War in Ukraine

The most significant European war in almost 80 years has begun.

Early this morning in Ukraine, Russian troops poured over the border, and Russian planes and missile launchers attacked Ukrainian cities and airports. The attacks spanned much of the country, far beyond the border provinces where there has been sporadic fighting between the nations for years.

Ukraine’s government called it “a full-scale attack from multiple directions.”

Blasts could be heard in Kyiv, the capital, as well as more than a dozen other cities. At an airport outside Kyiv, rocket attacks targeted parked Ukrainian fighter jets. In the southern port city of Odessa, Russian troops arrived from the sea. In Lutsk — in the northwest corner of Ukraine, closer to Poland than Russia — explosions were also reported.

(Track the Russian invasion and see video of explosions near Kharkhiv here.)

Ukrainians rushed to take shelter in bus and subway stations. In Kyiv, people packed up their cars and waited in long gas lines on their way out of the city. In eastern Ukraine, lines formed at A.T.M.s and gas stations.

“It’s panic, don’t you see?” Yevheni Balai told The Times’s Michael Schwirtz, pointing to a line of anxious Ukrainians standing outside a closed bank in Slovyansk, in the eastern part of the country. “They’ve gotten exactly what they wanted, the ones on the other side, panic and destabilization,” he said.

“We’ve lived eight years of unending war,” a woman who runs a blood bank in eastern Ukraine told The Times. “There’s nowhere to run. All Ukraine is exploding.”