How the Russian invasion has unfolded, from the desperate fight for Mariupol to economic turmoil around the world
It was just hours until the first missiles would land. The last day of an era in Europe. On the evening of 23 February, the world braced.
Over Ukraine’s border, thousands of Russian troops had received their orders. A president in Kyiv and another in Moscow prepared the most significant addresses of their lives. In western capitals, officials worked to ward off what now seemed inevitable: the end of three decades of peace between Europe’s major powers.
And the end of an idea. That trade and prosperity could dissolve old European rivalries. That access to iPhones, Instagram and Ikea furniture could cool the chauvinist impulses that had fuelled centuries of bloody history.
In spite of unusually specific warnings from the US government of an imminent invasion, and the buildup of forces in Russia and Belarus, Ukrainians were not panicking. There were no queues at the western borders. The cafes and bars of Kyiv had been packed the previous Saturday evening. People continued making plans for holidays, dates, and swimming lessons for their children.
Volodomyr Ksienich, 22, a student organiser, spent the night with friends. They talked about the war, of course. “Nobody really believed it would happen,” he says.
Many analysts concurred. The Russian forces massing on the border were too few to occupy the country, they argued. State media had done little to prepare the Russian public for war. An invasion would trigger economic penalties so ruinous to the Russian economy that no leader would dare risk it.
All of this was true, and they were wrong.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, goes on TV in the early hours of Thursday with dire news. Dressed in a suit, his face still boyish and uncreased, Zelenskiy informs the country that after weeks of brinkmanship, Vladimir Putin has authorised military action against Ukraine. All of Europe is on the edge of a war that could “burn everything”, he says.
At 5.30am, Russian state media begins broadcasting a presidential address. Incensed by what he characterises as the creation of an “anti-Russia” on his borders, Putin announces a “special military operation” aimed at the “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine. As he is speaking and in the hours after, explosions are reported in Kyiv, Kramatorsk, Kharkiv, Odesa, Mariupol and other cities.
Ksienich is woken sharply by his father. “Did you hear that?” he asks him. “I think it’s bombs exploding. I think Russia’s started the war.”
The family gather their belongings and head to his grandparent’s country home on Kyiv’s outskirts. It is on the drive, when Ksienich stops to refuel his car, that he feels himself cross a dividing line between life before the war and after.
“I got out of my car and I heard bursts a couple of hundred metres from me,” he says. It is all still novel: the noise, the shaking ground, the impulse to flee and seek cover. He will grow weary of these sensations in the weeks to come, but the memory of this moment will still pierce through. “It was the first explosion I can remember.”
Over the course of a chaotic day, Russian troops and military vehicles are reported to have come within 18 miles of the capital; to have swept through Chornobyl and taken workers there hostage; to have pushed into eastern towns such as Sumy; and to have rained missiles on port cities across the Black Sea. Russian hit squads are searching for the Ukrainian president and gunfire is heard near the presidential compound. There is a feeling of doom in Kyiv and around the world.
By sunset, Ksienich’s family have gathered at the country house. Tomorrow they will need to decide whether to stay or go west. But first, they must survive the night. “We had a long discussion before going to bed, me and my relatives,” he recalls. “The Russian army could be trying to invade the place where we were staying. So we decided that some of us will sleep, some of us will not.”
Ksienich is part of the shift that sleeps first. He has a fitful spell in bed, ruminating. “You understand that something terrible is happening in your country,” he says.
After four hours, he gets up and takes his place on guard duty.
Kyiv is being attacked from three directions. Blasts are being reported across the city. Gun battles are raging in its northern suburbs as Russian forces close in. Ukraine’s defence ministry urges those who have not fled to make molotov cocktails and prepare to use them.
Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister, tells parliament that Zelenskiy has missed a scheduled call that morning, pausing as his voice falters. The chamber fills the silence with spontaneous applause.
Europe is uniting in revulsion and solidarity, imposing new sanctions, debating whether to excise Moscow from the Swift payments system. Russia is expelled from the Eurovision song contest.
A few dozen miles from the city, Ksienich and his family decide to stay. “We decided we needed to try to protect ourselves, then to protect our family, then to protect the whole country, if it’s possible,” he says.
The family get to work building makeshift barricades around their neighbourhood to slow oncoming tanks or armoured vehicles. They make contact with other men in the area and form a local defence unit. Ksienich is handed a Kalashnikov rifle several decades older than he is.
Forty-eight hours ago he was a data analyst, but now he is learning to fight like an insurgent. “They told us what to do when a column is right near you,” he says. “What to do when you see a tank.”
In the few quiet moments, he feels a moral vertigo. “You need to switch from a life where you are trying to solve all your conflicts verbally, by talking … But now you have ammo and a gun.”
That night, during a pause in the shelling, the Ukrainian president resurfaces. He posts a 32-second video, shot on the streets of Kyiv himself.
“Good evening, everyone,” he says, dressed in fatigues and surrounded by four other officials. He cycles the camera to each face – “The leader of the party is here. The head of the presidential administration is here” – and finally settles on his own. “The president is here.”
Kyrylo Demchenko, a history student from Dnipro, joins the rush of young men signing contracts to enlist in the Ukrainian army. He is immediately handed a gun and sent to a highway at the edge of the capital.
Hours after he arrives, Demchenko, 20, and his unit spot Russian soldiers and open fire. He survives, but has little memory of the exchange, only fleeting images. “It is so terrible, so cruel,” he says.
“I remember the music of the war – the bomb attacks, the shooting of the guns. I remember the tracer bullets, lighting up when they fly. I remember the anti-aircraft missiles. I remember short, separate details.
“It’s like a terrible story from a previous life.”
It is 3am, in a forest on the outskirts of Kyiv. Ksienich and a small unit of volunteers sit in silence, waiting for the telltale crack of a tree branch under a boot, or the rumble of a helicopter.
Russian battalions are 5 or 6 kilometres away, he says, but the mood on the ground is buoyant. “The first day many people were depressed, we didn’t know how our army would do,” he says. “After two or three days we have understood our army is very well prepared … We are planning to get rid of all the Russian occupants and get back Crimea and the occupied territories.”
Roads to the west of the country are choked with traffic and more than 300,000 Ukrainians have already fled the country. They are virtually all women and children; martial law has been instituted and men between 18 and 60 are banned from leaving. Across the country, families, friends and lovers are being divided, some for ever.
Old maxims of European security are crumbling every hour. Germany is sending anti-tank weapons and Stinger missiles to Ukraine, breaking a postwar taboo against exporting arms to conflict zones. The chancellor, Olaf Scholz announces the creation of a €100bn (£85bn) fund to boost the country’s armed forces. He calls it “Germany’s historical responsibility” to ensure that Putin “does not turn the clocks back”.
Four days in, Ukraine appears to have absorbed the initial Russian blow. Zelenskiy is still alive and in control of the government. Russian forces are uncoordinated, unable to take control of the airspace and running out of fuel and food. Hostomel airport, outside Kyiv, is the site of fierce fighting, preventing Russia from using it as a bridgehead into the capital.
In Bucha, a commuter town near Kyiv, an invading Russian column is devastated by Ukrainian artillery and retreats. But the soldiers return after a few hours, occupy local homes and dig in.
Putin’s plan appears not to have account for a decisive factor: that Ukrainian society would resist. That young, untrained people like Ksienich would take up guns, spend nights in a forest and risk death to defend their homes.
Fighting in Ukraine’s east has reached the town of Zaporizhzhia, home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. To the horror of world leaders and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a building inside the facility is hit by Russian shells and is set ablaze.
Miraculously, the damage does not extend to the reactors, avoiding a catastrophic nuclear release, though exchanges of gunfire and artillery around the site continue. “This is unprecedented,” says the IAEA’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi. “Completely uncharted waters.”
The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, tells the security council the world has “narrowly averted a nuclear catastrophe”.
In Mariupol, another disaster is taking shape. Hundreds of civilians have already died in shelling since the beginning of the war. The city is surrounded and its mayor, Vadym Boichenko, announces remaining residents no longer have heat, running water or electricity.
Roman Abramovich, one of the world’s richest men, whose ownership of Chelsea football club has revolutionised the English Premier League, has his assets frozen and is banned from travelling to Britain.
The sanctions against the oligarch – whose ties to Putin have been the subject of warnings for years – signal what campaigners hope is the end of London’s three-decade embrace of dirty Russian money.
The number of Ukrainians who have fled their country passes 2 million, in the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since the second world war.
Russia’s attempt to push its forces towards Kyiv has hit a snag. Ukrainian forces have blown up bridges and flooded plains, forcing the bulk of columns on to a few narrow roads. The result has been a predictable traffic jam. But after a few days, forces appear to be regrouping for an assault on the capital.
Kyiv is awash with anti-tank weapons, barricades and armed men. Ksienich has survived, and is stunned at the transformation of his home city, preparing for a battle “that could be compared to the battle for Kyiv in the second world war”.
Ukraine is receiving equipment donated from around the world, including sniper scopes manufactured by the glass and crystals firm Swarovski. “It costs thousands of dollars,” he marvels.
In a city bracing for war, there are still open cafes, barbers and other pockets of normal life. “It is even possible to eat yoghurt or ice-cream somewhere in the city,” Ksienich says.
Moscow is making faster progress in Ukraine’s south. The strategic port of Kherson has become the first major city to fall to Russia. About 2,000 people are estimated to have attended a protest in the city against the occupation.
Russian troops fire warning shots to disperse them, “but people are not afraid”, two anonymous diarists write. “But among the crowd, men in dark clothes are wandering, with hoods, hiding their faces, recording.”
Russia says it is “tightening the noose” in Mariupol. After relentless shelling that has destroyed more than 80% of residential buildings in the city, according to an estimate by its mayor, Russian forces have reached the centre and fighting has broken out around the Azovstal steelworks, a labyrinthine, Stalin-era facility that stretches for 10 sq km (4 sq miles), where hundreds of civilians are taking shelter.
A few days earlier, Russia bombed a theatre where an estimated 1,300 civilians were taking shelter. The Russian word “ДЕТИ” – “children” – had been marked out in large letters outside the building, in a fruitless appeal to the humanity of the attackers. An Associated Press investigation later estimates that at least 600 people were killed in the strike.
Just after midnight a Russian tabloid, Komsomolskaya Pravda, publishes a report claiming 9,861 Russian troops have been killed so far and 16,153 have been wounded. The breathtaking three-week toll is approaching the number of Russian servicemen killed in Afghanistan during the Soviet Union’s decade-long failed occupation.
By the end of the day, the figures have been removed from the story (the newspaper claims it was hacked) but its scale echoes what observers are seeing on the ground. The Russian campaign is indecisive, bogged down and pursuing too many targets at once.
There is “no real centre of gravity, five to six different axes of advance”, says Michael Kofman, a specialist in the Russian armed forces. “The military is trying to stretch itself thin, they’re stuck in urban fighting around Kyiv in the north, they can’t make much press in the east around Kharkiv or Sumy.”
Even in the south, where Russia’s forces are most numerous and making the most progress, they are trying to advance in two opposite directions, towards Mariupol in the east and west towards Odesa. “Which makes no sense whatsoever,” Kofman says. “None.”
The pain of this misadventure is starting to be felt around the world. Egypt, which imports 80% of its grain from Russia and Ukraine, fixes the cost of bread in response to a surge in prices. The soaring cost of fuel compounds a severe currency crisis in Sri Lanka. The price of cooking oils, cereals and meats are on their way to the highest levels recorded by the United Nations since it started tracking in 1990.
Kyiv is quieter than it has been in weeks. “We don’t hear anything about [Russia] trying to capture the city any more,” Ksienich says.
Days before, Russian negotiators at peace talks in Turkey made the surprise announcement that their forces would “radically reduce military activity” around Kyiv and another embattled city, Cherniyiv. The Ukrainian government is sceptical, but shelling in the capital has eased over the past week. Streets are busier and shops are reopening.
“There are huge sales on everything because businesses aren’t sure if [their stock] in warehouses will be safe, because Russia is bombing warehouses full of food, clothes, oil,” Ksienich says.
There is a feeling of relief in the city but also a building sense of dread at the rumours starting to emerge as Russian forces pull back. “Some friends of mine [are] in Irpin, a city near Kyiv that was captured,” Ksienich says.
“Our army is there and many civilians tell scary things about how the Russians behaved there … They were just shooting civilians, driving tanks over them.”
At 2.33pm London time, an alert is posted on the wire of the news service Agence France-Presse. It reads: “At least 20 bodies seen in one street in town near Kyiv.”
It is accompanied by photographs and video footage documenting the streets of Bucha, a satellite city on the outskirts of the capital. They are scenes from hell: crushed neighbourhoods, bound corpses strewn in the roads and bodies hastily buried in the front yards of their homes. In a cellar, authorities find the body of a woman dressed in a fur coat and nothing else, and torn condom wrappers on the floor above.
The discoveries immediately draw comparisons to the killings at Srebrenica or the My Lai massacre. “What Putin has done in Ukraine doesn’t look far short of genocide to me,” says the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson.
Over the coming days, journalists reach further-flung villages and find similar horrors. In Trostianets, near the Russian border, there is evidence of summary executions and torture. In the village of Staryi Bykiv, 50 miles east of Kyiv, Russian soldiers killed at least nine civilians. From homes in Novyi Bykiv, a settlement just across a river, they looted items including jewellery, a scooter, computers and from one house, a novelty cushion, in an orgy of looting so widespread across areas occupied by the Russians that it appears to be a systematic part of military culture.
Obscured by the grisly discoveries is a significant deadline: Friday was the end of the one-year term of tens of thousand of Russian conscripts, who are permitted to leave the army, despite rumours the Kremlin might seek ways to keep them in its ranks and bolster the invasion force.
It sets the future shape of the war: Russia will not have the numbers to encircle and cut off Ukrainian troops in Donbas. Any future Russian gains in the east will come through grinding attrition. “They will have to fight for every square inch of territory,” Kofman says.
Russia’s currency, the rouble, hits 80 to the dollar, roughly its rate before it invaded Ukraine, an astounding rebound from the records lows of the early weeks of the war.
The rouble’s resilience, despite suffocating sanctions and an exodus of foreign businesses, is based on short-term financial engineering, a surge in oil and gas prices caused by the invasion – and Europe’s inability to quickly find alternative supplies.
Germany, whose economic model is built in part on cheap Russian gas, is weathering diplomatic pressure to impose an outright ban on imports, calls that have grown more urgent since the discovery of war crimes in Bucha and elsewhere.
Germans are being urged to do their part by turning down thermostats and driving less, but business leaders such as Martin Brudermüller, the chief executive of BASF, one of Germany’s biggest chemical companies, is warning against drastic cuts.
“Do we want to destroy the entire economy with our eyes open?” he asks.
As Zelenskiy warns that Russia has commenced its campaign to seize all of the eastern Donbas region, at Mariupol’s sprawling Azovstal plant the few thousand remaining defenders and civilians – running out of food, water and medicine – are given a midday deadline to surrender. Those who do are “guaranteed to keep their lives”, the Russians say. They reject it.
Kyiv has surprised the world and repelled the invaders, but success is bittersweet. So many have been killed or are still fighting, Ksienich says, while people in the capital begin to resume normal lives.
“You see a guy in a military uniform with a gun, who is ready to defend our country. And then you see a guy coming from a bar who’s drunk … People are relaxing but I don’t think it’s right.”
Early in the war, he felt confident Ukraine would expel Russian forces from Kyiv, Crimea and Donbas. Now he is more circumspect. “I hope we at least get our borders before the invasion started,” he says.
Speaking in Poland after a surprise visit to Kyiv, Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, is asked if Washington’s goals in Ukraine have changed since the beginning of the war. He recites the administration’s standard line about helping Ukraine to defend its sovereignty. But this time, he adds something new and further-reaching.
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin says. “It has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
As the fighting in the east settles into a grinding war of attrition, the puppet leadership of Kherson, captured by Russia early in the fighting, say they plan to seek annexation by Moscow, giving a hint of a possible future for other cities and towns seized by Russian forces. Across the occupied region, Russia has reportedly disappeared mayors, journalists and artists as it seeks to tighten its grip. In some areas it will soon introduce the rouble as an official currency and offer fast-tracked Russian passports to residents.
Russia has won the battle for Mariupol but is losing its war against Nato’s encroaching alliance. Hours after Ukraine’s military command announces it is no longer defending the Azovstal plant, and the remaining fighters are bussed towards an uncertain future in Russia, the prime ministers of Sweden and Finland confirm they will jointly submit applications to become members of the group. If they succeed, the length of Nato’s border with Russia will double overnight.
In a rare display of dissent in a country where criticising the war – or even referring to it as one – now attracts a prison sentence, a Russian retired colonel offers a withering assessment on state TV of an invasion that has cost thousands of lives for little territorial gain. “We are in total geopolitical isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don’t want to admit it,” Mikhail Khodaryonok tells a dumbstruck panel show.
The US and its Nato allies have walked a careful line so far, seeking to funnel weapons and aid to Ukraine without provoking Russia into widening the war beyond its borders. In recent weeks, sensing an opportunity to trap Russia in a quagmire, western powers are pushing that line further.
The Biden administration passes a massive $40bn (£32bn) package of military and economic aid for Ukraine, and is shipping out long-range howitzers, armoured vehicles and kamikaze drones, a step up from the anti-tank missiles and small arms it sent earlier. It is now trumpeting its role training Ukrainian soldiers in how to use these weapons systems – and in providing intelligence that has helped killed a dozen Russian generals.
With fighting now largely confined to the east, more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees have returned home, the government says. More than 5 million remain abroad in the largest displacement crisis of the 21st century.
Russia is learning the lessons of its disastrous invasion. It has broken into Sievierodonetsk, the last major population centre in Luhansk province outside its control, by concentrating forces that earlier in the war it had spread thinly. Elsewhere in the east and south, it is digging in, fortifying its positions.
The heavy fighting in the eastern regions, where Russia can more easily supply its troops, is taking a heavy toll on Ukraine’s defenders. Zelenskiy says 50 to 100 soldiers could be dying each day, in a rare estimate of combat casualties.
Whatever triumphalism existed after Russia retreated from around Kyiv has evaporated. The country’s ports are being strangled by a blockade. Cities such as Kharkiv are still within reach of Russian artillery. Territory is expected to change hands back and forth over the next months as both militaries near exhaustion, pause to resupply and launch counter-offensives. It spells a war with no end in sight.
Ksienich spends his days ferrying tools and summer clothes to friends fighting in the east. In the spare hours, he works his old job in Warsaw remotely. He makes his life in a void between war and peace.
Even if the fighting ends soon, it will have changed his trajectory. He has given up his job overseas, and plans to do a degree in business. “I’m enrolling in how to run government and politics,” he says. “I want to come back to Ukraine [and] help my country.”
Demchenko, the young historian, has become the sergeant of a logistics unit stationed near Kharkiv. He and his men sleep in muddy trenches and, when they are lucky, on the floor of farmhouses. He shrugs off the danger and discomfort.
“When the missile or bullet is near to you, or a Russian artillery shot lands near to you, you understand your situation right now is not as good as it can be. I’m not with a glass of juice near the sea or in my favourite Carpathian mountains.”
These difficult days are charged with a potent force, he says, a forging process he had only studied before in books.
“Our company was [merged] with people from different socio-economic groups, from different cities, and all of them are very different. They have different educations, different professions, and right now we are together.
“It’s amazing to see how different people make this new social construction, how they discuss each other, how they are thinking about their future together … This is like the birth of a new nation.”
One hundred days since the invasion, Putin’s army has lost some battles and won others. But the Russian president’s rash invasion has become a strategic catastrophe. Ukraine is embattled but united. It has become the very “anti-Russia” the war was supposed to extinguish.