• Veteran aide Chubais quits over war, leaves Russia
• Biden on first foreign trip since war began

Russian forces bombed areas of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv yesterday, a month into their assault, while Western leaders gathered in Brussels to plan more measures to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to halt his campaign.
Putin, responding to a welter of Western sanctions that have hit Russia’s economy hard and frozen its assets, said Moscow planned to switch its gas sales to “unfriendly” countries to roubles — a move that alarmed international markets.
And in a sign of cracks in Moscow’s ranks, a veteran aide to Putin, Anatoly Chubais, resigned over the Ukraine war and has left Russia with no intention to return, two sources said. He was first senior official to break with the Kremlin since Putin launched his invasion on February 24.
Chubais was one of the principal architects of Boris Yeltsin’s economic reforms of the 1990s and was Putin’s boss in the future president’s first Kremlin job. He later ran big state businesses under Putin and held political jobs, lately serving as Kremlin special envoy to international organisations.
Chubais hung up the phone when contacted by Reuters. The sources did not say where he was.
Although the invasion force has stalled in some areas and fierce Ukrainian resistance has thwarted its hopes for a swift victory, Russian artillery and air strikes maintained their bombardments on several cities, while civilians who have been unable or unwilling to flee sheltered underground.
“I have never seen such cruelty before,” said Kateryna Mytkevich, 38, who reached the Polish border transit hub of Przemysl with her child after fleeing the eastern city of Chernihiv. The city was “fully destroyed”, she said.
US President Joe Biden was flying to Europe for an emergency summit on Ukraine with Nato and European leaders at the Western military alliance’s headquarters in Brussels yesterday.
The leaders are expected to roll out additional sanctions against Russia. They would also agree to bolster forces on the alliance’s eastern flank, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference ahead of the summit.
However, he said Nato would not send troops into Ukraine.
“It is extremely important to provide support to Ukraine and we are stepping up. But at the same time it is also extremely important to prevent this conflict becoming a full-fledged war between Nato and Russia,” he said.
Putin’s announcement that Russia would switch certain gas sales to roubles sent European futures soaring on concerns the switch would exacerbate the region’s energy crunch and jam up deals that run to hundreds of millions of dollars every day.
Russian gas accounts for some 40% of Europe’s total gas consumption.
Moscow has drawn up a list of “unfriendly” countries, which corresponds to those that imposed sanctions. They include the US, EU members, Britain and Japan, among others. “Russia will continue, of course, to supply natural gas in accordance with volumes and prices...fixed in previously concluded contracts,” Putin said at a televised meeting with government ministers.
“The changes will only affect the currency of payment, which will be changed to Russian roubles,” he said.
Western sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions have ostracised it from the world economy.
Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, told reporters yesterday that 264 civilians in the city had been killed by Russian attacks. The noise of bombs falling could be heard in background as he spoke. But Ukrainian forces had retaken the nearby towns of Makariv and Irpin from Russian control, he said.
Worst hit has been Mariupol, a southern port surrounded by Russian forces. Satellite photographs from commercial firm Maxar released overnight showed massive destruction of what was once a city of 400,000 people, with columns of smoke rising from residential apartment buildings in flames.
In Moscow, the Kremlin confirmed that Chubais, the senior official had resigned of his own accord.