Explosions rock Ukraine’s capital as Russian forces advance on Kyiv

Ukraine’s capital was rocked by explosions Friday as a Russian advance left residents and leaders bracing for the city to be overrun.

Invading Russian troops bore down on Kyiv despite a desperate defense in which Ukraine said hundreds of its troops were killed and injured. The government warned residents in Obolon, a district in the north of the capital, not to go outside early Friday and said that Russian saboteurs — troops disguised in Ukrainian uniforms — were in the streets.

Since before dawn the city of 3 million people faced a barrage of explosions accompanied by the wail of air-raid sirens, with residents huddled in shelters as Russia pressed forward with the invasion of its democratic neighbor.

"Horrific Russian rocket strikes on Kyiv," Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's foreign minister, wrote on Twitter. "Last time our capital experienced anything like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russian troops had been targeting civilians, something denied by Moscow which had for weeks been denying it planned an invasion at all.

It was day two of the attack on Ukraine ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, which has brought airstrikes and ground battles to cities across the country while threatening Europe's gravest security crisis in decades.

Zelenskyy said that he was “the number one target” of Putin's invasion — backing up Western intelligence that Russia intends to decapitate his Western-leaning government and possibly replace it with a regime closer to Moscow.

The assessment came after Russia attacked key cities across Ukraine Thursday, launching an invasion after months of military buildup and escalating tensions with the West.

Fierce battles took place Thursday at Hostomel just outside Kyiv, the home to an international cargo airport, as well as in the areas around the key cities of Kharkiv in the east and Kherson in the south, Ukrainian officials said.

“The hardest day will be today,” Ukrainian interior ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko said on the messaging service Telegram early Friday. “The enemy’s plan is to break through with tank columns” to Kyiv, he added.

In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, NBC News correspondent Matt Bradley reported around noon local time that car alarms went off across the city as loud, sustained bombardments drew closer.

“Up until now, we understood Russian troops had set up around the ring road of the city. Now we understand they are moving in,” he said from an underground parking garage filled with press and local residents, including children.

Zelenskyy said in a statement that at least 137 people had been killed and 316 had been injured during the first day of the invasion.

NBC News has not confirmed the numbers of any casualties.

“They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state,” he said in an emotional video address.

Around the same time, an apartment building in Kyiv was hit with debris after an aircraft was shot down, according to Ukrainian officials and the country’s emergency services.

On Friday Zelenskyy appealed to global leaders for even more severe sanctions than the ones imposed by the United States and its Western allies in the wake of the Russian invasion. He also called for more defensive help.

“If you don’t help us now, if you fail to offer a powerful assistance to Ukraine, tomorrow the war will knock on your door,” he said.

Russia intends to take the whole of Ukraine but the Russian army failed to deliver on the first day of its invasion, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said Friday.

However, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told an unclassified briefing Thursday with House lawmakers that the current phase of Russia’s military operation was the tip of the spear.

Austin noted that the vast majority of Russian troops were not yet in Ukraine, one person on the call and one senior defense official said.

Russia's defense ministry said it had achieved all of its main aims on the first day of the military operation.