War in Ukraine in 2022: the Russian invasion

On February 24, Russia attacks Ukraine on a large scale: at about 5 a.m. the Russian Armed Forces, after bombing some strategic targets, cross the border.
In the first 24 hours of the conflict, Russia fires 160 ballistic missiles and carries out 75 air strikes. The ground forces enter from the Belarusian and Russian borders and join the separatist forces already present in the Country and at war against Kiev since 2014.
Thus began the "special operation" wanted by Putin to protect the self-proclaimed separatist Republics of Luhans’k and Donec’k and to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, the Russian prime minister declared in a speech to the nation.
Missiles are raining down on some important Ukrainian cities and also on the capital: the Country is under attack and the first to pay for it are civilians.
A river of refugees leaves the areas where the fighting is taking place and with every available means they tries to save themselves in the west or outside the national borders.

In Dnipro, an important and strategic city in central-eastern Ukraine located between Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odessa and Donetsk, people flock to the railway station looking for a seat on the first available train: people push and scream, men greet their wives and children from the windows, the trains leave slowly with their load of uncertainty and despair.
Kharkiv, the second most important city after Kyiv, after repelling a first attack is quickly occupied in its northern and eastern suburbs. Saltivka, the neighborhood most affected by the bombings, becomes more and more a ghost neighborhood every day and its buildings, scarred by the continuous blows of Russian heavy artillery, tell of its incessant battle.
The population finds refuge in subway stations and those who do not feel like fleeing or simply do not have the possibility build their new home inside a train carriage or in the underground corridors of stations.

Meanwhile the civilian deaths on the streets, across Ukraine, tell the world the horror of what the Russian government continues to call a "special operation".
Throughout the Country there is a race for arms and solidarity: the Territorial Defense Units are growing every day and, who does not want to carry a rifle, becomes one of the thousands of volunteers who collect and distribute drugs, clothing and food to internally displaced persons and to the most fragile sections of the population.
In Zaporizzja, the first safe reception center in the south, thousands of refugees arrive fleeing Mariupol, the city currently under the control of the Russian Forces and also from other cities and villages in southern Ukraine after terrible trips, often lasting days.
Even in the east, in the Ukrainian Donbas, citizens evacuate en masse under specific government instructions and the cities become more spooky every day.

Around 10.30 a.m. on April 8 a missile hit the Kramatorsk station, one of the most symbolic cities of the 2014 war, where thousands of civilians were waiting for a train to flee west and killed 59 people, including seven children, and more than 110 were injured: it is the umpteenth inconceivable massacre of this terrible conflict that seems to have no end.

The toll of this new invasion is dramatic: 4,100 dead and more than 5,000 civilians injured, seven million refugees and eight million internally displaced persons, 256 health facilities destroyed, 18 schools razed or damaged per day, 262 children killed and 415 were injured in the attacks.
Finally, it is estimated that the casualties among the military are at least 12,000 on both sides.

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