It was reported that Ukrainian and American officials said, Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine late Wednesday, with President Joe Biden accusing Vladimir Putin of personally choosing to carry out “a premeditated war that will bring a catastrophic loss of life and human suffering.” Russian began to shell moments after Putin said he had “decided to conduct a special military operation” aimed at the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine. It was said he called on Ukraine’s forces to lay down their arms and surrender their country to Russian control.
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It was gathered that CBS News teams in the capital city of Kyiv and Kharkiv, close to the Russian border in the country’s east, heard shelling into the early hours of the morning.
Early Thursday a Ukrainian government spokesperson said “cruise and ballistic missile strikes are underway at the [military] control centers” in Kyiv.
A flame is seen from an area near the Dnieper river in Kyiv, Ukraine
It was said that in his speech on Russian state TV, Putin said his plans did not include an occupation of Ukraine and his government insisted it was not shelling population centers. It was stated that the Russian leader portrayed his attack on Ukraine as a defense of ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, whom he has repeatedly claimed is suffering “genocide” at the hands of the government in Kyiv.
It was reported that Ukraine’s government, and the U.S. and Europe, flatly reject accusations that any aggression was being directed at residents of Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists have fought government forces for almost eight years since Russia last invaded and annexed the southern Crimean Peninsula away from Kyiv.
It was also reported that the attack came just two days after Putin recognized the self-declared “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region as independent, sending shockwaves across the globe and sparking a round of sanctions from the West.
Russia had massed roughly 190,000 forces near the Ukrainian border, and Mr. Biden on Friday said he was “convinced” Putin had decided to invade.