President Joe Biden is set to meet virtually with Group of 7 leaders on Sunday morning to discuss Russia's war in Ukraine and potential new sanctions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will also participate in the meeting, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said. The G7 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the U.S.
The meeting comes the day before Russia will celebrate its Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet Union's defeat of Nazi Germany.
Western officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin could use the Victory Day holiday to make an announcement about the war in Ukraine — either declaring a victory or escalating the conflict.
Officials had warned about the potential for Russia to ramp up attacks ahead of its holiday. Russian forces fired cruise missiles at the city of Odesa and bombarded other regions, but Ukrainian troops mounted a strong resistance in key areas over the weekend.
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Latest developments:
►Almost 7,000 civilians have been killed or injured since the war in Ukraine started in February, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
►First lady Jill Biden visited a Romanian school on Saturday where Ukrainian children who fled the war with their families are trying to continue their education. Biden is in the region to learn about the refugee crisis caused by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
►Ukrainian forces have been making gains against Russian forces and may be able to push them out of artillery range of Kharkiv in the coming days, the Institute for the Study of War said in an assessment
►The latest military aid package from the U.S. is worth an additional $150 million, President Joe Biden announced.
Russia's 'firehose of falsehood'
In this war, Russia is invoking World War II and Nazism in an effort to smear Ukrainian leaders, including attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently fanned those flames when he raised the unproven claim that Adolf Hitler had Jewish ancestry. Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, accused Russia of spreading anti-Semitic tropes.
“Right now, at times, Russian propaganda even equates Nazis and Western civilization,” said Shirikov, who specializes in propaganda and misinformation.
Russia’s propaganda machine is a “firehose of falsehood” whose primary target audience is Russians themselves, said Christopher Paul, senior social scientist at the RAND Corp., a global policy think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif.
Read more here about the propaganda being use in war.
School shelter bombed, 60 feared dead
A Ukrainian official accused Russians of dropping an "air bomb" on a school where about 90 residents of the village of Bilohorivka were taking shelter.
Serhiy Haidai, the regional governor of Luhansk, said in a Facebook post that 30 of the people hidden there had been rescued so far.
“Most likely, all 60 people who remain under the rubble are now dead,” Gov. Serhiy Haidai wrote on the Telegram messaging app. Russian shelling also killed two boys, ages 11 and 14, in the nearby town of Pryvillia, he said.
Haidai said "almost the whole village was hidden. Everyone who didn't have time to evacuate."
Zelenskyy hopes to evacuate wounded and military from steel plant next
Now that evacuations have successfully removed all women, children and elderly from the Azovstol steel mill in Mariupol, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said another mission will attempt to rescue injured people and medics.
Zelenskyy also said in his nightly video address to the nation late Saturday that the effort to also evacuate the Ukrainian soldiers still there, the "heroes who defended Mariupol," would be "difficult."
Iryna Vereshchuk, a deputy prime minister for Ukraine, announced Saturday that the evacuations of vulnerable citizens had taken place from the steel mill, where civilians and Ukrainian troops were the last holdout from Russian forces. More than 300 people were evacuated in recent days, Zelenskyy said, after conditions in the underground bunkers increasingly worsened and Russia ramped up its shelling.
Russia rehearses Victory Day parade
Russia held a dress rehearsal on Saturday for the military parade to commemorate Victory Day on May 9, when the country marks the defeat of Nazi Germany during World War II.
In Moscow on Saturday, an RS-24 Yars intercontinental ballistic missile rolled through Red Square as part of the rehearsal, with warplanes and helicopters flying overhead, troops marching in formation and self-propelled artillery vehicles rumbling past.
Contributing: The Associated Press
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