Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called on ‘all citizens who were ready to defend the country from Russian forces’ to come forward, saying weapons would be given to anyone who wants them.

In an emergency broadcast shown below, the Ukrainian President tells citizens: “We are issuing arms to all Ukrainians capable of defending our sovereignty” and “anyone with military experience who is able to join the defence of Ukraine must report to battle stations”.

What’s happening?

At about 0600 Moscow time, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a military operation in eastern Ukraine; minutes later, missile strikes began at locations across the country, including in the capital Kyiv.

Here’s what has happened since.

This list was updated at 1630.

Videos from Ukraine

The following are tweets showing important events in the invasion so far.

This will be updated as the day goes on.

George Allison
George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
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41 COMMENTS

  1. Marco Rubio (USA) is tweeting from briefings and says it’s not going as well as Russia has hoped.

    They are going to try a strategic air assault using transports/paratroopers to encircle Kiev.

    Two pincers are aimed at Kiev, one from the north (Belarus) and one from the south in Crimea.

    • That may be so. However the real deal will come when Putin tries to occupy / pacify Kiev, a city of 4.5 million hostile people. It could get very bloody very quickly. Putin will need his entire force just to occupy Kiev let alone the rest of the country. Lets hope the Ukrainians can cause them huge casualties swiftly; that is the only way this will end.

    • So they encircle Kiev! Do they think that the rest of Ukraine will simply say ok then that’s it! I dare say that the Ukrainian army will have something to say about that.

  2. Strength to Ukraine 🇺🇦 and its people. May you kick Russia’s arse extremely hard! What an absolute evil monster Putin is!
    Sorry for my rant but this is beyond disgusting! I hope the West doesn’t just standby and watch.

    • Mate, I’m feeling very grateful we live down here! Your choice of the word disgusting is a prefect adjective for the situation – Putin, a disgrace of a human being and the embodiment of evil as you say. Perhaps he was never hugged as a child or dropped on his head at birth.

      • Morning Klonkie, all, it’s great this ukdj website is keeping us all posted on developments. I’m glued to it and feel very outraged by all this! I think we all sincerely hope Ukraine can stand up and defeat this evil monster and his forces and has enough AAW and AAT weaponry to take out every bloody, truck, tank, plane and helicopter there is.
        I have to admire the sheer guts of civilian men, women, young and old taking up arms for their country. God bless and strength to all of them!
        Hopefully opposition forces in Russia and Belarus might also seize this time for a domestic uprising and topple these barstads while their busy off invading Ukraine.
        I know we’re a long way down here, but it does bring home the vulnerability of civilian society and the absolute need to have a substantial armed forces and reserves to be able to defend yourselves and you values at all times. As a Aussie-Brit, I’m proud of our contribution, hope BJ rises to the occasion and the UK armed forces get a huge financial injection, upgrades, increase, whatever is truly needed. Hope for a bit here in Aus and even in NZ too.
        May Ukraine, led by an ex-comedian, got to like that, be victorious and have the last laugh!
        Sorry if I’m ranting, but I think like a lot of us watching all this on tv, Internet, just feel the horror of this reality going on. It’s really leaving a bad taste isn’t it, in our mind, heart and soul and sense of shared humanity.
        I’d better take a break and get a ☕️. I’m not even enjoying my Friday’s anymore…

  3. Looks like it wasn’t Trump that was buddies with Putin after all but Biden. Putin waited until Trump was out and Biden was in to invade Ukraine. The Chicoms will be invading Taiwan next just wait in see. They know Biden will do NOTHING to stop them but put a few worthless sanctions on a few of Putin’s gang. Biden/Harris are so out of their league with Putin.

    • Donald Trump has said that Vladimir Putin is “very savvy” and made a “genius” move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states and moving Russian armed forces to them.

      Trump said he saw the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis on TV “and I said: ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine … Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”

      The former US president said that the Russian president had made a “smart move” by sending “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen” to the area.

  4. I Ihave a question: if you don’t think Boris Johnson is a Russian asset, what do you think his game is?

    The sanctions he has announced today are tailor made for Russian oligarchs and companies to circumvent them – they will barely cost the friends of Putin a single rouble.

    If you think you disklike the Russian invasion of Ukraine, here is the news: you are actively supporting it if you support Boris Johnson – he is their number one weapon.

    • If that was the case, why was Boris along with the Baltic Statics, kicking Russia out of SWIFT? It was Western European nations that prevented that.
      As for sanctions, it’s difficult for the U.K. to add many given we instituted sanctions for both the Polonium and Novichok incidents.

      • “sanctions for both the Polonium and Novichok incidents.”? Do you mean the diplomats who were kicked out…..and then allowed back in 9 months later. We have more Russian diplomats in the country now than before Salisbury.

        And lets check it, it is 20:50 on the day Russia invaded Ukraine….and STILL there has not been a single UK sanction against a Russian who actually owns property in the UK……not even ONE.

  5. The trickle of info seems to show Ukraine having some success hitting the Russian armoured thrusts in the flanks and holding up large sections of the wider advance. Hoping they can take out some of those airborne bridgeheads Russia will try to reinforce

    Whilst they can’t win lets hope they can give Putin a seriously bloody nose. Whatever happens in the open warfare phase the Russians will have a hard time cracking the larger cities and containing the inevitable insurgency that would follow.

    The wider tragedy beyond the suffering of the Ukrainian people will be if any deescalation then enables The West to row back on some of unity and resolve we are now seeing against Putin as happened after Crimea.

    • They don’t have the numbers to defend across a 2000km front line. But falling back then hitting columns from the flanks and any following logistic trains is the best way to grind the Russian advance down and destroy their momentum.

  6. Boris completely ignoring the question about reversing cuts to the military- fills me with hope that they give a single fk about our defence.

  7. Hopefully, we will see some urgency in getting new equipment out of the door at a faster pace than normal.

    Nations sign Eurodrone contract24 FEBRUARY 2022

    “The milestone on 24 February sees France, Germany, Italy, and Spain move ahead with development of the European unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which is also known as the European Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance (MALE) Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) and/or the EuroMALE.”

    https://www.janes.com/defence-news/air-platforms/latest/nations-sign-eurodrone-contract

    Second French FREMM air-defence frigate starts sea trials

    “The second of two Aquitaine-class FREMM multimission frigates enhanced with air-defence capabilities on order for the French Navy has started sea trials off the coast of Brittany.”

    Lorraine is the eighth and final FREMM frigate being built by Naval Group for the French Navy and the second of two to be built to a modified FREMM DA (défense aérienne) standard.

    https://www.janes.com/defence-news/naval-weapons/latest/second-french-fremm-air-defence-frigate-starts-sea-trials

    Worth reading.

    24 February 2022
    The Ukraine Crisis – A Failure of Deterrence or Just the Kick the West Needed?
    
    https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/the-ukraine-crisis-a-failure-of-deterrence-or-just-the-kick-the-west-needed?

  9. Interesting article from the FT, it looks at how China has historically reduced the impact of sanctions on Russia and how they have been refocusing their economies to support each other, with 150billion of trade and taking the dollar out of their trading processes.

    It is interesting is the the FT talks about how the US and Taiwan have discussed stopping access to computer chips.

    It also talks about the need to pressure China if any sanctions will work.

    https://www.ft.com/content/55d86391-2d05-4eb4-869c-83a7878b8942

    what worries me is that as the west starts to limit access to chips it makes the option to invade Taiwan more attractive, as in really what would the US and west be able to do ? Apart from engage in WW3 or loss it’s main supply of chips.

  10. One fear I have is if Ukrainian Air Force jets cannot operate out of their own airbases because they have been attacked/rendered unusable, what if they were to escape to Poland, Germany, Lithuania etc. and start operating from there? What would Russia do then? Attack them in their new locations? If so, this would be a severe escalation, involving a NATO military response. It’s just a scenario, one of many running through my head, like may people… This is frightening, and everything has changed. For example, surely the Integrated Review is redundant now and needs to be radically reassessed, along with a radical increase of Defence spending, well above where it currently is..

    • Aircraft can’t act out of a neutral country in the same was as warships can’t continue to operate after being in a neutral port (doing so violates that country’s neutrality). See Graf Spee*.

      *My grandfather was a 2nd Lt on HMS Achilles, I studied classics at uni, in the Iliad Achilles was often referred to as ‘the son of Peleus’; my grandad would phone up saying he was Peleus’ stroppy nephew – even when he was in his 90s – I miss my grandad, I wish I was not living in a world where the world war he fought in might repeat itself…I’m rambling now, sorry.

    • Russian paras have taken an airport 10 miles nw of kiev,ukr 4th rapid reaction bgd is counterattacking, russian drive from crimea seems to have been going for kherson in the south but bypassed it e and w, chernobyl site has been taken by russian armor unit, seen a lot of west facing btr/bmp wrecks, a recon platoon captured by ukr militia unit, ka 25 downed at airport, a couple of vids of su25’s doing bomb lobs rather than missile strikes, All IMHO of course.

      • Seems you have a good source. I wouldn’t worry too much about Kiev airport, the Ukrainians will clean that lot up pretty quickly. Bad news on Chernobyl (perhaps they can bust the sealed reactor open). This is all phase 1. What happens when Ivan gets to the cities will decide it. Got to cause those guys as many casualties as possible.

        • Early signs seem to be the Ukrainians are having some success in hitting them in the flanks and lines of supply whilst giving up ground towards an inevitable withdrawal into the cities.

          Russian artillery and airstrikes don’t seem to be particularly accurate and there are snippets of them losing multiple armoured vehicles/helicopters whilst some of their slower units have stalled.

          The crunch point will be whether sufficient Ukrainian forces and resolve will remain to exact a high body count on the Russian’s in taking the population centres and then keeping them suppressed.

          As horrific it is for Ukraine I really hope this becomes a long, protracted invasion for the Russians who find themselves stuck in a costly quagmire trying to control a population of 40 million people determined not to cave and accept their puppet government.

          • Thanks Challenger.

            Truth is the Ukrainians will get massacred on the steppe but in the cities, with Javelin, NLAW and Stinger they can really bleed the Russians. Let’s hope they do so.

            BTW I think Putin has gone fruit loop, he’s no longer rational.

    • Great idea! Depending on how this plays out we could maybe see a similar situation to Afghanistan in the 80’s – training and support given under the radar to Ukrainians to mount a hit and run insurgency.

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