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PARIS President Vladimir V. Putin has ordered Russian troops into Ukraine but made clear his true target goes beyond his neighbor to Americas empire of lies, and he threatened consequences you have never faced in your history for anyone who tries to interfere with us.

In another rambling speech full of festering historical grievances and accusations of a relentless Western plot against his country, Mr. Putin reminded the world on Thursday that Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states with a certain advantage in several cutting-edge weapons.

In effect, Mr. Putins speech, intended to justify the invasion, seemed to come closer to threatening nuclear war than any statement from a major world leader in recent decades. His immediate purpose was obvious: to head off any possible Western military move by making clear he would not hesitate to escalate.

Given Russias nuclear arsenal, he said, there should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country. He added: All necessary decisions have been taken in this regard.

Mr. Putins move into Ukraine and his thinly veiled nuclear threat have now shattered Europes notions of security and the presumption of peace it has lived with for several generations. The postwar European project, which produced so much stability and prosperity, has entered a new, uncertain and confrontational stage.

In the run-up to Mr. Putins invasion of Ukraine, a train of Western leaders made the pilgrimage to Moscow to try to persuade Mr. Putin not to do it. The Americans essentially offered a return to arms control; President Emmanuel Macron of France was prepared to search for a new security architecture if Mr. Putin was unhappy with the old one.

The sincere, perhaps nave, belief of Mr. Macron and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany in the possibility of bringing Mr. Putin to reason suggests the gulf between the worlds they inhabit. The Russian leader was not interested in taking a fine scalpel to Europes security order, but rather a blunt knife to carve out, Cold-War-style, whats mine and whats yours.

Europe has rediscovered its vulnerability. Mr. Macron said on Thursday that Mr. Putin had decided to bring about the gravest violation of peace and stability in our Europe for decades. Of Ukrainians, he said, Their liberty is our liberty.

But no European country, nor the United States for that matter, will put lives on the line for that freedom. The question, then, is how they can draw a line for Mr. Putin.

After his short war in Georgia in 2008, his annexation of Crimea in 2014, his orchestration in 2014 of the military conflict in eastern Ukraine that created two breakaway regions, and his military intervention in Syria in 2015, Mr. Putin has clearly concluded that Russias readiness to use its armed forces to advance its strategic aims will go unanswered by the United States or its European allies.

Russia wants insecurity in Europe because force is its trump card, said Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador. They never wanted a new security order, whatever the European illusions. Putin decided some time ago that confrontation with the West was his best option.

Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvards Kennedy School, said the talk of nuclear conflict was worrisome. But I find it difficult to believe that any world leader, including Mr. Putin, would seriously contemplate using nuclear weapons in any of the scenarios we have here, for the simple reason that they understand the consequences, he said.

Still, history has demonstrated that European wars involving a major global power can spiral out of control. A long war in Ukraine could eventually bleed into Poland, Hungary or Slovakia.

Central Europe and the Baltic States, effectively NATOs front line against Russia, will live with a sense of credible threat for some time.

One ominous scenario remote but less so than before the invasion is that Mr. Putin, who has demanded that NATO pull back out of formerly Soviet-controlled countries to its posture before enlargement in 1997, will eventually turn his attention to Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, the small Baltic States that now form the front line of NATO countries.

Feb. 24, 2022, 6:00 p.m. ET

Mr. Duclos suggested Mr. Putins aim may well be to install a puppet Russian government in Kyiv and that, if he succeeded, he will want the same thing in the Baltic States.

All three countries, subjugated in the Soviet empire after World War II, joined NATO in 2004. President Biden has vowed that the United States and its allies will defend every inch of NATO territory, meaning that even a Russian attack on tiny Estonia could trigger a conflagration.

Immediately after the Russian invasion, the three Baltic States and Poland triggered Article 4 of the alliances founding treaty, which allows members to hold consultations when they feel their territorial integrity is threatened. NATO met in an emergency session as a result.

These nations fears were one clear sign of how the Russian invasion has upended European security and European assumptions in ways that appear certain to last.

What is at the root of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence, and it has grown unnerved at Ukraines closeness with the West and the prospect that the country might join NATO or the European Union. While Ukraine is part of neither, it receives financial and military aid from the United States and Europe.

Are these tensions just starting now? Antagonism between the two nations has been simmeringsince 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, after an uprising in Ukraine replaced their Russia-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimeaand inspired a separatist movement in the east.A cease-fire was negotiated in 2015, but fighting has continued.

How has Ukraine responded? On Feb. 23, Ukraine declared a 30-day state of emergencyas cyberattacks knocked out government institutions. Following the beginning of the attacks, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraines president, declared martial law. The foreign minister called the attacks a full-scale invasion and called on the world to stop Putin.

But Mr. Walt noted that if, in Ukraine, Russia cares more than anyone else and has greater means to affect the outcome in the short term, that equation begins to shift if Mr. Putin reaches further afield. At that point, resolve and capabilities start to shift back in our favor. He added that my chances of dying in a nuclear war still feel infinitesimally small, even if greater than yesterday.

European states, particularly France, generally viewed the American conviction that a Russian invasion was almost inevitable as too alarmist, but differences were papered over in the pursuit of diplomacy.

In the end, the diplomatic efforts Europeans believed in were doomed because an increasingly isolated Mr. Putin has worked himself into a revanchist fury. He appears to see himself standing alone against the United States and what he portrays as the far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis that the leading NATO countries are supporting in Ukraine.

Mr. Putins steadily mounting anger over the past two decades has been focused on the perceived Western humiliation of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union 31 years ago and on NATOs subsequent expansion eastward to safeguard countries like Poland that suffered during the Cold War under Moscows totalitarian domination.

But the Russian leader has evidently developed his outrage into a consuming worldview of American iniquity. What this will mean in military terms in the coming years remains to be seen.

Nearly everywhere, in many regions of the world where the United States brought its law and order, this created bloody, unhealing wounds and the curse of international terrorism and extremism, Mr. Putin said. Americas conduct across the globe was con-artist behavior.

He continued: Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same empire of lies.

Mr. Putin seemed oblivious to the fact that the choreography of the Russian invasion has been one of extraordinary, if predictable, doublespeak.

It has included unsubstantiated accusations of humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime; Russian recognition of the independence of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk so that these peoples republics could ask Russia for help; and the claim that therefore Russia was within its rights, under the United Nations Charter, in responding to a request for assistance by sending troops to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.

In the end, Mr. Putin appears to have had no hesitation in ordering Russia into Ukraine. He accused the authorities in Kyiv all neo-Nazi usurpers, in his view of aspiring to acquire nuclear weapons for an inevitable showdown with Russia.

He appeared to have forgotten that Ukraine once had a vast nuclear arsenal before it gave it up in 1994 under an agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum. Russia was one of the countries that signed the accord, promising in exchange that it would never use force or threats against Ukraine and would respect its sovereignty and existing borders.

So much for that.

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Beyond Ukraine, the Target Is What Putin Calls Americas Empire of Lies - The New York Times

Early Thursday, just as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia announced on television that he had decided to carry out a special military operation in Ukraine, explosions were reported across the country.

Blasts were heard in Kyiv, the capital; in Kharkiv, the second largest city; and in Kramatorsk in the region of Donetsk, one of two eastern Ukrainian territories claimed by Russia-backed separatists since 2014.

Ukraines Interior Ministry said that Russian troops had landed in the southern port city of Odessa and were crossing from Russia into Kharkiv. Footage captured by security cameras showed Russian military vehicles crossing into Ukraine from Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized in 2014.

Rocket attacks targeted Ukrainian fighter jets parked at an airport outside Kyiv, and Ukraine closed its airspace to commercial flights, citing the potential hazard to civilian aviation.

More than 40 Ukrainian soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in the fighting on Thursday morning, said Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.

As air raid sirens blared in Kyiv, the western city of Lviv and other urban areas, residents rushed to take shelter in bus and subway stations. In Kyiv, people packed up their cars and waited in long lines to fill up with gas on their way out of the city. In eastern Ukraine, early signs of panic appeared on the streets as lines formed at A.T.M.s and gas stations.

With attacks across the country, it quickly became clear that Russias campaign, whatever Mr. Putin meant by a special military operation, was aimed at far more than the rebel territories in the east. Within an hour, Ukraines state emergency service said that attacks had been launched in 10 regions of Ukraine, primarily in the east and south, and that reports of new shelling were coming in constantly.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraines foreign minister, called it a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and said his country would defend itself, while calling on the world to stop Putin.

Russias Defense Ministry said that it was using high-precision weapons to disable military infrastructure, air defense facilities, military airfields and Ukrainian army planes, Russias state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported. But the ministry said it was not attacking cities, and promised that the civilian population is not at risk.

The Ukrainian authorities said that invading naval forces were coming ashore at multiple points, including in Kharkiv and the southern city of Kherson. Three emergency workers were injured when a command post was struck by shelling in Nizhyn, in the north, and six people were trapped under rubble when the citys airport came under attack, Ukraines Interior Ministry reported.

Military depots, warehouses and National Guard were hit with artillery blasts, the ministry said.

As dawn broke in Kyiv, Mr. Zelensky of Ukraine said he had declared martial law. The countrys defense minister told citizens that the army was fending off enemy forces and doing everything it can to protect you.

But the army was under siege. In the east, Russia-backed separatists their ranks bolstered by the arrival of hundreds of Russian mercenaries in recent days, according to European officials said they were hammering Ukrainian troops along the entire 250-mile front line that has divided the rebels and Ukrainian forces since 2014.

Seeking to capture the entire territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, which Mr. Putin recognized as independent on Monday, the rebels were using all weapons at their disposal, the Russian news media reported. Ukrainian officials said the attacks included artillery strikes.

Ukraines state border service reported that Russian troops stationed in Belarus, north of Ukraine, had launched an attack with support from the Belarusian military. Russia had deployed as many as 30,000 troops to Belarus for exercises this month that the United States warned could provide cover for an attack against Kyiv, which lies a fast 140-mile drive away from a main border crossing. President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus denied that his forces were involved.

By midmorning in Kyiv, Russias Defense Ministry said it had disabled all of Ukraines air defenses and air bases. Ukraines Interior Ministry said that Russian forces had captured two villages in the Luhansk region.

The fighting intensified as Ukrainian forces shot down six Russian fighters and a helicopter in a fight to maintain control over key cities, a senior Ukrainian military official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to release information outside official channels. Ukraines defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, called on all Ukrainian civilians to join the fight and enlist with territorial defense units.

Ukraine is moving into all-out defense mode, he said.

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What Happened in Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Last Night - The New York Times

In the wake of what the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, described as Russias fully fledged invasion of Ukraine, the west has to decide how to respond to what Frances Emmanuel Macron has called a turning point in European history.

Yet can the west now offer Ukraine more than a mixture of prayers, sanctions and diplomatic demarches? Throughout this conflict western intelligence has shown it has been able to predict Putins next step, but less capable of stopping it. Boris Johnson told the Ukrainian people we are with you, but what this western solidarity means in practice is now up for debate.

The 30-nation Nato alliance will stick to its pledge that it will never send forces to protect Ukraine as a non-Nato member. Backbench Tory calls to give Ukraine air support have no support in Nato.

Instead the west will test Russias resolve through tough sanctions and by some countries providing arms if there is a resistance.

The coordinated sanctions in Washington, London, Berlin and Brussels being announced on Thursday are billed as massive, but Putin sits on a $600bn (450bn) war chest and will benefit from oil prices soaring past $100 a barrel. That makes him less dependent on the west to raise capital than five years ago, and such is his dominance of the Russian media that the chances of internal protests pressurising, let alone toppling, the 69-year-old president look minimal. The oligarchs may complain if sanctions are placed on them, but Putin is in too deep to retreat.

One London-based diplomat said this week after viewing Russias televised and cowed national security meeting: We used to talk about Putins inner circle. There is no inner circle. There is only Putin. Another said: The only thing that will change Russian public opinion is the mothers of Russia seeing the bodybags.

Nikolai Petrov from the Chatham House thinktank warned all infrastructure of political opponents and opposition has been destroyed, making it much easier for the Kremlin to to mobilise public opinion.

Dire predictions by the British of Putin being mired in a battlefield quagmire will now be tested. Many Ukrainians appear on western media to attest that Putin has underestimated Ukraines will to fight. They insist they will not tolerate a puppet government loyal to Moscow. But the long queues of traffic fleeing Kyiv in the westward direction speaks to another story. It is as likely that Ukraines prisons will be filled with dissidents.

In the short term there will be a debate, including in Germany, about whether to arm the resistance, with some Green party and CDU leaders already advocating this.

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, at the weekend said this was not the moment for Germany to make a 180-degree turn on such a strategic policy. Yet the debate is live. The former German defence minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said: Im so angry at us for historically failing. After Georgia, Crimea and Donbas, we have not prepared anything that would have really deterred Putin.

Keir Giles, also from Chatham House, urged the west to be cautious. Looking at Russias 100% success record on suppressing resistance movements in territories it has occupied often using medieval levels of savagery and inflicting terror on the civilian population we ask what would aid to a resistance achieve and would it make the situation better worse or better. The images of destruction in Aleppo, Grozny and Afghanistan show how merciless the Russian military can be.

Stoltenberg has said that it is a matter for individual nations to decide the help they provide to any resistance. But the risks are high. In his speech announcing the invasion, Putin warned outsiders tempted to interfere that there would be consequences you have never encountered in your history a chilling veiled reference to nuclear war.

There is also a danger that an insurgency would exacerbate a refugee crisis likely to be triggered across central Europe.

Plans are in infancy in the EUs Frontex border agency to prepare for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Some diplomats are optimistic that, unlike with Syria in 2015, there will not be a political backlash, pointing out many Ukrainians have already been welcomed to Europe. As many as 15,000 Ukrainians already live in Berlin. But autocrats have learned that refugees are weapons of war.

The British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has clearly indicated that there is a serious risk that Putin, judging by his words, will not stop at Ukraine, but wants to restore Russias empire, and remove western forces from all former Warsaw pact countries.

Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, said Putin had gone full tonto, and almost every western politician who returned from Moscow was disturbed by his demeanour and inability to focus on realistic solutions to the crisis.

It means once Ukraine is swallowed by Putin, Russia will be able to station forces land, air and missile in bases in western Ukraine as well as Belarus, which has effectively lost independence.

He may not invade the Baltic states, but he is in a better strategic position to demand a retreat by Nato to Warsaw pact boundaries and a land corridor through Poland to link Kaliningrad, the headquarters of the Russian Baltic fleet.

It will mean high defence spending, less dependence on Russian energy and more troops on Natos frontiers. Finland and Sweden may seek to join Nato. If Putin wanted less Nato, he may get more.

Finally, the west has to confront questions about the validity of the whole postwar diplomatic security architecture.

On Wednesday night UN diplomats gathered to condemn Russia at an emergency meeting, one chaired by Russia, this months presidents of the UN security council. It symbolised the degree to which the UN has become utterly compromised. But there may have been one diplomatic voice in New York that will disturb the west most that of the Chinese envoy. In his brief remarks he remained studiously on the fence, refusing to condemn Russia and knowing the wests anguish may provide it with nothing but opportunities ahead.

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What can the west do about Russia invading Ukraine? - The Guardian

BRUSSELS A new front line of conflict is taking shape in Europe, with enhanced levels of risk that raise questions about whether NATO will, or even can, respond effectively.

Having invaded Ukraine and deployed its troops in a compliant Belarus, Russia has suddenly extended its military power to the borders of several NATO countries, including the Baltic nations.

If Russia succeeds in taking over Ukraine and keeping bases in Belarus, as many experts now expect, its forces will extend from the borders of the Baltics and Poland to Slovakia, Hungary and northern Romania, making it significantly harder for NATO to defend its eastern flank.

And only a thin corridor some 60 miles long between Lithuania and Poland separates Russian forces in Belarus from Kaliningrad, the Russian territory on the Baltic Sea that is stuffed with missiles easily capable of flinging conventional or nuclear warheads into the heart of Europe.

The level of risk for NATO has simply and suddenly increased enormously, said Ian Lesser, a former American official who heads the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund. The possibility of conflict with Russian forces in Europe or elsewhere, like the Black Sea, the Sahel, Libya or Syria, could be dangerous and will be an issue for years to come.

This changes everything for NATO, said Ian Bond, a former British diplomat who heads foreign policy at the Center for European Reform. Russias aim is to extinguish Ukraine as a sovereign country in Europe. Now we need to worry about everything, and we need to get serious again.

NATO has already responded in a small way to the Russian buildup, sending some extra troops and aircraft into member states closest to Russia. On Thursday, NATO decided on further, unspecified deployments, and there are serious discussions about finally scrapping the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which put limits on NATO deployments in the eastern members and which Russia violated eight years ago, when it invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.

Russias actions pose a serious threat to Euro-Atlantic security, and they will have geostrategic consequences, said the NATO Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg. We are deploying additional defensive land and air forces to the eastern part of the alliance, as well as additional maritime assets.

Any discussions with Moscow about redrawing Europes security architecture take on a different cast with Russian troops deployed on NATOs eastern flank.

Even if military spending goes up considerably in response to the new Russian invasion, as it did modestly after Russia took Crimea, new and permanent deployments of forces, equipment, planes and even missiles will be a major blow to the last 30 years of relative peace, prosperity and complacency in the alliance.

NATO had been focused on all these important and fashionable things with little to do with its core responsibility, like climate and cyber, Mr. Lesser said. But we forgot that there are ruthless people out there and for them, foreign policy is a blood sport.

NATO was already rewriting its 12-year-old strategic concept and debating a replacement for Mr. Stoltenberg, who leaves office on Oct. 1. Now, those tasks become ever more pressing. NATO is already in a mode to think more broadly about its purpose, Mr. Lesser said.

But a serious effort to deter a newly aggressive Russia will not be so simple, said Benjamin Hodges, the former commander of U.S. forces in Europe, now with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Just moving troops and equipment around in a post-Cold War Europe has become far more cumbersome, with some bridges and railways no longer able to handle heavy armor.

Political leaders will be surprised at how long it takes to move stuff given E.U. road regulations and without special priority on the German rail system, Mr. Hodges said.

NATO also lacks significant air and missile defenses for a modern air war that, as in Ukraine, starts by hitting significant infrastructure like airports, roads and rail, he said. Just to protect the large American air base at Ramstein, in southwestern Germany, would take an entire battalion of Patriot missiles, he said, and we have only one Patriot battalion in Europe thats ours.

Feb. 24, 2022, 6:00 p.m. ET

Once the Fulda Gap in Germany was a worry of Cold War strategists, heavily defended by American troops to prevent the Warsaw Pact from rushing tanks from East Germany to the Rhine River. Now, the concern is the Suwalki Corridor, a narrow gap that connects Poland to Lithuania that, if captured, would cut off the three Baltic nations from the rest of NATO.

The corridor separates Belarus from Kaliningrad, headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet and isolated from Russia when the Soviet Union imploded. An emboldened Mr. Putin might very well demand direct access from Belarus to Kaliningrad, suggested Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution in a column for the Washington Post.

But even that would be just one piece of what is sure to be a new Russian strategy to delink the Baltics from NATO by demonstrating that the alliance can no longer hope to protect these countries, he wrote.

The threat now to Poland becomes acute, said Mr. Bond, recommending that the United States quickly put two heavy battalions in Poland for a start. The deployments in the three Baltic states also need to be beefed up, he said.

In 2016, NATO agreed to put battalions in Poland and the Baltic nations for the first time. Known as an enhanced forward presence, they consist of about 1,100 soldiers each, combat ready but small, more like tripwires than anything that could slow down a Russian advance for very long.

In 2014, NATO also established a very high readiness joint task force, currently under the command of Turkey, that is supposed to deploy at short notice against threats to NATO sovereignty. It consists of a land brigade numbering around 5,000 troops, supported by air, sea and special forces, with more reinforcements able to be deployed within 30 days.

But the smaller force is essentially untested, and the larger Response Force of which it is the spearhead is only a quarter the size of the Russian invasion force into Ukraine. The larger force was created in 2002 and was meant to be rapidly deployable, but its 40,000 members are based in their home countries and gathering them can be a slow exercise.

What is at the root of this invasion? Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence, and it has grown unnerved at Ukraines closeness with the West and the prospect that the country might join NATO or the European Union. While Ukraine is part of neither, it receives financial and military aid from the United States and Europe.

Are these tensions just starting now? Antagonism between the two nations has been simmeringsince 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, after an uprising in Ukraine replaced their Russia-friendly president with a pro-Western government. Then, Russia annexed Crimeaand inspired a separatist movement in the east.A cease-fire was negotiated in 2015, but fighting has continued.

How has Ukraine responded? On Feb. 23, Ukraine declared a 30-day state of emergencyas cyberattacks knocked out government institutions. Following the beginning of the attacks, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraines president, declared martial law. The foreign minister called the attacks a full-scale invasion and called on the world to stop Putin.

There are also questions about the vow of NATO members to send weapons to Ukraine as it fights the Russians or to help mount an insurgency. Efforts to supply arms to Ukraine by air, rail or road could be intercepted or obstructed by the Russian military, Mr. Hodges said, even if the shipments are delivered by contractors and not NATO soldiers.

And what country is going to dare support an insurgency knowing that the Russian military is on the other side of the border?

In general the chance of accidental confrontations leading to escalation cannot be ruled out in such a tense atmosphere. Analysts point to the way Turkey shot down a Russian fighter plane near the Syria-Turkey border in 2015. It didnt escalate then, but today it very well could, Mr. Lesser said.

At the same time, the arms control agreements that tried to keep the Cold War cold are nearly all defunct, raising new threats about deployments of conventional forces and medium-range missiles. Russia has also been extremely active in cyber warfare, hacking the German Parliament, interfering in the last French election and issuing mounds of local-language disinformation on social media.

Altogether, the new threats should reinforce the logic of stronger European Union and NATO cooperation on defense, Mr. Lesser said, and should knock a lot of the politics and theology out of that relationship. Coordinating with the E.U. over its areas of strength, like economic sanctions, cyber resilience, energy security and information warfare can only help both organizations, he said, given that 21 of the E.U.s 27 members already belong to NATO and others, like Sweden and Finland, are closely allied.

We need the Americans, said Mr. Bond. But we should not drop the idea of European autonomy and more self-reliance. There are doubts in Europe about whether President Biden will run or win again in 2024 and worries that former president Donald J. Trump or a Republican more in tune with his isolationist, America first credo will take office.

Europe will be very exposed, so it must increase military spending and efficiency, filling real capability needs, Mr. Bond said. All this becomes vital now, and not just a bunch of nice ideas.

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With the Ukraine Invasion, NATO Is Suddenly Vulnerable - The New York Times

Vladimir Putin has said there is broad public support for the invasion of Ukraine that he announced just before dawn on Thursday morning. But by evening, thousands of people in cities across Russia had defied police threats to take to central squares and protest against the military campaign.

Police had made at least 1,702 arrest in 53 Russian cities as of Thursday evening, according to the OVD-Info monitor, as they cracked down on the unsanctioned protests. Most of the arrests were made in Moscow and St Petersburg, where the crowds were largest.

The protesters chanted: No to war! as they exchanged shocked reactions to the attack on Ukraine.

In Moscow, Alexander Belov said he thought that Putin had lost his mind. I thought that we would never see a war like this in the 21st century, said Belov, who arrived early at Moscows Pushkinskaya Square to find it surrounded by police vans. It turns out we live in the Middle Ages.

The mood in Moscow was dark and sombre hours after Putin had announced that he was launching a broad military offensive targeting Ukraine.

I am embarrassed for my country. To be honest with you, I am speechless. War is always scary. We dont want this, said Nikita Golubev, a 30-year-old teacher. Why are we doing this?

His anger and hopelessness were shared by many commuting to work down central Arbat Street. At the Ukrainian culture centre just down the road, the mood was even grimmer.

The Ukrainian administrator said the centre, which aims to promote the language, traditions and identity of a country Vladimir Putin denied the legitimacy of as a modern state in his speech on Monday, would be shut for the coming period.

We are being bombed as we speak. Of course we are closed! Jesus, what is happening? the administrator, who did not want to give his name, shouted.

There were already signs that Russians were uncomfortable with Putins initial decision to recognise the two self-proclaimed republics in Donbas.

On Tuesday, Yuri Dudt, one of Russias most popular media personalities, said he did not vote for this regime and its need for an empire, and felt ashamed, in a post that received almost a million likes in 24 hours.

A fresh poll by the independent Levada Center released on Thursday showed that only 45% of Russians stood in favour of the recognition move that preceded Thursday mornings dramatic events.

I didnt think Putin would be willing to go all the way. How can we bomb Ukraine? Our countries have their disagreements, but this is not a way to solve them, said Muscovite Ksenia.

But outcries of anger were not only felt on the streets of Moscow, where the Guardian did not encounter support for the military assault.

Russias cultural and sporting elite, usually firmly behind Putin and often called upon by the president during election campaigns to gather popular support, also expressed their deep worries about Russias invasion.

Valery Meladze, arguable the countrys most beloved singer, posted an emotional video in which he begged Russia to stop the war. Today something happened that should have never happened. History will be the judge of these events. But today, I beg you, please stop the war.

Likewise, Russian football international Fyodor Smolov posted on his Instagram channel: No to War!!!

US intelligence has for months warned that Russia would seek to fabricate a major pretext before launching an invasion of Ukraine. In the end, no major false flag came, and experts now believe that Putin decided to act without gathering the backing of his own electorate.

Putin seems totally indifferent to approval on the street. Hes acting not like a politician in need of public support, but like a figure from national history books who cares only about the approval of future historians and readers, tweeted Alexander Baunov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

The Russian leader looked to have also surprised some of Russias most prominent oligarchs, who saw their wealth tumble as the countrys financial markets collapsed.

Just on Monday, after Putin recognised the independence of the two Donbas territories, Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin-friendly oligarch who once said that he does not separate himself from the Russian state, exclaimed on his Telegram channel that war had been averted. He has since deleted the post.

On Russian state television, the invasion was framed as a defensive mission aimed at preserving Russian lives. Whats the point of a major first strike? However strange or cynical it sounds, its actually humane because it allows everyone around to prevent a large massacre. By immobilising Ukraine, life is being preserved, said pundit Vladislav Shurygin on the Channel One programme Vremya Pokazhet.

Some risked arrest on Thursday evening in order to voice their opposition to the invasion. Zhargal Rinchinov from Buryatia arrived on the square in a jacket with the inscription: No to war. If he held up a sign, he said, he would be arrested.

Everyone is scared, he said. They know if they say something bad then theyll be put in jail. So people pretend they dont notice we have started a war, so they dont have to speak up about it.

For Ukrainians, public messages of opposition to the war will come too late. The country has said that at least 40 soldiers have already been killed and many more civilians injured, as it is threatened with being overrun by a much larger military force.

Yet, sensing that a genuine large-scale pushback against war might be Ukraines best bet, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraines president, on Thursday morning urged Russians to speak up.

If the Russian authorities dont want to sit down with us to discuss peace, maybe they will sit down with you.

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Thousands join anti-war protests in Russia after Ukraine invasion - The Guardian