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 civilian aviation.”

More than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in the fighting on Thursday morning, said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

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, Mr. Zelensky of Ukraine said 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.

“Let’s do this without chaos. Calm down!” urged one driver standing in front of a large white bus headed for the city of Lviv.

A river of red taillights stretched for miles along the road that leads west to Lviv, and eventually, Poland.

Roman Timofeyev, who was standing with four friends in Kyiv’s main bus station and trying to get on a bus, said he was trying to reach Lviv and then Poland. He said he had packed clothes, documents and medicine for the trip. At first, he said, he didn’t think he would leave, but then “it was too unexpected to hear the explosions near the houses, so we are afraid.”

His friend, Nastya Oleinik, said, “We didn’t sleep all night.”

He and his friends planned to go to Turkey for a few weeks to wait out whatever might happen.

“Wait for the end of war, and then come back,” he said.

A young man in gray sweatpants and black hat sat looking stunned on a small black duffle bag next to a long line of prospective bus passengers. He said he was waiting for a bus west.

“Horrible,” said the man, who gave only his first name, Alexander, and said he was 18. “Our people, our military are now dying in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and it’s horrible. Tanks from Belarus started to attack us. So I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

Asked whether he would come back to Kyiv, he said, “If it will be Russian, no,” and added, “By the evening, I think half of Ukraine will be Russian.”

As tickets sold out and more people poured in, some residents began to organize their own buses. A young man with a large green backpack said he had not been able to buy a ticket to the town he wanted to go to, Viltnitsa. So he had called around and found a driver who was willing to make the trip, provided that he gathered 55 people who could pay for it in half an hour.

He said he had walked into the parking lot and shouted the name of the town, and almost immediately filled the seats. A woman in a pink jacket was writing down the names.

“He told me it could take up to 60,” he said to her as she wrote a name in her small notebook. “We can take five more.”

In front of Kyiv’s central train station, several police officers stood in front of the main doors, turning prospective passengers away.

“They’re canceled,” one of the officers said to a young woman in a gray coat. “I don’t have any more information.”

Inside, passengers sat staring at their phones, trying to find ways out of the city. A young couple sat on the floor next to a large black suitcase piled high with coats. They said they were trying to get to the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, but had not been able to reach their family there since last night. And with trains stopped, they were intensely focused on their phones, looking for other options.

A young woman, Tatiana Melnik, sat on a window ledge with her 5-year-old daughter, Karolina, and tried to make arrangements after their train was canceled.

“We don’t know where to go or what to do,” Ms. Melnik said.

“There can be no justification for war, I say no to war!” Mr. Galkin, who runs a popular prime time show on a state-run television network, wrote on Instagram.

Valery Meladze, a popular singer who is often featured on state-run television networks, said in a video statement: “What happened today is something that could not and should not have happened, ever.”

“I plead you to stop military hostilities and start negotiations,” he said, without specifying whom he was referring to.

Zemfira Ramazanova, one of Russia’s most popular rock stars, published a post saying: “No to war.”

By speaking out against Mr. Putin’s decisions, Russian celebrities often put their careers at risk. The government controls vast segments of Russia’s popular culture by filtering access to the main television networks it controls.

Ksenia Sobchak, a popular socialite and journalist, was barred for years from appearing on state-sponsored shows because of her participation in anti-government protests. After reading the news on Thursday morning, she was bewildered.

“We Russians will deal with had happened today for many years,” Ms. Sobchak said in a post on Instagram. “I will now trust only the worst scenarios, even though I have always been optimistic,” she said, adding that “only optimists stayed in Russia, pessimists are long gone.”

In at least one case, the resentment of war among Russian cultural figures went beyond public statements. Yelena Kovalskaya, director of the Meyerhold Center, a state-run theater in Moscow, said she had resigned from her post. In a statement, she said, “it is not possible to work for a murderer and receive a salary from him.”

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Diplomats said that earlier resistance by some countries over specific sectors — for example, by Italy over luxury goods and Belgium over diamonds — had evaporated in the face of the invasion and that there was now broad consensus across the 27 member states.

The E.U.’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, described the proposed measures on Thursday morning as the “the harshest package of sanctions we have ever implemented.”

But a new rift emerged: A handful of member states led by Germany were advocating that the package exclude Mr. Putin for now.

Asked for comment, a German diplomat did not deny that Germany wanted to keep Mr. Putin off the latest sanctions.

The rationale for omitting him is a desire to keep channels open for dialogue with the top Russian leadership. They were considering exempting Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov for the same reason.

But other member states argued that the bloc should immediately inflict the maximum possible pain on Russia rather than hold back in hopes of renewed diplomatic dialogue.

E.U. leaders were scheduled to convene in Brussels on Thursday evening and were expected to meet through the night. The sanctions they are expected to agree on will come into effect when the legal language is published, on Friday or Saturday, diplomats said.

Closer to Russia than any other large Ukrainian city, Kharkiv has long loomed large in President Vladimir V. Putin’s view that Ukraine is no more than an appendage of Russia unjustly snatched away by the machinations of foreigners and misguided Ukrainian nationalists.

When protesters in Kyiv toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, in 2014, Kharkiv became the focus of a Russian-orchestrated effort to rally opposition to the new government in Kyiv and restore Mr. Yanukovych to power. The ousted president fled to Kharkiv, where the mayor at the time, Hennadiy Kernes, hosted a congress of pro-Russia politicians and officials from largely Russian-speaking regions in the east and southeast of Ukraine.

That effort, supported by Russian agents and agitators from across the nearby border, quickly fizzled but generated many of the propaganda tropes now being deployed by the Kremlin: claims that Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis; that Ukraine’s Russian speakers are in mortal danger; that Ukraine exists as a country only as result of foreign meddling.

Kharkiv, long a melting pot of different ethnic groups, including a large Jewish population, played a particularly important role in shaping Ukraine during and after World War I. It served as the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a largely Moscow-controlled entity set up in opposition to the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Kyiv, which sought to break away from Moscow and declared an independent Ukrainian state.

Soviet forces based in Kharkiv quickly crushed this early attempt at Ukrainian statehood, seizing Kyiv in February 1918.

In a lengthy historical essay on Ukraine published last July, Mr. Putin cited this obscure episode as an example of the doomed, foolhardy attempts to establish a Ukrainian state by “the different quasi-state formations that emerged across the former Russian empire.”

This history, Mr. Putin added, carried a pointed message for the current leaders of Ukraine: “For those who have today given up the full control of Ukraine to external forces, it would be instructive to remember that, back in 1918, such a decision proved fatal for the ruling regime in Kiev.”

And while some commentators called the visit ill-timed and said it would be cut short, Pakistan’s information minister said on Twitter that it would proceed as planned, with Mr. Khan returning to Pakistan later Thursday.

Gas is a crucial export for Russia, and Germany on Monday halted certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking the country to Russia in response to the Kremlin’s recognition of two separatist regions in Ukraine. That could potentially increase the importance of other outlets for Russian gas.

Mr. Khan, in an interview broadcast on Tuesday, avoided criticizing Moscow’s policy in Ukraine and said he hoped the crisis could be resolved peacefully.

“What we want to do is not become part of any bloc,” he said in the interview, given with the Russian news media courtesy of the Moscow-controlled broadcaster RT. “We want to have trading relations with all countries.”

He said that sanctions on Iran had contributed to delays in building the pipeline.

The U.S. State Department said that it was aware of Mr. Khan’s visit and that it hoped Pakistan, like all countries, would voice objection to Mr. Putin’s action in Ukraine, especially given the longstanding partnership between Islamabad and Washington.

Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said at a briefing on Wednesday that Washington hoped “every country around the world would make that point clearly in unambiguous language in their engagements with the Russian Federation.”

In Moscow, Mr. Khan laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a war memorial dedicated to Soviet troops who died in World War II, according to The Associated Press of Pakistan, which said it was the first visit by a Pakistani leader to Moscow in two decades.

At least 18 military officials were killed in an attack outside the Black Sea port city of Odessa, where amphibious commandos from the Russian Navy came ashore, according to Sergey Nazarov, an aide to Odessa’s mayor.

Explosions rang out around Odessa at about 10:30 a.m., sending firefighters scurrying to put out blazes and rescue people in the vicinity, according to the city’s emergency services agency. By noon, however, the fighting in Odessa appeared to have subsided, and there was no indication of any Russian forces in the city, said Mr. Nazarov.

The country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that Ukraine was facing “a full-scale attack from multiple directions” but that it “continues to defend itself” from the Russian advance. Civilians lined up at recruitment offices to take up arms against President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces.

Starting before dawn, Russian forces crossed into Ukraine at multiple points, with helicopter-borne troops flying in under the cover of machine-gun fire, naval units coming ashore from the Black Sea and military vehicles crossing from Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in 2014.

Ukrainian forces said they had shot down several Russian fighter aircraft and a helicopter in an increasingly intense battle to maintain control over key cities. Ukrainian troops had also repelled Russian advances on two major cities: Chernihiv in the north, near the Belarus border, and Kharkiv in the northeast, close to Russia, a senior Ukrainian military official said.

Video footage verified by The Times showed at least half a dozen Russian helicopters flying west over the Dnieper river toward Hostomel, a town on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, with some helicopters apparently attacking Hostomel’s airport. One video released by Ukraine’s armed forces appeared to show at least one of those helicopters being shot down.

Other videos posted to social media showed Russian military vehicles parked on the outskirts of Kharkiv, the second largest city, where troops had set up checkpoints on a main road.

The Ukrainian army is badly outgunned and outmanned by Russian forces, but in one indication that it was mounting a resistance, two Russian armored personnel carriers were seen damaged, one crashed into a tree, in the eastern Ukrainian town of Shchastya early Thursday.

Maryna Danyliuk, a retiree, was awaken by intense explosions — she believed them to be caused by Russian artillery fire — around 5 a.m. She hastily packed to flee.

By the time she was driving, she said in a telephone interview, she could hear sounds of combat on the town’s street, and saw the two apparently damaged armored vehicles. They had no markings other than a white circle surrounding the letter Z, a symbol that has been seen on Russian military vehicles in recent days on the Russian side of the border.

It was unclear what had happened to the vehicle crews, she said: “We were driving very fast. There was shooting in the city.”

In Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, about 100 men, ranging in age from their 20s to 50s, turned up at a military recruitment office even as the dull thuds of explosions could be heard from the direction of the town’s military airport.

They packed into a corridor and filled out forms to join the military, heeding a call from Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, who asked all able citizens to immediately enlist with the country’s territorial defense units.

“The enemy is attacking, but our army is indestructible,” he said. “Ukraine is moving into all-out defense mode.”

Until Thursday, officials had seen barely a trickle of people come through the sites. But the flow is expected to grow as the conflict intensifies and expands.

Poland’s defense ministry introduced a higher alert level on Thursday, requiring soldiers from operational and territorial defense forces to stay in their units. All leave and business trips were canceled.

The Biden administration has repeatedly said that U.S. troops will not fight in Ukraine or rescue Americans trapped there by a Russian attack. But American commanders and their counterparts in Poland have been preparing parts of several Polish facilities for possible evacuees.

In Jasionka, Poland, an indoor arena has been outfitted with bunk beds and supplies for up to 500 people, and U.S. officials say that capacity could be quickly expanded.

American officials have estimated that a nationwide attack on Ukraine could result in one million to five million refugees, with many of them going to Poland. That could lead to the largest arrival of refugees in Europe since more than one million migrants and refugees arrived in 2015, a dynamic that had a profound effect on European politics by bolstering far-right parties.

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“The women will go to Poland, and the men will fight,” she said.

Some of her friends already had weapons. For now, she said, she was going to a small village outside Lviv. But first, she wanted to get her valuables from a security box at a bank near the city council, which was festooned with the blue and gold of Ukraine’s flag.

“They sent us a message and said come collect all your valuable today, tomorrow we will be closed,” she said. So she joined those people waiting in lines at grocery stores, pharmacies and other shops that sold essential products.

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As she stood in line, people swapped stories and tried to reach relatives. They also shared videos of unconfirmed military actions in eastern Ukraine, frightening images that hinted at the devastating firepower that Russia had begun to unleash on Ukraine.

It was hard to imagine that Lviv, with its medieval layout, cobblestoned streets and ornate buildings, could be a target. The city is in the northwest corner of Ukraine, near the border with Poland and the NATO front lines.

But for many people living here, the idea of Russia attacking a country that posed no military threat seemed beyond belief.

Air raid sirens wailed eight or nine times in the early morning before falling silent. People gingerly made their way out onto the streets.

There was no Bolt taxi service, but some restaurants and shops started to open by midday. The internet and cellphone service were working, although they were occasionally spotty given the demand.

But Ms. Kornienko was not sure that would last. She felt fortunate to be in the western part of the country rather the eastern regions. But she was preparing to take out her money and head to a village.

“It is scary, right?” she said.

Mr. Navalny, who is serving a prison sentence that could be extended by up to 15 years if he is convicted of embezzlement and other charges, went on to say: “This war will lead to a vast number of victims, destroyed lives and continued impoverishment of Russian people.”

Mr. Navalny, who built a large anti-corruption organization and opposition party over the past decade with thousands of supporters and offices across Russia, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent in 2020 and arrested upon his return to the country last year.

Some of Mr. Putin’s critics describe his campaign against Mr. Navalny’s organization, which has been declared an extremist group and banned, as a prelude to the attack he has launched against Ukraine.

Mr. Navalny has continued to criticize Mr. Putin via Twitter, through lawyers who meet him occasionally in prison. On Tuesday, after Mr. Putin made a long, aggrieved speech in which he appeared to lay claim to all of Ukraine, Mr. Navalny published a long Twitter thread calling members of Mr. Putin’s inner circle “senile thieves.”

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 Slovyansk.