In Ukraine, blasts before dawn, outrage, then panic

SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — The explosions began before dawn. Loud booms of artillery in the distance, shaking a region that knows conflict and death all too well. Then came an eerie silence, pierced by the crowing of roosters, as people blinkingly stepped out of their homes into the morning light.

Then came the outrage, and the panic.

In this small town in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, not too far from where heavy fighting was underway on Thursday morning, people were making runs on the banks, runs on the gas stations, and some people were just running, trying to get west.

“It’s panic, don’t you see?” said Yevheni Balai, pointing to the line of anxious Ukrainians standing outside a closed bank, desperate to take out cash. “They’ve gotten exactly what they wanted, the ones on the other side — panic and destabilization.”

For years, war between the Ukrainian military and Russia-backed separatists has been a persistent conflict to which the rest of the world scarcely paid attention. To a degree, rushing to get money and food after explosions had become part of the rhythm of daily life.

But this was different. Now Russia was invading.

Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, called on anyone looking to take up arms against Russian forces to immediately join the country’s territorial defense units. All anyone needed to sign up was a Ukrainian passport, he said.

“The enemy is attacking, but our army is indestructible,” he said. “Ukraine is moving into allout defense mode.”

In Washington, President Joe Biden on Thursday said the United States was imposing what he said would be crushing sanctions on Russia for waging war on Ukraine, denouncing President Vladimir Putin of Russia for launching a “brutal assault on the people of Ukraine” overnight.

“Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war,” Biden said in remarks from the White House. “And now he and his country will bear the consequences.”

Biden said the United States would cut off Russia’s largest banks and largest companies from the western financial markets and would restrict exports of technology to Russia, saying that would vastly degrade the country’s ability to thrive in the weeks, months and years ahead.

He also said the United States was freezing trillions of dollars in Russian assets, including the funds controlled by Russian elites and their families, making them pay for what Biden called “a premeditated attack” against a free nation in Europe.

In Ukrain, from all appearances, most people seemed to be moving into flight mode. With Russian attacks having been launched against several cities, a mass migration appeared to be underway in the capital, Kyiv, where the main airport was bombed and major roads were jammed with traffic.

Lines formed at bank machines, and frantic shoppers emptied grocery store shelves in a number of neighborhoods. Some hauled shopping bags, suitcases, cat carriers and dogs and children in tow, as they poured into Kyiv’s main bus station, overflowed onto its sidewalks and surrounded open bus doors to push against drivers trying to control the flow of the crowds.

“Let’s do this without chaos. Calm down!” urged a driver standing in front of a large white bus headed for the city of Lviv in the country’s west.

A river of red taillights stretched for miles along the road that leads west to Lviv and, eventually, Poland, which is where Roman Timofeyev, who was standing with four friends in Kyiv’s main bus station, was trying to get.

He said he had packed clothes, documents and medicine for the trip. At first, he said, he didn’t think he would leave, but then “it was too unexpected to hear the explosions near the houses, so we are afraid.”

His friend, Nastya Oleinik, said, “We didn’t sleep all night.”

He and his friends planned to go to Turkey for a few weeks to wait out whatever might happen.

“Wait for the end of war, and then come back,” he said.

Around the eastern Ukraine town of Kramatorsk — the scene of a pitched battle earlier that left two Russian armored vehicles lying in smoldering ruin — traffic snarled the roads, sometimes bringing movement to a crawl in the midst of bucolic farm fields.

Ukrainian army convoys, many carrying pontoon bridges for unclear reasons, clogged roads. Ambulances sped both ways. At one point, a convoy of gigantic grain harvesters rumbled along, as farmers or maybe their creditors rushed to move the valuable vehicles ahead of the Russian advance.

In Slovyansk, with Russian fighters engaging Ukrainian forces farther east, the city manager, Vadim Lyakh, said the city would continue to function as normally as possible even as he began to prepare residents for the worst.

He said he had ordered all basements to be unlocked and all underground walkways to be cleared to be used as bomb shelters should the city come under attack.

All public transportation that relies on gasoline, including city buses, was shut down to preserve fuel that would be needed if an evacuation is ordered.

“Slovyansk is a city that knows what war is,” Lyakh said. “In the 21st century, to have rocket and air attacks, it seems like something out of a fantasy. But it turns out it’s reality.”

Slovyansk was the site of fierce fighting in 2014 when war broke out between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed rebels. But while many expressed anger at Russia for bringing war into their lives, not everyone blamed Putin.

“It’s our scoundrels in Ukraine who listen to NATO and the Pentagon, which are pushing them into war,” said Lyubov Vasilyevna, 75, who would give only her first name and patronymic.

Her bag was filled with newly purchased loaves of bread as she waited in line to take cash from an ATM, although there appeared to be none left.

All she wanted, she said, was to live in peace in her native Donbas region.

At a base in Slovyansk for Ukraine’s National Guard, troops in drab green uniforms scrambled in all directions. Wives and girlfriends had come to say goodbye to soldiers, even as the soldiers admitted that they did not quite know where they were being ordered to go.

“It’s not good, I’ll tell you,” said one of the guardsmen, who gave only his first name, Yevheni. He said he had been fighting against Russian-backed separatists in the breakaway enclaves of eastern Ukraine since the war broke out in 2014. His wife, Yelena, came to deliver clothes for him.

“They told us to not come to work. All the kindergartens are closed. But right now, everything is quiet,” she said. “They said they are preparing for evacuation.”

Outside a blood bank in Slovyansk, Bohdan Kravchenko was sitting in his car after making a donation, listening to the Ukrainian national anthem on high volume.

“We’re doing what we can to support the country,” he said. “There is no panic. We just have to act according to the situation. Things have only just begun.”

Inside, the director of the blood bank, who gave only her first name, Katerina, was fuming.

“They’re treacherous,” she said of the Russians. “They call themselves our brothers. What kind of brothers! I’m indignant. How many years did we belong to the same so-called country? How could the Russians behave like this?”

She said people were coming in to donate blood, elderly pensioners and young people. Last week, soldiers came in as if in anticipation of what was to come.

“We’ve lived eight years of unending war,” she said. “There’s nowhere to run. All Ukraine is exploding.”

That sense of panic and disorientation in the face of widespread attacks pervaded the bus station in Kyiv. A young woman, Tatiana Melnik, sat on a window ledge with her 5-year-old daughter, Karolina, and tried to make arrangements after their train was canceled.

“We don’t know where to go or what to do,” Melnik said.

A young man in gray sweatpants and a black hat sat looking stunned on a small black duffle bag next to a long line of prospective bus passengers. He said he was waiting for a bus west.

“Horrible,” said the man, who gave only his first name, Alexander, and said he was 18. “Our people, our military are now dying in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, and it’s horrible. Tanks from Belarus started to attack us. So I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

Asked whether he would come back to Kyiv, he said, “If it will be Russian, no,” and added, “By the evening, I think half of Ukraine will be Russian.”