Russia has been stripped of soccer's biggest annual match, the Champions League final, after Ukraine invasion

• Russia has been stripped of hosting the 2022 Champions League final, the Associated Press reports.
• St. Petersburg was set to host the soccer showpiece in May.

UEFA will no longer host this season's Champions League final in St. Petersburg after Russia invaded Ukraine, a source told the Associated Press.

European soccer's showpiece event was set to be held at the Gazprom Arena in Russia's second city on May 28.

It is unclear where the match will be moved to, but UEFA on Friday is expected to confirm the decision to take the match out of Russia after an extraordinary meeting of the UEFA executive committee was called.

"Following the evolution of the situation between Russia and Ukraine in the last 24 hours, the UEFA president has decided to call an extraordinary meeting of the Executive Committee for Friday 25 February at 10:00 CET in order to evaluate the situation and take all necessary decisions," UEFA said in a statement.

"Further communication will be made after the meeting of the UEFA Executive Committee."

Russia launched a military assault in Ukraine on Thursday at about the same time as a television address from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin said in his address that Russian forces would strive for the "demilitarization" and "denazification" of Ukraine, whose president is Jewish.

Attacks have since been reported on Ukrainian military targets, including in the cities of Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odessa.

Russia's conflict with Ukraine has been rumbling for years but escalated dramatically in recent weeks.

Russia assembled vast numbers of troops around Ukraine — as many as 190,000, per US estimates — in the largest military operation in the region since World War II.

On Monday, Putin recognized the claims to independence of the breakaway Luhansk and Donetsk areas of Ukraine, ordering troops there for what he described as a limited peacekeeping operation in the east of the country.

Less than 72 hours later, Putin authorized a full-scale attack on Ukraine. In the hours that followed, explosions pounded cities around Ukraine, many hundreds of miles from the previous conflict zone.

Ukrainian officials reported fighting on its borders with Russia, and dozens of casualties.

The new wave of hostilities expanded the clash from a limited incursion over disputed land into the most serious armed conflict in Europe for at least a decade.

Insider's live blog of the invasion is covering developments as they happen.