A SON weeps over the body of his father among the wreckage of a missile strike in a residential district in the eastern town of Chuguiv, Ukraine, as the country wakes up to a Russian invasion today.

“I told him to leave,” said the man in his 30s, sobbing.

Nearby, a woman screams curses into the wintry sky.

A 5m-wide missile crater is scoured into the earth between two devastated five-storey apartment buildings. Firefighters battle to extinguish the remains of a blaze.

Several other buildings on the street are seriously damaged, their windows shattered and doorframes hang in the frigid morning air.

These are among the first reported damage after Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine early today, with explosions heard in several locations across the country in the early morning hours.

Sergiy, 67, tries to use the leg of an Ikea table to block up his smashed window. The leg sticks out into the air.

He received a few bruises, but said he is fine.

“I am going to stay here. My daughter is in Kyiv and it is the same there.”

He said the missile targeted the nearby military airfield, close to Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv and some 40km from the Russian border.

“It is one of the targets that Putin cited, so I am not even surprised,” he said, refusing to give his surname.

“We will hang in there.”

Thick black smoke can be seen billowing from the direction of the airfield – one of a raft of strategic locations across the country pounded by Moscow’s firepower in an opening barrage.

A policeman said the toll from the bombardment is still being “evaluated”, without giving more details.

Teenager Anastasia clutches her grey cat as she watches her grandfather in a wheelchair being loaded onto a minibus waiting to rush them to a nearby village.

‘Hope the war will spare us’

“We could never have expected this. We are going to the village, we hope the war will spare us there,” she said.

Ukrainian military personnel and trucks swarm around the town, as the government in Kyiv insists its forces will do all they can to protect Ukraine.

Across the vulnerable eastern front, civilians and soldiers scramble to react as one of the most powerful militaries in the world begins a “full-scale invasion”.

Some 300km to the south in key port city of Mariupol – close to the frontline where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine – authorities are rushing to evacuate civilians as fighting rages.

Local official Alexiy Babchenko said they are starting to move people out of two areas to the nearest railway station, but the violence is too heavy to begin in another location.

“It is under heavy artillery,” he told AFP.

Yevgeny Kaplin, head of the humanitarian organisation Proliska, said attacks are going on across the entire frontline that has divided Ukrainian forces from an enclave held by Russian-backed rebels.

But poor communications are hampering information coming about victims.

“The offensive is underway along the entire demarcation line in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions,” he said.

“Fighting is happening everywhere. We cannot yet receive information about victims because there is no communication in this area.” – AFP, February 24, 2022.