Russia’s ground forces on Thursday crossed into Ukraine from several directions, Ukraine’s border guard service said, hours after President Vladimir Putin announced the launch of a major offensive.
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Ukraine’s border guard service said Russian tanks and other heavy equipment crossed the frontier in several northern regions, as well as from the Kremlin-annexed peninsula of Crimea in the south, and they reported the first death from the ground invasion.
At least eight people have been killed and nine were wounded by the Russian shelling, an advisor to the Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs said on Thursday.
The border guard said Russian military columns have crossed Ukrainian border into Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Luhansk regions.
Ukraine said on Thursday that Russia was moving military equipment into the country from annexed Crimea and that Russia was shelling it across the country all the way to western Ukraine’s Lviv region.
The country was facing non-stop cyber attacks, one official said.
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