Team News Riveting
Russian missiles and air strikes hit Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and more than a dozen other cities across the country Thursday, minutes after President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation.
Putin justified the action stating he seeks to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine” and bring its leaders to trial.
Ukrainian officials said an initial wave of strikes targeted military installations, airfields and government facilities across the country, as well as border force installations. Ukraine’s border service said its troops came under attack all along the country’s frontiers with Russia and Belarus.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that Russian troops had landed in Odessa and were crossing the border. “The invasion has begun,” the ministry said in a statement.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Twitter that Putin had “started a full-scale war against Ukraine” and had begun shelling civilian cities. “This is a war of aggression,” he wrote on Twitter. “Ukraine will defend itself and win. The world must act and stop Putin. It is time to act — immediately.”
Evoking the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Putin cast his action as a long-overdue strike against an American-led world order that he described as an “empire of lies.” Putin said he was acting after receiving a plea for assistance from the leaders of the Russian-backed separatist territories formed in eastern Ukraine in 2014 — a move that the Western officials had predicted as a possible pretext for an invasion.
According to latest updates, Ukraine said enemy forces had seized control of 2 villages in country’s east. Ukraine’s parliament had approved martial law even as reports said over 800 Ukrainian military casualties. While Ukraine claimed that it had downed five Russian planes, helicopters, Russia said it had destroyed the Ukraine military base and was advancing fast.
Kyiv residents huddled inside a metro station, which serves as a bomb shelter, after air raid sirens sounded early on Thursday morning. Several cities in Ukraine were under attack as Russia began its invasion from land and sea.
Video of a Russian cruise missile hitting a target in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk airport, reportedly in Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine had gone viral. Many apartments had been badly damaged in the bombing with huge casualties of civilians.
(The News Riveting will keep updating the story related to military action in Ukraine)
