Russia on Thursday launched a massive, coordinated assault on its neighbor Ukraine, bombing key cities and sending troops across the border from multiple directions, as President Vladimir Putin’s …
Russia on Thursday launched a massive, coordinated assault on its neighbor 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 hard 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 on Thursday 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, saying it was still not too late to reverse the slide toward all-out war. On a day of fast-moving events, it appeared Russian forces were preparing the battlefield for a ground invasion, bombing military facilities and infrastructure and targeting sites such as an airport near the capital of Kyiv. Ukrainian forces were said to be putting up substantial early resistance, although the country is virtually surrounded by enemy units in Russia, Belarus and the Black Sea and is badly outgunned. 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 earlier this week in a pretext for invasion. Instead, it’s become clear that Russia intends to capture most if not all Ukrainian territory and dramatically reshape the geopolitical order in the region. Mr. Putin also threatened “consequences they have never seen” against any countries that try to interfere with the Russian assault, stoking fears that an increasingly unpredictable Russian leader is prepared to resort to using 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, while the first of what could be a flood of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the fighting crossed over the border into neighboring Poland Thursday. 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.
