Global stocks and US bond yields dived on Thursday, while the dollar, gold and oil prices rocketed higher as Russian troops landed in Ukrainian cities on the Black Sea and Ukraine said Moscow had launched a full-scale invasion.
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The comments worsened an already grim selloff in Asian trade, pushing MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan down more than 3.2%, with Australian shares off more than 3% and Chinese blue chips down 1.3%.
Tokyo's Nikkei was 2.4% lower. US stock market futures were also down sharply, with S&P 500 e-minis down 2.3% and Nasdaq futures 2.8% weaker.
Brent crude futures, which seesawed between sharp rises and falls on Wednesday, jumped more than 3.5% to shoot past $100 a barrel on Thursday for the first time since September 2014. West Texas Intermediate leaped 4.6% to $96.22 per barrel, their highest since August 2014.
Spot gold jumped more than 1.7% to hit its highest level since early January 2021.
All the same, immediate geopolitical threats weighed on US yields on Thursday, pushing the benchmark US 10-year yield down sharply to 1.8681% from its US close of 1.977% on Wednesday. The 2-year yield also fell, to 1.5% from a close of 1.6%.
The global flight to safety boosted the dollar, which jumped more than half a% a basket of other major trading partners to 96.715.
The euro was down 0.8% on the day at $1.1220.
The Russian rouble turned violently lower after posting small gains early in the session. It was last down nearly 4% on top of a 3% slump against the dollar on Wednesday.
The sell-off spread to cryptocurrency markets, pushing bitcoin below $35,000 for the first time in a month.
