Putin Issues Threat Against ‘Anyone Who Tries to Interfere’

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that Russian troops had landed in the southern port city of Odessa and were crossing from Russia into Kharkiv. Footage captured by security cameras showed Russian military vehicles crossing into Ukraine from Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in 2014.

Rocket attacks targeted Ukrainian fighter jets parked at an airport outside Kyiv, and Ukraine closed its airspace to commercial flights, citing the “potential hazard to military aviation.”

As air raid sirens blared in Kyiv, the western city of Lviv and other urban areas, residents rushed to take shelter in bus and subway stations. In Kyiv, people packed up their cars and waited in long lines to fill up with gas on their way out of the city. In eastern Ukraine, early signs of panic appeared on the streets as lines formed at A.T.M.s and gas stations.

With attacks across the country, it quickly became clear that Russia’s campaign, whatever Mr. Putin meant by a “special military operation,” was aimed at far more than the rebel territories in the east. Within an hour, Ukraine’s state emergency service said that attacks had been launched in 10 regions of Ukraine, primarily in the east and south, and that reports of new shelling were “coming in constantly.”

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, called it “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine” and said his country would defend itself, while calling on the world to “stop Putin.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it was using “high-precision weapons” to disable military infrastructure, air defense facilities, military airfields and Ukrainian army planes, Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported. But the ministry said it was not attacking cities, and promised that “the civilian population is not at risk.”

The Ukrainian authorities said that invading naval forces were coming ashore at multiple points, including in Kharkiv and the southern city of Kherson. Three emergency workers were injured when a command post was struck by shelling in Nizhyn, in the north, and six people were trapped under rubble when the city’s airport came under attack, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry reported.

Military depots, warehouses and National Guard were hit with artillery blasts, the ministry said.

As dawn broke in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that he had declared martial law. The country’s defense minister told citizens that the army was “fending off enemy forces” and “doing everything it can to protect you.”

But the army was under siege. In the east, Russia-backed separatists — their ranks bolstered by the arrival of hundreds of Russian mercenaries in recent days, according to European officials — said they were hammering Ukrainian troops along the entire 250-mile front line that has divided the rebels and Ukrainian forces since 2014.

Seeking to capture the entire territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Mr. Putin recognized as independent on Monday, the rebels were “using all weapons at their disposal,” the Russian news media reported. Ukrainian officials said the attacks included artillery strikes.

Ukraine’s state border service reported that Russian troops stationed in Belarus, north of Ukraine, had launched an attack with support from the Belarusian military. Russia had deployed as many as 30,000 troops to Belarus for exercises this month that the United States warned could provide cover for an attack against Kyiv, which lies a fast 140-mile drive away from a main border crossing. President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus denied that his forces were involved.

By midmorning in Kyiv, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had disabled all of Ukraine’s air defenses and air bases. Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that Russian forces had captured two villages in the Luhansk region.

The fighting intensified as Ukrainian forces shot down six Russian fighters and a helicopter in a fight to maintain control over key cities, a senior Ukrainian military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to release information outside official channels. Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, called on all Ukrainian civilians to join the fight and enlist with territorial defense units.

“Ukraine is moving into all-out defense mode,” he said.

More than six hours after the attack began, the top article on the website of the official People’s Daily newspaper was about Inner Mongolia’s new commercial policy. And the website of the official Xinhua news agency led with an article about an upcoming meeting of China’s rubber-stamp Parliament. (Chinese social media, however, was ablaze with discussions about the conflict.)

China’s ambivalent position reflects the dilemma facing Beijing. On one hand, it has long enjoyed friendly relations with Ukraine and has held up the principle of noninterference in other countries’ affairs. There are also concerns about further alienating the European Union and aggravating an already tense relationship with the United States.

On the other hand, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, recently declared a partnership with “no limits” with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Both share in the belief that the United States is determined to hobble the ascent of their countries. And they have signaled a desire to see a world order in which Washington’s influence is far diminished.

The strengthened bond between China and Russia was on display on Thursday when news reports emerged that China’s customs agency had cleared the way for the import of wheat from all regions of Russia, instead of what had been only certain designated areas.

The move was part of a series of agreements signed by Mr. Putin during a recent trip to Beijing. For Russia, the world’s largest wheat exporter, China’s huge domestic economy offers a potential bulwark against Western sanctions.

The closer ties were also apparent in the instructions that China’s embassy in Ukraine issued to its citizens. Instead of urging people to evacuate, as other countries have done, the embassy told Chinese people on Thursday to stay at home and advised those traveling by car to display a Chinese flag in a prominent place on their vehicles.

Claire Fu contributed research.

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While she waited to withdraw money from an apparently empty A.T.M., she showed a sack filled with loaves of bread she had just purchased.

A native of Donbas, the eastern region of Ukraine, she said all she wanted was to live in peace, reciting a poem she wrote two years ago:

I am so looking forward to peace,

But it is coming to us so slowly.

We still have а little patience.

Peace is close at hand

And we are waiting for it to arrive

Without gunfire, with blood.

Enough has been spilled in Donbas.

Let the sun smile and the sky brighten

And the children smile.

Let it go in black moment.

There will be peace for all

And people will say God heard us.

Let all stormy skies leave us,

And hail Donbas and the city of Slaviansk.

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Israel is a key ally of the United States and has received more American aid since World War II than any other country. But Israel is wary of angering Russia, which has a large military presence in Syria, Israel’s northeastern neighbor and enemy.

The Israeli air force frequently strikes Iranian and Syrian military targets in Syria, and needs Russia’s tacit blessing to continue that campaign. Iran uses Syria to funnel weapons and aid to Hezbollah, a militant group that dominates southern Lebanon and is opposed to Israel.

But as Russian troops launched an invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, it became painfully clear that they had badly miscalculated.

E.U. leaders will therefore flock to Brussels on Thursday evening for an emergency summit that will seek to quickly approve the second round of sanctions, although finding compromise without appearing to dither in the face of a once-in-a-generation conflict will be hard.

Until the invasion, European diplomats directly involved in the talks over sanctions presented a much less united picture of the European Union, whose dependence on Russian gas is just one of the ways it is limited in truly punishing Moscow without crippling its own economies.

Diplomats said that several E.U. members were concerned about other sectors of Russia’s economy that could be penalized. Austria, Germany and Italy raised concerns about imposing broad sanctions on cross-border financial transactions and banking operations. And Italy was pushing to leave the luxury goods industry untouched so that it could continue exporting fashion and other high-end products to Russia.

“Going further than Wednesday’s sanctions could prove a big problem for Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy,” said Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe with the Eurasia Group consulting firm, referring to Italy’s multifaceted dependence on Russia.

Belgium was seeking an exemption for its large diamond sector, and no E.U. countries were seriously advocating sanctions on Russia’s vital energy sector.

The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, has been working on the sanctions package for months, which partly explains why the first set of penalties this week was approved so swiftly. But there are no guarantees that the same will be the case with the second one on Thursday.

Josep Borrell Fontelles, the E.U.’s top diplomat, said on Thursday morning that the bloc was set to adopt “the harshest package of sanctions we have ever implemented.” The proof will be in the doing.

“They’ve gotten exactly what they wanted, the ones on the other side, panic and destabilization,” Mr. Balai said, refusing to mention the word Russia or the name of President Vladimir V. Putin, whom he referred to as “that person.”

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At a base for Ukraine’s National Guard, troops in drab green uniforms raced to and fro, seemingly uncertain of what it was they were supposed to be doing. Wives and girlfriends had come to say goodbye to soldiers, who acknowledged that they did not quite know where they were being ordered to go.

A National Guard soldier named Yevheni, who would not give his last name, listed cities nearby in eastern Ukraine where he said the Russian flag was already flying.

“It’s not good, I’ll tell you,” he said, adding that he had been fighting against Russia-backed separatists in breakaway enclaves of eastern Ukraine since the war broke out in 2014.

His wife, Yelena, came to deliver clothes from the couple’s home village of Bakhmut about 40 minutes’ drive further east.

“They told us to not come to work; all the kindergartens are closed; but right now everything is quiet,” she said. “They said they are preparing for evacuation.”

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Very quickly, he said, the Ukrainian military would be incapacitated, its leadership unable to coordinate a defense and supply the front. After that, he said, responsibility would fall to frontline commanders to carry on the fight alone.

“They will hold up as long as there are bullets,” General Budanov said in an interview. “They’ll be able to use what they have in their hands, but believe me, without delivery of reserves, there’s not an army in the world that can hold out.”

General Budanov spoke at a time when the Russian military had deployed about 100,000 troops to the region. By the time of the invasion, according to U.S. officials, Russia had amassed an estimated 190,000 troops in or near Ukraine, including in Crimea and in Russia-backed separatist areas in the eastern Donbas region.

In recent weeks, the Russian military also deployed advanced S-400 antiaircraft systems that could effectively neutralize Ukraine’s small air force, as well as Iskander-M cruise missiles capable of striking targets just about anywhere in Ukraine.

The Russian force includes 120 to 125 battalion tactical groups, up from the mid-80s earlier in the month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the American intelligence assessment. Some of the forces are Russian reservists who would make up an occupation force after an invasion, the officials said. The officials asked for anonymity to discuss government assessments.

Ukraine has only slightly more enlisted soldiers and officers in its entire military, according to the Ministry of Defense. The roughly 200 aircraft that comprise Ukraine’s entire air force are fewer than the number of fighter planes that Russia has deployed already to the Ukrainian border.

But Ukraine’s military is not the pushover it once was. In 2014, elite Russia troops were able to seize the entire Crimean Peninsula in southern Ukraine without firing a shot. When Russian-backed separatists then took over part of the Donbas, Ukraine had to rely on volunteer brigades of people who took up arms, with little or no military training.

The Ukrainian military has since clawed its way back, fighting the separatists to a stalemate and putting a stop to the most serious hostilities. It did so with help from Western allies.

The United States alone has provided $2.5 billion in military assistance that has included high-tech surveillance and communications equipment and drones. In November, the United States delivered about 88 tons of ammunition, part of a $60 million military aid package pledged by the Biden administration.

In a live televised news conference from the Ukrainian embassy in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, Ambassador Vasyl Bodnar said Ukraine had made an official request to the Turkish government. He also called for support from Turkey for sanctions against Russia, and for military and humanitarian assistance and help for Ukrainian citizens in Turkey.

“Right now all the masks are off,” he said. “Right now we are at war. We call all the world to take up and prevent that aggression. Today Ukraine is protecting your safety too.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who visited Ukraine earlier this month, began a security meeting with senior security officials Thursday morning, the presidential palace announced in a statement.

Turkey is a member of NATO but also maintains economic and military industry ties with Russia. The two countries are on opposing sides in two Middle Eastern wars, in Syria and Libya, and in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the South Caucasus.

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She is in Lviv. Her mother and older sister are hundreds of miles away in Kyiv.

“I asked them to find a bomb shelter, because this is important,” she said. “Where we live is not in the center, and I asked them not to go into the center. We don’t know what we need to do because it is difficult — it is impossible — to understand Putin.”

She was particularly scared because of Russia’s arsenal of weapons. She was searching how to describe them in English and got out her phone to use Google translate. It said: “Nuclear weapons.”

She said her sister worked for the government ministry. “Just one or two weeks ago, she thought war was impossible in Ukraine,” Olha said.

“Putin is not a normal person,” she said, turning back to Google translate to find the right word. “Crazy.”

She said she wanted to be a journalist. She has a master’s degree, and has made a podcast — “Green Philosophy” — about Lviv.

Asked what she was most afraid of, she returned to the power of Russia’s weapons: “I am afraid Ukraine could be the start of a world war.”

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Mr. Biden and his top aides have said for days that they would issue more sweeping economic penalties if Russia escalated the conflict in Ukraine and tried to seize more territory in the country — a prospect that became a reality on Thursday when Russian troops were shown on footage entering Ukraine.

Those penalties could include severing Russia’s top banks from the financial system, cutting off technology exports or imposing sanctions on President President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his top officials directly.

The administration had already imposed an initial slate of sanctions, hoping to deter the Russian leader from a larger incursion. But after Mr. Putin announced the military operation, Mr. Biden and lawmakers from both parties in Congress denounced the move and signaled support for a more aggressive response.

Mr. Biden spoke to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and briefed him on the steps Washington was taking to rally international condemnation.

“He asked me to call on the leaders of the world to speak out clearly against President Putin’s flagrant aggression, and to stand with the people of Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said.

Before his address on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Biden will meet with leaders of the Group of 7 conference of industrialized nations.

The White House and European allies unveiled an initial slate of economic penalties this week after Mr. Putin recognized the self-declared separatist states in eastern Ukraine and Russian forces started rolling into their territory. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden imposed penalties on two Russian banks and several members of the Russian elite, and prohibited Russia from trading debt in American or European markets. On Wednesday, the administration issued sanctions against the company behind an energy pipeline connecting Russia to Germany.

Mr. Putin’s declaration set off a rare moment of bipartisan ire in Congress as lawmakers in both parties called on Mr. Biden to swiftly enact new, debilitating sanctions on Russia.

“Every option must be placed on the table to stop Putin’s malevolence that not only threatens Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but the security of all liberal democracies around the globe,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire. “Putin chose a path to war, and he must now suffer the consequences.”

Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, had pressed the Biden administration for weeks to enact a sweeping array of sanctions on Moscow, on activities including the Russian gas pipeline. He warned that the repercussions Mr. Putin would face would be “painful and swift.”

The House and the Senate are out of session, with lawmakers working from their districts across the country, but senators are expected to receive a briefing on the situation from the Biden administration on Thursday afternoon. And even outside Washington, before the invasion, a bipartisan group of senators had been working to reach agreement on a new set of sanctions targeting Moscow.

“For more than 70 years, we have avoided large-scale war in Europe,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “With his illegal invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has tragically brought decades of general peace to an end.”

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The United States said the Council would meet on Thursday to vote on a resolution condemning Russia’s actions. A European diplomat said earlier in the day that the resolution had been circulated among Council members and had wide support.

It was unclear whether the text would be adjusted to reflect Mr. Putin’s announcement. But in any case, the resolution is likely to be vetoed by Russia.

The Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, who is serving as the Council’s rotating president this month, repeated Moscow’s talking points by blaming Ukraine for the crisis. He accused the West of not caring about the millions of people in the breakaway holdouts of eastern Ukraine.

“If you don’t change the geopolitical lens, you will never understand us,” Mr. Nebenzya said, portraying Russia as the savior of eastern Ukrainians rather than an aggressor invading a neighboring nation.

“For us,” he said in reference to the separatist area of Ukraine, “these people living in Donbas are women, elderly and children who have for years been cowering from Ukraine’s shelling.” He added that the aim of Moscow’s military operation was “to protect the people who have been suffering from genocide.”

Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, the last to speak as per protocol, looked shocked. His voice shaking with emotion, he said he had scrapped his prepared speech because Mr. Putin had “declared war on my country” as of 10 p.m. Eastern time.

“It is the responsibility of this body to stop the war,” Mr. Kyslytsya told the gathering. “I call on every one of you to do everything possible to stop the war.”

The meeting had started with a sliver of hope, albeit fading, that diplomacy and negotiations could stand a chance.

The United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, whose comments are often measured, opened the session by pleading with Mr. Putin to stop.

“I have only one thing to say from the bottom of my heart,” Mr. Guterres said, “President Putin, stop your troops from attacking Ukraine. Give peace a chance. Too many people have already died.”

After more than two hours of speeches, the meeting ended with a tense exchange between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine called on Russia to relinquish its chair and duties as Council president.

“There is no purgatory for war criminals,” Mr. Kyslytsya said. “They go straight to hell, ambassador.”

After a bit of silence, Russia’s ambassador responded calmly.

“We aren’t being aggressive against the Ukrainian people, but against the junta in power in Kyiv,” he said.

He then announced the meeting adjourned.

“At least there are catacombs to hide in,” she said.

There was little sign of panic. Sloviansk was the site of fierce fighting in 2014, when Russian-backed separatists from further east pushed into town. Residents recalled hiding in basements from artillery bombardments.

Lilya Solyak, who works at a local hotel, said that she was staying put, believing that this time serious violence would pass the town by.

“They’re going to attack Kyiv and Dnipro, important places with airports,” she said. “Compared with those, our tiny little town won’t give them much.”

Lera Alekseeva was standing in a courtyard, warming her hairless cat in the folds of a jacket. She said she planned to report to work first thing Thursday at a company in town that sells and repairs cash registers.

Although she said she had no intention of leaving, she was taking the cat and her poodle with her to work just in case.

“They’re like children,” she said. “I can’t go anywhere without them.”

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In the northwestern city of Lviv, all but two guests checked out of the Citadel Inn, a military fort built in the 19th century that is now a hotel. Many were going to Kyiv.

“They are afraid for their families, afraid for their friends,” said Denys Derchachev, 36, the hotel doorman.

Others were afraid to travel east, including a 47-year-old business owner who said he had come to Lviv with his family a week earlier for a business meeting. “We are extending our stay a week,” he said. His company has some 600 employees across the country, including in Kyiv and Odessa.

“They are writing and asking where they can go, where is there a place that is safe,” he said. “What can I tell them?” he said. “I tell them to stay home and find somewhere safe.”

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Ms. Reshetylova said Ukrainians had sensed a war brewing for years, “and this moment has come.”

She wrote: “Fear is normal. It helps us survive. But panic is evil. Try to master yourself and think rationally.”

Urging Ukrainians to protect their children and homeland, she added: “I believe in us.”