BELGOROD, Russia — Russian conscripts are being forced into signing contracts and taken to serve in Ukraine amid a large-scale attack, human rights group the Committee of the Soldier’s Mothers told The Washington Post in an interview on Friday.

“Issue number one right now, eight out of 10 calls that we get are about the same question: ‘Is my child alive? Where is he?’" said Andrey Kurochkin, the organization’s deputy head.

Russia has mandatory one-year-long military service for all men under the age of 27. According to Russian regulations, conscripts can be sent to a combat zone no earlier than four months into their training. The Committee says it received a barrage of calls saying some conscripts barely served two months and are unprepared for the battlefield.

Kurochkin explains that, according to their mothers, some of the conscripts thought they were heading toward the Ukrainian border for drills, which is how Russia explained its massive buildup for weeks. “Then they are being told: now you are contractors,” he said. “And everyone’s phones are being taken away, while moms are crying and in panic.”

More than three decades after it was first introduced, a House bill that would create a commission to study reparations for Black Americans has the votes to pass, its key champions say.

That broad support, they contend, shows that the idea of reparations has gone from the fringes to the mainstream of American politics.
“This has been a 30-plus year journey,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). “We had to take a different approach. We had to go one by one to members explaining this does not generate a check.”

The commission would hold hearings with testimony from those who support and oppose the idea. Jackson Lee said the country would end up better from the process. “Reparations is about repair and when you repair the damage that has been done, you do so much to move a society forward. This commission can be a healing process — telling the truth can heal America,” she said.

Russian forces have entered Kyiv and were threatening the Ukrainian capital from the north-west and east in a lightning attack apparently aimed at seizing the city.

The defence ministry in Moscow claimed its forces had taken control of the strategic Hostomel airfield to the north-west after a day of fighting, while Russian tanks were filmed by locals in the Obolon suburb about six miles north of the city centre in the morning.

Gunfire could be also heard close to St Sophia Cathedral, reporters said, creating an increasingly tense atmosphere in the capital, which many expected would have been better defended given its obvious strategic significance.

Konrad Muzyka, the president of Rochan Consulting, said the “situation does look dire at the moment” particularly regarding Kyiv. “It appears that the main goal is to take Kyiv, break the C2 [command and control], and ‘decapitate’ the political leadership.”

BRUSSELS — The European Union will freeze the assets of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, but will not impose a travel ban on them, two diplomats familiar with the draft E.U. sanctions said on Friday.

The news, which was reported earlier by The Financial Times, came just hours after European leaders meeting into the early hours of Friday hammered out an agreement over a new set of sanctions that they said would hurt the Russian economy and put Mr. Putin under tremendous pressure as his troops advanced in their invasion of Ukraine.

The bloc’s 27 members had been able to push out a first set of sanctions on Wednesday in response to Mr. Putin’s recognition of separatist enclaves in Ukraine, and they did so in record time.

But the second package of penalties, which they described as unprecedented for the European Union in terms of size and reach, was harder to forge consensus on, even as Russian forces approached Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and war in Europe was no longer a theoretical concept, but a devastating reality.

(CNN)President Joe Biden has reached a decision on his first nominee to the Supreme Court, people familiar with the selection said Thursday, with his historic selection of the first Black woman to serve on the nation's highest court set to be revealed as soon as Friday.

The precise timing of the announcement remains fluid, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but a Friday ceremony would mark two years to the day when Biden made his initial pledge to choose the first African American female justice during a 2020 primary debate in South Carolina.

But even if the announcement is delayed beyond Friday afternoon, aides said, it will take place no later than Monday, the eve of the State of the Union address.

The first step of the carefully orchestrated rollout calls for the President to formally offer the lifetime position, a step that was poised to take place Thursday evening or Friday morning in hopes of preserving secrecy.