Dozens of Ukrainian soldiers are killed, as the government vowed an “all-out defense.” NATO’s secretary general condemned the “reckless and unprovoked attack” by Russia.

 

Live Updates: Russia Attacks Ukraine From Land, Air and Sea

Dozens of Ukrainian soldiers are killed, as the government vowed an “all-out defense.” NATO’s secretary general condemned the “reckless and unprovoked attack” by Russia.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/24/world/russia-attacks-ukraine

 

 

Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Marc Santora and Shashank Bengali

 

Here’s how the Russian attack is unfolding.

Early Thursday, just as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia announced on television that he had decided “to carry out a special military operation” in Ukraine, explosions were reported across the country.

 

Blasts were heard in Kyiv, the capital; in Kharkiv, the second largest city; and in Kramatorsk in the region of Donetsk, one of two eastern Ukrainian territories claimed by Russia-backed separatists since 2014.

 

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that Russian troops had landed in the southern port city of Odessa and were crossing from Russia into Kharkiv. Footage captured by security cameras showed Russian military vehicles crossing into Ukraine from Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in 2014.

 

Rocket attacks targeted Ukrainian fighter jets parked at an airport outside Kyiv, and Ukraine closed its airspace to commercial flights, citing the “potential hazard to civilian aviation.”

 

More than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in the fighting on Thursday morning, said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

 

As air raid sirens blared in Kyiv, the western city of Lviv and other urban areas, residents rushed to take shelter in bus and subway stations. In Kyiv, people packed up their cars and waited in long lines to fill up with gas on their way out of the city. In eastern Ukraine, early signs of panic appeared on the streets as lines formed at A.T.M.s and gas stations.

 

With attacks across the country, it quickly became clear that Russia’s campaign, whatever Mr. Putin meant by a “special military operation,” was aimed at far more than the rebel territories in the east. Within an hour, Ukraine’s state emergency service said that attacks had been launched in 10 regions of Ukraine, primarily in the east and south, and that reports of new shelling were “coming in constantly.”

 

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, called it “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine” and said his country would defend itself, while calling on the world to “stop Putin.”

 

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it was using “high-precision weapons” to disable military infrastructure, air defense facilities, military airfields and Ukrainian army planes, Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported. But the ministry said it was not attacking cities, and promised that “the civilian population is not at risk.”

 

The Ukrainian authorities said that invading naval forces were coming ashore at multiple points, including in Kharkiv and the southern city of Kherson. Three emergency workers were injured when a command post was struck by shelling in Nizhyn, in the north, and six people were trapped under rubble when the city’s airport came under attack, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry reported.

 

Military depots, warehouses and National Guard were hit with artillery blasts, the ministry said.

 

As dawn broke in Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky of Ukraine said he had declared martial law. The country’s defense minister told citizens that the army was “fending off enemy forces” and “doing everything it can to protect you.”

 

But the army was under siege. In the east, Russia-backed separatists — their ranks bolstered by the arrival of hundreds of Russian mercenaries in recent days, according to European officials — said they were hammering Ukrainian troops along the entire 250-mile front line that has divided the rebels and Ukrainian forces since 2014.

 

Seeking to capture the entire territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Mr. Putin recognized as independent on Monday, the rebels were “using all weapons at their disposal,” the Russian news media reported. Ukrainian officials said the attacks included artillery strikes.

 

Ukraine’s state border service reported that Russian troops stationed in Belarus, north of Ukraine, had launched an attack with support from the Belarusian military. Russia had deployed as many as 30,000 troops to Belarus for exercises this month that the United States warned could provide cover for an attack against Kyiv, which lies a fast 140-mile drive away from a main border crossing. President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus denied that his forces were involved.

 

By midmorning in Kyiv, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had disabled all of Ukraine’s air defenses and air bases. Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that Russian forces had captured two villages in the Luhansk region.

 

The fighting intensified as Ukrainian forces shot down six Russian fighters and a helicopter in a fight to maintain control over key cities, a senior Ukrainian military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to release information outside official channels. Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, called on all Ukrainian civilians to join the fight and enlist with territorial defense units.

 

“Ukraine is moving into all-out defense mode,” he said.

 

 

Sabrina Tavernise

Feb. 24, 2022, 8:26 a.m. ET5 minutes ago

5 minutes ago

Sabrina Tavernise

 

‘By the evening, I think half of Ukraine will be Russian’: Residents scramble to flee Kyiv.

KYIV, Ukraine — A mass migration appeared to be underway in Kyiv on Thursday as people fled the Ukrainian capital for parts of the country they thought might be safer after a Russian military assault began.

 

Lines formed at bank machines, and frantic shoppers emptied grocery store shelves in a number of neighborhoods. Some hauled shopping bags, suitcases, cat carriers and dogs and children in tow, as they poured into Kyiv’s main bus station, overflowed onto its sidewalks and surrounded open bus doors to push against drivers trying to control the flow of the crowds.

 

“Let’s do this without chaos. Calm down!” urged one driver standing in front of a large white bus headed for the city of Lviv.

 

A river of red taillights stretched for miles along the road that leads west to Lviv, and eventually, Poland.

 

Roman Timofeyev, who was standing with four friends in Kyiv’s main bus station and trying to get on a bus, said he was trying to reach Lviv and then Poland. He said he had packed clothes, documents and medicine for the trip. At first, he said, he didn’t think he would leave, but then “it was too unexpected to hear the explosions near the houses, so we are afraid.”

 

His friend, Nastya Oleinik, said, “We didn’t sleep all night.”

 

He and his friends planned to go to Turkey for a few weeks to wait out whatever might happen.

 

“Wait for the end of war, and then come back,” he said.

 

A young man in gray sweatpants and black hat sat looking stunned on a small black duffle bag next to a long line of prospective bus passengers. He said he was waiting for a bus west.

 

“Horrible,” said the man, who gave only his first name, Alexander, and said he was 18. “Our people, our military are now dying in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and it’s horrible. Tanks from Belarus started to attack us. So I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

 

Asked whether he would come back to Kyiv, he said, “If it will be Russian, no,” and added, “By the evening, I think half of Ukraine will be Russian.”

 

As tickets sold out and more people poured in, some residents began to organize their own buses. A young man with a large green backpack said he had not been able to buy a ticket to the town he wanted to go to, Viltnitsa. So he had called around and found a driver who was willing to make the trip, provided that he gathered 55 people who could pay for it in half an hour.

 

He said he had walked into the parking lot and shouted the name of the town, and almost immediately filled the seats. A woman in a pink jacket was writing down the names.

 

“He told me it could take up to 60,” he said to her as she wrote a name in her small notebook. “We can take five more.”

 

In front of Kyiv’s central train station, several police officers stood in front of the main doors, turning prospective passengers away.

 

“They’re canceled,” one of the officers said to a young woman in a gray coat. “I don’t have any more information.”

 

Inside, passengers sat staring at their phones, trying to find ways out of the city. A young couple sat on the floor next to a large black suitcase piled high with coats. They said they were trying to get to the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, but had not been able to reach their family there since last night. And with trains stopped, they were intensely focused on their phones, looking for other options.

 

A young woman, Tatiana Melnik, sat on a window ledge with her 5-year-old daughter, Karolina, and tried to make arrangements after their train was canceled.

 

“We don’t know where to go or what to do,” Ms. Melnik said.

 

Ivan Nechepurenko

Feb. 24, 2022, 8:09 a.m. ET22 minutes ago

22 minutes ago

Ivan Nechepurenko

 

Russian celebrities denounce the military operation.

 

Russian celebrities joined a chorus of public figures on Thursday in condemning President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to launch military action in Ukraine.

 

Maksim Galkin, one of Russia’s most popular television anchors, said he could not express his feelings.

 

“There can be no justification for war, I say no to war!” Mr. Galkin, who runs a popular prime time show on a state-run television network, wrote on Instagram.

 

Valery Meladze, a popular singer who is often featured on state-run television networks, said in a video statement: “What happened today is something that could not and should not have happened, ever.”

 

“I plead you to stop military hostilities and start negotiations,” he said, without specifying whom he was referring to.

 

Zemfira Ramazanova, one of Russia’s most popular rock stars, published a post saying: “No to war.”

 

By speaking out against Mr. Putin’s decisions, Russian celebrities often put their careers at risk. The government controls vast segments of Russia’s popular culture by filtering access to the main television networks it controls.

 

Ksenia Sobchak, a popular socialite and journalist, was barred for years from appearing on state-sponsored shows because of her participation in anti-government protests. After reading the news on Thursday morning, she was bewildered.

 

“We Russians will deal with had happened today for many years,” Ms. Sobchak said in a post on Instagram. “I will now trust only the worst scenarios, even though I have always been optimistic,” she said, adding that “only optimists stayed in Russia, pessimists are long gone.”

 

Tyler Hicks

Feb. 24, 2022, 8:01 a.m. ET30 minutes ago

30 minutes ago

Tyler Hicks

Packing up belongings from an apartment to move farther away from the military airport, which was bombed Thursday morning in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine.

 

Feb. 24, 2022, 7:56 a.m. ET35 minutes ago

35 minutes ago

Matina Stevis-Gridneff

 

As the E.U. weighs new sanctions on Russia, it’s considering omitting Putin for now.

BRUSSELS — European Union ambassadors in Brussels moved closer to consensus on a significant package of sanctions targeting broad sectors of the Russian economy and individuals on Thursday, but were debating whether to keep President Vladimir V. Putin off their list for now, diplomats who participated in or were briefed on the talks said.

 

The ambassadors met on Thursday morning, just hours after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and were scheduled to meet again in the afternoon to prepare for negotiations that E.U. leaders will hold in Brussels on Thursday evening about an overall response to the invasion.

 

Diplomats said that earlier resistance by some countries over specific sectors — for example, by Italy over luxury goods and Belgium over diamonds — had evaporated in the face of the invasion and that there was now broad consensus across the 27 member states.

 

The E.U.’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, described the proposed measures on Thursday morning as the “the harshest package of sanctions we have ever implemented.”

 

But a new rift emerged: A handful of member states led by Germany were advocating that the package exclude Mr. Putin for now.

 

Asked for comment, a German diplomat did not deny that Germany wanted to keep Mr. Putin off the latest sanctions.

 

The rationale for omitting him is a desire to keep channels open for dialogue with the top Russian leadership. They were considering exempting Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov for the same reason.

 

But other member states argued that the bloc should immediately inflict the maximum possible pain on Russia rather than hold back in hopes of renewed diplomatic dialogue.

 

E.U. leaders were scheduled to convene in Brussels on Thursday evening and were expected to meet through the night. The sanctions they are expected to agree on will come into effect when the legal language is published, on Friday or Saturday, diplomats said.

 

 

Feb. 24, 2022, 7:56 a.m. ET35 minutes ago

35 minutes ago

Stanley ReedReporting from London

The extent of the Russian military operation ordered by President Vladimir V. Putin appeared to surprise people in the oil markets, and could explain the powerful jump in prices, said Richard Bronze, the head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm. “There was a mistaken view in the market as recently as yesterday that either Putin had gotten enough to pause or that things would be limited to the Donbas,” he said, referring to the disputed region in eastern Ukraine.

 

Andrew Higgins

Feb. 24, 2022, 7:43 a.m. ET47 minutes ago

47 minutes ago

Andrew Higgins

 

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, is a major target of Russia. Here’s why.

 

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and a major target of Russia’s invading forces, has a special place in the Kremlin’s version of history, which portrays it as the place that demonstrates the folly of Ukraine trying to live apart from Russia.

 

Russian troops poured across the border just 20 miles from the city early Thursday with residents reporting loud explosions, apparently caused by artillery shells or missiles landing on the outskirts of town.

 

Closer to Russia than any other large Ukrainian city, Kharkiv has long loomed large in President Vladimir V. Putin’s view that Ukraine is no more than an appendage of Russia unjustly snatched away by the machinations of foreigners and misguided Ukrainian nationalists.

 

When protesters in Kyiv toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, in 2014, Kharkiv became the focus of a Russian-orchestrated effort to rally opposition to the new government in Kyiv and restore Mr. Yanukovych to power. The ousted president fled to Kharkiv, where the mayor at the time, Hennadiy Kernes, hosted a congress of pro-Russia politicians and officials from largely Russian-speaking regions in the east and southeast of Ukraine.

 

That effort, supported by Russian agents and agitators from across the nearby border, quickly fizzled but generated many of the propaganda tropes now being deployed by the Kremlin: claims that Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis; that Ukraine’s Russian speakers are in mortal danger; that Ukraine exists as a country only as result of foreign meddling.

 

Kharkiv, long a melting pot of different ethnic groups, including a large Jewish population, played a particularly important role in shaping Ukraine during and after World War I. It served as the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a largely Moscow-controlled entity set up in opposition to the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Kyiv, which sought to break away from Moscow and declared an independent Ukrainian state.

 

Soviet forces based in Kharkiv quickly crushed this early attempt at Ukrainian statehood, seizing Kyiv in February 1918.

 

In a lengthy historical essay on Ukraine published last July, Mr. Putin cited this obscure episode as an example of the doomed, foolhardy attempts to establish a Ukrainian state by “the different quasi-state formations that emerged across the former Russian empire.”

 

This history, Mr. Putin added, carried a pointed message for the current leaders of Ukraine: “For those who have today given up the full control of Ukraine to external forces, it would be instructive to remember that, back in 1918, such a decision proved fatal for the ruling regime in Kiev.”

  

Dozens of soldiers are killed as Ukraine tries to mount an ‘all-out defense.’

 

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces were in “all-out defense mode” on Thursday to repel a multipronged Russian assault by land, sea and air. The Ukrainian military claimed to have shot down several Russian military aircraft, and civilians lined up at recruitment offices to take up arms against President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces.

 

More than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in fighting on Thursday morning, said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

 

The country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that Ukraine was facing “a full-scale attack from multiple directions” but that it “continues to defend itself” from the Russian advance.

 

Initial reports of the fighting suggested that Russian forces had crossed into Ukraine at multiple points, with helicopter-borne troops flying in under the cover of machine-gun fire, naval units coming ashore in the southern port city of Odessa and military vehicles crossing from Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in 2014.

 

Ukrainian forces said they had shot down several Russian fighters and a helicopter in an increasingly intense battle to maintain control over key cities, a senior Ukrainian military official said. Ukrainian troops had also repelled Russian advances on two major cities: Chernihiv in the north, near the Belarus border, and Kharkiv in the northeast, close to Russia, the official said.

 

In videos posted to social media, Russian military vehicles were seen on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the second largest city, where troops had set up checkpoints on a main road.

 

The Ukrainian army is badly outgunned and outmanned by Russian forces, but in one indication that it was mounting a resistance, two Russian armored personnel carriers were seen damaged, one crashed into a tree, in the eastern Ukrainian town of Shchastya early Thursday.

 

Maryna Danyliuk, a retiree, was awaken by intense explosions — she believed them to be caused by Russian artillery fire — around 5 a.m. She hastily packed to flee.

 

By the time she was driving, she said in a telephone interview, she could hear sounds of combat on the town’s street, and saw the two apparently damaged armored vehicles. They had no markings other than a white circle surrounding the letter Z, a symbol that has been seen on Russian military vehicles in recent days on the Russian side of the border.

 

It was unclear what had happened to the vehicle crews, she said: “We were driving very fast. There was shooting in the city.”

 

In Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, about 100 men, ranging in age from their 20s to 50s, turned up at a military recruitment office even as the dull thuds of explosions could be heard from the direction of the town’s military airport.

 

They packed into a corridor and filled out forms to join the military, heeding a call from Ukraine’s defense minster, Oleksiy Reznikov, who asked all able citizens to immediately enlist with the country’s territorial defense units.

 

“The enemy is attacking, but our army is indestructible,” he said. “Ukraine is moving into all-out defense mode.”