Russia Launches Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine as Explosions Rock Kyiv

At 3:55am Kyiv time on 24 February 2022, Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian state television to announce that he had ordered military forces into Ukraine. Within minutes, explosions were reported in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Odesa. By dawn, Russian armoured columns were advancing on the Ukrainian capital from the north, crossing from Belarus, while a separate assault opened from the Russian-occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Russian forces landed on the Black Sea coast near Odesa in the south.

The attack came after months of diplomatic warnings that most Western governments had treated with scepticism until the final days. US intelligence had been briefing since January that an invasion was imminent; European governments, led by Germany and France, had pursued talks with Moscow almost until the last hour. When the missiles began falling, the scale and ambition of the assault — directed simultaneously at the capital and at Ukraine's second city, Kharkiv — made clear that Putin's objectives extended well beyond the Donbas regions he had officially recognised as independent two days earlier.

"Russia has attacked Ukraine. This is an unprovoked and criminal act of war." — Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, 24 February 2022

The assault on Kyiv

Russian forces advanced rapidly south through the Chernobyl exclusion zone and towards the capital, seizing Hostomel airport in the first hours with the apparent aim of establishing an air bridge to deliver troops directly into the city. The plan faltered when Ukrainian forces retook the airport and destroyed several Russian transport aircraft. Over the following days, a vast Russian armoured column — estimated at 64 kilometres in length by satellite imagery — stalled north of Kyiv, slowed by Ukrainian resistance, logistical failures and, reportedly, Ukrainian civilian vehicles blocking the roads.

The failure to take Kyiv in the first days of the invasion proved strategically decisive. Zelensky refused to be evacuated, remaining in the capital and making a series of video addresses that galvanised Ukrainian resistance and changed international opinion. His government, written off as likely to collapse within days by some Western intelligence assessments, instead organised a national defence that would eventually repel the Russian advance from the north entirely by early April 2022.

International response

The speed and severity of the Western response surprised Moscow. Within 48 hours, the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom had announced sweeping sanctions targeting Russian banks, oligarchs and state institutions, including the exclusion of major Russian banks from the SWIFT international payments system. Germany announced a historic reversal of its post-war defence policy, pledging €100 billion in new military spending and agreeing to halt the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. NATO put its rapid response force on standby and reinforced the eastern flank with additional troops.

Ukraine received an immediate flow of anti-tank weapons, man-portable air defence missiles and artillery ammunition from Western countries. The UK was among the first to supply NLAW anti-tank missiles, which Ukrainian forces used with devastating effect against Russian armoured columns in the early weeks of the war.

The humanitarian cost

Within a week of the invasion, UNHCR reported that more than one million people had fled Ukraine into Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia — the fastest displacement of a population in Europe since the Second World War. By the end of 2022, the number of Ukrainian refugees in Europe had exceeded eight million. The city of Mariupol endured a brutal siege for 86 days before falling to Russian forces, with much of the city destroyed; Ukrainian authorities estimated that tens of thousands of civilians had been killed there alone.

The war reshaped European security architecture, accelerated Finland and Sweden's applications to join NATO, triggered a global energy crisis as Europe scrambled to replace Russian gas, and produced the first major land war between two European states since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Its ultimate outcome, two years on, remained uncertain — but its consequences for the world order were already beyond dispute.