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US President Joe Biden arriving at Warsaw Airport.
In Poland he met American soldiers and NGOs supporting Ukrainian refugees
Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP
Russia's Defense Ministry signals it may reduce war targets.
Western secret services report overstretched supply lines and problems with the use of high-tech weapons by the Russian military.
More and more people from Ukraine are fleeing.
The developments at a glance.
The military situation
Four weeks into its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army is struggling on some fronts but making progress elsewhere.
According to British information, the Ukrainian army was able to recapture towns and defensive positions up to 35 kilometers east of Kyiv.
The British Ministry of Defense announced that this contributed to the fact that the Russian troops were falling behind because their supply lines were overstretched.
According to US information, Russia also has massive problems with its precision-guided missiles.
The high-tech weapons used in the attack on Ukraine had a failure rate of up to 60 percent, US officials said, citing intelligence information from the Reuters news agency.
According to the Russian General Staff, 1,351 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine.
It was the first official figure since early March, when the number of 498 soldiers killed was given.
However, experts assume thousands of dead Russian soldiers.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it had succeeded in destroying a large fuel depot near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv through rocket fire.
Ukraine's Defense Ministry said Russian troops managed to create a land bridge from the Donetsk region in the east to the Crimean peninsula.
Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Russia, meanwhile, has signaled that it may scale back its war targets.
The Defense Ministry said the objectives of the "first phase of the operation" had been "largely achieved," with Ukraine's combat capability "substantially reduced."
Major General Sergei Rudskoy said Russia will now focus on defeating Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbass region.
While Russia "does not rule out" that its forces will storm major Ukrainian cities like Kyiv, capturing these cities is not the primary goal.
The humanitarian situation
The number of war refugees from Ukraine has risen to more than 3.7 million.
According to its website, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR registered 3,725,806 people who had fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began on February 24.
This represented an increase of more than 50,000 refugees compared to the previous day.
According to UN figures, more than ten million people in Ukraine have had to leave their homes.
According to this, 6.5 million people are currently living as internally displaced persons in Ukraine.
According to information from Kyiv, 135 children have already been killed since the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine began around a month ago.
More than 180 children were injured, the Attorney General said on Friday.
Most of the children and young people died in the Kyiv region and in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv and Donetsk.
The information could not initially be independently verified.
The need for humanitarian aid is also increasing in Germany.
According to SPIEGEL, the food banks that hand out free food to the needy have seen a large number of refugees from Ukraine.
For example, 800 of the 1250 table guests at the Saturday edition at the Munich wholesale market hall were Ukrainians.
The previous weekend there had only been around 200.
"We set up a second afternoon shift with volunteers and had to create a waiting list," reports Steffen Horak, spokesman for the Munich food bank.
They are currently buying four to five tons of groceries a week because the donated goods are not enough.
The additional costs in Munich are 12,000 to 15,000 euros per week.
That's what Kyiv demands, that's what the West says
In an impassioned speech on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on the heads of state and government of the European Union to speed up the imposition of further sanctions.
In particular, he called on Hungary to make it clear whether it supports Russia or Ukraine in the escalating dispute over its neighboring country.
»Hungary... I want to stop here and be honest.
Once and for all.
You have to decide for yourself whose side you're on," said Zelenskyy.
In a video posted to social media on Friday morning, Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán dismissed Zelenskyy's demands.
Given Hungary's dependence on Russian energy, the prime minister said, "sanctions would mean that the Hungarian economy would slow down and come to a standstill."
"This is unacceptable.
It is contrary to the interests of Hungarians,” Orbán said.
According to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the United States will "under no circumstances" use chemical weapons, not even in the event of a Russian chemical weapons use in Ukraine.
Russia will pay a "high price" in this case, Sullivan told journalists on board the US presidential plane Air Force One on Friday.
“I'll just say this much: The United States has no intention of using chemical weapons.
Period.
Under no circumstances."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has called on Vladimir Putin to make an "honorable withdrawal" from Ukraine.
"We must now say, 'Now you must be the architect of the step that must be taken towards peace'," Erdoğan said to the Russian president, according to the Turkish Presidential Office.
However, Erdoğan reiterated that he did not want to impose sanctions on Russia.
It is impossible for Turkey to break ties with Russia.
Moscow says so
With regard to Western sanctions, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has spoken of a "total war" directed against Moscow.
"Today they declared real hybrid war on us, total war," Lavrov said at a meeting with representatives of a diplomatic foundation in Moscow.
"This term, which was used in Hitler's Germany, is now used by European politicians when they talk about what they want to do with the Russian Federation."
In fact, European politicians are not known to have used the term in recent days.
At the beginning of March, France's Economics Minister Bruno Le Maire spoke of a "total war" against Russia on an economic and financial level in view of the sanctions taken, but retracted the formulation on the same day after criticism.
Russia has described US warnings against Russian use of chemical weapons in Ukraine as a tactical maneuver.
It only serves to divert attention from issues uncomfortable for the United States, says spokesman for the Presidential Office in Moscow, Dmitry Peskov.
The military will now submit proposals to President Vladimir Putin on how Russia should react to the strengthening of NATO's eastern flank, he said in a conference call with journalists.
Peskov said there was no official statement on whether Russia would rebuild Ukrainian cities like Mariupol.
The sanctions imposed would have no effect on the Russian government, said former Russian President and Putin confidante Dmitry Medvedev in an interview with the RIA news agency.
It is "foolish" to believe that the sanctions can make a difference.
They would only strengthen Russian society and not arouse popular displeasure with the authorities.
Biden visits troops in Poland
US President Joe Biden once again called Russian President Vladimir Putin a "war criminal" during his visit to Poland.
The devastation in Ukraine comes from "a man who, frankly, I believe is a war criminal," said Biden in Rzeszow, Poland, about 90 kilometers from the border with Ukraine.
"And I think that will fit the legal definition, too," he added.
Biden has previously labeled Putin a war criminal.
The White House then emphasized that the US President spoke from his heart.
Biden also thanked US soldiers in Poland for their deployment on NATO's eastern flank.
Biden underlined that 100,000 US soldiers are now in Europe due to troop reinforcements due to the Ukraine war.
In the evening Biden wants to travel to Warsaw.
There is a speech on the Ukraine war on the program for Saturday.
Further meetings with Polish political leaders are also planned.
What happened today
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered energy giant Gazprom to accept payments for its natural gas exports in the local currency, rubles.
In the coming days, the group should find out how this could happen, the Kremlin said in Moscow.
At the same time, spokesman Dmitry Peskov pointed out that Novatek, as Russia's largest producer of liquefied natural gas, had not received such instructions.
The train connection between the Finnish capital Helsinki and the Russian metropolis St. Petersburg will be discontinued from the beginning of next week.
The Finnish railway company VR announced that the Allegro express train would no longer run from Monday.
So far, train services have been maintained in accordance with the authorities' instructions to ensure Finnish citizens' access to their home country.
Those who wanted to leave Russia for Finland had had time to do so in the past few weeks.
The last train from St. Petersburg towards Finland will therefore be on Sunday.
The Allegro covers the approximately 400-kilometer route between Helsinki and St. Petersburg in a good three and a half hours.
It was last considered the only major public transport link between Russia and the EU after both sides blocked the airspace for the other.
You should read this
In an interview, military researcher Philipps Payson O'Brien talks about the high losses suffered by the Russian military.
He sees not only the lack of morale on the part of the Russian troops as reasons, but also poor leadership and logistics.
In the SPIEGEL editorial, René Pfister argues why Europe cannot rely solely on NATO for its defense.
The EU must become a defense alliance - which if necessary is also able to replace NATO.
The security expert Gustav Gressel warns: »There is a wrong perception in the West«.
Anti-tank weapons and surface-to-air missiles alone would not be enough to defend Ukraine in the long term.
In order to survive in battles outside of the cities, Ukraine urgently needs battle tanks.
mts/dpa/AFP/AFX/Reuters