Russia Ukraine news

President Zelenskiy calls on Ukrainians to defend country as Russia claims to have neutralised its airbases and air defencesRussia-Ukraine crisis: live ...

Some of the first explosions after Putin announced the operation were heard near Kramatorsk, the headquarters of the Ukrainian army’s operations near the Russian-controlled territories in south-east Ukraine. Russia appeared to be targeting military infrastructure in its early strikes on Thursday morning. Russia has every incentive to move as fast as possible,” wrote Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program. “We have taken the decision to conduct a special military operation,” he said, in what amounted to a declaration of war. But the answer is up to you,” he said. In 2014, Putin ordered undercover Russian soldiers to seize the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow then annexed. The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson said: “I am appalled by the horrific events in Ukraine and I have spoken to President Zelenskiy to discuss next steps. President Putin has chosen a path of bloodshed and destruction by launching this unprovoked attack on Ukraine. The UK and our allies will respond decisively. Zelenskiy used a video address to appeal to the Russian public for help after an attempt to speak to Putin was unsuccessful. “We do not intend to occupy Ukraine,” he said, and he had a chilling warning for other nations. “What we have heard today are not just missile blasts, fighting and the rumble of aircraft,” he said. “Putin has just launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” said Dmytro Kuleba. “Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strikes. Zelenskiy also said Ukrainian forces were fighting to prevent Russian troops capturing Chernobyl. It was later reported that the Russians now held the former nuclear plant.

Russian forces have launched missile and helicopter attacks around Ukraine, and early signs suggest their goal is to encircle Kyiv.

The mayor of Mariupol said three civilians had been killed there and emergency services in Kharkiv said a boy had been killed after shelling struck an apartment building. Half of Moscow’s air force is also deployed in the region. The local administration in Odesa said 22 people had died in a strike on a military base. “However, it’s high risk because until ground forces link up, the airborne assault forces are deep in Ukrainian territory and dependent on aerial resupply, casualty evacuation and fire support,” he said. Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had destroyed 74 “objects of above-ground military infrastructure”, though this could not be confirmed. Shortly after, however, Ukraine’s armed forces chief said Kyiv’s forces were fighting back in a critical early battle.

After air and missile strikes, Russian troops launched attacks from Ukraine's northern border with Belarus, across its eastern frontier and in the south from ...

Slovakia said that its border with Ukraine was open for “all persons fleeing this war”. The US has warned that as many as 5mn Ukrainians could be displaced. “Vladimir Putin gave extensive explanations of the causes and circumstances of why a decision was taken to launch a special military operation. The leaders had a “serious and frank exchange of views about the Ukraine situation”, the Kremlin said in a readout. The price dropped back to about $99 after the Biden administration announced a raft of sanctions that focused on Russia’s financial sector, rather than its energy industry, which is an important supplier to many western countries. Korsunsky said the Russian vessels had twice demanded the Ukrainians lay down their weapons and surrender or be destroyed. Alarm over the conflict ripped through international markets, with the price of European natural gas contracts jumping as much as 70 per cent to €142 per megawatt hour. Biden said the US and its allies would impose new sanctions in response to Russia’s aggression. Shocked by the ferocity of Russia’s assault, world leaders addressed their nations to condemn what they cast as the most momentous challenge to the postwar order in Europe for 80 years. The Ukrainian president said 137 Ukrainians were killed in Thursday’s fighting. Ukraine’s land forces said Russia fired at peaceful areas of Kyiv but the strike was intercepted. “[Putin] has much larger ambitions than Ukraine,” said Joe Biden, US president. My family is the number-two target.

UK government and banks on alert for new form of electronic attack said to have affected hundreds of machines.

That does not seem to be the case. It’s more that kind of secondary impact,” said Jamie Collier, a Mandiant consultant, who described a DDoS as akin to stuffing a thousand envelopes through a letterbox every second. Yegor Aushev, co-founder of a cybersecurity company in Kyiv, told Reuters he wrote the post at the request of a senior defence ministry official who contacted him on Thursday. Aushev’s firm Cyber Unit Technologies is known for working with Ukraine’s government on the defence of critical infrastructure. The targets on Wednesday included the Ukrainian defence ministry and PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest commercial bank. There is a danger here of escalation because offensive cyber activity is fundamentally not very good at staying where you put it.” It’s time to get involved in the cyber defense of our country,” one post read.

Ukrainians react with defiance as Vladimir Putin launches biggest attack by one European state against another since second world war.

“This is the sound of a new iron curtain, which has come down and is closing Russia off from the civilised world. “What we have heard today are not just missile blasts, fighting and the rumble of aircraft,” the Ukrainian president warned. By 6pm, there were still huge queues of cars trying to escape the capital and head westward, with the main road out jammed with vehicles. Tatyana, who asked for her surname not to be published, said she “couldn’t believe the news I read this morning. Nearly 560 miles away in Moscow, banks and exchange bureaux opened for business but rapidly ran out of dollars as the Russian rouble plunged to an all-time low. “I didn’t think Putin would be willing to go all the way. “We’ve collected our stuff and are ready to run to a bomb shelter if necessary,” she said. “The shops are closed, nothing is working.” There was shelling earlier, but now it was quiet. Tanya Hrunyk, a 43-year-old economist waiting in one of the bank queues, was wondering whether to stay in Lviv and for how long. “I have family in the country where I could go. The station was crammed with people desperate to get on a train out – in almost any direction but eastwards. This was “a war of aggression”, Kuleba said.

Historian Mary Elise Sarotte tells the inside story of the west's efforts to secure a post-cold-war settlement — and how Putin seized on missteps and ...

The outbreak of war in Ukraine means, among many other consequences, that we need to view the cold war’s end through a new lens. And it was easy to ignore how seriously Putin was taking the conflict with the west over Ukraine’s future, and how much he wanted to recreate Moscow’s line of control. As he said in the year he became president of Russia, “only one thing works in such circumstances — to go on the offensive. For a long time, we rightly trumpeted the ways that dissolution of the line dividing cold war Europe created freer societies and wider life choices for central and eastern European nations and new post-Soviet states. In a 2017 estimate, the Pew Research Center put the number of ethnic Russians living outside Russia in other former Soviet republics to be 25mn. Meanwhile, bloodshed in the Balkans added urgency to all questions of European security and created new frictions between Washington and Moscow over how to handle the conflict. Instead of incremental accession by a large number of states through PfP, they had the alliance extend the full weight of the Article 5 guarantee to a small number of states. In light of all these considerations, Clinton decided that rather than draw a new line between Nato and non-Nato Europe so soon after erasing the cold war line, he would instead try to blur any future divisions. If he acceded to the wishes of the countries between Germany and Ukraine to join Nato, however, that might have the opposite effect on Kyiv. As Clinton warned his fellow Nato leaders in January 1994, the “nations of the former Soviet Union . . . have been almost ignored through this entire debate” about where to enlarge the alliance. But the sense of urgency survived the presidential transition and took on new complexity as the prospect of extending Nato beyond a reunited Germany — discussed speculatively under Bush — became a reality. In late 1991 and 1992, he embarked on repeated, urgent diplomatic missions to the crumbling Soviet Union in a fight to ensure that only one nuclear successor state emerged: Russia.