Russia last night launched a full on assault on Ukraine, with cruise missile strikes reported on the airport east of Kiev amongst targets in at least a dozen other cities. At the moment, it is unclear whether it is Kiev’s military or civilian airport which has been hit; air raid sirens sounded at 7am. The city of Mariupol on the Azov sea has come under heavy shelling.  Ukraine’s border guard agency said two Chernihiv and Zhytomyr, in northwest Ukraine, are coming under attack.  A senior Ukrainian official has been quoted saying large numbers of of Ukrainian soldiers have already been killed.

In a televised address, Putin has declared that his aim is to ‘demilitarise and de-Nazify’ Ukraine. He has repeated his absurd claim that ‘genocide’ is taking place in the country. In an attempt to deter other countries from intervening to prevent Russian aggression, he warned that:

‘Anyone who tries to interfere with us, or even more so, to create threats for our country and our people, must know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never before experienced in your history.’

He also addressed Ukrainian military with his analogy that the (Jewish) president of Ukraine represents a “neo-Nazi” threat;-

“Dear comrades! Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazis, defending our common homeland, so that today’s neo-Nazis seized power in Ukraine,”

Short of supplying weapons to Ukraine’s military, Nato countries are unlikely to respond militarily: the fighting will be done only by Ukrainian troops. Some 36,000 reservists with combat experience are being called up to add to its 200,000-strong army, but they may soon find themselves under multiple attacks  Confirmed explosions have been seen in Kharkiv, Dnipro and Kramatorsk (below).

Russia’s actions raise the question of whether it was wise for the West to start with limited sanctions, rather than going for the most comprehensive set available immediately. But it is now vital that Moscow is hit with the most stringent sanctions possible, including ones aimed at Putin himself. Deterrence through economic measures has its limits, as Niall Ferguson argues in the magazine this week. But if these sanctions are going to have any hope of changing Russia’s behaviour, they will have to be so comprehensive that they will impose pain on the West too.

The White House says that Joe Biden will make a statement later today. So we can expect the announcement of further sanctions within hours. But the question is will the measures that the US, the EU, the UK and other democratic nations impose on Moscow be sufficient to make Moscow, which has been trying to sanction proof its economy since 2014, think again.