Russia-Ukraine WarFive U.N. Inspectors Remain at Embattled Nuclear Plant

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ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Most of a team of United Nations inspectors departed the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on Thursday after a short risky visit to assess its safety, leaving behind five experts to monitor the plant, where shelling has raised the risk of a nuclear accident, Ukraine’s nuclear energy company said.

Just four hours after the team from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived, the head of the agency and leader of the mission, Rafael M. Grossi, left the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

“I have just completed a first tour of the key areas that we wanted to see in this first approach to the whole facility,” Mr. Grossi said in a video statement on Twitter. “Of course there is a lot more to do.” He said of the experts staying on: “We are establishing a continued presence from the I.A.E.A. here.”

Speaking to reporters on a roadside after leaving the plant, Mr. Grossi said he continued to worry about the plant’s safety.

“It is obvious that the plant and physical integrity of the plant have been violated several times,” he said. “By chance or by deliberation? We don’t have the elements to assess that. But this cannot continue to happen.”

Ukrainian energy officials said in a statement that the five members of the team who remained would stay until Saturday and continue working at the plant. The company said the U.N. scientists were “unloading the equipment they brought,” but it was not immediately clear what equipment they carried or what tasks they would carry out in the coming days.

The I.A.E.A. had said earlier that the monitors would check on safety systems, assess damage to the plant and evaluate the staff’s working conditions. Among the main concerns the agency has raised is that fires or other damage from shelling could cause cooling systems to fail and lead to a nuclear meltdown.

Hours before they arrived, artillery shells struck the sprawling complex and caused damage, according to Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear energy company, highlighting the safety risks the team had come to assess. Russia and Ukraine traded accusations about which side had fired the shells.

It took weeks of delicate negotiations for Russia and Ukraine to agree to the I.A.E.A. visit, but it remained unclear how much the experts would be able to do during a short visit to the nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, which lies in an intensifying combat zone and has been repeatedly struck by shelling.

An I.A.E.A. spokesman earlier said the team intended to present its findings back at its headquarters in Vienna by the end of the week.

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As the U.N. experts set off on Thursday morning in a convoy of armored S.U.V.s toward a dangerous buffer zone separating the two armies, Energoatom said that Russian mortar shells had struck the plant, causing equipment failures that forced the shutdown of one reactor and the activation of backup generators at another.

Russia said it was Ukrainian artillery that had shelled the sprawling nuclear facility on Thursday and had also bombarded the route that the inspectors took to the plant. Four shells had exploded about a quarter mile from one of the reactors, the Russian ministry of defense said.

The extent of damage from the strikes was not immediately clear, and there were no reports of heightened radiation levels around the facility. But weeks of repeated strikes in and around the plant, which is controlled by Russian forces but operated by Ukrainian engineers, have raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe.

Although neither Russia nor Ukraine had agreed to a cease-fire in the area, both had said they would guarantee the safety of the mission. As the shelling continued despite those promises, both armies accused the other of attacking the route toward the plant and placing the U.N. inspectors in peril.

Foreign journalists were not permitted to accompany the inspectors, who are among the few international personnel who have crossed the front line since the war began in February.

Edwin Lyman, a nuclear power expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that experts could inspect the state of all the emergency systems as well as the diesel supply, and then make arrangements for replenishing it.

The urgency of the mission to a nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine caught in the middle of a raging war was underscored even before the team of international inspectors set off on Thursday morning into Russian occupied territory as artillery boomed in the distance.

Only hours earlier, renewed shelling at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant had forced the shutdown of one of two working reactors, and for the second time in less than two weeks, emergency diesel generators had to be switched on to keep the plant running safely, Ukrainian energy officials said.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency who led the team of inspectors, said the peril of the moment justified the risks of the journey.

But even after the team safely reached the plant and gave it an initial four-hour inspection, it was far from clear what the mission could ultimately accomplish.

The crisis at the plant is about a battle for control of the facility itself, now occupied by Russian forces but operated by Ukrainian engineers working under near daily bombardment.

The agency has no authority to order a cease-fire or to demand the creation of a demilitarized zone — the two steps outside experts say would provide the fastest way to limit the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.

Russia has rejected both ideas.

The U.N. agency is also not designed to investigate and assign blame for the shelling of the plant. Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of shelling the sprawling plant, which has six reactors.

Still, the visit was the first time independent monitors have been able to assess conditions at the plant — no small thing given that it remains far from clear how much damage has been done to critical equipment since Russian forces first stormed the facility in early March.

The immediate checklist for the monitors, according to people familiar with the mission, was to ensure the plant’s most critical emergency equipment is operational and in good working order. That included checking to see there were adequate supplies of fuel for the emergency diesel generators and sufficient reserves of high-quality water that can be reliably delivered to supply emergency pumps.

Ukrainian officials wanted the I.A.E.A. to be allowed to keep monitors on site after the mission is complete, in the hopes their mere presence will create better conditions for the workers. Mr. Grossi, in brief remarks broadcast as he toured the facility, said five monitors would remain at the plant until at least Saturday. “We are establishing a continued presence from the I.A.E.A. here,” he told reporters.

The Ukrainians also called on the I.A.E.A. to do a detailed study of all critical systems over at least a 24-hour period and release the results — a safeguard against what they fear will be coerced statements by workers at the plant speaking under Russian intimidation.

Mr. Grossi has not said how his team will communicate their findings, but some experts hoped he would use the authority vested in the I.A.E.A. to increase pressure on Russia to cycle down all the reactors until the fighting ends.

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant was forced to deploy emergency backup responses after shelling struck the facility on Thursday morning, Ukraine’s nuclear power company said, just as U.N. nuclear experts set off toward the plant.

Mortar shells hit the facility in southern Ukraine at about 5 a.m., damaging equipment and triggering the emergency responses, the company, Energoatom, said in a statement.

Ukrainian officials blamed Russia for the mortar fire; Russia’s defense ministry said Ukraine had shelled the plant, with some rounds landing a quarter mile from one of the reactors.

It was the second time in 10 days that combat near the plant had damaged equipment and triggered the emergency use of diesel generators, the statement noted. The Ukrainian military accused Russian forces of carrying out attacks to prevent the nuclear monitors from visiting.

The severity of the damage was not immediately known. There were no reports of heightened radiation levels around the facility.

Station operators shut down one of the two active reactors at the site, Reactor No. 5, the statement said. An already idled reactor, No. 2, lost external power and switched to diesel generators.

One reactor, Reactor No. 6, continues to operate, the statement added.

The nuclear plant, which is controlled by Russian forces but operated by Ukrainian engineers, is in the middle of an active battlefield where frequent shelling has raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe. The United States has said the plant and surrounding area should be demilitarized and all reactors shut down to avoid risks of a radiation release.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine hailed the arrival of United Nations inspectors at the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant on Thursday but said Russia was undermining the inspection by preventing independent journalists from observing it and by intimidating residents in the surrounding town.

“We have clear evidence that Russia did a lot of cynical things to deceive the mission,” he said in his nightly address, saying residents of Enerhodar were forced to lie to the representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. The claims could not be independently verified.

International and Ukrainian journalists were not allowed to join the inspectors and observe the plant, as promised, Mr. Zelensky said, adding that only Russian “propagandists” were allowed in.

“Unfortunately, the I.A.E.A. representatives did not protect the representatives of independent media,” he said.

Mr. Zelensky again called for a demilitarized zone around the plant, where constant shelling has raised the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.

A high-ranking Russian oil executive died on Thursday after falling from a sixth-floor hospital window in Moscow, the country’s state media reported, the latest in a series of deaths of businessmen with ties to the energy industry since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Ravil Maganov, the chairman of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil producer, fell out of a window at the Central Clinical Hospital, according to a report by Channel 1, the country’s leading state-owned television network. The report said the clinic had confirmed the incident.

Lukoil, the country’s biggest private company, said in a statement on its website that Mr. Maganov “had passed away following a severe illness.” It did not elaborate.

Tass, the Russian state-run news agency, called Mr. Maganov’s death a suicide. It cited an unnamed source in law enforcement who said that Mr. Maganov, 67, had been hospitalized after a heart attack and that he was taking antidepressant pills. Russian investigators were on the scene, Tass said.

Reuters, though, reported that two people who knew Mr. Maganov well said they believed it was highly unlikely that he had taken his own life.

Other Russian executives tied to the energy industry have died under suspicious circumstances in the months since the invasion of Ukraine.

On Feb. 25, one day after President Vladimir V. Putin ordered troops to cross the Ukrainian border, Alexander Tyulakov, a deputy general director of the treasury for Gazprom, Russia’s energy giant, was found dead in his garage near St. Petersburg, the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported. The report described his death as a suicide.

In April, Vladislav Avayev, a former deputy president of Gazprombank, one of the largest Russian lenders and a bank with ties to Gazprom, was found dead in an apartment in Moscow along with the bodies of his wife and daughter. The investigators said it appeared that Mr. Avayev had fatally shot the two before taking his own life, according to Kommersant, a Russian newspaper.

In May, Tass reported that Aleksandr Subbotin, a former Lukoil executive, had been found dead in a basement of a house in Mytishchi, a town outside Moscow. The police opened a criminal investigation, the report said.

Lukoil said Mr. Maganov had started his career in the energy industry as an oil operator at a company that later merged with others to form Lukoil, working his way up to become one of Russia’s top oil executives. In a statement, the company said that thanks to Mr. Maganov the company had “evolved from a small oil production group to one of the world’s leading energy companies in next to no time.”

In March, Lukoil took an unusual stance among Russian businesses by calling for a “fast resolution” to the invasion of Ukraine, distancing itself from the official Kremlin line.

The statement, from the board of directors, headed by Mr. Maganov, expressed the company’s “deepest concerns about the tragic events in Ukraine” and called for “the soonest termination of the armed conflict.”

“We strongly support a lasting cease-fire and a settlement of problems through serious negotiations and diplomacy,” the company said.

The statement appeared to be a way to protect Lukoil’s international interests as Western criticism rained down on Russia after the invasion. Lukoil is one of the most recognizable Russian brands in the United States, where it has a network of more than 200 franchised gasoline stations.

The bitterness and acrimony from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spilled onto the tennis courts of the U.S. Open again Thursday as Victoria Azarenka of Belarus beat Marta Kostyuk of Ukraine in straight sets, 6-2, 6-3.

Kostyuk, who has been outspoken in her belief that players from Russia and Belarus should be barred from the sport, refused to shake Azarenka’s hand after her defeat, opting only to tap rackets with Azarenka when it was over.

In April, Kostyuk and several other players from Ukraine called for ruling organizations of tennis to ask players from Russia and Belarus if they supported the war and to denounce it if they did not. In the absence of declarations against the war, Kostyuk and the other Ukrainian players said the players from Russia and Belarus should be barred from any international event.

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal, and that time is now,” the statement from the players said.

Speaking with journalists at a news conference after the match, Kostyuk explained that she had no interest in shaking hands with players who had not spoken out publicly against the brutality of the war. She also criticized players from Russia and Belarus for not reaching out to players from Ukraine, several of whom have not been able to go home since Russia invaded their country in February.

Kostyuk texted Azarenka before the match to tell her she would not be shaking her hand after the match, but the two did not speak beforehand.

It was the second time in two weeks that Kostyuk went after Azarenka, who in years past made multiple appearances with President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. Last week, Kostyuk pushed officials from the United States Tennis Association to prohibit Azarenka from participating in an exhibition to benefit relief efforts in Ukraine. On Thursday, she defended those actions, saying it would have been akin to having a German attend a benefit for European Jews during World War II.

Azarenka had planned to participate in the benefit until Kostyuk and other players from Ukraine protested.

Shortly after Kostyuk spoke Thursday, Azarenka held her own news conference and defended her actions. She said she had reached out to players from Ukraine but had sent the messages through intermediaries with the WTA Tour, which she helps run as a member of its Players’ Council.

“I’ve had a very clear message from the beginning, that I’m here to try to help, which I have done a lot,” Azarenka said. “Maybe not something that people see. And that’s not what I do it for. I do it for people who are in need, juniors who need clothes, other people who need money or other people who needed transportation or whatever. That’s what is important to me, to help people who are in need.”

Azarenka said if Kostyuk wanted to speak with her, she was “open any time to listen, to try to understand, to sympathize.” She added, “I believe that empathy in the moment like this is really important.”

Tensions among players from the warring countries have been mounting for months.

Iga Swiatek of Poland, the world No. 1, who has held her own fund-raiser for relief efforts in Ukraine and who has condemned the invasion, said the sport’s leaders missed an opportunity to manage those tensions when the war first broke out.

“Right now, it’s kind of too late, I think, to fix that,” Swiatek said Thursday. “Right now, it’s easy to say that maybe there was lack of leadership, but at that time I didn’t know what to do either.”

The U.N. nuclear agency’s visit to inspect the Zaporizhzhia plant is just the latest time that a convoy of white U.N. vehicles has snaked its way into a combat zone. For veterans of such missions, the adrenaline and the risks are familiar.

While it is rare for the International Atomic Energy Agency to operate in a combat zone, the United Nations more broadly has worked for decades to cross front lines under its blue banner, negotiating with warring parties and navigating checkpoints. The aim has often been to rescue stranded civilians or to deliver aid.

And while the risks of such operations are many, the security to protect those U.N. missions has improved, senior humanitarian officials say.

A turning point for the United Nations came in August of 2003, when a suicide truck bomb exploded at U.N. headquarters in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing 22 people, including the United Nations special representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

“There was a complete realization that the U.N. had until that point been inconsistent in security to the point of being reckless,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former United Nations humanitarian coordinator, who has led many U.N. missions. “We who operate in very dangerous circumstances have to avoid two things: recklessness, but also risk aversion, which is equally bad, because then we are not doing our jobs in serving the civilian population.”

A year after the Baghdad attack, the U.N. created a separate organization, the U.N. Department of Safety and Security, which was a major change in its security apparatus. The department coordinates a network of security personnel and also provides training and other services.

Mr. Egeland argued that, in some ways, it is easier to negotiate humanitarian access in Ukraine, because the conflict does not feature a large number of independent armed groups. He said that, while there have been numerous attacks on aid workers and medical facilities in Ukraine, the United Nations has largely been considered exempt.

The I.A.E.A. operates under U.N. security structures but improvements in U.N. procedures have cast a spotlight on risks faced in conflicts by the national staff of nongovernmental organizations.

According to a report by Humanitarian Outcomes, a research and policy organization, 23 international staff members of nongovernmental organizations and the U.N. were killed, injured or kidnapped last year, in postings outside of their home countries. But the figure for staff working within their own countries stood at 438, the report said.

The disparity could, in part, be explained by revised security structures implemented by the United Nations, under which international staff more often remain in capital cities, which tend to be safer, or in highly protected compounds, said Abby Stoddard of Humanitarian Outcomes.

“The people in the most dangerous places are the least equipped and the least resourced to protect themselves,” Ms. Stoddard said, referring to national NGO staff working in their own countries.

Kilian Kleinschmidt, who heads IPA SwitxBoard, an organization that promotes development, has headed U.N. operations to deliver aid in countries such as Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sri Lanka.

He recalled leading a mission to refugee camps south of the city of Kisangani in the former Zaire in 1997 that was met by gunfire. He described it as “highly dangerous” because it had not been possible to negotiate safe passage with all sides in the conflict.

“The security architecture has evolved,” Mr. Kleinschmidt said. “What we were doing would never have been authorized today.”

BUCHA, Ukraine — The bodies that littered the school playground in April are gone. The blood on the walls has been scrubbed clean and workers were repairing shattered windows.

Still, School No. 3 in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, the site of some of the worst Russian atrocities of the war, did not open when classes began on Thursday for millions of Ukrainian children whose families are struggling to educate them.

That is because the basement of the school was used by Russian soldiers as a torture chamber, residents said. It is still considered a crime scene, and in Ukraine — where the Education Ministry estimates Russian bombs, rockets and shelled have struck more than 2,400 schools, leveling at least 270 — no school can open without a bomb shelter.

For students like 6-year-old Vera, who loves math and castles, that means remote learning. She had looked forward to the first day of school in Ukraine, when, as a new first grader, she would be hoisted on the shoulders of an older student to “ring the first bell,” to start the school year and kick off a day of celebrations.

“She does not want to start the school year taking classes online,” her mother, Lyudmila, said as she took her daughter’s picture outside the school, holding the bell that she would not ring.

“It is a bleak and unwelcome experiment in childhood suffering,” James Elder, the spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, said in an interview. “With thousands of schools damaged or destroyed, less than 60 percent are expected to open on time.”

The lack of a bomb shelter is just one of many challenges facing Ukraine’s schoolchildren and their teachers.

An estimated 2.8 million of the nation’s six million children have been forced from their homes because of the war. If they are fortunate enough to find a seat in a classroom, it will probably be in an unfamiliar town or city.

Another two million children are estimated to be living outside Ukraine and will either log on remotely for schooling with Ukrainian teachers or try to integrate into new schools.

In the government-controlled parts of Ukraine, teachers are receiving training in how to treat battlefield wounds and what to do in case they come across an unexploded ordnance. In addition to pens, paper and chalk, schools are being supplied with extra blankets, flashlights and first aid kits.

Unicef has reached around 1.7 million children and their caregivers offering psychological support. And they have dispatched 50 mobile teams to areas that are hard to reach because of the raging conflict.

“From Yemen to Syria, what we have learned is that children just absolutely need this psychological break from war,” Mr. Elder said. “And attending class plays a critical role in that.”

The fact that schools in Bucha and other hard-hit towns and cities across the country are opening at all is in many ways remarkable.

Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, said that in the first days of the war, many families sought shelter in schools, thinking of them as places of refuge.

“They were wrong, they were not safe,” he said. During 32 days of Russian occupation, he said, schools were turned into firing positions and places of oppression.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday bowed and crossed himself at the open coffin of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last Soviet premier, but the Kremlin said Mr. Putin would not attend the funeral of a man whom many Russians see as a failed leader.

The Kremlin released about 30 seconds of video showing Mr. Putin, alone in a hall at the Central Clinical Hospital where Mr. Gorbachev died, placing a bouquet of red flowers by the coffin, and paying his respects to Mr. Gorbachev’s body and his photograph.

The choreography and official reaction surrounding Mr. Gorbachev’s death on Tuesday has been closely watched because Mr. Putin has spent much of his tenure trying to reverse the former leader’s legacy. His invasion of Ukraine, in the eyes of the Kremlin’s backers, is a bid to regain control over lands that were wrongfully separated from Russia with the end of the Soviet Union, which Mr. Gorbachev oversaw. Mr. Putin has termed the Soviet collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said that Mr. Putin made the stop at the hospital before traveling to the Russian Baltic region of Kaliningrad, where he is expected to attend an education-themed event on the nationwide first day of school. Mr. Peskov said Mr. Putin paid his respects on Thursday because “unfortunately, the working schedule of the president will not allow” him to attend Mr. Gorbachev’s funeral on Saturday.

Mr. Putin, despite his busy schedule, has attended major funerals in the past — including that of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist politician who died in April.

Mr. Peskov said Saturday’s ceremony in Moscow would have “elements of a state funeral, such as an honor guard,” Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.

The Russian military is trying to make up for its severe manpower shortage in the war in Ukraine by compelling wounded soldiers to return to the front lines, bringing private security contractors into the military and paying bonuses to conscripts, according to a newly declassified U.S. intelligence assessment.

Two U.S. officials described the assessment on Wednesday, adding that the United States also has credible reporting that Russia is likely to begin recruiting some convicted criminals to serve in Ukraine, in exchange for pardons.

High casualties in Ukraine, coupled with a failure by the Russian military to predict how long and bloody the war would be, have caused a manpower crisis in Ukraine.

Last week Russia announced it would expand the size of its army by 137,000, which Western officials said was a reflection of the military’s struggles in Ukraine. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, between 70,000 and 80,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded.

American officials have repeatedly said they believe that Russia can overcome its military shortages and achieve its strategic goals in Ukraine only by resorting to a draft. The interim steps, like expanding bonuses and raising the maximum age of new recruits, will fall short of making up for the thousands of losses Russia’s military has suffered in the six-month war.

While debate over the need for a mass mobilization has grown more urgent in Russia in recent weeks, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made clear that he will not resort to a draft, a sign that support for the war is thin among the Russian populace, according to analysts.

“I think Putin knows the war is very unpopular,” said Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official and retired C.I.A. officer.

Keen to avoid a draft, Mr. Putin has been looking for other ways to make up for the heavy casualties in Ukraine. “He is essentially losing there,” Mr. Mulroy said. “Or at least not winning, which is losing.”

He wrote a book describing a Russian military so ill-prepared when it invaded Ukraine that he didn’t know his unit had entered the country until he awoke to the sound of artillery fire.

Now 34-year-old Pavel Filatiev, who says he was a paratrooper in Russia’s military, is seeking political asylum in France after arriving there last weekend. He has been greeted as a hero by some in the West, his book embraced by Kremlin opponents as proof of what he has called a “terrible war.”

But Mr. Filatiev remains a scourge and a traitor in his native Russia, at least among proponents of the war who know of his existence, as opponents of the invasion are aggressively censored. Some critics also say his book ignores the strong support for President Vladimir V. Putin and the war among many Russians and Russian soldiers. And some Ukrainians and Russian opponents of the war say he is an unreliable narrator and complicit in the violence.

The book has drawn widespread attention, in part, for the rarity of a Russian soldier speaking out about his experiences. Mr. Filatiev’s account of his time in Ukraine could not be independently verified by The New York Times. Kamalia Mehtiyeva, his lawyer, said he was awaiting a decision in the coming days on whether he could remain in France as a refugee.

“He fears persecution from the Russian Federation,” she said by phone from Paris.

According to his book, Mr. Filatiev spent about two months as a paratrooper stationed in the southern Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Mykolaiv, and contracted an eye infection in a trench. He then tried to leave the army after being sent to a military hospital in Sevastopol, citing health reasons. But he writes that he was threatened with prosecution unless he returned.

He fled Russia in August after publishing his book, “ZOV,” which refers to the symbols painted on Russian military vehicles, and escaping to France via Tunisia.

“We had no moral right to attack another country, especially the people closest to us,” he writes in the book, which he self-published on VKontakte, a Russian social media network, in August. “We started a terrible war,” he writes, “a war in which cities are destroyed and which leads to the deaths of children, women and the elderly.”

“ZOV” describes a chaotic Russian army in which demoralized recruits were equipped with rusty guns and ill-fitting uniforms. On Feb. 24, the day the invasion began, Mr. Filatiev writes that he and other soldiers were shocked to learn they were invading Ukraine.

“I woke up at around 2 a.m.,” he writes. “The column was lined up somewhere in the wilderness, and everyone had turned off their engines and headlights,” he continues. “I couldn’t understand: Are we firing at advancing Ukrainians? Or maybe at NATO? Or are we attacking? Who is this hellish shelling aimed at?”

Later, he characterizes the Russian Army as lacking basic supplies. During a military operation in occupied Kherson in March, he writes, desperate Russian soldiers raided buildings looking for food, water, showers, and a place to sleep, and looted everything they could find of value, including computers and clothing.

Mr. Filatiev’s account was widely reported by independent Russian media outlets, most of them based outside the country. But state-run outlets have conspicuously ignored him. And even some Ukrainians on social media have lashed out against attempts to glorify or praise him, given that he fought in Ukraine.

Ivan Zhdanov, a Russian opposition activist and ally of the jailed dissident Aleksei A. Navalny, said that Mr. Filatiev had blood on his hands.

“Honestly, I am skeptical about his decision because he went there and fought there,” he said on his show on YouTube.

In an interview with the Agence France-Presse news agency, Mr. Filatiev said he believed he had a moral imperative to say what was happening in Ukraine.

“I want people in Russia and in the world to know how this war came about,” he told the news agency.

Constant Méheut contributed reporting from Paris.