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Underground I met Pete Kiehart, photographer working with BuzzFeed News, and Isobel Koshiw, fixer and reporter in our team. They’ve been gathering things and have been reading news reports and social media to see what’s going on. It was jarring to see people there, having spent the evening before celebrating a good reporting week with cocktails and steaks. Before turning around and because all my reporter’s notebooks were used up, I went to a stationery store, a young girl asked her mother to buy a pen with a teddy bear.
It was the last normal thing I remember experiencing before the bomb went off.
In a video carried by Russian state television and circulated on social media, Putin announced that a military operation was underway to force the Ukrainian government to hand over control to him. Very quickly we realized that missile strikes were launched on strategic military installations across the country – from eastern Kharkiv to western Ivano-Frankivsk to central Uman – and the scale of Putin’s invasion became abundantly clear.
During the day, the casualties increased. Among the first to be killed were young children. A woman who was riding a bicycle on the road was also killed. And there are many more Ukrainian civilians and troops killed. On Thursday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that at least 137 Ukrainians had been killed so far in the Russian invasion, including civilian and military casualties.
Ukrainians I’d interviewed and friends I’ve made over more than a decade living and working here frantically call and send texts asking for information and advice. Where is it safe? What will happen? When will it end? Not being able to give you an adequate answer, I think it’s pointless.
In the industrial eastern steppe of the country, where the shooting war has simmered for eight years, in the capital, Kyiv, with golden-domed monasteries and cobblestone streets, and in the pastoral west near the border of Poland and the European Union, black plumes. from the smoke filled the sky, every sign of Putin’s hatred for Ukraine.
This country is on fire.
Defiant Zelensky declared martial law and ordered the country’s arsenal to be open to “all patriots” willing to defend freedom and democracy against tyranny and terrorism.
As of last night, it was not clear what happened. Some unknown Ukrainians sought safety in bomb shelters built after World War II that no one thought they should use. And the fight continues.
In a sign that the tide could be in Ukraine’s favor, the military managed to take control of Hostomel Airport, where earlier in the day 34 attack helicopters swooped in from the border and dropped Russian troops just 15 minutes from Kyiv.
But somewhere near the capital, the sound of cannons could still be heard, indicating another sleepless night.
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