Live Updates: Biden to Confer With Allies As Ukraine Tensions Rise

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As fears of a Ukraine invasion mount, President Biden is set to speak with global allies Friday afternoon about Russia’s buildup of military troops, in a continued effort to deter Moscow’s hostile advances on its neighbor.

While the American president has said “there is a path” to a diplomatic resolution, Mr. Biden has also warned that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, could launch an invasion within several days.

Washington and Moscow have been trading conflicting accounts over whether Russian forces are really pulling back from the Ukrainian border, with Russia insisting it has no plans to invade and dismissing the American warnings as “information terrorism.” A heated exchange of artillery fire on Thursday between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces, the most intense in months, amplified the hostilities and differences.

The separatists claimed on Thursday that they had come under fire from Ukrainians, the type of fighting that Western officials have warned Moscow might try to use to justify military action. The Ukrainian military said that three adult civilians had been wounded at a kindergarten by shelling.

The fighting set off another diplomatic scramble. A White House official said that Mr. Biden will host a phone call with trans-Atlantic leaders in “continued efforts to pursue deterrence and diplomacy.” It is unclear who will join.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Thursday made an unscheduled trip to New York, where he told the United Nations Security Council that Moscow appeared to be setting the stage for an attack. Mr. Blinken also accepted a proposal to meet with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, late next week.

A State Department spokesman, Ned Price, did not provide a time or place for the meeting, the diplomats’ second in two months, except to say it would not happen if Russia attacked Ukraine. “If they do invade in the coming days, it will make clear they were never serious about diplomacy,” Mr. Price said in the statement.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, also offered an ominous assessment on Thursday. “The excessive concentration of Ukrainian forces near the contact line, together with possible provocations, can pose terrible danger,” he said.

STANYTSIA LUHANSKA, Ukraine — The sharp cracks of explosions echoed off buildings and flashes of light from incoming artillery shells silhouetted trees on the edge of this town on the frontline of the war in eastern Ukraine, which escalated sharply on Thursday.

The fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces has been flaring for eight years, long before the threat of a broader conflict between Russia and Ukraine that has loomed for the last month. Daily skirmishes, mostly low-level and localized, had become routine.

But an outbreak of hostilities on Thursday, which each side blamed on the other, was viewed in Ukraine and in Western capitals as a particularly perilous moment for its potential to spiral into a bigger conflict that would draw the United States and Europe into a tense standoff with Russia.

The United States has said that Russia has massed about 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. And Western military analysts have predicted that Russia may claim an unprovoked attack, perhaps manufactured by Moscow, to justify an intervention in eastern Ukraine, possibly under the claim of serving as a peacekeeping force.

That sequence of events has played out before. In 2008, the Russian army invaded Georgia after a flare-up in fighting between government troops and a Russian-backed separatist movement in South Ossetia, a region of Georgia that Moscow now recognizes as an independent state.

Yelnya

Russian or Russian-

backed military

positions as of Feb. 13

Minsk

Ukraine

BELARUS

RUSSIA

Klintsy

Kursk

POLAND

Kyiv

Lviv

Kharkiv

Boguchar

UKRAINE

Stanytsia Luhanska

Dnipro

Luhansk

Donetsk

Approximate line

separating Ukrainian

and Russian-backed

separatist forces.

MOLDOVA

Rostov-on-Don

Tiraspol

ROMANIA

Odessa

SEA OF

AZOV

CRIMEA

Sevastopol

200 MILES

BLACK SEA

Russian or Russian-backed

military positions as of Feb. 13

Ukraine

Yelnya

BELARUS

RUSSIA

Brest

Klintsy

POL.

Pogonovo

Kyiv

Lviv

Soloti

UKRAINE

Stanytsia Luhanska

Luhansk

Kryvyi Rih

MOLDOVA

Donetsk

ROMANIA

Odessa

Approximate line

separating Ukrainian

and Russian-backed

separatist forces.

CRIMEA

Sevastopol

BLACK SEA

200 MILES

The artillery strikes began early Thursday and continued into the evening. The Ukrainian military reported 47 cease-fire violations in at least 25 different locations, including two towns, Stanytsia Luhanska and Popasna.

The Ukrainian military said shells hit a kindergarten, wounding three teachers but no students, as well as the playground of a high school. They also said two soldiers and a woman at a bus station were wounded. There were no reported fatalities.

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“It was a whistling sound, then an explosion,” said Tatyana Podikay, the director of the school, called Fairytale Kindergarten.

The teachers herded the students into a hallway with no windows, the building’s safest place, and waited for parents to pick them up. “To create a calm psychological atmosphere the teachers told stories, and whoever needed it got a hug,” Ms. Podikay said.

Analysts said the nature of the shelling, which hit multiple sites along the contact line all in a single day, was unusual compared to recent months. “Today it was long-distance and synchronized shelling,” said Maria Zolkina, a political analyst. “It was simultaneous. This is notable.”

After a lull in the afternoon, artillery fire resumed Thursday evening in Stanytsia Luhanska, a hardscrabble town of dusty, potholed roads surrounded by farm fields, not far from the Russian border. There is a gas station, a few leafy residential streets and not much else.

Shells exploded in or near the town in at least two volleys of a half dozen rounds each. Drivers stopped their cars, got out and listened, worriedly.

Amid the fighting, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine flew to the front line to visit troops and was quoted in Ukrainian media saying he was proud of the army for “giving a worthy rebuff to the enemy.”

In Brussels, the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, said that the reports of shelling were “troubling.” While the United States was still gathering details, Mr. Austin said: “We’ve said for some time that the Russians might do something like this in order to justify a military conflict. So we’ll be watching this very closely.”

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, blamed Russia for a “severe violation” of the tenuous cease-fire agreement in the region, while Mr. Zelensky described it as “provocative shelling.”

The Kremlin was taking a different line. “We have warned many times that excessive concentration of Ukrainian forces near the contact line, together with possible provocations, can pose terrible danger,” President Vladimir V. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said. He added that he hoped Western countries would warn Kyiv against a “further escalation of tensions.”

The Russian-backed separatists also blamed the Ukrainian army. Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, said the Ukrainian army had shelled civilians early Thursday morning — a claim that could not be independently verified.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, has said about a quarter of the inhabitants in the separatist regions — that would be 750,000 out of about three million — are Russian citizens. A strike that wounds or kills a Russian citizen could elevate the risk of a Russian response.

To highlight what it called reckless firing into civilian areas, the Ukrainian military flew reporters to the site of the damaged kindergarten. The strike also knocked out electricity and sent residents scrambling into basements to seek cover.

The Ukrainian military said a 122-millimeter artillery shell hit the school, spraying cinder blocks into a play area for toddlers that was empty at the time.

Artillery and small-arms fire are common along the frontline, where an international monitoring group typically reports dozens to hundreds of cease-fire violations every day in recent years. Homes, schools, administrative buildings and infrastructure including electrical pylons are often damaged. Earlier this year, Ukrainian authorities reported that a drone strike hit an abandoned school in an eastern Ukrainian town.

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Stanytsia Luhanksa, Ukraine, and Valerie Hopkins from Kyiv. Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow.

BRUSSELS — Ulrike Franke is a self-confessed German millennial, a defense analyst who worries about her generation’s allergy to the military, especially as it moves into positions of power.

“After 30 years of peace,’’ she wrote last year in a well-read essay, “German millennials have a hard time adjusting to the world we are living in now. We struggle to think in terms of interests, we struggle with the concept of geopolitical power, and we struggle with military power being an element of geopolitical power.”

Russia’s massive and open military threat to Ukraine, she and others say, is now shaking a sense of complacency among young and old Europeans alike who have never known war, hot or cold. For some, at least, the moment is an awakening as the threat of war grows real.

But just how far Europe is prepared to go in shifting from a world where peace and security were taken for granted remains to be seen. For decades Europeans have paid relatively little in money, lives or resources for their defense — and paid even less attention, sheltering under an American nuclear umbrella left over from the Cold War.

That debate had begun to shift in recent years, even before Russia’s menacing of Ukraine, with talk of a more robust and independent European strategic and defense posture. But the crisis has done as much to expose European weakness on security issues as it has to fortify its sense of unity.