Russian Invasion of Ukraine: What Happened on Day 67 of the War in Ukraine (Published 2022) (2024)

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Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

General Gerasimov’s visit was an effort to change the eastern offensive’s direction, a Ukrainian official said, as Russian forces have been able to make only incremental gains there so far.

Ms. Pelosi announced on Sunday that she had met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and had pledged “to help the Ukrainian people as they defend democracy for their nation and for the world.”

The visit on Saturday by Ms. Pelosi and a few fellow Democratic lawmakers was kept secret until they returned to Poland, where they held a news conference on Sunday morning and vowed to back Ukraine “until victory is won.”

Here are some other developments:

• An evacuation of civilians from Mariupol was underway as women and children confined to bunkers beneath a sprawling steel plant started to make their way to safety, according to Ukrainian officials and the United Nations.

• Ukrainian officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions reported fierce battles as Russian tank columns tried to push into areas that Moscow’s forces have pounded with artillery fire. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that it had struck 800 targets across Ukraine over the past day, including a hangar in the port city of Odesa that it said was storing weapons and ammunition delivered to Ukraine by the United States and Europe.

• In territory controlled by Russia, including the southern region of Kherson, the occupying forces were trying to solidify control and taking steps to erase Ukrainian identity.

• Russian attacks on fuel depots and other infrastructure in Ukraine have led to shortages of gasoline, with drivers lining up outside gas stations.

• Russia’s foreign minister claimed that nearly a million people had been moved to Russia from Ukraine in voluntary “evacuations.”

Michael Schwirtz of The Times talks about life in Ukraine and reporting on the war.

“People miss their former life — the lives they’ll probably never get back, at least not in the same way,” he said.

“They’re in mobilization mode. Either they’re volunteering or fighting or taking care of their relatives. I don’t know what people are doing in moments of self-reflection. But when they’re out and about, you don’t see a lot of despair. Everyone’s so stoic, even in the midst of a bombing.”

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A gas station in Kharkiv grapples with Ukraine’s fuel shortage.

“What do I do? How can I explain to people that this is not my fuel station and it’s not me who’s deciding how many liters of petroleum anyone gets?” said Maria, the manager of an Okko fuel station in the city center.

Kharkiv was once Ukraine’s second largest city at roughly 1.4 million people. And though many have fled, a large population still remains. Morning rush hour is still noticeable, traffic lights still work and street cleaners continue to carry out their duties.

Maria, who did not provide her last name because she feared for her safety, said that her station’s regular supply of fuel did not arrive two days ago. Despite the attacks, a shortage of this scale was the first since the war began in February, she said.

The company has instructed her that only civilians with prepaid gas cards can get fuel, and usually only around five liters (about a gallon). Meanwhile, the military has a separate arrangement where they can continue to get gas for their vehicles, she added.

No such fortune for the police. One officer walked in Sunday afternoon asking if he could fill up his cruiser without the prepaid gas card.

Maria responded: “Not now.”

While some gas stations have closed in the city because of fuel shortages, Maria’s station has remained open because of its extensive food and snack selection, making it a popular stop for soldiers, volunteers, medical workers and police officers who continue to stream through her doors.

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A Russian tycoon criticized Putin’s war. Retribution was swift.

“I couldn’t discuss the price,” Mr. Tinkov said. “It was like a hostage — you take what you are offered. I couldn’t negotiate.”

Mr. Tinkov, 54, spoke to The New York Times by phone on Sunday, from a location he would not disclose, in his first interview since Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine. He said he had hired bodyguards after friends with contacts in the Russian security services told him he should fear for his life, and quipped that while he had survived leukemia, perhaps “the Kremlin will kill me.”

It was a swift and jarring turn of fortune for a longtime billionaire who for years had avoided running afoul of Mr. Putin while portraying himself as independent of the Kremlin. His downfall underscores the consequences facing those in the Russian elite who dare to cross their president, and helps explain why there has been little but silence from business leaders who, according to Mr. Tinkov, are worried about the impact of the war on their lifestyles and their wallets.

Indeed, Mr. Tinkov claimed that many of his acquaintances in the business and government elite told him privately that they agreed with him, “but they are all afraid.”

In the interview, Mr. Tinkov spoke out more forcefully against the war than has any other major Russian business leader.

“I’ve realized that Russia, as a country, no longer exists,” Mr. Tinkov said, predicting that Mr. Putin would stay in power a long time. “I believed that the Putin regime was bad. But of course, I had no idea that it would take on such catastrophic scale.”

The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comment.

Tinkoff, the bank Mr. Tinkov started in 2006, denied his characterization of events and said there had been “no threats of any kind against the bank’s leadership.” The bank, which announced last Thursday that Mr. Tinkov had sold his entire stake in the company to a firm run by Vladimir Potanin, a mining magnate close to Mr. Putin, appeared to be distancing itself from its founder.

“Oleg has not been in Moscow for many years, did not participate in the life of the company and was not involved in any matters,” Tinkoff said in a statement.

Mr. Tinkov has also run into trouble in the West. He agreed to pay $507 million last year to settle a tax fraud case in the United States. In March, Britain included him on a list of sanctions against the Russian business elite.

“These oligarchs, businesses and hired thugs are complicit in the murder of innocent civilians and it is right that they pay the price,” Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said at the time.

Mr. Tinkov is nevertheless widely seen as a rare Russian business pioneer, modeling his maverick capitalism on Richard Branson and morphing from irreverent beer brewer to founder of one of the world’s most sophisticated online banks. He says he has never set foot in the Kremlin, and he has occasionally criticized Mr. Putin.

But unlike Russian tycoons who years ago broke with Mr. Putin and now live in exile, such as the former oil magnate Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky or the tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov, Mr. Tinkov found a way to coexist with the Kremlin and make billions — at least until April 19.

That is when Mr. Tinkov published an emotional antiwar post on Instagram, calling the invasion “crazy” and deriding Russia’s military: “Why would we have a good army,” he asked, if everything else in the country is dysfunctional “and mired in nepotism, servility and subservience?”

Pro-war Russians posted photos of their shredded Tinkoff debit cards on social media. Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent state television host, delivered a tirade against him, declaring, “Your conscience is rotten.”

Mr. Tinkov was already outside Russia at that point, having departed in 2019 to receive treatment for leukemia. He later stepped down and ceded control of Tinkoff, but kept a 35 percent stake in the company, which was valued at more than $20 billion on the London stock exchange last year.

A day after the April 19 post, Mr. Tinkov said Sunday, the Kremlin contacted the bank’s senior executives and told them that any association with their founder was now a major problem.

“They said: ‘The statement of your shareholder is not welcomed, and we will nationalize your bank if he doesn’t sell it and the owner doesn’t change, and if you don’t change the name,’” Mr. Tinkov said, citing sources at Tinkoff he declined to identify.

On April 22, Tinkoff announced it would change its name this year, a step it claims was long planned. Behind the scenes, Mr. Tinkov says, he was scrambling to sell his stake — one that had already been devalued by Western sanctions against Russia’s financial system.

Mr. Tinkov said he was thankful to Mr. Potanin, the mining magnate, for allowing him to salvage at least some money from his company; he said that he could not disclose a price, but that he had sold at 3 percent of what he believed to be his stake’s true value.

“They made me sell it because of my pronouncements,” Mr. Tinkov said. “I sold it for kopecks.”

He had been considering selling his stake anyway, Mr. Tinkov said, because “as long as Putin is alive, I doubt anything will change.”

“I don’t believe in Russia’s future,” he said. “Most importantly, I am not prepared to associate my brand and my name with a country that attacks its neighbors without any reason at all.”

Mr. Tinkov is concerned that a foundation he started that is dedicated to improving blood cancer treatment in Russia could also become a casualty of his financial trouble.

He denied that he was speaking out in the hopes of getting the U.K. sanctions against him lifted, though he said he hoped the British government would eventually “correct this mistake.”

He said that his illness — he is now suffering from graft-versus-host disease, a stem-cell transplant complication, he said — might have made him more courageous about speaking out than other Russian business leaders and senior officials. Members of the elite, he claimed, are “in shock” about the war and have called him in great numbers to offer support.

“They understand that they are tied to the West, that they are part of the global market, and so on,” Mr. Tinkov said. “They’re fast, fast being turned into Iran. But they don’t like it. They want their kids to spend their summer holidays in Sardinia.”

Mr. Tinkov said that no one from the Kremlin had ever contacted him directly, but that in addition to the pressure on his company, he heard from friends with security service contacts that he could be in physical danger.

“They told me: ‘The decision regarding you has been made,’” he said. “Whether that means that on top of everything they’re going to kill me, I don’t know. I don’t rule it out.”

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Growth slows to a crawl as war and Covid grip the biggest economies.

One day earlier, the United States announced that its economy had shrunk 0.4 percent over the same period. China, the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, reported signs of significant weakness this month as another wave of Covid-19 prompted widespread lockdowns.

“The overarching message is that the global growth outlook is souring, and it is deteriorating at a faster rate and in a more serious way than most analysts have anticipated,” said Neil Shearing, chief group economist at Capital Economics.

There is significant variation in the causes, as well as the forecasts, among the three major economic blocs.

Although total output in the United States contracted, analysts tended to be more sanguine about the American economy’s prospects, noting that consumer spending was strong despite high inflation and that the labor market remained tight. The downturn during the first quarter was most likely the result of one-time measuring quirks.

By contrast, China’s report of 4.8 percent growth in the first quarter masks just how much that economy is suffering from a slump in the real estate industry, overinvestment and pandemic-related shutdowns.

As for Europe, it is much more affected by the war in Ukraine.

Pelosi’s visit to Ukraine signals a growing U.S. resolve against Russia.

On Sunday, a day after her visit to Ukraine, Ms. Pelosi told a news conference in Poland: “America stands with Ukraine. We stand with Ukraine until victory is won. And we stand with NATO.”

Ms. Pelosi, the second in line to succeed President Biden, is the highest-ranking American official to visit Kyiv since the war began, and her words carry weight, seeming to underscore an expanded view of American and allied war aims.

Her visit, with a congressional delegation, followed a joint visit to Kyiv by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III only last Sunday. Mr. Austin caused some controversy and debate afterward when he appeared to shift the goal of the war from defending Ukraine’s independence and territorial sovereignty to weakening Russia.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Mr. Austin said, implying that the United States wanted to erode Russian military power for years to come — presumably so long as Vladimir V. Putin, president of Russia, remains in power.

In one positive development on Sunday, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross helped organize what was described as an “ongoing” evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, where they have been taking shelter with a dwindling number of Ukrainian soldiers who have refused to surrender to the Russians. Between 80 and 100 civilians arrived in a convoy of buses at a temporary accommodation center 18 miles east of the city, in the village of Bezimenne.

The evacuation appeared to be the fruit of a visit to both Mr. Putin in Moscow and Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv last week by António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, who called the war in Ukraine “an absurdity.” Mr. Guterres and the Red Cross have been working to get humanitarian aid and supplies of food and water to civilians trapped by the fighting; any serious peace negotiations still appear far off.

In a Twitter message, Mr. Zelensky applauded the evacuation of what he said was a “first group of about 100 people,” and said that “tomorrow we’ll meet them in Zaporizhzhia.”

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said in a statement that it would not provide details of the effort while it was continuing; further evacuations are expected to resume on Monday.

Russian forces have not yet been able to finally take the last slice of Mariupol, which no longer matters militarily but which has been an inspiring symbol of Ukrainian bravery, morale and resistance that is bound to go down in Ukrainian history.

But if there is a new allied consensus about supplying Ukraine with heavier and more sophisticated weapons for the latest stage of the war in eastern Ukraine, there is no allied consensus about switching the war aim from Ukraine to Russia.

There is a sense in Europe that “the U.S. is dragging everyone into a different war,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, citing similar comments by President Biden about “the butcher of Moscow” and how “Putin must go.”

Some wonder what Washington is trying to say — or do.

“To help Ukraine prevail is not about waging war against Russia for reasons related to its governance,” Mr. Heisbourg said. “Regime change may be a vision, but not a war aim.”

He and others said that such talk from Washington plays perfectly into Mr. Putin’s narrative that NATO is waging war against Russia, and that Russia is fighting a defensive war for its survival in Ukraine. That may give Mr. Putin the excuse on May 9, the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, to declare this “special military operation” a war, which would allow him, if he chooses, to mobilize the population and use conscripts widely in the battle.

Talk of victory over Russia “gives easy ammunition to the other side and creates the fear that the West may go further, and it’s not what we want,” said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst. “We don’t want to cut Russia into pieces.”

Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, commented on Twitter: “The support to Ukraine in its modalities and its objectives should be agreed at a political level between allies. Right now, we are sleepwalking to nobody knows where.”

In response, Moscow has raised the tone of its own rhetoric.

On Wednesday, Mr. Putin said that any countries who “create a strategic threat to Russia” during this war in Ukraine can expect “retaliatory strikes” that would be “lightning-fast.” Days before, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said in an interview that “NATO is essentially going to war with Russia through a proxy and arming that proxy.”

Mr. Putin’s military, having lost what Britain estimates to have been at least 15,000 killed in action — that is more than in the Soviet Union’s entire war in Afghanistan — has been struggling to cut supply lines of Western arms, munitions and heavy weapons to Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine.

On Sunday, the Russians said they had bombed a runway and a munitions dump at a military airfield near Odesa that was storing Western arms, and Russia has been attempting to attack roads and especially railway terminals, since most heavy weapons are traveling east by rail. The Russian aim is to slowly cut off or encircle the bulk of Ukraine’s army east of the Dnipro River and starve it of new supplies.

But that grinding effort is going slowly, with fierce artillery battles and high casualties on both sides.

It is not just Ukraine’s military that is being starved of supplies. There is now a shortage of gasoline and diesel, at least for civilian use, stemming from Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports and attacks on refineries and fuel depots. Long lines for gasoline have been seen even in cities like Lviv, and there are concerns about the impact of the shortages on agriculture, even in fields untouched by the war.

A report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said that only a fifth of almost 1,300 large agribusinesses surveyed by the government in mid-March had enough fuel to operate the farm equipment needed to plant corn, barley and other crops this spring, which is already causing rising food prices in countries far from Ukraine.

In a possible indication of flagging Russian morale, the chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the country’s top uniformed officer, made a visit to a dangerous frontline position in eastern Ukraine this weekend in an effort to “change the course” of Russia’s offensive there, according to a senior Ukrainian official with knowledge of the visit.

Ukrainian forces launched an attack on a Russian headquarters in Izium on Saturday evening, but General Gerasimov had already left to return to Russia, the official said. Still, some 200 soldiers, including at least one general, were killed, the Ukrainian official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military operation. A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that General Gerasimov had been in eastern Ukraine but did not confirm the rest of the Ukrainian account.

Fighting has intensified around the large eastern city of Kharkiv in recent days as Ukrainian forces have attempted to push away Russian units. Though the gains have been small, they are emblematic of both the Ukrainian and Russian forces’ strategy as the war drags into its third month, one that focuses on a village at a time and leverages concentrated artillery fire to dislodge one another.

Ukraine’s military said in a statement on Saturday that it had been able to retake four villages around Kharkiv: Verkhnya Rohanka, Ruska Lozova, Slobidske and Prilesne. The claims have been hard to verify since much of those areas are currently closed to the media; on Sunday, Ukraine announced that it had rebuffed Russian advances toward villages in the Donbas, but that, too, could not be confirmed.

Ukrainian forces were also suspected of another attack over the border near the Russian city of Belgorod, a staging area for Russian forces, where a fire broke out in a defense ministry facility, the regional governor said.

The Russian forces in control of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson and its surrounding province started to enforce a transition to the Russian ruble from Ukrainian currency on Sunday, a move that Ukrainian officials have described as part of an attempt to scrub a part of the country clean of its national identity and embed it in Moscow’s sphere of influence.

At the same time, the Ukrainians reported on Sunday that nearly all cellular and internet service in the area was down. The Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior accused Russian forces of cutting service, saying it was an attempt to keep Ukrainians from seeing truthful information about the war.

The Hollywood actor Angelina Jolie, who has been a special representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees since 2011, made her own surprise visit to Ukraine over the weekend, visiting the western city of Lviv to meet displaced Ukrainians from the east who have found refuge there, including children undergoing treatment for injuries sustained in Russia’s missile strike on the Kramatorsk railway station in early April.

Ms. Pelosi was accompanied by legislators whose comments largely echoed her own.

“This is a struggle of freedom against tyranny,” said Representative Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. “And in that struggle, Ukraine is on the front lines.”

Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado, a veteran and a member of the House intelligence and armed services committee, said his focus was on the supply of weapons. “We have to make sure the Ukrainians have what they need to win,” he said. Praising Ukrainian bravery, he said, “The United States of America is in this to win, and we will stand with Ukraine until victory is won.”

But as ever, what is meant by “victory,” whether it involves pushing Russia entirely out of Ukraine or just blocking its advance until its offensive runs out of steam and negotiations ensue, remains an open question. So does the equally central question of what Mr. Putin decides is victory enough for his own war of choice.

Steven Erlanger reported from Brussels, Jane Arraf from Lviv and Marc Santora from Krakow, Poland. Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine; and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kharkiv.

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Russia’s top officer visited the front line to change the offensive’s course, U.S. and Ukraine officials say.

Two U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments, confirmed that General Gerasimov had been in eastern Ukraine for the past couple days, but had no information about the attack on the Russian base. The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Our working assumption is that he was there because there’s a recognition they haven’t worked out all their problems yet,” said one of the officials.

The presence of such a high-ranking official on the front lines is highly unusual and comes amid what Western military analysts describe as increasing disarray within Russian forces. Even with dramatically scaled down objectives, Western officials and analysts say the Russian military continues to struggle with logistical problems and coordination among its troops, while facing persistently fierce resistance from the Ukrainians.

Izium, a medium-sized city in eastern Ukraine, has become a base of operations for the Russian military as it pursues an offensive meant to wrest away the two eastern Ukrainian territories bordering Russia that make up the region known as the Donbas. The successful seizure of the area would represent a consolation prize for the Kremlin, after an embarrassing withdrawal from the region around the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, which, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, the Russian leadership had expected to fall within days of invasion.

But even in the east progress has been slow. Russian forces have been able to make incremental gains, day by day, taking some villages, while losing others, as strongly entrenched Ukrainian troops put up stalwart resistance.

General Gerasimov sits at the right hand of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and is one of only three people, along with the president and the minister of defense, who were principally in charge of plotting the course of the war from its outset. This strict hierarchy that defines Russia’s military leadership is one reason Western analysts say Russia’s forces have so often appeared unable to adapt quickly to changing battlefield conditions.

For more than a month after the war started, Russian forces lacked a battlefield commander who might guide the action from inside Ukraine, leading to poor coordination among different units and services that has contributed to the deaths of thousands of troops. It also led to the deaths of 10 or more generals who had moved into front-line positions to try to untangle the mess.

Early last month, the Kremlin finally appointed a seasoned commander, Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, who was accused of ordering airstrikes on civilian neighborhoods in Syria, to oversee forces on the ground in Ukraine.

American officials said General Gerasimov’s secret visit to the eastern front underscores the problems Russian forces are confronting in the Donbas.

“It likely means things are not going well for the Russians,” Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee and former Army Ranger, said in a telephone interview from Poland after visiting Ukraine on Saturday with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“They’ve had thousands killed in action, troop morale is low, and, very significantly, their offensive in the south and east appears to be stalled,” Mr. Crow said.

General Gerasimov had been in eastern Ukraine for several days and arrived on Saturday during the day at School No. 12, which was being used as a base by Russia’s Second Combined Arms Army, as well as airborne forces deployed to the region, the senior Ukrainian official said. According to preliminary information gathered by Ukrainian forces, Maj. Gen. Andrei Simonov, who was among the commanders at the base in Izium, was killed in the attack.

“The decision to destroy this object was taken not because of Gerasimov, but because it is an important base of operations,” the official said.

As war drags on, Ukrainians pause and remember the dead.

Olga Datsko, 35, visited her husband’s grave on Sunday with her 14-year-old daughter, Hanna, and 5-year-old son, Ustym.

The children stood by the resting place of their father, Ivan Datsko, 38, a Ukrainian soldier who was killed on April 17 while fighting in Lozova in the eastern Donetsk region. He had been buried four days later on his and Ms. Datsko’s 15th wedding anniversary.

At the cemetery, she crossed her arms and looked down at the thicket of yellow and blue flowers that surrounded his grave. A Ukrainian flag protruded from the pile of bouquets placed around it.

Ustym looked on, too.

“Here I stand and guard my dad,” he said, his sweatshirt’s hood covering his ears.

A toy weapon was in his hands.

“It’s my sword, you see. It’s wooden,” he said. “I made it by myself.”

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After fires and blasts inside Russia, a Ukrainian official says: ‘We don’t confirm, and we don’t deny.’

Russia blamed Ukraine for the helicopter strike, in Belgorod on April 1, and military analysts have suggested that Ukrainian sabotage very likely caused the other fires. Ukraine, for its part, has made no official admissions but has winked at the possibility of its involvement.

Now, a senior Ukrainian official has described in the clearest terms yet his government’s policy on strikes inside Russia, calling it one of strategic ambiguity.

“We don’t confirm, and we don’t deny,” said the official, Oleksei Arestovych, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff.

Russian and Ukrainian media reports have attributed a dozen or so blazes to strikes or sabotage. These fires potentially shift the military equation of the war, raising the possibility that Russia might start to suffer losses on its own land.

Roman Starovoit, the governor of Kursk in Russia, said on Telegram on Sunday that Russian investigative bodies have opened a criminal case because of the “sabotage” that resulted in the collapse of a bridge with railway tracks in the Kursk region. Mr. Starovoit said there were no deaths.

“Investigative bodies, specialists of law enforcement agencies will investigate in more detail,” he said. “We will give the information a little later.”

Any escalation of attacks on Russia by Ukraine could have far-reaching implications, perhaps influencing public opinion about the war in Russia, or inflaming the Kremlin to escalate its own strikes.

And if Western weaponry were deployed in striking Russia, it would fuel Russian propaganda and enhance the possibility that the conflict could spill past Russia and Ukraine’s borders.

Long lines at Ukrainian gas stations reveal just the tip of a looming crisis.

Roman Yarema, a retired civil servant who was two vehicles away from his turn at the pumps, said he had waited in line for an hour to buy what he expected to be a limit of 10 liters — less than three gallons — for his small car.

“It’s OK, though,” he said. “There are farmers who need to plant fields, and there is war in this country.”

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in a report in March cited fuel shortages as a major factor in whether Ukrainian farmers would be able to harvest existing crops or plant new ones this year.

That was before Russia attacked Ukraine’s biggest refinery and crucial fuel storage facilities last week.

Before war broke out in late February, almost three-quarters of Ukraine’s imports of gasoline and diesel came from the Russian Federation and its ally Belarus. Ukraine is negotiating with European fuel suppliers, but it faces formidable logistical obstacles in getting supplies overland from ports in Poland and Romania.

“The European Union will need to make a lot of changes of the transportation system for it to be possible to efficiently sell the gasoline to Ukraine,” said Serhiy Kuyun, director of A-95, a Ukrainian consulting firm.

Natalia Katser-Buchkovska, a former member of the energy committee in the Ukrainian Parliament, said Ukraine would need to expand its rail and road system across the Polish border as well as add terminals on the Baltic Sea coast.

Since the start of the war, Russia has targeted Ukrainian infrastructure, including the electrical grid. In March, Ukraine disconnected from the Russian power grid it had depended upon for decades. Ukraine and neighboring Moldova have now synchronized their grid with European operators, allowing them to keep the power running.

Ukraine has also carried out limited strikes on Russian infrastructure, striking an oil depot across the border, Russia said at the beginning of April.

The U.N. agricultural report said that only a fifth of almost 1,300 large agribusinesses surveyed by the government in mid-March had enough fuel to operate farm equipment needed to plant corn, barley and other crops this spring.

The lack of fuel also imperils wheat and other harvests this summer.

“As food access, production and overall food availability deteriorate in many parts of Ukraine as a result of the war, efforts to bolster agricultural production and the functioning of food supply chains will be critical to averting a food crisis in 2022 and into 2023,” the Food and Agriculture Organization report said.

In Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second-biggest city, the fuel shortages have left even the police stranded.

“How can I explain to people that this is not my fuel station and it’s not me who’s deciding how many liters of petroleum anyone gets?” said Maria, the manager of an Okko fuel station. Soon after she had to tell a police officer he would not be able to buy gas for his cruiser.

Maria, who did not provide her last name because she wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said that her station’s regular supply of fuel that was supposed to arrive about two days ago never did. She said shortages of this scale were a first since the war began in February.

Orders from her company’s head office said that only civilians with prepaid gas cards could get fuel from her gas station, and usually only around five liters. The military has a separate arrangement where they can continue to get gas but police officers seemed stuck in the middle.

Mr. Yarema, the Lviv retiree, said people in the city were driving less these days and using public transportation more.

At the gas station, the price of gasoline was listed at about 90 cents a liter — about $3.40 a gallon. Only two types of gas, rather than the usual three or four, were available. Motorists said the price was slightly higher than last week but not exorbitantly so. The Ukrainian government has eliminated taxes on gasoline to ease price shocks for drivers.

Other customers were less patient after waiting in line for an hour, with one visibly irritated man brusquely laying down his credit card to pay at a cash register crowded with cases of glazed doughnuts and roasting hot dogs.

“You can see the atmosphere is not very positive because people cannot fill the amount of gasoline they need,” said a gas station worker named Nadia, who did not want to give her last name because she was not authorized to speak publicly.

She said the gas station stocks were limited by reserves being held back for the military and civil defense forces. The chain’s customers with loyalty cards were also able to buy more.

Other gas stations were closed, while those who were dependent on fuel from Ukrainian refineries, rather than refined imported fuel, were selling gasoline only to people with special permits.

“People understand what the situation is, so people are quietly waiting,” said Viktor Bonchak, a patron at the gas station who works in tourism, one of Lviv’s hardest-hit economic sectors. Mr. Bonchak had arranged to have someone else drive his car and wait in line an hour for him before he arrived.

Mr. Kuyun, the Ukrainian energy consultant, said the attacks on infrastructure have caused fewer disruptions than they might have if the refinery had been attacked in winter, when people are even more reliant on fuel.

“May is considered as a calm month in the industry, so we have time” to find alternatives, he said.

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Ukraine acknowledges that the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ is a myth.

“The ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend, whose character was created by Ukrainians!” Ukraine’s Air Force Command wrote on Facebook on Saturday, dispelling a monthslong rumor — fueled by Ukrainian authorities themselves — that had invigorated the resistance to Russia’s invasion.

The Ukrainian statement came after some news outlets, including the Times of London, identified the Ghost of Kyiv as Major Stepan Tarabalka, an actual 29-year-old who died in an air battle in March. The claim echoed across social media and tabloid publications in Ukraine and the West, seeming to confirm that the story of the heroic fighter was real.

Instead, it has turned out to be one of the more successful pieces of propaganda in an information war that, at times, Ukraine has fought as fiercely as it has on the battlefield.

It was only a day after the beginning of Russia’s invasion that the Ukrainian media started reporting that an unknown pilot of a MIG-29 fighter jet had downed six enemy planes in 30 hours. Memes and illustrations started circulating online with the hashtag #ghostofkyiv, collecting hundreds of millions of views.

Even a former president of Ukraine, Petro O. Poroshenko, tweeted a picture of a pilot who he said was the Ghost of Kyiv and who had “six victories over Russian pilots!”

“With such powerful defenders, Ukraine will definitely win!” Mr. Poroshenko wrote. (The photo, it turned out, was from a 2019 Twitter post by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.)

The Ukrainian government also joined in. On Feb. 27 it relayed on Twitter the story and the photo, calling the unknown pilot “a nightmare for invading Russian aircrafts.” It posted a video praising the pilot that included a clip from a combat flight simulator.

Around the same time, when the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced on Facebook that dozens of discharged military pilots were returning to the Air Force, it referred to the fascination with the anonymous pilot: “Who knows, maybe one of them is the air avenger on the MIG-29.”

The stories proliferated and overlapped. After reports in early March that the Ghost of Kyiv had been shot down, Ihor Mosiychuk, a former Ukrainian lawmaker, reported that the pilot survived, went back to his base, took off in another jet and downed another enemy plane.

“The ghost is alive!” he wrote on Facebook. The Kyiv Post reported that he had destroyed as many as 49 planes.

Skepticism spread in some quarters. But the legend only grew. Artists produced NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, with the pilot’s image. Blue and gold “Ghost of Kyiv” fliers and illustrations circulated online.

On Friday, several publications identified the pilot as Mr. Tarabalka, an airman who died in battle on Mar. 13 and was posthumously awarded the military honor “Hero of Ukraine.” The Times of London also quoted Ukrainian sources as saying the pilot’s helmet and goggles were expected to go on sale at an auction in London.

The next day, the Air Force Command of Ukraine’s Armed Forces debunked the claims. “Hero of Ukraine Stepan Tarabalka is NOT ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ and he did NOT shoot down 40 planes,” it wrote on Facebook. But they still worked to keep the myth going.

“The #GhostOfKyiv is alive,” the Air Force wrote on Twitter. “It embodies the collective spirit of the highly qualified pilots of the Tactical Aviation Brigade who are successfully defending #Kyiv and the region.”

For many Ukrainians, that was all that mattered.

“He IS a legend,” Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, wrote on Twitter, “He can’t be killed — he is a ghost.”