I found Pete Kiehart, a photographer who works with BuzzFeed News, and Isobel Koshiw, a fixer and reporter on our team. They’ve collected their stuff and have scanned news reports and social media to see what’s going on. It was jarring to see them there, they had spent the previous evening celebrating a well-reported week with cocktails and steaks. Before I entered and since I had used up all the reporter’s notebooks, I stopped by a stationery store, where a young girl begged her mother to buy her a pen with a teddy bear on it.
It was the last normal thing I remember experiencing before the bomb went off.
In a video made by Russian state television and widely shared 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 attacks were being carried out on strategic military installations across the country – from eastern Kharkiv to western Ivano-Frankivsk to central Uman – and the scale of the attack. Putin’s aggression becomes terrifyingly clear.
By midday, casualties were piling up. Among the first to be killed was a young boy. A woman who was riding a bicycle down the street was also killed. And many more civilians and Ukrainian troops were killed. On Thursday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that so far at least 137 Ukrainians have been killed in the Russian invasion, including civilian and military casualties.
The Ukrainians I’ve interviewed and friends I’ve made for over a decade living and working here have been frantically calling and texting asking for information and advice. Where is safe? What is going to happen? When will it end? Unable to give them full answers, I feel completely useless.
On the steppes of the industrial east of the country, where a shooting war has been going on for eight years, in the capital Kyiv, with its golden-domed monasteries and cobblestone streets, and in the western part near the border of Poland and the European Union, clouds of black smoke filled the sky, each a mark of Putin’s hatred of Ukraine.
The country is on fire.
A defiant Zelensky declared martial law and ordered the country’s army to open its doors to “all patriots” ready to defend freedom and democracy against tyranny and terrorism.
When night falls, it’s not clear how things will play out. An unknown number of Ukrainians sought safety in bomb shelters created after World War II that no one thought they would ever need to use. And the battle raged.
In a sign that perhaps the situation could be in Ukraine’s favor, the army managed to regain control of Hostomel Airport, where earlier in the day 34 attack helicopters had rushed in from across the border and take down Russian forces just 15 minutes from Kyiv.
However, somewhere near the capital, firecrackers still rang out, suggesting a long night of no more sleep.
