Ukraine said a Russian missile attack killed seven people in Lviv yesterday, the first civilian victims in the western city, and reported signs that Russia had started its anticipated new offensive in the east.
Maksym Kozytskyy, the governor of Lviv which lies 60km from the Polish border, said preliminary reports suggested there were four strikes, three on warehouses that were not in use by the military and another on a car service station.
“It was a barbaric strike at a service station, it’s a completely civilian facility,” he told a news conference.
Andriy Sadoviy, mayor of Lviv, said the youngest victim among the dead was aged 30. The blast also wounded 11 and shattered windows of a hotel housing Ukrainians evacuated from elsewhere in the country, he added.
“Seven peaceful people had plans for life, but today their life stopped,” the mayor said.
Driven back by Ukrainian resistance in the north, Moscow has refocused its ground offensive in the two eastern provinces known as the Donbas, while launching long-distance strikes at other targets, including the capital, Kyiv.
Ukraine’s armed forces command said it believed that Russia had started a new push for control of the east, increasing the intensity of attacks.
“This morning, along almost the entire front line of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions, the occupiers attempted to break through our defences,” Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov said in televised comments.
“They began their attempt to start the active phase this morning,” he said.
A man and a woman were killed in Kharkiv yesterday when shells hit a playground near a residential building, the prosecutor’s office said in a post on Telegram messaging service.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had hit hundreds of military targets in Ukraine overnight. It said air-launched missiles had destroyed 16 military facilities in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and in the port of Mykolayiv, which are in south and east Ukraine.
It added that the Russian air force had launched strikes against 108 areas where Ukrainian forces were concentrated and Russian artillery struck 315 Ukrainian military targets.
Ukraine called for Russia to facilitate a humanitarian corridor for evacuees from Mariupol and one from the steel plant that is the city’s last significant area of Ukrainian resistance.
The Azovstal steelworks are one of Europe’s biggest metallurgical plants, covering more than 11sq km and overlooking the Sea of Azov.
Video and audio footage showed explosions rumbling and smoke rising from the steelworks, which contain myriad buildings, blast furnaces and rail tracks.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said yesterday that the situation in Mariupol was “extremely difficult” but the city was not under full control of Russian forces.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner said on Monday that the civilian death toll from the war in Ukraine had surpassed 2,000, reaching 2,072 as of midnight on 17 April from the start of the Russian invasion on February 24. About 4mn Ukrainians have fled the country.
Smoke rises after Russian missile strikes in Lviv yesterday. (Reuters)
