Russia on Thursday launched a massive, coordinated assault on neighboring Ukraine, bombing key cities and sending troops across the border from multiple directions, as President Vladimir Putin’s long-feared invasion wreaked havoc on global markets and threatened to plunge all of Eastern Europe into its most devastating conflict since World War II.
President Biden and a string of Western leaders announced tough new sanctions on the Kremlin as a stunned world watched tanks roll into Ukraine and Russian fighter jets strike targets throughout the country. As Russian forces battled Ukrainian troops just miles outside the capital, Kyiv, U.S. defense officials warned that Mr. Putin wants to “decapitate” the Ukrainian regime and install a pro-Kremlin puppet government in its place.
“Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences,” Mr. Biden said in a White House address.
Mr. Biden also ordered an additional 7,000 Army troops to Europe to bolster NATO allies while continuing to insist that U.S. troops will not participate in the fighting inside Ukraine, which is not a NATO ally.
A slew of world leaders appealed to Mr. Putin to pull back, with little apparent effect. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was freeing up $20 million in initial humanitarian aid for Kyiv.
“Stop the military operation. Bring the troops back to Russia,” Mr. Guterres said at U.N. headquarters. He insisted it was not too late to reverse the slide toward all-out war.
SEE ALSO: Cunning and confounding, an unchecked Putin charts erratic path
On a day of fast-moving events, it appeared Russian forces were preparing the battlefield for a ground invasion. The Russians bombed military facilities and infrastructure and targeted sites such as an airport near the capital of Kyiv. Ukrainian forces were said to be putting up substantial resistance, although the country is virtually surrounded by enemy units in Russia, Belarus and the Black Sea and is badly outgunned.
North of the capital, Russian forces reportedly gained control of the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power plant. A separate force landed by sea in southern Ukraine, and explosions were reported in the cities of Odessa and Mariupol. Russian forces also moved on Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.
The large-scale invasion puts to rest the notion that Mr. Putin may settle for claiming control over the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and its breakaway enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk, which the Kremlin formally recognized as independent states this week in a pretext for invasion.
Instead, it has become clear that Russia intends to capture most, if not all, Ukrainian territory and dramatically reshape the geopolitical order in the region. Mr. Putin threatened “consequences they have never seen” against any countries that try to interfere with the Russian assault. His words stoked fears that an increasingly unpredictable Russian leader is prepared to use his country’s massive nuclear weapons stockpile.
Video from Kyiv showed residents of the Ukrainian capital huddled for safety inside the city’s subway tunnels. The first of what could be a flood of Ukrainian refugees fled the fighting and crossed the border into neighboring Poland. A train from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine arrived Thursday afternoon in the Polish town of Przemysl, near Ukraine’s western border, carrying a few hundred passengers, The Associated Press reported.
A dark moment
SEE ALSO: Biden unveils new sanctions as Russia advances in Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a televised address to the nation late Thursday night that 137 Ukrainians had died in the invasion and 316 had been wounded. He said in some remarks that Russia “wants to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state … but I am staying in the government quarter in Kyiv together with others.”
Mr. Biden used an address at the White House to again condemn Mr. Putin and to announce another round of unprecedented economic sanctions targeting major Russian banks and oligarchs in the Russian leader’s inner circle. Leaders of the European Union were preparing to roll out their own sanctions against Moscow.
Mr. Putin “rejected every good-faith effort the United States and our allies and partners made to address our mutual security concerns through dialogue to avoid needless conflict and avert human suffering,” Mr. Biden said. “Putin declared his war. … He has much larger ambitions than Ukraine. He wants to, in fact, reestablish the former Soviet Union. That’s what this is about.”
Other world leaders cast Mr. Putin as the chief villain in what will be remembered as one of Europe’s darkest chapters.
“Now we see him for what he is: a bloodstained aggressor who believes in imperial conquest,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
After an emergency session, the U.S. and other NATO members announced the movement of more troops and military equipment to Eastern Europe. The effort is designed to reinforce NATO’s defenses as fears grow that Mr. Putin won’t stop with Ukraine and could seek to capture Moldova or perhaps even the Baltic states, which are NATO members.
Across Ukraine, explosions were reported in at least 16 cities, suggesting that the massive Russian assault is aimed at taking out Ukraine’s military defenses while terrifying the civilian population. Missiles rained down on Ukrainian cities while Russian armored columns moved across the border. Russian bombers targeted airports and other crucial infrastructure that the Ukrainian military would need to defend its territory and move supplies and equipment.
Russian military officials said they had “crippled” at least 74 Ukrainian military facilities, according to Moscow’s state-run Tass news agency. That figure was not independently confirmed.
Pentagon officials said Russia used at least 75 heavy and medium bombers during its initial attack but cautioned that it is too early to assess the damage and casualty figures.
Video footage posted to social media showed massive traffic jams in and around Kyiv as citizens looked to escape the escalating attack. Mr. Zelenskyy appealed for help from the West and warned that Mr. Putin wouldn’t stop with Ukraine.
“If you don’t help us now, if you fail to offer a powerful assistance to Ukraine, tomorrow the war will knock on your door,” he said.
Mr. Zelenskyy said the survival of his nation is at stake. Like Mr. Biden, he blamed the Russian president for the unfolding bloodshed and potential humanitarian catastrophe.
“Putin began [a] war against Ukraine, against the entire democratic world. He wants to destroy my country, our country, everything we’ve been building, everything we were living for,” Mr. Zelenskyy said in a video address, according to an English translation of his remarks broadcast on CNN.
Immediately after the invasion began, Mr. Zelenskyy declared martial law within his country. He formally cut off diplomatic relations with the Kremlin, signaling that the West’s diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis were abandoned amid war’s beginnings.
Indeed, Mr. Biden also indicated that the time for diplomacy was over.
“I have no plans to talk with Putin,” the president said when asked whether he would meet with his Russian counterpart.
Fighting back
Ukrainian forces reportedly claimed to have taken out several Russian tanks as they fought the advance.
U.S. defense officials said there is evidence of Ukrainian forces inflicting damage on Russian formations.
“We’ve seen indications that they are resisting and fighting,” a U.S. official told reporters at the Pentagon. “We’re going to look to [continue] to provide both lethal and non-lethal assistance.”
Russian forces appeared to be advancing cautiously but steadily. Russian defense expert Pavel Felgenhauer said there were some signs that Mr. Putin underestimated the military task before him.
“Russia failed to generate enough ‘shock and awe’ right away to convince the Ukrainians of the futility to resist further,” Mr. Felgenhauer wrote in an analysis in the Eurasia Daily Monitor. “Possibly, Putin and his generals actually believed their own propaganda about Ukrainians greeting Russians as liberators and the defending soldiers putting down their arms.”
Video posted online showed that even some in Russia were brave enough to challenge Mr. Putin’s authority and his decision to launch a war. Russian police detained more than 1,600 at anti-war rallies in 53 cities. Authorities threatened to block media reports carrying “false information,” the Reuters news agency reported.
Still, the Ukrainian military is vastly overmatched by the Russians. Despite being equipped with U.S. anti-tank missiles and a host of other equipment, Ukraine is outnumbered at least 4-to-1 by the Russians and has nowhere near the amount of artillery, planes, vehicles and weapons.
Thursday’s developments indicate that Mr. Putin is prepared to use the full force of his military to crush Ukraine. This former Soviet republic has steadily built closer ties to the U.S. and NATO in recent years, angering the Kremlin.
Russia’s close ties to Belarus and its 2014 military annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula are greatly aiding the Russian assault. Both areas have served as key staging grounds for troops ahead of the invasion.
Russian troops also landed by sea in the southern city of Mariupol, Reuters reported, suggesting that Mr. Putin and his military planners aim to connect the Crimean Peninsula with the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
In his address, Mr. Putin urged the Ukrainian military to lay down its weapons and cast the invasion as a just war against Ukrainian oppressors, a narrative that is broadly rejected around the world. The Russian leader also made a bizarre statement about an effort to rid eastern Ukraine of Nazis as both sides of the battle used World War II imagery.
“Its purpose is to protect the people who have for eight years been exposed to humiliation and genocide by the regime in Kyiv. For this, we will seek demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, and also press for bringing to justice those who have committed numerous bloody crimes against peaceful civilians, including Russian citizens,” he said, according to the Tass.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.