Michael is on the ground in central Ukraine where he spoke to residents preparing for a Russian attack. He began working for The Times in 2006 in the Moscow bureau, covering the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Dnipro, Ukraine: Outside the large military hospital in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, people lined up on Sunday to donate warm clothes and water, while a priest moved among the crowd offering sips of holy wine from a silver chalice. He allowed those waiting to kiss the large silver cross he wore on a chain around his neck.

Since the war began three days ago, wounded soldiers have been pouring into the hospital, sometimes as many as 80 at a time, largely from the front lines in Ukraine’s east and south, said Serhii Bachynskyi, the hospital’s deputy director. The hospital has 400 beds, but the number of wounded has exceeded that at times in the past few days, he added.

Because of Russian aircraft patrolling the skies, it is too dangerous to evacuate the wounded on helicopters. “We’re evacuating with whatever we can; on trains, buses. People are volunteering,” Bachynskyi said.

Across the street, a group of combat medics, who had just arrived in green military trucks with wounded, were smoking cigarettes and preparing to return to the front lines.

“Either we fight them off or we will all die,” said one of the medics. “We’re hanging on and will do so to the end.”

Before the war began, officials and military analysts warned that Russia could carry out simultaneous attacks on many different regions as a diversionary tactic to draw Ukrainian forces away from the main objective. The result is that nearly all of Ukraine has been put on a war footing.

So far, Russian forces have concentrated much of their firepower on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in the north, but fighting has been raging in other parts of the country as well..

There was growing evidence that despite its superiority over Ukrainian forces, the Russian military was having difficulties getting a foothold in many regions around the country.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers have managed to keep most Russian troops out of the city centre. In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where Russian forces have been pounding outlying villages and neighbourhoods with artillery, Russian troops briefly pushed into the city centre on Sunday, but were driven back by Ukraine’s military, according to Ukrainian officials.

After a short respite, shelling again commenced on Saturday against Ukraine’s busiest port city, Odessa, but there was no sign the city was in danger of falling into Russian hands. And in Mariupol, the Russian navy’s first attempt to mount an amphibious assault was thwarted.

Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to the Ukrainian President, gave an upbeat assessment of the Ukrainian military’s efforts on Sunday, and, speaking in Russian, made a direct appeal to Russian troops to give up the fight.

Even in cities and towns that have not yet heard the boom of Russian artillery fire, residents were preparing for the possibility of an attack. In the tiniest villages, people were out in force on Sunday, setting up checkpoints and building fortifications out of sandbags, tyres and sometimes entire trees.

At the entrance of a village called AgroCentre 2, locals were loading sandbags, and someone had erected a wooden cross inscribed with the words “Save and Protect” in Ukrainian. At another checkpoint, someone had scrawled a vulgarity directed at the Russian President that has become a rallying cry for Ukrainians.

(New York Times News Service)