strikes in Crimea, which Russia seized illegally in 2014 and uses as base of operations for its invasion into Ukraine. Russia holds Ukraine responsible for the strikes, but Ukrainian officials maintain a policy of official ambiguity about attacks far from the battlefield.

After Russian officials accused Ukrainian forces of a drone attack on the Black Sea Fleet in October, the Kremlin temporarily suspended its participation in a grain deal that provides a safe Black Sea corridor for the grain shipments. Russia has since rejoined the agreement, which was brokered by Turkey and the United Nations.

Although the October strike was far from the route taken by grain ships, Russian officials said they had rejoined the deal after receiving assurances from Ukraine that it would not use the grain corridor to attack Russian vessels.

In the first months of the war, two Ukrainian-made Neptune cruise missiles slammed into the hull of the Moskva, the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. The strike, in April, set off a series of explosions that eventually caused the cruiser to sink, killing an unknown number of sailors.

A senior Ukrainian official acknowledged that the country’s forces had carried out a successful attack in August on the Saki Air Base on Crimea’s western coast. Satellite photos taken after a series of explosions there appeared to show at least eight wrecked warplanes.

More recently, in October, a truck bomb, apparently deployed by Ukrainian saboteurs, severely damaged the main bridge linking Russia to Crimea.

KYIV, Ukraine — With Ukraine’s energy grid suffering “colossal” damage after waves of Russian missile attacks, President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced a national drive to prepare thousands of makeshift centers to provide basic services in the event of prolonged blackouts.

“If massive Russian strikes take place again and if there is an understanding that the electricity supply cannot be restored within hours, the work of ‘Points of Invincibility’ will be activated,” he told the nation in his nightly address on Tuesday.

“All basic services will be there,” he said, including electricity, mobile communications, internet access, heat, water, and first-aid supplies.

Almost no thermal and hydroelectric power plants remain undamaged after successive waves of Russian strikes aimed at energy infrastructure in recent months, according to the head of Ukraine’s national electricity grid.

“The scale of the destruction is colossal,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of Ukrenergo, told a news conference on Tuesday.

Oleksii Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security and defense council, said a barrage of attacks on Nov. 15, including from more than 100 missiles and drones, was the broadest assault on the country’s energy infrastructure of the war so far.

While Moscow is running low on precision cruise missiles, according to Ukraine and its allies, Ukrainian intelligence reports suggest the Kremlin still has enough in its arsenal to carry out attacks of a similar scale “three or four more times.” Ukrainian and U.S. officials have also said that Moscow is looking to Iran and North Korea to replenish its stockpiles.

Andriy Yermak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said that the aerial attacks on energy infrastructure are a part of a “malign strategy” by Russia, which has been pushed back into defensive positions in the south and northeast after Ukrainian forces reclaimed around 55 percent of the territory occupied by Moscow during the early months of the war. Russia remains on the attack toward one eastern city, Bakhmut.

“Their goal is obvious: to cause a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe, to provoke another refugee crisis in Europe,” Mr. Yermak said in a statement. “It’s either force Ukraine to make peace or force the West to force Ukraine to make peace.”

Mr. Zelensky said it was clear that Russia was aiming “to turn the cold of winter into a weapon of mass destruction.”

Moscow’s effort to plunge the nation into darkness and freezing conditions has already forced the national utility to implement controlled but extensive rolling blackouts, leaving nearly everyone in the country without power for between 4 to 12 hours a day.

Not knowing when the next wave of Russian missiles will come — and how effective Ukrainian air defenses will be in blunting their impact — Ukrainian officials must reckon with the possibility that further damage could render them unable to provide basic services.

Mr. Zelensky on Tuesday encouraged people in towns and cities across the country to go to a government website, nezlamnist.gov.ua, to find one of the 4,000 planned centers for basic services nearest their home.

People working at the centers, he said, would be able to direct residents to the nearest gas station, bank, pharmacy and grocery store in the event of a blackout.

“All of us must be prepared for any scenario,” he said. “I am sure: by helping each other, we will all be able to get through this winter together.”

In addition to the “Points of Invincibility” — its name meant to promote Ukrainian solidarity and courage — municipal workers in Kyiv are setting up 1,000 heating shelters that can double as bunkers for hundreds of people, stocked with essential supplies to last more than a week. Similar efforts are underway in towns and cities around the nation.

In parts of the country recently reclaimed from retreating Russian forces, including Kherson, the damage to infrastructure is so severe that Ukraine’s government is helping residents evacuate to other parts of the country. But Ukrainian officials have emphasized that there is no need for a broader evacuation.

“I believe that the call for a mass departure of Ukrainians abroad is currently inappropriate,” Mr. Kudrytskyi said.

When The Associated Press wrote last week that Russia had struck a village in Poland with a missile, fears quickly rose the event would escalate the Ukraine-Russia war into an even bigger conflict.

But it soon appeared that Russia did not fire the missile. And one of the journalists behind the article is now no longer at the news organization.

The reporter, James LaPorta, who had worked at The A.P. since April 2020, had provided information that Russia was to blame from a single U.S. intelligence source. The A.P. used that information in a news alert: “A senior U.S. intelligence official says Russian missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, killing two people.”

The significance of the alleged event was immediately apparent: It could escalate the war.

The information was soon proven wrong. The NATO secretary general and Polish officials said the explosion was most likely caused by a Ukrainian air-defense missile that was fending off a Russian attack and went off course.

The A.P. corrected the article the next day, stating that the erroneous report was “based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.”

The correction said: “Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.”

In a response to questions about Mr. LaPorta, Lauren Easton, a spokeswoman for The A.P., said in a statement, “When our standards are violated, we must take the steps necessary to protect the integrity of the news report. We do not make these decisions lightly, nor are they based on isolated incidents.”

Mr. LaPorta declined to comment for this article.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Mr. LaPorta thanked “the multitude of journalists, editors and long-time readers that have reached out to me with words of encouragement and kindness. It sincerely means the world.”

Mr. LaPorta covered national security and the U.S. military for The A.P. He previously worked as a reporter for Newsweek, Frontline PBS, United Press International and the Daily Beast. He is a Marine Corps veteran and served in the Afghanistan war. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was a military adviser for the NBC show “This Is Us.”

The news of Mr. LaPorta’s departure from The A.P. was reported earlier by The Daily Beast.

A Russian shell struck an aid station at a school in southern Ukraine on Tuesday, killing a social worker and wounding two women, the governor of the Zaporizhzhia region said, in the latest violence against civilians in almost nine months of fighting. The social worker was among at least eight people killed across the country on Tuesday, officials said.

People lining up at the aid station in the town of Orikhiv had left spaces between them as a security precaution and this prevented a higher casualty toll, said the governor, Oleksandr Starukh, in a post on the Telegram social messaging app. Since Russia’s invasion in February, there have been several incidents of shellfire killing people lining up for food or other forms of aid in Ukraine.

“Others present were saved by the fact that they went down to the shelter in time,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said on Telegram. He gave no further details.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, 6,557 civilian deaths have been recorded and more than 10,000 people have been wounded, according to a report last week by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The deadliest month was March, but Russia last month escalated its missile strikes targeting energy infrastructure in cities and towns across Ukraine.

Orikhiv has been repeatedly struck for months, given its position on the front line of a highly contested region, and many civilians have fled. Russian shellfire in the region has destroyed 58 houses and apartments since Monday, according to the regional administration.

While more attention has been focused on areas where territory changes hands, such as the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, which was retaken by Ukrainian forces this month, shelling and other forms of violence remain a daily reality for civilians in other areas of Ukraine.

In the wider Kherson region, three people were killed and 10 others were wounded in Russian attacks on Monday, Mr. Tymoshenko said. Russian shellfire hit residential neighborhoods in the city on Monday morning. Four people were killed in the Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine, he said.

In the south, the city of Nikopol was hit by more than 60 Russian shells overnight, according to Valentyn Reznichenko, head of the military administration in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Like Orikhiv, Nikopol, which lies on the western bank of the Dnipro River, is a regular target of Russian artillery attacks. In a post on Telegram, Mr. Reznichenko said there were no casualties.

Rocket fire in the town of Chuhuiv, in the northeastern Kharkiv region, on Monday evening damaged a two-story home and destroyed several cars, according to Oleh Syniehubov, head of the regional administration.

In the village of Pryshyb, farther south, a 50-year-old man was killed when a land mine detonated on Monday evening, Mr. Syniehubov said on Telegram.

Higher inflation and slower growth are the heavy price that the global economy is paying for Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said on Tuesday.

Record inflation, fueled by the largest energy crisis since the 1970s, is creating financial hardship for millions, the organization said in a new report. Governments and policymakers must make it their top priority to bring inflation down, while shielding households and businesses with targeted spending, the O.E.C.D. added.

“Navigating the economy from the current situation to a sustainable recovery will be challenging,” Mathias Cormann, the secretary-general of the Paris-based O.E.C.D., said in a news briefing.

“An end to the war and a just peace for Ukraine would be the most impactful way to affect the economic outlook,” Mr. Cormann added. “But until this happens, governments should deploy measures for a stronger and sustainable recovery.”

The grim assessment echoed a warning by the International Monetary Fund last month that “the worst is yet to come” for the world economy. The fund downgraded its global growth projections for next year and warned of a harsh worldwide recession if policymakers mishandled the fight against inflation.

Photographs of War

KHERSON, Ukraine — The principal artist designing the exhibitions at Kherson’s regional history museum, Anatoliy Gryaznov, was near tears. The collection to which he had dedicated a lifetime was mostly gone, he explained, another cultural institution ransacked and looted by Russian forces before they withdrew from the city in defeat.

Glass display cases were smashed. Deep gouges in the floor marked the paths along which Russian soldiers had dragged tombstones and other heavy objects.

“I spent my whole life working in this museum,” Mr. Gryaznov said. “And now it is all gone. Twenty years of my life — gone.”

According to the head of the culture department at its city council, Svitlana Dumynska, Kherson had “one of the most impressive collections of regional museums in Ukraine.”

They are now in ruins. At the regional history museum, the section on guns and weapons was decimated, the Russians taking everything they could carry. A few heavier objects remained, alongside the whole of the nature exhibit.

At the nearby Kherson Art Museum, local officials said, religious paintings from the 17th and 20th centuries were torn from the walls. Ukrainian art from the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries was missing, along with contemporary art from the last 100 years.

The Kherson police have opened a criminal investigation, classifying looting as a war crime.

Ukraine’s Minister of Culture, Oleksandr Tkachenko said that about 80 percent of the museums’ collections were gone. “Mostly the most valuable things were stolen,” he said.

The deputy governor of the Kherson region, Serhii Khlan, told journalists on Monday that there were reports that a second branch of the regional history museum — in Kakhova, east of the Dnipro River, near an important hydroelectric plant — had also been robbed.

The Russians also cleared out the entire section of Kherson’s history museum that was dedicated to World War II, including the identification documents and medals of a Nazi soldier bearing Hitler’s signature.

They seem to have done little to conceal what they were taking.

Days after their soldiers fled the city, images circulated on Ukrainian social media that appeared to show objects from the Kherson Art Museum being unloaded at a museum in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia unlawfully annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Museum experts identified several works of art in the pictures, including paintings by the Ukrainian modernists Ivan Pokhitonov and Mykhailo Andrienko-Nechitaylo.

In an interview this month with the news outlet The Moscow Times, the Crimean museum’s director, Andrei Malgin, confirmed that the artworks had come to his institution, the Central Museum of Taurida in Simferopol.

“I have been instructed to take the exhibits of the Kherson Art Museum for temporary storage and ensure their safety until they are returned to their rightful owner,” he said.

In forests, in fields and in fierce urban combat, the Ukrainian military has defied the odds, and all expectations, and forced Russia into multiple retreats over nine brutal, bloody months of war.

And yet despite its success, and even with tens of thousands of soldiers killed on each side, Ukraine by one measure is only halfway done: Its army has now reclaimed about 55 percent of the territory Russia occupied after invading in February.

Ukraine is on the offensive along most of the 600-mile frontline. Russia is in a defensive crouch in the south and northeast while still attacking toward one eastern city, Bakhmut.

Ukraine’s success has brought the war to a pivotal juncture. Because it is on the offensive, it can shape the next phase of the fighting, determining whether to push its advantage farther into Russian-occupied territory, or settle in for the winter, as military analysts say Russia would like to do.

Should it press on, Ukraine faces significant hurdles: While it has pushed more Russian fighters into a tighter space, this means the battles ahead will be against more densely defended territory, on challenging terrain.

YAHIDNE, Ukraine — The elementary school’s former custodian carefully turned the key to the green door leading to the basem*nt and walked down the stairs, shining a flashlight. Eventually, he paused the beam on a calendar scrawled on the cement wall and on the list of names alongside it.

It is how the people imprisoned there by Russian occupiers kept a record of who died and when.

“People were dying, people couldn’t take it,” said the former custodian, Ivan Petrovich Polhui. “There was not enough air. We spent a month there — 28 days.”

Mr. Polhui has become something of an unofficial keeper of the memories of the school and of the suffering that Russian soldiers inflicted there in March, when they held him and more than 300 of his neighbors, including children, in the dank and desperate confines of the basem*nt.

Before the war, the elementary school had been a center point in the community. Mr. Polhui, whose grandchildren attended the school, said that there had been many happy memories made there before the Russian invasion.

Now, the children in the area attend other schools or take classes online. And while the Russian forces have gone, the trauma lingers for those who were held in captivity, with the still-intact elementary school serving as a daily reminder of their experiences.

A complex effort by Ukraine’s allies to deprive Russia of billions of dollars in oil revenue by putting a cap on the price paid for its crude is reaching a crescendo this week.

European Union diplomats will meet on Wednesday to try to set that price after discussions with the United States and other Group of 7 industrialized nations, with two weeks to go before the cap is scheduled to take effect.

The diplomats’ meeting in Brussels will mark the last stage of implementing the policy that requires regulatory and logistical alignment in the complicated business of ferrying the fuel out of Russia to markets such as India and China.

The policy must be in place by Dec. 5, when the European Union’s near-total embargo on Russian oil begins, one of many actions the bloc has taken to hobble Russia’s economy and limit its ability to wage war in Ukraine.

The idea behind setting a price cap is to limit the revenue Russia can make from its oil exports while also averting a shortage of the fuel, which would force prices up and compound a cost-of-living crisis around world.

The way the G7 nations want to make this work is by putting the burden of implementing and policing the price cap on the businesses that help sell the oil: global shipping and insurance companies, which are mostly based in Europe.

This is why the regulatory framework to enforce this measure needs to be adopted in Europe as well as other G7 members such as the United States, Britain and Japan, which also host companies active in transporting or insuring Russian oil.

A senior Treasury official said on Tuesday that the coalition was expected to announce the price in the coming days. The price is likely to change over time, the official said, based on regular reviews that take into account changing market conditions.

On Tuesday, the Treasury Department released new guidance outlining how the price cap would work, including that it would be set “after a technical exercise conducted by the Price Cap Coalition.”

The guidance explained that Russian oil that had been sold under the cap but was then “substantially transformed” or refined outside of Russia would no longer be subject to the sanctions. It also provides a “safe harbor” provision that protects insurers and other financial service providers from liability if they violate sanctions based on falsified information about the price of oil in shipping transactions.

LVIVSKY OTRUBI, Ukraine — More that 15,000 people have gone missing since Russia invaded Ukraine, the International Committee for Missing Persons estimated on Friday. This is the story of two of them.

After Russian forces retreated from the southern port city of Kherson and its environs earlier this month, Serhiy Novosad, 26, returned to the small village of Lvivsky Otrubi where he had grown up, looking for his father and grandmother.

As the Russians’ fortunes sank in recent months, their occupation tactics had turned increasingly savage, and Mr. Novosad had begged his father and grandmother to leave and join him in Kyiv. But his father, also named Serhiy Novosad, would have none of it.

He was a farmer and had to tend to his field, he said. City life was not for him. The two men had been able to stay in touch up until the final days of the Russian occupation. But as the Russians pulled out of the village in early November, his father’s phone stopped working.

After being unable to reach him on Nov. 10, Mr. Novosad set out on the three-day journey from Kyiv to search for him and his grandmother.

When he got to his family home, he found Ukrainian soldiers living there. He asked them where his father was. They shrugged their shoulders, and pointed to what appeared to be a makeshift grave with a cross in front of the house directly across the street.

Reluctantly, he went to investigate.

The first thing he noticed were his father’s shoes sitting in a narrow trench dug into the front yard. But before he could look more closely, he had to wait for a demining team.

The Russians had used the family’s house as a base of sorts, and all around were discarded Russian uniforms and boots, dozens of empty ammunition crates, obscene graffiti scribbled on the walls, half-eaten hotdogs and tinned meat.

And the threat of mines.

The scale of the mining around Kherson is hard to comprehend, Rostyslav Smirnov, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, said on Friday. While more than 5,000 mines have been disposed of, he said, they remain everywhere, including in children’s toys. “There was a mine between two soccer balls,” he said.

Once the sappers had removed the wooden cross to make sure it was not rigged, Ukrainian police officers this week started to clear dirt from the shallow grave.

Mr. Novosad recognized his father’s feet. He also spotted his grandmother’s cane visible through a thin layer of dirt. The bloodied, bruised and bullet-riddled bodies made it clear that Serhiy Novosad, 49, and his mother, Lyubov Novosad, 78, had met a violent end.

Andriy Kovalenko, a prosecutor in the Kherson regional prosecutor’s office, said their deaths would be added to the more than 6,000 criminal cases opened in and around Kherson city since the start of the war, based on testimony from people who had fled the area.

The Russian retreat from Kherson to the other side of the Dnipro River played out over weeks, during which time Russian soldiers had time to systematically loot the city and, according to Ukrainian officials, cover up evidence of war crimes.

Only now, with the Russians having withdrawn from the area, is it possible to independently investigate allegations of atrocities, including torture, kidnapping, murder and sexual violence.

But that work is complicated by the fact that Russian forces now across the river are stepping up their shelling of Kherson city and the surrounding towns and villages, promising more death and destruction in the coming weeks and months.