After nearly 100 days of fighting, Russia holds one-fifth of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday. In a video address to the Parliament of Luxembourg, he said the battle is being waged from Kharkiv in the nation's northeast to Mykolaiv in the south, a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers, or 620 miles, the New York Times reports. "Just imagine!" he said. "Constant fighting, which stretched along the front line for more than a thousand kilometers." Russian forces are concentrating their efforts now on taking the last major city in eastern Ukraine's Luhansk region they don't hold: Sievierodonetsk. The fighting in the east is intense, with both sides sustaining heavy losses. In other developments:
White House talks: NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg met with President Biden at the White House on Thursday. Stoltenberg told reporters afterward that the battle in Ukraine has become a war of attrition, so NATO must "be prepared for the long haul." NATO will continue its support of Ukraine, he said, partly to ensure it's in the best possible position to negotiate an end to the fighting at some point, per the Washington Post. He made clear that NATO isn't actually in the fight. "We provide support to Ukraine, but we're not part of the conflict," Stoltenberg said.
More sanctions: The US moved against a Russian yacht management company and its owners, as well as luxury asset management and service companies, accusing them of helping to make President Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs wealthy and avoid the force of sanctions. The Treasury Department named the Shellest, the Nega, the Graceful, and the Olympia as yachts Putin uses. An official said the US will continue to "expose the corrupt systems by which President Putin and his elites enrich themselves."
Cyber battle: The US has run offensive cyber operations on behalf of Ukraine, the military's hacking unit confirmed, per CNN. "We've conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum; offensive, defensive, information operations," said Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of Cyber Command. The military rarely confirms such operations.
Energy concerns: The increase in energy prices could be just the beginning, per CNN. With the war in Ukraine coming on top of years of inadequate investment in the energy sector, the world could be headed into a period worse than the oil crisis of the late 1970s, energy experts and officials said. "Now we have an oil crisis, a gas crisis, and an electricity crisis at the same time," said Fatih Birol of the watchdog group International Energy Agency. (More Russia-Ukraine war stories.)
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