Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

The invasion Vladimir Putin thought would last days is now in its fourth month. The Ukrainian people surprised Russia and inspired the world with their sacrifice, grit and battlefield success. The free world and many other nations, led by the United States, rallied to Ukraine’s side with unprecedented military, humanitarian and financial support.

As the war goes on, I want to be clear about the aims of the United States in these efforts.

America’s goal is straightforward: We want to see a democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression.

As President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said, ultimately this war “will only definitively end through diplomacy.” Every negotiation reflects the facts on the ground. We have moved quickly to send Ukraine a significant amount of weaponry and ammunition so it can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.

That’s why I’ve decided that we will provide the Ukrainians with more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine.

We will continue cooperating with our allies and partners on Russian sanctions, the toughest ever imposed on a major economy. We will continue providing Ukraine with advanced weaponry, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles, powerful artillery and precision rocket systems, radars, unmanned aerial vehicles, Mi-17 helicopters and ammunition. We will also send billions more in financial assistance, as authorized by Congress. We will work with our allies and partners to address the global food crisis that Russia’s aggression is worsening. And we will help our European allies and others reduce their dependence on Russian fossil fuels, and speed our transition to a clean energy future.

We will also continue reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank with forces and capabilities from the United States and other allies. And just recently, I welcomed Finland’s and Sweden’s applications to join NATO, a move that will strengthen overall U.S. and trans-Atlantic security by adding two democratic and highly capable military partners.

We do not seek a war between NATO and Russia. As much as I disagree with Mr. Putin, and find his actions an outrage, the United States will not try to bring about his ouster in Moscow. So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces. We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia.

My principle throughout this crisis has been “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” I will not pressure the Ukrainian government — in private or public — to make any territorial concessions. It would be wrong and contrary to well-settled principles to do so.

Ukraine’s talks with Russia are not stalled because Ukraine has turned its back on diplomacy. They are stalled because Russia continues to wage a war to take control of as much of Ukraine as it can. The United States will continue to work to strengthen Ukraine and support its efforts to achieve a negotiated end to the conflict.

Unprovoked aggression, the bombing of maternity hospitals and centers of culture, and the forced displacement of millions of people make the war in Ukraine a profound moral issue. I met with Ukrainian refugees in Poland — women and children who were unsure what their lives would be, and whether the loved ones who stayed behind in Ukraine would be OK. No person of conscience could be unmoved by the devastation of these horrors.

Standing by Ukraine in its hour of need is not just the right thing to do. It is in our vital national interests to ensure a peaceful and stable Europe and to make it clear that might does not make right. If Russia does not pay a heavy price for its actions, it will send a message to other would-be aggressors that they too can seize territory and subjugate other countries. It will put the survival of other peaceful democracies at risk. And it could mark the end of the rules-based international order and open the door to aggression elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences the world over.

I know many people around the world are concerned about the use of nuclear weapons. We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible. Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.

Americans will stay the course with the Ukrainian people because we understand that freedom is not free. That’s what we have always done whenever the enemies of freedom seek to bully and oppress innocent people, and it is what we are doing now. Vladimir Putin did not expect this degree of unity or the strength of our response. He was mistaken. If he expects that we will waver or fracture in the months to come, he is equally mistaken.

Boris Johnson has insisted the UK must continue to show its support for Ukraine.

He said today: “The Russians are grinding forward inch by inch and it is vital for us to show what we know to be true which is that Ukraine can win and will win.

“When Ukraine fatigue is setting in, it is very important to show that we are with them for the long haul and we are giving them the strategic resilience that they need.”

A “large column of smoke” can be seen over a Topaz plant in Russian-occupied Donetsk, according to Belarusian media outlet Nexta.

Britons on the streets of Nottingham earlier this month told Express.co.uk the West should be encouraging more peace talks between Ukraine and Russia to bring the conflict to an end.

Some argued that the UK should be wary about getting too involved in the war and should, for example, cease sending arms.

Pensioner Barbara Finch said the delivery of weapons supported the notion that the “human race does not learn its lessons”.

Septuagenarian Stewart Crisp added that he fears Ukraine will become a land of “ongoing warfare”, like Syria, where the UK has also been criticised for the shape of its involvement.

Read more here.

As well as appearing to be snubbed by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in yesterday gathering of the annual Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (see below), Vladimir Putin is said to have received a “tepid” response when discussing the war in Ukraine.

Max Seddon commented in a post on Twitter that most officials at the event had done their “utmost” to avoid the subject.

When the Kremlin leader declared that “all of [the war’s] tasks will be undoubtedly be met”, Mr Seddon added that there was only “tepid applause”.

Read more here.

Gazprom said its supply of gas to Europe through Ukraine via the Sudzha entry point was down to 41.1million cubic metres today.

Yesterday, it stood at 41.9mcm.

The Russian gas producer, cited in Reuters, said it had made an application to supply gas via another entry point, but this was rejected by Ukraine.

In its latest intelligence update on the war in Ukraine, the UK Ministry of Defence said Russia had “likely renewed its efforts to advance south of Izium, with the goal of advancing deeper into the Donetsk Oblast, and to envelop the Sieverodonetsk Pocket from the north”.

UK Ministry of Defence update. (Image: Twitter/@DefenceHQ)

Boris Johnson received a warm welcome in Kyiv yesterday, where he met with Volodymyr Zelensky for the second time since the beginning of the war.

But in England, Tories were left frustrated by a late event cancellation.

The Prime Minister was scheduled to make a Wakefield by-election campaign visit and to engage in a Q&A session with Northern Tories.

Christopher Hope of the Telegraph quoted one Northern Research Group source in a post on Twitter as fuming: “Sadly, today’s events show the PM has no commitment to levelling up, his voters, or the North of England. He is burning through goodwill, and looks scared to come and engage with the very group who delivered for him during the vote.”

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has since sprung to Mr Johnson’s… defence.

He wrote in a post on Twitter that the Kyiv visit was “organised in total secrecy”, as are all such events, and that “as a Northern MP myself, I am not affronted by the fact he had to cancel speaking at the conference”.

Mr Wallace added: “As a northern MP I am proud that Britain has been at the forefront of the international effort to support Ukriane.”

He dismissed backlash to the change of scheduling as “a lot of rubbish”.

So there is a lot of rubbish being spouted about the PMu2019s trip to Ukriane. 1. Firstly these trips are organised in total secrecy. Very few, and i mean very few, people know the dates and arrangements. Russia is still launching missile strikes right across Ukriane . 1/5

u2014 Rt. Hon Ben Wallace MP (@BWallaceMP) June 17, 2022

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has urged the West not to suggest “peace initiatives with unacceptable terms”.

Writing in the Odessa Journal, he said such proposals “are premised on the idea that, no matter how well Ukrainians fight, they cannot defeat Moscow’s forces”.

This, Mr Kuleba argued, “is wrong”.

He drew particular attention to Emmanuel Macron’s claim that the West “must not humiliate Russia” so it can “build an exit ramp” for the country after the war.

Few were keen to broach the subject of the war in Ukraine yesterday at the annual Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum, according to reports.

When Vladimir Putin did so, one of his claims was rejected by a key ally onstage.

The Kremlin leader argued the invasion was justified because he was protecting Russian-speakers in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk peoples’ republics of eastern Ukraine, which Russia recognised as independent ahead of the “special military operation”.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, sat beside him, signalled that he disagreed.

He, quoted in Bloomberg, said Kazakhstan does not recognise “quasi-state territories which, in our view, is what Luhansk and Donetsk are”, and added there would be “chaos” in the world hundreds of new countries emerged.

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. (Image: Getty)

Three hearings from the House committee investigating Jan. 6 have undercut former President Donald J. Trump’s claims of a stolen election.Credit…Kenny Holston for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — It was all a lie, the tales of stuffed ballot drop boxes, rigged voting machines, and constitutional “flexibility” that would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the 2020 election results and send them back to Republican state legislatures.

The first three hearings of the House Jan. 6 committee have deeply undercut, if not demolished, the postelection myths repeated incessantly by former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters and embraced and amplified by Republicans in Congress.

A parade of Republican witnesses — his attorney general, William P. Barr, his daughter Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign lawyers — knew he had lost the election and told him so. Mr. Trump was informed that the demands he was making of Mr. Pence to block his defeat unilaterally were illegal. Even the most active coup plotter, the conservative lawyer John C. Eastman, conceded before Jan. 6 that his scheme was illegal and unconstitutional, then sought a presidential pardon after it led to mob violence.

Yet the most striking revelation so far may be how deeply Mr. Trump’s disregard for the truth and the rule of law have penetrated into the Republican Party, taking root in the fertile soil of a right-wing electorate stewing in conspiracy theories and well tended by their media of choice. The Republican response to the hearings — a combination of indifference, diversion and doubling down — reflects how central the lie of a stolen election has become to the party’s identity.

In Washington, Republicans in Congress have neither broken with Mr. Trump nor expended much energy trying to rebut the investigation’s findings. And from Nevada’s secretary of state race to Michigan’s contest for governor, Republican candidates have embraced the fictional conspiracy in their 2022 campaigns.

“I have been fighting for safe, honest and transparent elections since before Jan. 6, and that fight continues,” said Michigan State Representative Steve Carra, whose re-election run has been blessed by Mr. Trump and who said Friday he has watched some but not much of the hearings. “Absentee ballots sent out unsolicited, signature verification relaxed, drop boxes all over the place, especially in Democratic area — it all deserves further scrutiny.”

Like mint in the garden, the seeds that the Trump team planted between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, are now growing out of control, aided by the former president’s allies.

Jarome Bell, a leading candidate to challenge Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia, has been traveling her Republican-leaning district showing voters a film by the right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza that pushes the bogus fraud claims. The hearings, he said on Friday, have had “no impact on me. ‘2000 Mules’ has a bigger impact on what truly happened.” He added, “the 1/6 commission is the cover-up.”

Jon Rocha, a candidate for state representative in Michigan who has Mr. Trump’s backing, also cited the film and bragged that he had watched none of the hearings, “not even a 30-second clip.”

One reason the falsehoods have flourished is the failure of Republicans who do not believe them to push back. Before the Jan. 6 hearings began, Republican leaders promised a robust “rapid response” effort to counter the narratives that would emerge.

But there has been no such pushback from the Republican National Committee or any other organization to revelations that Mr. Trump continued to pressure Mr. Pence to overturn the election results, even after having been told doing so was illegal.

No Republican leader offered a response to the testimony of retired federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a revered conservative, who said on Thursday that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence an order whose execution would have prompted “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”

None bothered to counter the panel’s finding, revealed on Monday, that Mr. Trump and his campaign raised hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters based on the false pretense of massive election fraud, using money collected for an election defense fund that did not exist.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, has chosen not to engage on the issue at all. And to the extent that they are trying to counterprogram the hearings, House Republicans have been prodding voters to look elsewhere — to rising gas prices, inflation and migrants at the southern border.

Only Mr. Trump seems particularly irritated by the exercise, appalled by the testimony of his daughter, who shared details of his abusive phone call with Mr. Pence on the morning of Jan. 6 and said she trusted Mr. Barr’s judgment when he said that the 2020 election was not stolen.

“It’s a one-way street, it’s a rigged deal, it’s a disgrace,” a thoroughly unrepentant Mr. Trump said on Friday at a speech in Nashville in which he called Jan. 6 “a simple protest that got out of hand” as he continued spinning out false claims and grand conspiracy theories of election fraud.

But if his allies in Republican leadership are not countering the message that the attack was fueled by lies, neither are they acknowledging that the election was not stolen.

And 50 years to the day after henchmen of Richard M. Nixon broke into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, the hearings sparked by the two scandals are highlighting just how dramatically the Republican Party has changed. Then, key Republican leaders reacted to increasingly damning revelations about their president by siding with the Democrats and forcing Mr. Nixon from power. Today, Republican leaders are either silent or contemptuous of the committee uncovering a steady stream of misdeeds by Mr. Trump.

Representatives Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney, and Adam B. Schiff “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, wrote on Twitter, referring to the Democratic chairman from Mississippi, Republican vice chairwoman from Wyoming and Democratic member from California.

Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting Jan. 6, said the hearings have so far been “a reminder of how deeply divided, even from an information consumption standpoint, we are.”

Many of his constituents have not even seen the videotaped testimony laying out the case against Mr. Trump — only footage of police removing barricades to let rioters into the Capitol on Jan 6. Some blame nonexistent F.B.I. provocateurs for the violence, in line with a debunked conspiracy theory embraced by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others on the right.

Mr. Meijer said he has heard far more from constituents on the right lamenting the “Jan. 6 political prisoners” than those in the center demanding accountability for the attack.

Most voters, though, are not paying attention, said Representative David Valadao of California, another Republican to vote for impeachment.

“Talking to voters at home right now — I mean, the fuel prices, food prices, baby formula, you name it,” Mr. Valadao said. “There’s just so many things that people are focused on right now that they’re just not paying attention to the Jan. 6 stuff as much as I know a lot of folks would want them to.”

Asked if the hearings might do Republicans a favor by making it easier to find an alternative presidential nominee in 2024 than Mr. Trump, he responded: “I don’t know if enough people are paying attention where it’ll have that big of an impact.”

But in a Republican primary season fueled by pro-Trump fervor, many candidates have emerged as their party’s nominees for top offices in large part because they campaigned on the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen by President Biden.

The Republican nominees for governor in Pennsylvania, secretary of state in Nevada, Senate in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and attorney general in Texas all tried to overturn the 2020 election or embraced false claims of voter fraud.

Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican who won a House seat in a special election on Tuesday, has declined to say whether Mr. Biden won in 2020, telling The San Antonio Express-News: “I’m speaking just in general. There is voter fraud.”

And there is more to come. State Representative Ron Hanks, vying to challenge Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, in Colorado’s Republican primary June 28, marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and launched his campaign with an ad showing him shooting a fake Dominion voting machine, a device central to a sprawling conspiracy theory about votes purportedly stolen by foreign powers from Mr. Trump.

On Monday, the committee showed a videotaped deposition in which Mr. Barr at one point could barely suppress his laughter at the absurdity of such stories and testified that Mr. Trump would have had to be “detached from reality” if he believed them.

In Michigan, a wild contest to choose the Republican to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is narrowly led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the Jan. 6 riot. Mr. Rocha, the state house candidate in Western Michigan, said voters were far more concerned about gas prices and empty store shelves than the Jan. 6 hearings, then offered that voters in fact are still very angry about “election integrity.”

“They did it in 2020. Now they’re finding new avenues to remove Republicans from the ballot this year,” he said.

In Arizona, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made her “stolen election” claims central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was at the front steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6. And Blake Masters, who hopes to challenge Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, suggested baselessly that “one-third of the people outside of the Capitol complex on Jan. 6 were actual F.B.I. agents.”

Annie Karni contributed reporting.