Russia, Undaunted by Furor Over a 4-Year-Old’s Death, Strikes More Civilian Centers in Ukraine

DNIPRO, Ukraine — Russian forces fired several rockets at one of the most populous cities in Ukraine on Friday evening and killed at least three people in Dnipro, according to officials, as Russia continued a campaign of attacks against large population centers.

The sound of explosions reverberated through Dnipro, in central Ukraine, at about 9 p.m., just as the sun was setting and residents were gathering for dinner and drinks ahead of the evening curfew. Black smoke quickly enveloped large swaths of the city, and rescue workers raced to put out myriad fires sparked by the attack.

And on Friday morning, at least 10 Russian missiles slammed into the strategically important southern city of Mykolaiv, according to local officials, hitting two universities, a hotel and a mall. “Now they attack our education,” said the leader of the regional military administration, Vitaliy Kim, posting a video that showed dark palls of smoke rising above the city. The strike took place at 7:50 a.m., he said, adding that the Russians knew “full well that there were already many people on the streets at that time.”

Russian forces have repeatedly targeted large Ukrainian cities in recent days, killing dozens of civilians. A day earlier, in the city of Vinnytsia, a rocket attack on the city center killed at least 23 people and wounded dozens more, in one of the bloodiest single attacks on civilians since the start of the war. One of those killed was a 4-year-old girl with Down syndrome, a case that rapidly became a cause célèbre within Ukraine and beyond.

In Dnipro on Friday, the rockets hit a manufacturing company and residential neighborhoods around it, Valentin Reznichenko, the regional governor, said on the Telegram messaging app.

Among the dead was a bus driver who had just finished his shift for the day, according to Ivan Vasyuchkov, a member of the Dnipro City Council.

“We will take our revenge and punish everyone responsible for today’s terrorist attack,” he said.

One of the strikes on Friday was so intense it melted storefronts, blew out windows in several nearby apartments and set nearby trees ablaze. The rocket appeared to rip straight though a truck or bus that had been driving down the road, leaving it a burning wreck at the bottom of a large crater.

Whether this was the vehicle driven by the bus driver killed in the attack was not immediately clear. Rescue workers were unable to identify any human remains left in the cab of the vehicle.

In Mykolaiv, at least two people were injured in the Russian strikes, the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Sienkevych, said in a post on Telegram.

Mykolaiv has been under assault since the war began in late February. It lies on a river that drains into the Black Sea, where Russia has established naval dominance, and it sits just west of the city of Kherson, which Russia controls. Control of Mykolaiv is also seen as essential for any potential Russian attack on the Ukrainian port city of Odesa.

Iryna Dmytriyeva posted a video early Thursday of her 4-year-old daughter, Liza, wearing green sneakers and happily pushing a pink stroller, as they walked in the central Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia. Soon afterward, Russian missiles struck.

Ukrainian officials confirmed on Friday that Liza was among 23 people killed in a Russian strike Thursday that left her mother in critical condition, as social media images of their lives and her final moments captured global attention and punched through the too-familiar drumbeat of daily violence in Moscow’s nearly five-month war.

Ms. Dmytriyeva and her daughter had an appointment that morning with a speech therapist who had taught Liza, who had Down syndrome, how to pronounce her first words. Soon after Ms. Dmytriyeva posted the video on Instagram, a volley of Russian missiles struck the heart of the city, hitting a shopping mall, a dance studio and a center for children with neurological disabilities.

Photos shared online by Ukraine’s State Emergency Service and verified by The New York Times appeared to show Liza’s lifeless body next to the overturned stroller, which was spattered with blood.

Video

A spokesman for the Security Service of Ukraine in Vinnytsia, Denys Zakabluk, confirmed in a telephone interview that Liza had died.

As Ms. Dmytriyeva recovered in a hospital — among the 80 people who were treated for injuries in the attack, Ukrainian officials said — her story and the bond with her daughter, painstakingly chronicled on her Instagram account, served as searing reminders of the toll that indiscriminate Russian attacks are exacting on Ukrainian civilians.

Ms. Dmytriyeva’s Instagram feed was a running testament to her love for Liza, traced through posts depicting milestones, struggles and words of encouragement for other parents.

“You must educate yourself. The more resources parents have, the more the child receives,” she wrote in a post the day before the attack. “Make your own dreams come true!”

Ms. Dmytriyeva moved with Liza from the capital, Kyiv, to Vinnytsia earlier this year, and signed her up for speech therapy classes at a center called Logoclub. Always smiling, Liza earned the nickname “Sunny Flower” at the center, her therapist, Alyona Korol, said in an interview.

As news of the Russian attack reverberated worldwide on Thursday, Ms. Korol said she noticed a familiar pair of green sneakers in photos from the scene.

“When I saw those shoes, I recognized them,” Ms. Korol said. “I knew it was our Liza.”

Images of the sneakers and stroller, which started circulating on social media in the hours after the attack, were held up by Ukraine’s leaders as an example of Russia’s disregard for civilian lives.

Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said in a Twitter post on Friday that she recognized Liza from a Christmas video she had filmed with children in 2021. “The little girl managed to paint with dye not only herself, her dress, but also all the other children, me, the cameramen and the director just in half an hour,” she wrote, sharing the video. “Look at her, alive, please.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening address, “The child was four years old!” and accused Russia of a litany of atrocities.

“No other state in the world allows itself to destroy peaceful cities and ordinary human life with cruise missiles and rocket artillery every day,” he said.

Russia has claimed that it only strikes locations of military value — even though some, like Vinnytsia, are hundreds of miles from the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine. In a statement on Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had targeted an office building in Vinnytsia where members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were meeting with “representatives of foreign armament suppliers,” adding that the attack resulted in the “elimination of the conference participants.” Its account could not be verified.

On Friday, people placed flowers and a teddy bear at the site where Liza was killed. An outpouring of grief filled social media. A support group that helps connect families of children with Down syndrome posted updates on Ms. Dmytriyeva’s condition on Facebook and a link to a fund-raiser for the family.

“Today, our hearts are bleeding and our eyes are full of tears, because our multi-thousand family has lost one of ‘its own’,” the post read. “They just found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

When SpaceX next launches a Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station, one of the astronauts aboard will be Russian.

NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced on Friday that they had reached an agreement that would give Russian astronauts seats on American-built spacecraft in exchange for NASA astronauts’ getting rides to orbit on Russian Soyuz rockets.

Also on Friday, Russian president Vladimir V. Putin signed a decree dismissing Dmitry Rogozin, who since 2016 had led Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russia’s space activities.

Russians and Americans in orbit have sustained their close cooperation despite the fracturing of ties between the two countries after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. The relationship also endured Mr. Rogozin’s repeated belligerent pronouncements in the Russian news media and on his Twitter and Telegram accounts.

In April, Mr. Rogozin demanded that economic sanctions against Russia be lifted and said that he had submitted a proposal urging the Russian government to leave the space station.

This week, after the European Space Agency formally pulled out of a collaboration with Russia on sending a robotic rover to Mars, Mr. Rogozin said Russian astronauts on the space station would stop using a robotic arm built by the Europeans and lobbed disparaging words at Josef Aschbacher, the director general of the European Space agency, and Josep Borrell Fontelles, a top European Union foreign policy official.

“I, in turn, give a command to our crew on the ISS to stop working with the European ERA manipulator,” Mr. Rogozin wrote on his Telegram channel. “Let Aschbacher himself and his boss Borrell fly into space and do at least something useful in their lives.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, insisted that the move had nothing to do with Mr. Rogozin’s performance and promised that the former director would soon be employed again.

Mr. Rogozin’s successor will be Yuri Borisov, who takes over Roscosmos after his own ousting as the deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s military industrial complex. Mr. Borisov is a longtime government official who also previously served as a deputy defense minister. Unlike Mr. Rogozin, he is not known for being a firebrand in public.

NASA officials have been steadfast in insisting that operations on the space station remain normal, usually letting Mr. Rogozin’s comments pass without comment.

Last week, however, NASA put out a statement rebuking Russia after Roscosmos distributed photographs of the three Russian astronauts on the space station holding the flags of pro-Russia separatists in two provinces of Ukraine.

On Friday, NASA resumed highlighting the cooperation.

Brittney Griner’s lawyers argued on Friday that the American basketball star had a medical prescription for the drug that she mistakenly carried into Russia, where she has been detained for nearly five months amid Moscow’s escalating tensions with Washington over the war in Ukraine.

As Ms. Griner’s trial on drug charges resumed at a courtroom outside Moscow, her defense team provided medical documents showing that she had a prescription for medical cannabis for chronic pain, according to Reuters.

The Russian authorities accused Ms. Griner in February of having two vape cartridges with hashish oil — a cannabis derivative — in her luggage at an airport near Moscow. The 31-year-old Phoenix Mercury star and two-time Olympic gold medalist had traveled there to play with UMMC Yekaterinburg, a Russian team, during the W.N.B.A. off-season.

She was charged with willfully smuggling the vape cartridges, violating Russian laws prohibiting the import of narcotics.

Ms. Griner pleaded guilty last week, telling the judge she had “no intent” to break the law. In the Russian justice system, the trial process continues even after defendants plead guilty.

Her lawyers have argued that she had packed in a hurry. At the hearing on Friday, they provided evidence including “a doctor’s appointment for the substance that, due to an oversight of B.G., remained among her belongings when crossing the border,” according to a statement from Maria Blagovolina, a partner in the law firm Rybalkin, Gortsunyan, Dyakin and Partners.

Ms. Griner has found herself caught in the growing acrimony between the Kremlin and the Biden administration, which has pledged to do everything it can to secure her freedom. Facing a possible 10-year sentence if convicted, in a justice system that heavily favors the prosecution, Ms. Griner has expressed fear that she may never be freed, and wrote in a recent letter to President Biden: “Please don’t forget about me.”

Her case has galvanized support in the American sports world and beyond. As she sat behind bars in the courtroom on Friday, Ms. Griner, clad in a Nirvana T-shirt, held up a photo of W.N.B.A. players wearing her number during last week’s All-Star Game in Chicago.

Her lawyers also submitted evidence including commendations from Russian and U.S. organizations. A day earlier, the director of UMMC Yekaterinburg, the team doctor and a fellow player testified in her defense, praising her athletic ability and character.

Despite growing pressure for the United States to make a deal to free Ms. Griner, possibly through a prisoner exchange, Russian officials have played down the possibility of an imminent resolution, and insisted that no negotiations could occur until the legal proceedings are finished.

Atrocities against civilians. Thousands of casualties, with the toll rising. Millions of refugees. Thriving cities besieged and reduced to rubble.

Ukrainians continue to resist the Russian onslaught. Moscow, however, has claimed the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, cementing Russia’s control of Luhansk Province and allowing it to turn its focus to Donetsk, the other province in the eastern Donbas region.

Russian artillery, rockets and missiles have rained on cities and villages across Donetsk, even as its ground forces have seemingly paused their advance in order to regroup and resupply before a widely expected push deeper into the province.

Many of the strikes have hit civilian areas, including markets, universities and apartment and office buildings, making death and injury a daily reality for those who have not fled the Russian onslaught.

Photographers with The New York Times and other organizations have been on the ground in Ukraine since before the start of the war, and have continued to chronicle the conflict as it rolls on for a fifth month.

A British volunteer aid worker captured in April by pro-Russian forces in southeast Ukraine has died while in custody, according to a pro-Russian separatist group and a humanitarian organization in contact with his family.

Paul Urey, 45, had traveled to Ukraine independently to assist humanitarian efforts after Russia invaded the country in late February. He was detained at a checkpoint south of Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine, along with another Briton, Dylan Healy, on April 25, according to Presidium Network, an aid organization the pair were in contact with.

Mr. Healy was later reportedly charged with being a mercenary in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, the Moscow-backed breakaway group in occupied eastern Ukraine, but there had been little news of Mr. Urey’s status.

On Friday, Daria Morozova, an ombudsman of the separatist group, said in a Telegram post that Mr. Urey had died on July 10 from chronic illness and stress-related causes. He suffered from diabetes, damage to his respiratory system and signs of depression, she said, adding that the separatists had given him medical care.

Mr. Urey’s death was confirmed by Presidium Network, which said it has been in touch with Mr. Urey’s family and was still trying to verify the circumstances and timing. “It’s believed that he died because of the lack of welfare and treatment for the diabetes he had before he was in captivity,” said Dominik Byrne, a co-founder of Presidium.

He said Mr. Urey’s family had been notified on Friday morning by Britain’s Foreign Office. “They’re just in complete shock and devastation at the moment,” he said.

Britain’s Foreign Office said on Friday that it was urgently seeking clarification from the Russian government about reports that Mr. Urey had died, adding that it had summoned the Russian ambassador.

“I am shocked to hear reports of the death of British aid worker Paul Urey while in the custody of a Russian proxy in Ukraine,” said Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary, in a statement shared on Twitter. She added that Mr. Urey was captured while trying to help the Ukrainian people in the face of an unprovoked invasion, saying that those responsible would be help to account.

Mr. Urey was living in Lancashire, England, before he went to Ukraine this year.

“Please let him come home to me, to his kids,” said his mother, Linda Urey to the BBC in April. “I miss him.”

A Russian missile strike on a city in central Ukraine on Thursday killed at least 23 people, including three children. Two weeks earlier, missiles crashed into buildings near Odesa, killing 21. And for weeks in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, civilians bore the brunt of Russia’s assault — killed on their bicycles or while walking down the street, or executed with their hands bound.

Indiscriminate Russian attacks on civilian areas have become a hallmark of its invasion, and this week, an international conference in The Hague sought to coordinate an approach to the overwhelming allegations of war crimes in Ukraine.

But investigators face a formidable challenge, with as many as 20,000 war crimes investigations, multiple countries and international agencies at work, and a high burden of proof to reach a conviction. Complicating matters further, investigations are working while the war is still raging. The Kremlin has denied allegations against its forces, and Russia’s Defense Ministry has called graphic evidence of atrocities “fake.”

Prosecutors are keen to prevent a situation in which national and international prosecutors trip over one another in their search for evidence and witnesses. On Thursday, Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, stressed the need to coordinate investigations and avoid a “stampede” of many parties “running to the crime scenes.”

At The Hague this week, representatives from 45 nations, including the United States and European Union countries, heard testimony about atrocities and pledged about $20 million to assist the I.C.C., Ukraine’s prosecutor general and efforts by the United Nations.

Experts say the International Criminal Court, established in 1998 to handle cases of mass atrocities, could be an important avenue for accountability for Russia, though there are many obstacles. Neither Russia nor Ukraine is among the court’s 123 member nations, but Ukraine has granted the court jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory.

The Dutch foreign minister, Wopke Hoekstra, said at a news conference on Thursday that the Netherlands was considering setting up an ad hoc international Ukraine war crimes tribunal.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine addressed the conference by video even as rescuers were digging through rubble from Thursday’s missile strike on Vinnytsia, a city far from the fighting on the eastern front. “This is the act of Russian terror,” he said.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Russian authorities have  “deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, from their homes into Russian territory, often to isolated regions in the far east. The unlawful transfer of protected persons, he said, was a breach of a Geneva Convention and a war crime.

Russia has acknowledged that 1.5 million Ukrainians are now in Russia, but has asserted that they were evacuated for their own safety.

The history of war crimes cases suggests it would be hard for prosecutors to bring cases over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Three of the most prominent prosecutions — against Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein — were brought against leaders who were out of power; no sitting president has ever been handed over to an international court.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has significant support at home and has developed strong ties with the leaders of other large nations, including those of China, Turkey and Iran.

Proving war crimes, and especially proving who ordered a given action, is also very difficult. In the case of Mr. Putin, prosecutors would have to demonstrate that he issued specific orders that led to specific atrocities, that he knew about the crimes or that he did nothing to prevent them.

Prosecutors would also have to show that Russian commanders had intentionally targeted civilian structures, or struck them during attacks that failed to discriminate between civilian and military targets. Acquiring such evidence or testimony may be impossible in the near future, at least as long as the fighting is raging.

Marlise Simons contributed reporting from Paris.

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

KYIV, Ukraine — At the thousand-year-old Cathedral of Saint Sophia here, standing on an easel in front of a towering Baroque golden altar, is a new, freshly painted icon that’s just a foot square.

It depicts a 17th-century Cossack military commander with a long gray beard. His eyebrows are arched. His halo is a plain red circle. He looks humble beneath the immense mosaics that have glinted since the 11th century — through Kyiv’s sacking by the Mongols, its absorption into Poland, its domination by the Soviet Union.

No gold. No gemstones. This icon has been painted on three planks of knotty wood: the planks, I learn, of an ammunition box recovered from the devastated Kyiv suburb of Bucha. Out of Bucha’s mass graves, in the wake of terrifying Russian atrocities against civilians, something new has come to Saint Sophia: an image of mourning and resolve, of horror and courage, of a culture that will not give up.

Why would a critic go into a war zone? Why should anyone care about a painting when cruise missiles are overhead? Because “this is a war about cultural identity,” said the curator Leonid Maruschak — one of so many writers, musicians and scholars I’ve met here who make no distinction between the survival of Ukraine’s people and land and the survival of its history and ideas.

With Russia actively trying to erase Ukraine’s national identity, this country’s music, literature, movies and monuments are not recreations. They are battlefields. The true culture war of our age is the war for democracy, and Ukrainian culture, past and present, has become a vital line of defense for the whole liberal order.

BRUSSELS — There is the war on the ground in Ukraine and the war over weapons supplies, on which the first war depends.

In the weapons war, there is a significant disparity between the flood of arms supplied by Britain, Poland and the United States, and what the rest of Europe is providing, which has raised the persistent question of whether some countries are slow-walking supplies to bring about a shorter war and quicker negotiations.

Those whispers, coming most loudly from countries on NATO’s eastern flank, closest to the war, have not stopped despite the very public visit to Kyiv in June by some of Europe’s top leaders — from France, Germany and Italy — aimed at reassuring the Ukrainians of their support.

If anything, the suspicions have intensified, as the economic pain of the war is felt more deeply in the West, the conflict enters a new phase of attrition and concerns ebb that the fighting will spill into Western Europe — unless, perhaps, Russia feels cornered and humiliated.

Western European nations blame logistics and a reluctance to deplete national stockpiles for their slow contributions. Beyond that, there are also broad divisions in European strategic thinking about whether Russia should be punished, isolated or, eventually, accommodated.

An American who has lived in Ukraine for the past four years has been taken into custody in Russian-occupied territory there, his family said.

Suedi Murekezi, 35, was arrested last month in Kherson, a provincial capital in southern Ukraine that was captured by Russian forces early in the war, according to his brother Sele Murekezi, who lives in Minnesota and said he spoke to him by phone.

It is unclear on what grounds Suedi Murekezi was detained. According to his brother, he was falsely charged with attending pro-Ukrainian protests.

Suedi Murekezi, a native of Rwanda, served eight years in the U.S. Air Force, according to an Air Force spokesman. His brother said Mr. Murekezi moved to Ukraine four years ago, drawn to the weather and vibrant tech industry, and had lived in Kherson for more than two years.

Sele Murekezi said his brother’s captors allowed him to make a phone call to his family last Thursday.

On the call, Mr. Murekezi said that he had not been injured and was being held by the Donetsk People’s Republic — the name of a separatist territory backed by Russia in eastern Ukraine — in the same jail as two other captured Americans, Alex Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27. Mr. Drueke and Mr. Huynh volunteered to fight in Ukraine and were captured near the city of Kharkiv on June 9 while fighting alongside other foreign soldiers.

The State Department would not confirm that Mr. Murekezi had been captured, although a spokesperson said that officials were aware of reports about his case.

Bryan Stern, co-founder of Project Dynamo — a nonprofit that has conducted rescue operations in Ukraine — said he also believed that Mr. Murekezi was being held with Mr. Drueke and Mr. Huynh.

Mr. Stern said he had been told that Mr. Murekezi was living in Kherson and driving a car with U.S. license plates. He would not disclose the source of his information.

“His only crime was being American,” said Mr. Stern, whose organization helped another American, Kirillo Alexandrov, leave Ukraine in May after he was arrested and detained for two months.

Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city that fell to Russia in the early days of the war. Mr. Murekezi’s family said they were worried about his safety, but knew he had a community in Kherson that he did not want to leave behind.

But after his arrest, Sele Murekezi said, two of his brother’s closest friends fled the country, to Poland and Georgia.

“They spooked them, you know,” he said. “They were very, very scared.”

Jane Arraf contributed reporting.