KYIV, Ukraine — Artillery barrages along a section of the front line near an imperiled nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine struck towns, ammunition dumps and a Russian military base in intense fighting overnight, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.
Reports of fighting all along the southern front suggested that neither side was pausing hostilities, even amid complex negotiations to allow for a team of scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which has been repeatedly damaged by recent shelling. The plant is controlled by the Russian military but operated by Ukrainian engineers.
The I.A.E.A. said Sunday that talks were ongoing with the goal of sending a team to the plant “in the next few days,” noting that the latest shelling “once again underlined the risk of a potential nuclear accident.”
The team would assess physical damage to the plant, determine whether the main and backup safety and security systems were functional and evaluate the staff’s working conditions, the I.A.E.A. said in a statement.
Russian forces fired rocket artillery and howitzers overnight at the Ukraine-controlled town of Nikopol, across from the plant on the opposite side of the Dnipro River, which separates the two armies in the area, a local military official, Valentin Reznichenko, said. The strikes damaged several houses and cars and knocked out electricity for 1,500 residents, he said in a post on the Telegram social networking site.
In a separate assault on the town, Russian helicopters fired rockets, according to the Ukrainian military, which reported damage to a house but no casualties.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its Air Force had hit Ukrainian workshops where helicopters were being repaired in the surrounding Zaporizka region, according to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The claim could not be independently verified.
Artillery shells have already hit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, damaging auxiliary equipment and power lines but not the reactors. The strikes — for which each side blames the other — have stirred fears of a radiation release if combat rages on in this area, an expanse of farm fields along the banks of the Dnipro.
After fighting severed one high-tension electrical line last week, operators in the control rooms implemented emergency procedures to cool the reactor cores with pumps powered by diesel generators. The electrical line has since been repaired.
In a sign of mounting worry over a possible radiation release in a country still haunted by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, a Ukrainian official announced on Saturday that the government would distribute a drug, potassium iodide, that can protect against some radiation poisoning, to people within 35 miles of the plant.
Plant employees and outside experts say an artillery strike would not penetrate the yard-thick reinforced concrete of the containment vessels over the sites’ six reactors, but could damage the reactors’ complex supporting equipment or spark fires that could burn out of control. Artillery strikes could also breach less robust containers used to store spent nuclear fuel.
Ukrainian forces also reported striking targets behind Russian lines in occupied areas of southern Ukraine. The Ukrainian military claimed to have hit two Russian ammunition dumps in Kherson Province.
On the east bank of the Dnipro, a massive explosion early on Sunday shook windows and caused plaster to rain down from ceilings in the Russia-controlled city of Melitopol, according to the city’s exiled Ukrainian mayor, Ivan Fedorov.
Mr. Fedorov said the explosion had destroyed “one of the largest enemy military bases,” although the claim could not be verified. The base, he said, had been set up on the grounds of a factory complex.
Photographs by Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Cars and buses carried fleeing civilians out of the area around a besieged nuclear power plant and other Russian-controlled territories in southern Ukraine on Sunday after another night of fierce fighting and artillery barrages.
The intensifying battles around the Zaporizhzhia power plant — controlled by Russian forces and the first active nuclear plant in a combat zone — have triggered an exodus of residents and raised fears of a catastrophe. Officials have started to hand out iodine pills as a precaution to people living within 35 miles of the plant.
Many, though, do not want to run the risk of staying.
At a Ukrainian-controlled checkpoint outside of Zaporizhzhia, a steady stream of vehicles arrived in police-escorted convoys on Sunday afternoon. Passengers crammed into dozens of cars, buses, and vans stuffed with personal belongings. Security forces checked their documents before sending them on to be processed at a reception center in Zaporizhzhia.
Olena Bondarchyk, 46, was among those waiting at the checkpoint. It had taken her two months to find a vehicle big enough to carry her and her husband out of Enerhodar, the town next to the besieged Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
Anna Overko, 18, was relieved to arrive in the relative safety of Zaporizhzhia with her friend, Yeva Burukina, 15, and Ms. Burukina’s grandmother.
“Now it is difficult to sleep,” Ms. Overko said, “The shelling is so much. Last week when the plant lost electricity, it was so scary.”
Valentina Velichko, 39, had come with her 15-year-old daughter, Victoria, and their dog.
“I took my daughter and left Enerhodar because of education: I want my daughter to have a Ukrainian education, not Russian,” she said.
While many of those who passed through the checkpoint on Sunday had left communities near the nuclear plant, some were coming from other southern cities that had fallen under Russian control. They came from Melitopol, about 50 miles from the besieged plant, and Kherson, a hundred miles to the southwest.
Her hands covering her face, a woman named Svetlana shed tears of relief and joy after arriving from the city of Kherson. Then she crumbled into a childish giggle.
“I can’t believe this,” said Svetlana, 66. “We have been trying to escape for 6 months.”
It took two and a half days on the road to reach the checkpoint, Svetlana said.
“Glory to Ukraine!” she added.
- What Is Next?: After six months of fighting, the war seems to have settled into an impasse on the battlefield. Here is how the next stage of the war might shape up.
- Nuclear Plant Standoff: As renewed shelling intensified fears about a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant, the United Nations neared a plan to send inspectors to the Russian-controlled station.
- Russia’s Military Expansion: President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a sign that he expects a prolonged war — an outcome Ukraine has incentive to avoid.
- Poking the Bear: On the battlefield and on social media, Ukraine’s leadership is regularly goading its antagonist, driven by a newfound military confidence, the need to rally support and the desire to unnerve the enemy.
President Vladimir V. Putin signed a pair of decrees on Saturday providing Ukrainians with financial benefits and the right to work, widening the Kremlin’s efforts to integrate those now living in Russia and the territory it occupies.
In one decree, the president gave Ukrainian citizens the right to stay and work in Russia without a time limit or special work permit, provided they meet certain requirements, including passing a drug test, state media in Moscow reported.
The other measure establishes a monthly pension of about $170 for people who have been forced to leave Ukraine since Feb. 18, a week before Russia launched its invasion and plunged the region into war. It also provides monthly pensions for disabled people and a one-time payment to pregnant women.
The decrees are the latest in a series of moves by the Kremlin that seem intended to knit the Russia-occupied territories in Ukraine’s east and south closer to Russia. Moscow has been offering Russian passports to Ukrainians in those regions, asking people to use the ruble as currency and rerouting the internet through Russian servers.
Kremlin-appointed local officials in occupied territories are also preparing to hold tightly controlled referendums in which the outcome of the vote is preordained to justify annexing those regions as part of the Russian Federation.
There is no precise estimate of the total number of Ukrainians currently living in Russia and in the 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory that Russia is now estimated to control. Before Russia’s invasion, millions lived in the parts of eastern and southern Ukraine now occupied by Moscow’s forces, though many have since fled.
From the start of the war, people from Russia-held territories in Ukraine have been moving in large numbers into Russia. Some evacuated willingly, fleeing the chaos and danger of the invasion, but others were deported or compelled to move, Ukrainian officials have said.
Russia has acknowledged that 1.5 million Ukrainians are now in Russia and has asserted that they were evacuated for their own safety.
Ukrainian and U.S. officials, however, have accused Russia of forcibly deporting hundreds of thousands of people, including children. In July, the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, estimated Russian authorities had “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, taking them from their homes into Russian territory. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has described the deportations as “one of Russia’s most heinous war crimes.”
President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to sharply increase the size of Russia’s armed forces is unlikely to significantly alter the country’s fortunes in its war in Ukraine, according to American and British officials and independent military analysts.
An order announced last Thursday raises Russia’s target number of active-duty service members by about 137,000, to 1.15 million, beginning in January. But that number is unlikely to be reached quickly, and Russia will be unable to train or deploy new troops effectively enough to make up for huge casualties in Ukraine, analysts said.
Mr. Putin’s announcement “is unlikely to make substantive progress towards increasing Russia’s combat power in Ukraine,” Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Sunday.
The agency cited “tens of thousands” of Russian losses on the battlefield. American and British military officials have estimated that Russia has suffered up to 80,000 casualties in Ukraine, including deaths and injuries, since Mr. Putin ordered the invasion in February. Without an expanded national draft and relying mainly on contract soldiers, the Russian armed forces have been struggling to attract recruits despite cash bonuses and other inducements, the latest British assessment said.
The assessment generally matched that of United States officials, who said last week that Mr. Putin’s decree would do little good in replacing forces killed in the first six months of the war. Former American officials said the just-announced expansion was likely to take months to bring forces to the battlefield.
Russia’s losses — and its inability to capture significant amounts of territory in recent weeks — have led some analysts to describe Mr. Putin’s order as a sign that he has no plans to relent in Ukraine.
Even if Russia could somehow attract army recruits, it would struggle to train them quickly because some of its training units were deployed to Ukraine and suffered casualties, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington research body.
It could seek to bring in more conscripts from the roughly 130,000 mostly young men who would be called up for one year of mandatory military service in the fall, the group said, or it could absorb Russian proxy forces of the breakaway republics of eastern Ukraine into its regular army.
“The net addition to Russia’s combat power in any such case would be very small,” the group said in a report last week.
American officials said they remained surprised that Mr. Putin had not taken any steps to widen conscription or start a forced mobilization of the Russian people. Mr. Putin has been unwilling to announce an expanded draft for fear of undercutting his support. But American officials believe the extent of Russia’s losses is such that Moscow cannot achieve its strategic goal of taking over more of Ukraine without requiring one.
Supply-chain constraints and Western export controls have also made it more difficult for Russia to replace sophisticated military equipment. While the Kremlin has a practically limitless supply of artillery pieces, it is struggling to build precision cruise missiles and high-end tanks, American officials say.
As the W.N.B.A. star Jonquel Jones looked ahead to the off-season this year, she couldn’t help but think about her friend Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Russia since February after customs officials arrested her at an airport near Moscow.
“Her not being with us, her not being with her team and the W.N.B.A., her family not being able to see her,” Jones said. “Just her being over there and understanding that it could have easily been somebody else on our team and just kind of feeling the weight of that.
“When you’re so close to that person it’s a little bit different.”
Griner, like Jones, had been in Russia during the W.N.B.A. off-season to supplement her relatively modest salary by playing for some of the highest-paying women’s basketball teams in the world. But for the upcoming off-season, Jones, 28, signed with a Turkish team instead.
“What would make me feel comfortable about going back to Russia?” Jones said. “B.G. being home, first and foremost. U.S.A. and Russia relations being better. The war in Ukraine being over with.”
Playing overseas remains extremely popular for W.N.B.A. players seeking to earn more money or gain more pro experience, but several agents and players told The New York Times that, because of Griner’s ordeal and the war, they did not know of anyone who would be playing in Russia this off-season. The W.N.B.A. said it did not have a complete list of players going abroad because its playoffs are underway.
The coronavirus pandemic had already winnowed overseas opportunities for W.N.B.A. players in virus-conscious countries like China and South Korea before the war in Ukraine and Griner’s detention made Russia essentially off limits, too. Players are still opting to go places like Turkey, Israel, Spain, Italy and France.