It began an hour before dawn, airstrikes and missiles raining down on military bases, airfields, border posts and cities across Ukraine, explosions lighting up the still-darkened sky from Odessa to Mariupol, Kharkiv to Dnipro, Lutsk to the capital, Kyiv.
In the grey early light that followed, Russian tanks and troops began rolling across the border, columns of soldiers pouring into the eastern regions of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Luhansk. Others landed in the ports of Odessa and Mariupol.
