Russia Attacks UkraineUkrainian Officials Report Missile Attacks in Kyiv
Ukraine’s president denounced Russia in a televised address: “They say that civilian objects are not a target for them. It is a lie. They do not distinguish in which areas to operate.”
Follow the latest updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, was under bombardment on Friday morning, with missile strikes and a rocket crashing into a residential building as the second day of Russia’s military offensive pressed closer to the heart of the government.
Ukrainian forces were battling Russian troops on the outskirts of Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million people, where President Volodymyr Zelensky warned in a television address that he was “target No. 1” of the Russian advance.
By midmorning, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said that Russian forces had entered the Obolon district, a few miles north of central Kyiv, and urged people in the capital to stay indoors. In a sign of the potentially chaotic fight that could unfold, the ministry said on Facebook that Kyiv residents should “prepare Molotov cocktails” to deter “the occupier.”
Mr. Zelensky said that 137 Ukrainians, military and civilian, had been killed in the Russian invasion that began on Thursday morning, and that Russian “sabotage groups” had entered the capital with the aim of decapitating Ukraine’s government “by destroying the head of the state.”
The 44-year-old president, appearing unshaven and in a T-shirt, called on Ukrainians to defend themselves, in absence of military help from the outside world. He said not to expect foreign military forces to come to their aid. “We are left to our own devices in defense of our state,” he said. “Who is ready to fight together with us? Honestly, I do not see such.”
A day earlier, Mr. Zelensky’s government had declared martial law and ordered a general mobilization, urging all able-bodied Ukrainians to sign up with the country’s defense forces. Under the mobilization, most men ages 18 to 60 are barred from leaving the country, even as many Kyiv residents sought to flee the capital via road and rail to the relative safety of western Ukraine.
“The first days are the most difficult, because right now the enemy will feel it has the advantage, or will be broken physically and morally,” Hanna Malyar, the deputy minister of defense, said on Friday morning before calling on people to join the general mobilization.
“It is important that everyone is strong in spirit,” Ms. Malyar said. “This is our land. We will not hand it over.”
A day after heavy fighting was reported in eastern Ukraine, in Moscow-backed separatist enclaves along the Russian border, the conflict appeared to be intensifying in Kyiv.
Videos verified by The New York Times showed a large explosion in the sky over the outskirts of southern Kyiv early Friday. Witnesses filmed fiery debris falling over parts of the city. The videos appeared to show at least two surface-to-air missiles being fired near Kyiv before the explosion.
Vitali Klitschko, the city’s mayor, said that a rocket fragment had hit a residential building in a civilian neighborhood, injuring three people, one of them critically, according to preliminary reports. Emergency workers were on the scene, and the house was on fire and at risk of collapsing, Mr. Klitschko said.
Ukrainian officials said that Kyiv had been under such large-scale attack only once before — in 1941, when it was attacked by Nazi Germany.
“Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted. “Stop Putin.”
PARIS — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shifted the debate in the French presidential race, shining a spotlight on the candidates’ stances toward President Vladimir V. Putin.
Analysts said that President Emmanuel Macron’s active diplomacy in trying to avert the attack, although unsuccessful, would bolster his chances of victory at home in April’s election. Mr. Macron, who has not announced a re-election bid, has used the crisis to avoid the day-to-day domestic political fight in France and present himself as the leader of Europe, engaging in extensive discussions with President Biden, Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
“The tragic times of history are coming back,” Mr. Macron said at a news conference early Friday morning. The war in Ukraine, he added, shows that Europe “has no other choice but to become” powerful.
Mr. Macron’s chance of victory has risen to 70 percent, up from 65 percent before the Ukraine crisis, according to a study published by the Eurasia Group on Friday. The organization didn’t detail its methodology, but predicted the conflict would “freeze” the campaign or tip it in Mr. Macron’s favor.
By contrast, Russia’s invasion has put some of Mr. Macron’s fiercest rivals in a difficult position, as they struggle to shrug off a string of statements in the past excusing, or even praising, Mr. Putin’s aggressive moves toward Ukraine, such as the annexation of Crimea.
In past interviews and writings, Éric Zemmour, a far-right candidate, has said he was dreaming of a “French Putin” and argued that “Ukraine did not exist” because it was “the cradle of Russian civilization,” echoing arguments made by Mr. Putin. Marine Le Pen, another far-right contender, has never hidden her admiration for Mr. Putin, meeting him in the Kremlin in 2017 before the last presidential election that year.
But the war in Ukraine forced both candidates to make about-faces. After stating his skepticism about an invasion and blaming the “propaganda” of the U.S., Mr. Zemmour on Thursday condemned the attack “wholeheartedly.”
Both Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Zemmour, as well as candidates from the far left, have been criticized for their desire to leave NATO. The center-right party Les Républicains has been embroiled in controversy after its former leader and prime minister François Fillon, who recently entered the board of a Russian petrochemical giant run by close allies of Mr. Putin, blamed the West on Wednesday for not “taking into account Russia’s requests regarding NATO expansion.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMEDYKA, Poland — Terrified by Russian bombs and missiles landing near their towns and villages, and rumors that Russian tanks would soon arrive, thousands of Ukrainians crossed into eastern Poland on Friday as a mass exodus from Ukraine gathered pace.
Poland’s border service said that 29,000 people had arrived from Ukraine on Thursday, the first day of the war. Many more made the journey across Ukraine’s western border on Friday as fears grew that Russia intended to seize the whole country, even western regions far from the fiercest fighting north of Crimea on the Black Sea and in the eastern Donbas region.
Most of those who crossed into Poland at Medyka, one of the few border posts with Ukraine that allows pedestrians as well as vehicles, were women and their children. All men between the ages of 18 and 60 are barred from leaving Ukraine by a government order aimed at keeping potential fighters inside the country to confront advancing Russian forces.
Russia’s attack has taken on such large unpredictable dimensions that even people living far from what were expected to be the main combat zones are taking flight and racing to border crossings into Poland, Hungary, Moldova and Romania.
Oxana Olekhsova, 49, said her town of Khmelnitski, in western Ukraine, had not been hit directly but bombs had fallen on a nearby military airfield. She left her husband, a retired police officer, at their home and traveled overnight by car to the Polish border. There, they joined a line of pedestrians and vehicles waiting to cross the frontier that she said now stretches for miles.
Her 11-year-old daughter shivered at her side as they waited for her son, a Polish resident, to arrive to collect them after they crossed.
An ethnic Russian, she cursed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for causing so much suffering for the people of her adopted home in Ukraine. She said that Russian forces “will of course win eventually” because they have so many more soldiers and better equipment than Ukraine. His goal, she added, “is not just to beat Ukraine but to make the whole world afraid of him.”
In contrast to the often brutal reception Poland gave last year to migrants, mainly from the Middle East and Afghanistan, who tried to sneak across the border from Belarus, refugees arriving from Ukraine have been greeted with welcoming smiles, hot drinks and transport to the nearest railway station. Police officers handed out fruit and sandwiches to Ukrainians camped out in the waiting room.
Unlike the migrants beaten back from the border by Polish security forces last year, Ukrainians have a legal right to enter Poland and other European Union countries without visas. Nearly a million Ukrainians already live in Poland.
Lyudmilla Vitovich arrived with her two children from Lviv, a city near the Polish border that has been largely untouched by the fighting. “It is mostly calm now but nobody knows what their next target will be,” she said.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Air raid sirens are sounding in Lviv, and I joined a group of local journalists in an underground pass in the city center. “Yes, I am scared,” said Vita Labych, 25, who works at a Lviv television station, NTA. “But this is a big fight for our whole history. It is our responsibility for our whole generation to destroy Russia.”
Reporting from Paris
The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, expressed “increasing concern” at the events in Ukraine and said his office was committed to holding accountable any party responsible for war crimes.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTRussia’s invasion of Ukraine is the biggest in Europe since World War II. With the full-scale assault entering its second day on Friday, Ukrainians are coming to terms with the reality that the unthinkable has actually happened. A new episode of “The Daily” podcast explores the significance of this moment and speaks to Ukrainians on the ground.
Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, wrote Friday on Twitter that he had spoken with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and expressed his support for the Ukrainian people. “The senseless suffering and loss of civilian life must stop,” he tweeted. “Second wave of sanctions with massive and severe consequences politically agreed last night. Further package under urgent preparation.”
The senseless suffering and loss of civilian life must stop.
— Charles Michel (@eucopresident) February 25, 2022
Europe stands with #Ukraine’s people and will continue to provide support.
Second wave of sanctions with massive and severe consequences politically agreed last night.
Further package under urgent preparation.
Reporting from Moscow
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, dismissed Ukraine’s offer to negotiate. He said at a news conference in Moscow that President Volodymyr Zelensky was “lying” in saying he was ready to discuss a neutral status for Ukraine, Russian news agencies reported.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Ukraine
We just arrived in Kharkiv, where a large rocket landed right in the middle of the street and failed to detonate near the National Guard academy. The long, silver rocket was sticking out of the asphalt as soldiers ran around throwing on body armor and cocking automatic weapons. It was unclear if anyone was injured, and we were told to leave the area immediately.
Reporting from Berlin
Former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who during her tenure favored strong ties with Russia, said on Friday that she fully supported economic sanctions against Moscow to end the “war of aggression by Russia and President Putin.”
“There is no justification whatsoever for this blatant breach of international law, and I condemn it in the strongest possible terms,” Ms. Merkel told the German wire service DPA, in her first public comments about the invasion of Ukraine.
LONDON — Britain’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said on Friday that the verified assessment of his country’s intelligence services was that Russian forces “hadn’t achieved their goals so far” and had failed to meet any of their objectives in the first day of their invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Wallace, speaking to the BBC on Friday morning, said President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had so far failed in an attempt to take a key airport north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Russian forces also lost approximately 450 troops and a significant number of tanks, and have so far not broken through the line of control in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, he said.
“Putin had in his mind and in his articles and speeches that somehow Ukrainians were waiting to be liberated by the great czar, and that he would turn up in Ukraine and they would all cheer him,” Mr. Wallace said. “Of course we all saw that’s not true.”
He added that while Ukrainians were bravely standing up for their values, Mr. Putin had also grossly miscalculated the support he would receive at home.
“It shows how out of touch with his own people he is,” Mr. Wallace said, pointing to antiwar protests in several Russian cities.
Mr. Wallace repeated that he had no intention of ordering British forces into a ground battle in Ukraine, despite what he called Russia’s “naked military aggression.”
“I said very clearly about a month ago that we are not going to be sending British troops to fight directly with Russian troops,” he said.
Instead, Mr. Wallace again emphasized the new sanctions imposed by Britain, which include a ban on Russia’s Aeroflot flights. Russia retaliated against those actions on Friday morning by banning British flights from its own airspace.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTNAIROBI, Kenya — African citizens remained stranded across Ukraine on Friday, even as their governments called for an immediate cease-fire, urging Russia to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and to withdraw its troops.
The rapidly escalating conflict is trapping thousands of African nationals in multiple cities, many of them medicine and science students at Ukrainian universities. As Russia began shelling Ukrainian towns and cities on Thursday, many of the students took to social media to share their fears and frustrations and plead for help from their governments.
“We are really terrified,” Mohamed Abdi Gutale, a Somali citizen who is a first-year medicine student at Kyiv Medical University, said in a telephone interview on Friday morning.
Just hours before, Mr. Gutale said, he and 168 other Somali nationals were able to secure buses to transport them from Kyiv, the capital, to Lviv in western Ukraine. He said they didn’t know what their next plans were, “but we will decide what to do once we get there.”
Russia has staunch allies across Africa, with Russian mercenaries battling insurgents in Mali, its companies mining for diamonds in the Central African Republic and its weapons finding ready customers in Egypt and Burkina Faso. In 2019, Russia convened a summit of African leaders in the southwestern Russian city of Sochi as part of its ambition to revive its economic, political and military influence in the continent.
But no African nation has come out to support the invasion of Ukraine, and some have expressed their dismay at the Russian attack.
On Thursday, the chairman of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, and President Macky Sall of Senegal called on Russia “and any other regional or international actor to imperatively respect international law, the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of Ukraine.”
South Africa, which is part of the group of five emerging economic powers known as BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — also urged Moscow to withdraw its forces from Ukraine.
“Armed conflict will no doubt result in human suffering and destruction, the effects of which will not only affect Ukraine but also reverberate across the world,” South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation said in a statement. “No country is immune to the effects of this conflict.”
In the lead-up to Russian invasion this week, Gabon, Ghana and Kenya, which are current nonpermanent members of the United Nations Security Council, also expressed their concerns and denounced the dangers of using force to change borders.
“The conflict will cause reputational damage to Russia,” said Murithi Mutiga, the Africa program director at the International Crisis Group. “Many on the African continent cheered Moscow’s vocal opposition to American-led wars in Iraq and Libya and now Russia will come across as the aggressor in a war of choice against a less powerful neighbor.”
As the crisis unfolded this week, however, one African leader headed to Russia. Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, Sudan’s second most powerful man, on Thursday met with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, as part of a trip aimed at improving diplomatic and economic ties. General Hamdan, also known as Hemeti, was among the generals who carried out a coup in October that derailed Sudan’s democratic aspirations.
As the war began on Thursday, African governments scrambled to respond to citizens’ pleas for evacuation. Abdisaid M. Ali, Somalia’s foreign minister, said in an interview that his office had contacted countries such as Poland in an effort to provide legal entry to about 300 Somalis. Francisca K. Omayuli, a spokeswoman for Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement that it would evacuate its citizens once airports were reopened.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
In Lviv, Ukraine, about 1,000 volunteers enlisted the day the war started, and the numbers are growing. Conscription of fighting-age men will start with those with previous service records. Under martial law, no man aged 18 to 60 is allowed to leave the country.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
A Ukrainian soldier who was going off to fight on Friday said he was not afraid to die. “The war has been going on for more than eight years, and how much more will be, no one knows,” he wrote in a message translated by the Telegram app as he showed me his smartphone in the Lviv train station. “But the Ukrainian people will remain free!”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Singapore
Vietnam said it was “extremely concerned about the armed conflict in Ukraine.” Vietnam has very close ties to Russia, which is Hanoi’s top supplier of weapons.
Follow live updates of the UEFA Champions League final.
European soccer’s governing body on Friday voted to move this season’s Champions League final, the showcase game on the continent’s sporting calendar, to Paris as punishment for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The game, on May 28, had been scheduled to be played in St. Petersburg, in a stadium built for 2018 World Cup and financed by the Russian energy giant Gazprom, a major sponsor of the governing body, UEFA. It will take place instead at the Stade de France, in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. It will be the first time France has hosted the final since 2006.
UEFA said it had made the decision as a result of “the grave escalation of the security situation in Europe.”
The 2021/22 UEFA Men’s Champions League final will move from Saint Petersburg to Stade de France in Saint-Denis.
— UEFA (@UEFA) February 25, 2022
The game will be played as initially scheduled on Saturday 28 May at 21:00 CET.
Full statement: ⬇️
UEFA also said it would relocate any games in tournaments it controls that were to be played in Russia and Ukraine, whether involving clubs or national teams, “until further notice.”
At the moment, that affects only a single club match: Spartak Moscow’s next home game in the second-tier Europa League. But UEFA’s move to punish Russia will put new pressure on world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, to move a World Cup qualifying match set for Moscow next month.
On Thursday the soccer federations from Poland, Czech Republic and Sweden wrote to FIFA calling for Russia to be banned from hosting playoff games for the 2022 World Cup that are scheduled for next month. Poland is scheduled to play Russia in Moscow on March 24. If Russia wins that game, it would host the winner of the game between the Czechs and Sweden in a match to decide one of Europe’s final places in the World Cup in Qatar later this year.
OŚWIADCZENIE FEDERACJI PIŁKARSKICH POLSKI, SZWECJI I CZECH. Więcej... https://t.co/fkNXQJIseH pic.twitter.com/Tc9o5POp02
— PZPN (@pzpn_pl) February 24, 2022
“The military escalation that we are observing entails serious consequences and considerably lower safety for our national football teams and official delegations,” the federations wrote in a joint statement. They called on FIFA — which has authority over the games — and UEFA to immediately present “alternative solutions” for sites that were not on Russian soil.
Russia’s soccer federation, known as the R.F.U., reacted angrily to the decision to move any matches.
“We believe that the decision to move the venue of the Champions League final was dictated by political reasons,” said the federation’s president, Alexander Dyukov. “The R.F.U. has always adhered to the principle of ‘sport is out of politics,’ and thus cannot support this decision.”
Александр Дюков по итогам экстренного заседания исполкома УЕФА
— РФС (@rfsruofficial) February 25, 2022
– Мы считаем, что решение о переносе места проведения финала ЛЧ продиктовано политическими причинами. РФС всегда придерживается принципа «спорт вне политики».
Подробнее: https://t.co/swOkmXPXmj pic.twitter.com/uKkfhKPJFi
“The R.F.U. also does not support the decision to transfer any matches involving Russian teams to neutral territory as violating the sports principle and infringing on the interests of players, coaches and fans.”
Dyukov is also the chief executive of Gazprom and the president of the Russian team Zenit-St. Petersburg.
UEFA had in recent days been lobbied extensively privately and publicly by British officials about moving the Champions League final to London. That idea was quickly rejected, however, for logistical reasons as well as unease about the game’s becoming a political tool for British lawmakers who have often used soccer to score points at home and abroad. Britain’s foreign secretary, for example, this week suggested British teams that should boycott the game if they qualified and it was not moved out of Russia.
Paris emerged as the top candidate to replace St. Petersburg because it had not hosted the game since 2006 and because France currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, one of the bloc’s key decision-making bodies.
The UEFA president, Aleksander Ceferin, traveled to the French capital on Thursday to meet with France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, to finalize the agreement.
It will be the third straight year the Champions League final has had to be relocated, with the two most recent editions shifted to Portugal because of coronavirus concerns.
The final in Paris also will be the first time since the outbreak of the coronavirus that the game will be played in a full stadium. The 2020 final was played without spectators as part of a so-called bubble environment created to finish the competition’s remaining games, while last year restrictions meant only a quarter of the Dragão stadium in Porto was allowed to be populated.
Reporting from Rostov-on-Don, Russia
Russia’s Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said that since Thursday morning, Russian forces had destroyed 118 military facilities in Ukraine, including 11 military airfields and 13 surface-to-air missile systems. He added that Russia had downed five Ukrainian military planes, one helicopter and five drones, and that more than 150 Ukrainian service members had given up arms.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Moscow
Russia announced its first response to Western sanctions: British planes will be banned from flying to Russia or crossing its airspace, which could affect flights from London to Asia. Britain this week banned the Russian national airline Aeroflot.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
At the Lviv train station, Anton, a resident of Dnipro, said he had decided to move west after a rocket attack struck a military installation near where he lives. Asked the worst case for how things might go from here, he said, “Nuclear war.” Asked for the best-case scenario, he said, “Putin dies.”
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, in a post on its official Facebook page, warned residents in a district in northern Kyiv of fighting with Russian forces nearby, telling them to stay home and prepare Molotov cocktails.
Reporting from London
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain spoke to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Friday morning. He told him that “the world is united in its horror” at the Russian aggression, paid tribute to the “bravery and heroism of the Ukrainian people,” and “committed to provide further U.K. support to Ukraine,” Downing Street said in a statement.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSouth Korea, which exports semiconductors, automobiles and electronics to Russia, is bracing for any economic slowdown resulting from the international sanctions being placed against Russia. South Korea’s financial authorities said they are reserving up to 2 trillion won, or $1.7 billion, in emergency funds to support its companies. The Korean government has not specified what sanctions it will place upon Russia.
The Taliban on Friday issued its first response to the turmoil in Ukraine, calling on “both sides of the conflict to resolve the crisis through dialogue and peaceful means.” The statement, posted on Twitter by the group’s spokesman, Mohammad Naeem, also asked Ukraine and Russia to safeguard “the lives of Afghan students and migrants in Ukraine.” After the collapse of Afghanistan’s Western-backed government in August, the Ukrainian military evacuated nearly 100 Afghans to Kyiv.
Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan
Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, called on Friday for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries to be respected while also acknowledging Ukraine’s “complex” history and Russia’s “legitimate” security concerns. At a regular news briefing, he echoed almost word-for-word what Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, told his Russian counterpart in a telephone call on Thursday.
Ukrainian defense officials said Friday morning that multiple missile strikes had hit Kyiv, but the targets and the damage inflicted remained unclear. “They say that civilian objects are not a target for them,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said of the Russian assault. “It is a lie, they do not distinguish in which areas to operate.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTLVIV, Ukraine — In Lviv on Friday, air-raid sirens sounded repeatedly, sending waves of anxiety through the city.
After a second alarm in the morning, the hotel staff at the Citadel Inn grew nervous. They said that there was a bomb shelter under the hotel, which started as an imposing and solid fort built in 1865 to look down over the city.
Staff and guests went outside first and talked nervously, then decided to go into the basement, hoping that walls that have stood for over 150 years would protect them from any Russian bombs.
A father ran back to his room to get blankets for his daughter. A woman carried a small dog.
The hotel is like a stone fortress. But many guests, including small children, were huddled in a tiny room in the basement.
Myanmar’s military junta expressed support on Friday for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, even as a group of officials from Myanmar’s shadow civilian government took the opposite position.
“In the case of Russia and Ukraine, Russia has done its part to maintain its sovereignty, and I think it is the right thing to do,” the spokesman for the junta, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, told The New York Times by telephone. “Russia is also a big country among world powers and is showing that it also plays a main role in the balance sheet of maintaining world peace.”
Duwa Lashi La, the acting president of the National Unity Government in Myanmar, said on Twitter that those in the government “strongly condemn the unprovoked attack on Ukraine that undermines the UN charter and international law.”
“We pray for the people of Ukraine as they face catastrophic suffering from this unjustified invasion,” he wrote.
The National Unity Government is made up of a group of deposed officials who banded together after generals in Myanmar seized power in a coup in February 2021.
Since the coup, the generals have cultivated closer ties with Moscow. Russia is a major supplier of arms to the junta, and senior military officers from each country visited their counterparts several times last year. In June, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of Myanmar’s junta, traveled to Russia to meet with the country’s defense minister.
The junta is also courting Russia to invest in sectors like fuel, natural gas, cement and electric public transit in Myanmar.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA small contingent of Ukrainian border guards defending Snake Island, a remote outpost in the Black Sea, were among the 137 civilians and military personnel killed in Thursday’s attacks, according to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
“All border guards died heroically but did not give up,” Mr. Zelensky said in a short video message posted just after midnight on Friday. He added that the guards would be posthumously awarded the title of “Hero of Ukraine.”
Snake Island, also known as Zmiinyi Island, is 30 miles off the coast of Ukraine and less than one-tenth of a square mile in area. The island grew in importance for Ukraine’s maritime territorial claims after nearby Crimea was seized by Russia in 2014.
In an audio clip circulating online, an approaching Russian warship ordered Ukrainian guards on the island to “lay down arms and surrender.” The guards on the island rejected the demand, using an expletive.
The Ukrainian ambassador to Japan, Sergiy Korsunsky, said in Tokyo on Friday that his country “would very much welcome if China will exercise its connection with Russia and talk to Putin and to explain to him, this is kind of inappropriate in the 21st century to do this massacre in Europe.” Mr. Korsunsky noted that China was Ukraine’s largest trading partner, with China buying $17 billion in coal, food and other products last year.
Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan
The actor and filmmaker Sean Penn is in Kyiv to make a documentary about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a post released through the official Facebook account of Ukraine’s Office of the President. “Our country is grateful to him for such a show of courage and honesty,” the office said.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMikhail Yurievich Galuzin, Russia’s ambassador to Japan, said there would be a “serious” response by Russia after Japan announced further sanctions earlier Friday, though he declined to specify any details. Japan’s sanctions, he said, were “counterproductive” and could potentially affect “our dialogue around a very very broad agenda” including any agreement on disputed islands that Russia calls the Southern Kuril Islands and Japan calls the Northern Territories.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Ukrainian defense officials said Friday morning that multiple missile strikes had hit Kyiv, but the targets and the damage inflicted remained unclear. “The first days are the most difficult, because right now the enemy will feel it has the advantage, or will be broken physically and morally,” Hanna Malyar, the deputy defense minister, said before calling on people to join a general mobilization. “It is important that everyone is strong in spirit. This is our land. We will not hand it over.”
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, accused Russia of targeting civilian areas with rocket attacks on Friday morning, including in the capital, Kyiv. “They say that civilian objects are not a target for them,” he said in a televised address. “It is a lie, they do not distinguish in which areas to operate.”
Zelensky said that “in most directions the enemy was stopped, the fighting continues. The purpose of this attack is pressure, not only on the government, but on all Ukrainians.”
NEW DELHI — India has so far resisted entreaties from the United States and Ukraine to join the international condemnation of Russia, its most important source of military supplies.
As U.S. foreign policy has shifted its focus toward Asia, ties with India have deepened, particularly through the four-country coalition known as the Quad, which also includes Japan and Australia. Yet the Quad has not yet proven to be a bulwark against incursions by Chinese soldiers on India’s eastern border.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he appealed in a call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday for a “cessation of violence” but fell short of condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Mr. Modi and other Indian officials have said their priority is the safe evacuation of about 16,000 Indian nationals, including thousands of students, who were stranded in Ukraine. India also appears to be waiting to see how the toll of sanctions will affect its relationship with Russia, from whom it bought a missile defense system late last year.
Late Thursday, President Biden said the White House was seeking to resolve India’s stance on Russia. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in a statement that he “stressed the importance of a strong collective response to condemn Russia’s invasion” in a call with India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
On Friday a spokesman for the Modi government on Twitter mocked the United States’ appeal for help, citing the U.S. push for U.N. intervention after India demoted Kashmir from a state to a territory in 2019.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Lviv, Ukraine
For a second time this morning, sirens have wailed in Lviv, and people are growing increasingly anxious. A father ran back to his room to get blankets for his daughter. A woman carried a small dog. They went outside first and talked nervously, then decided to go into the basement of the fort, hoping that walls that have stood for over 150 years would protect them from Russian bombs.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
When a second air raid alarm in Lviv sounded this morning, the hotel staff at the Citadel Inn grew nervous. They said that there was a bomb shelter under the hotel, which started as an imposing and solid fort built in 1865 to look down on the city.
Ukrainian officials on Friday braced for an attack on the capital, Kyiv, as an explosion lit up the night sky on the city’s outskirts and a rocket crashed into a civilian apartment building.
Ukrainian officials said there were multiple missile strikes in Kyiv, but the targets and the damage remained unclear.
President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of targeting civilian areas with rocket attacks on Friday morning, including in Kyiv.
“They say that civilian objects are not a target for them,” he said in a televised address. “It is a lie. They do not distinguish in which areas to operate.”
He said that rocket attacks had resumed around 4 a.m. and claimed that “in most directions the enemy was stopped, the fighting continues.”
“The purpose of this attack is pressure, not only on the government, but on all Ukrainians,” he said.
As Russian troops advanced on Kyiv, officials tried to reassure Ukrainians that the government would stand strong.
“The first days are the most difficult, because right now the enemy will feel it has the advantage, or will be broken physically and morally,” Hanna Malyar, the deputy minister of defense, said on Friday morning, before calling on people to join the general mobilization.
“It is important that everyone is strong in spirit,” Ms. Malyar said. “This is our land. We will not hand it over.”
Officials fear a major attack on the city of 2.8 million people.
“Horrific Russian rocket strikes on Kyiv,” the foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, wrote on Twitter. He said the last time the capital had experienced something similar was in 1941, when it was attacked by Nazi Germany.
“Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one. Stop Putin,” Mr. Kuleba said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Videos verified by The Times showed a large explosion in the sky over the outskirts of southern Kyiv. Witnesses filmed fiery debris falling over parts of the city. The videos appeared to show at least two surface-to-air missiles being fired near Kyiv before the explosion.
Separately, a rocket struck a civilian building in a residential neighborhood, according to Ukrainian officials.
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said on Twitter that according to preliminary reports, three people were injured, one of them critically, when a residential building was hit by debris. He said emergency workers were on the scene and that the house was on fire and at risk of collapsing.
Mr. Klitschko, a former heavyweight champion in boxing, said in an interview with “Good Morning Britain” on Thursday that he was prepared to take up arms to defend against Russia’s invasion and that Mr. Putin had “lost reality.”
“I don’t have another choice — I have to do that,” the mayor said.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Air-raid sirens wailing in Lviv.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
Three Ukrainian border guards were killed by a Russian rocket strike early on Friday, according to the State Border Guard service. The strike, which took place around 4:25 a.m., hit a border post in the Zaporizhia region in southeastern Ukraine.
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
As the skies above Kyiv were lit up by a huge explosion and at least one rocket crashed into a civilian building, Ukrainian officials braced for attacks. “Horrific Russian rocket strikes on Kyiv,” the foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, wrote on Twitter. The last time the capital “experienced anything like this,” he wrote, was in 1941 “when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one. Stop Putin.”
Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine
A civilian building was struck in a residential neighborhood, according to Ukrainian officials.
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said on Twitter that according to preliminary reports, three people were injured, one of them critically, after a rocket fragment hit a residential building. He said emergency workers were on the scene and that the house was on fire and at risk of collapsing.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Taipei, Taiwan
Taiwan’s foreign ministry said on Friday that the self-governed island would join the international community in imposing economic penalties on Russia, though it did not specify details.
Videos verified by The Times showed a large explosion in the sky over the outskirts of southern Kyiv early on Friday morning. Witnesses filmed fiery debris falling over parts of the city. The videos appeared to show at least two surface-to-air missiles being fired near Kyiv before the explosion.
Most Asian stock markets posted gains on Friday morning, while Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, climbed 2.5 percent to $101.57 a barrel. Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 1.5 percent, and the Shanghai Composite advanced 0.8 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 0.4 percent. Overnight on Wall Street, stocks rebounded from a selloff to close higher on Thursday.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Taipei, Taiwan
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, said that President Vladimir V. Putin had “lost reality” and that he was prepared to take up arms to defend against Russia’s invasion. “I don’t have another choice — I have to do that,” he told a reporter from Good Morning Britain. Mr. Klitschko, 50, and his brother Wladimir Klitschko are former heavyweight champions.
GMB EXCLUSIVE:
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) February 24, 2022
'I don't have another choice. I have to do that.'
The Mayor of Kyiv @Vitaliy_Klychko tells @richardgaisford that it is 'already a bloody war' and he is prepared to fight for his country. pic.twitter.com/KvoGP5f92C
Reporting from Taipei, Taiwan
China’s embassy in Ukraine is arranging charter flights for Chinese nationals who are looking to evacuate. There are around 6,000 Chinese citizens in Ukraine. The announcement came after a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman declined to call Russia’s attack on Ukraine an “invasion.”
PARMA, Ohio — Ukrainian Americans, watching the Russian attack on their homeland with horror and anger on Thursday, described Ukraine as vulnerable and helpless — but also as a country with the same aspirations as the United States.
“Americans have to realize that this is about freedom and being able to live one’s life as they see fit, to govern as they want to, and not to be put under the power of a dictator’s ego,” said the Very Rev. John Nakonachny, 75, pastor of St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Parma, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb with a sizable Ukrainian population.
“Isn’t caring about what happens in Ukraine something Americans would get behind?” he asked.
Peter Teluk, 55, worked in Ukraine for 25 years as a consultant for American business interests and returned to the United States last year. He urged Americans not to turn a blind eye to the conflict.
“The U.S. has a short attention span and has a desire to think less about foreign conflict these days,” said Mr. Teluk, a lawyer in the Cleveland area. But he said the United States should appreciate that Ukraine was “symbolically what we want the rest of the world to be — a country that wants to define what it is by themselves.”
“We should understand that,” he continued, “because that is what we have always believed.”
Taras Szmagala Jr., the board chairman and president of the Ukrainian Catholic University Foundation, said President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was threatened by the growing independent voice of middle-class Ukrainians. Russians, he said, are hearing those voices and seeing what a democracy can bring them.
“Ukrainians are maturing as a society and they are getting better over time, and that is a threat to Putin,” he said. “The Americans and the media need to see that side of things.”
Across the nation, Ukrainian immigrants said they felt a profound sense of helplessness as they heard from panicked relatives who felt trapped as much of their home country was transformed into a war zone.
“I didn’t sleep all night. I talked to my brother and sister. They are so scared,” said Tanya Vlasenko, 48, of Vancouver, Wash. “There is nothing we can do, only pray,” she said, weeping.
Vancouver and nearby Portland, Ore., are home to more than 20,000 Slavic Christians. Most of them are Ukrainians who began settling in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s with refugee status, after fleeing religious persecution. They have erected dozens of churches that are the center of community life.
At First Slavic Evangelical Baptist Church, where Ms. Vlasenko’s family worships, the pastor has been leading congregants in prayer since Russian military action in Ukraine became a possibility.
Salah Ansary, senior district director for Lutheran Community Services Northwest, a refugee resettlement agency, said anxious Ukrainian immigrants had been calling to ask how they could get their relatives out of the country.
“We don’t have good information to provide, or anything to offer that can give them any kind of comfort at this moment,” he said. “The situation is so fluid.”
Solomia Gura, 31, of Philadelphia, said it had become increasingly difficult to reach people in her home country who have taken refuge in bunkers.
“I am trying to check if everybody is alive, if no bomb hit them,” said Ms. Gura, whose mother and brother live outside Lviv, a city in western Ukraine that had not been spared from the Russian military incursion.
Ms. Gura said she planned to attend a rally for Ukraine on Friday in Philadelphia, where about 70,000 Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans live.
“That’s as much we can do is show our support,” said Ms. Gura, her voice laden with exhaustion and tears.
Irena Mykyta, 60, an immigration lawyer in New York, said that, like her relatives and friends in Ukraine, she was incredulous her home country was under attack.
“I feel useless and guilty that I am a Ukrainian here,” said Ms. Mykyta, who has lived in the United States for 26 years and is a naturalized citizen. “Ukraine is helpless and we are helpless here.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Singapore
Singapore said it was “gravely concerned” about Russia’s announcement of the start of the “special military operation” in the Donbas region and of reports of land and air attacks on Ukraine. “Singapore strongly condemns any unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country under any pretext,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. “We reiterate that the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine must be respected.”
For weeks, a Russian invasion had been expected by some Ukrainians and merely sequestered in the mind’s recesses by others. But once the sweeping attacks began on Thursday, hitting seemingly every corner of the country, the war became unavoidably tangible for Ukrainians — a hovering cloud of darkness that once seemed unimaginable in the post-Cold War era. These images are a visual documentation of a populace coping with the initial stages of a national military invasion, struggling with newfound uncertainty and fear.