Ukrainians wake up to 'the worst sunrise' of their lives

The missile fragment pierced the ceiling of Mikhail Shcherbakov’s apartment in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. A Russian attack, after weeks of rhetoric and warning signs, had hit home. "I heard noise and woke up. I realised it sounded like artillery,” Shcherbakov said.

He jumped from the couch and ran to wake his mother, and something exploded behind him. The missile left a nearby computer and teacup shrouded with dust, instant artifacts of Europe’s latest crisis. At dawn on Thursday, Ukrainians’ uneasy efforts at normality were shattered.

Smoke rose from cities, even ones well away from a long-running separatist conflict in the country’s east. "Today I had the worst sunrise in my life,” said another Kharkiv resident, who gave her name only as Sasha. She rushed to her balcony and realised the sounds that had woken her weren’t fireworks.

A son wept over the body of his father among the wreckage of a missile strike in a residential district in the eastern Ukrainian town of Chuguiv as the country reeled on Thursday from Russia's invasion.

"I told him to leave," the man in his 30s sobbed, next to the twisted ruins of a car. Nearby a woman screamed curses into the wintry sky.

A missile crater, some four to five metres wide, was scoured into the earth between two devastated five-storey apartment buildings.

Firefighters battled to extinguish the remains of a blaze. Farther from the border, a morning commute transformed into chaos, with lines of cars waiting at fuel stations or fleeing from the grey and drizzly capital, Kyiv.

People carrying luggage took shelter in the subway, unsure of where to go. Some panicked. Others clung to routine, with irritation. "I’m not afraid. I’m going to work. The only unusual thing is that you can’t find a taxi in Kyiv,” one resident complained, as air raid sirens wailed.

Many seemed unsure how to react. Kyiv’s main street, Khreshchatyk, rippled with anxiety as people checked their phones.

Some walked their dogs or waved at friends. "I’m not scared at the moment. Maybe I’ll be scared later,” resident Maxim Prudskoi said.

Residents said a 13-year-old was among those killed in the town, but there was no definitive death toll from the authorities. Sergiy, 67, tried to use the leg of an Ikea table to block up his smashed window. He had received a few bruises but said he was fine. "I'm going to stay here, my daughter is in Kyiv and it's the same there," he said.

Sergiy thought the target had been the nearby military airfield, close to Ukraine's second city Kharkiv and just 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the Russian border.

"It was one of the targets that Putin had cited, I'm not even surprised," he said, refusing to give his surname. "We will hang in there."

But elsewhere in the capital, Anna Dovnya watched soldiers and police remove shrapnel from an exploded shell and was terrified. "We have lost all faith,” she said. "Until the very last moment, I didn’t believe it would happen. I just pushed away these thoughts.”

In Mariupol, the Azov Sea port city that many feared would be the first major target because of its strategic importance, journalists saw similar scenes of mixed routine and fear. Some residents waited at bus stops, seemingly on their way to work, while others rushed to leave the city that is only about 15 kilometres from the front line with the Donetsk People’s Republic, one of two separatist-held areas recognised by Russian President Vladimir Putin as independent this week in a prelude to the attack. "I can’t do anything. I’m just stuck standing here,” said one Mariupol resident who gave only his first name, Maxim, after running around the city since sunrise in search of cash or a full tank of gas, in vain.

At a supermarket, retiree Anna Efimova worried about her mother, who she said was busy stocking her basement with supplies. "There’s nowhere to run, where can we run?” she said. As the day progressed, alarm rose across Ukraine. People crowded grocery stores.

In Kharkiv, worried residents inspected fragments of military hardware strewn across a children’s playground.

Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko called on the city’s 3 million people to stay indoors unless they worked in critical sectors and said everyone should prepare go-bags with necessities such as medicine and documents. Ukrainians in the western city of Lviv, not far from Poland, began lining up outside gun shops, encouraged by the government to join the national defence.

"We are defending and not attacking,” said one resident, who gave his name only as Yuri. "This is our land, and we will fight to the last.” The possible repercussions extended well beyond economics and geopolitics. The director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worried that the crisis will further distract global attention from helping the world’s least vaccinated continent fight COVID-19.

Agencies