Explosions shook Ukraine at the crack of dawn on Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the largest full-scale invasion of a European nation since World War II.
Air strikes hit several cities, including the capital Kyiv, and Russian troops, tanks, and heavy weaponry crossed the border to invade from Belarus and the restive pro-Russian enclaves in the East.
Footage emerged of Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine unopposed, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the nation in an address Thursday morning that the army was engaging the Russian forces as they tried to move deeper into the country.
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He called on volunteers to pick up weapons and join the fight by defending the city squares from Putin’s onslaught. He also called for emergency blood donors. “We will give weapons to anyone who wants to defend the country. Be ready to support Ukraine in the squares of our cities,” he said.
As of Thursday afternoon, the Ukraine Interior Ministry said Russian forces had already attacked several sites in the Kyiv region by air, including the Gostomel airfield which is just 20 miles outside the capital.
The roads were jammed as people tried to leave the city by car, by bus or even on foot.
The Interior Ministry said ground battles were underway in the Luhansk region, where Russian forces trying to take the city of Schastye had suffered major losses. So far, Ukrainian troops were “holding the line,” the ministry said. Russian troops were also said to have suffered losses outside Kharkiv, and despite attempts to break through into the Zhytomyr Oblast in the north, authorities said border guards and Ukrainian soldiers were fighting back.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said it had recorded more than 30 strikes by Russian forces using Kalibr cruise missiles, on both civilian and military sites.
At least 137 Ukrainians were reported dead in the invasion.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had disabled 74 Ukrainian military facilities, and claimed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had directed troops to treat Ukrainian soldiers with respect.
U.S. President Joe Biden slammed Putin—who issued a bloodcurdling warning for the West to keep out of the conflict: “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history.”
Shortly after Putin made a surprise 5:40 a.m. appearance on Russian state TV to announce the invasion, residents and web cameras captured images of explosions across Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kyiv, which now appears to be the Russians’ key target. In the northeastern city of Kharkiv—less than an hour from the Russian border at which military vehicles had been massing—webcams captured explosions along the horizon.
“Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, declared in a tweet. “Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strikes. This is a war of aggression. Ukraine will defend itself and will win. The world can and must stop Putin. The time to act is now.”
Ukrainian citizens woke up to the sound of missile strikes.
“As soon as Putin declared a war against Ukraine I heard several very loud explosions near Shevchenko park, I believe they fired from the sea,” Odessa resident Boris Khodorkovsky told The Daily Beast. “I can hear our artillery now. We hear that the military storages and bases are under attack. I have two children, my wife’s parents are in Mariupol. I am thinking of how and where to take my family, where we could be safe. Right now it seems the attack is all over the country.”
Tanya Bezruk, a Ukrainian analyst in Kyiv, told The Daily Beast that terrifying messages were coming in from her friends and family all over the country. ‘Tanya, it’s fucked up, they fire at houses, that’s it. We run,” wrote one pregnant friend living in the south, close to Crimea.
Bezruk’s parents, who have been together for 30 years, are choosing not to run, but they told their daughter in a call on Thursday that tanks were closing in on their home in Kherson in the south. “It’s impossible to stay calm when your parents tell you that Russian tanks are coming their way,” she said, with her voice trembling. “This is just awful.”
People in Kyiv rushed down into the metro to seek shelter from the incoming missiles.
DANIEL LEALAFP via Getty ImagesPutin made his announcement about the invasion while the United Nations Security Council’s emergency meeting in New York was in progress. Impotent leaders decried the imminent attack.
In his speech, Putin attacked so-called Western-supported nationalists in power in Kyiv and called the West an “empire of lies.” He said “a clash with Russia is inevitable” and once again claimed that pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine’s occupied territories had requested military help to repel unspecified Ukrainian aggression.
“Circumstances require us to take decisive and immediate action,” he said.
The address came after a day of rapidly escalating tensions, with the Pentagon warning that Russian troops could invade Ukraine at “any hour” and Zelensky making a last-minute plea for peace as hundreds of thousands of Russian troops amassed on the border.
Biden said he would be monitoring the situation overnight and on Thursday would meet with his G7 counterparts and then address the nation. “Tonight, Jill and I are praying for the brave and proud people of Ukraine,” he said.
“The prayers of the entire world are with the people of Ukraine tonight as they suffer an unprovoked and unjustified attack by Russian military forces,” Biden said in a statement. “President Putin has chosen a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering. Russia alone is responsible for the death and destruction this attack will bring, and the United States and its Allies and partners will respond in a united and decisive way. The world will hold Russia accountable.”
Alarm bells in the West had reached a deafening pitch this week when Putin formally recognized the separatist leadership of Ukraine’s occupied territories and won approval from lawmakers to deploy troops into the country for a supposed “peacekeeping” mission.
A deeply alarming national address delivered by the Russian president on the eve of that deployment seemed to make clear it was anything but. In the hour-long speech, Putin spouted off a revisionist history according to which Ukraine was “created by Russia” and belittled the Ukrainian identity as “parasitical.”
Smoke rises near the town of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
Gleb Garanich/ReutersAlmost immediately after the formal recognition, videos emerged of Russian military equipment moving into the occupied territories, and separatist leaders threatened to reclaim land won back by Ukrainian forces in 2014, teeing up a direct military confrontation. Ukrainian authorities soon moved to declare a nationwide state of emergency amid reports of further Russian troop buildups at the border, and Russia's Foreign Ministry pulled personnel from all consular offices in the country.
Despite a flurry of sanctions meant to give Putin one last chance to pull back from a full invasion, Moscow was unfazed, dismissing the sanctions as ineffective and boasting that “Russia has proven it is able to minimize the damage inflicted by all costs of sanctions.”
Cars drive out of Kyiv after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in eastern Ukraine.
Valentyn Ogirenko/ReutersThe “military operation” announced by Putin on Thursday is the beginning of the nightmare invasion analysts and U.S. intelligence officials have been warning about, Michael Kofman, the research program director in the Russia Studies Program at Virginia-based national security research organization CNA, told The Daily Beast.
“His speech made very clear he was speaking about all of Ukraine. He spoke of demilitarization of Ukraine. And as you can see, airstrikes have begun in Kharkiv and Kyiv area,” said Kofman. “It’s very clear that this is an operation of maximum [effort]. The aim of this operation is going to be regime change.”
Natalia Zabolotna, an art curator in Kyiv, told The Daily Beast she was worried that the whole country may be under Russian control by next week. “We hear from our friends in special services that the full capitulation of Ukraine might take place in a couple days,” she said. “The Kremlin’s plan is clearly to free Putin’s friend, [the] oligarch [Viktor] Medvechuk, from the house arrest, put him at the head of the presidential office and make [Yevgeny] Murayev their proxy prime minister.”
British and U.S. intelligence predicted that Russia would invade and install Murayev, a pro-Russian politician, at the head of a puppet government in Kyiv. Reached on the phone on Thursday, Murayev told The Daily Beast that he had sent his family out of the city but he had remained in place.
Predictably, he blamed the West for the outbreak of war. “Instead of acting as an independent state, our leadership listened to the Western leaders—they wanted us to be drawn into this war,” Murayev said. “Even yesterday I hoped that they could solve the crises without a war—if only Zelensky signed the guarantee of not joining NATO, he would have saved Ukraine. Right now there are huge traffic jams on the central highways in the direction to Odessa and Lviv. I am staying in Kyiv for now to wait for the end of the military actions and the beginning of the negotiations. At the moment, only the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky and the speaker of parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, have authority to negotiate Ukraine’s future with Moscow.”
