At least six dead as Russia pounds Lviv: Blasts rock city 40 miles from Poland

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Five ‘powerful’ Russian missile strikes have left at least six people dead and eight more injured in Lviv early Monday, the regional governor has said, as multiple Russian attacks rocked Ukraine overnight.

The strikes were a rare fatal attack on the city 40 miles from the border with Poland that has so far been spared much of the fighting since the Russian invasion began almost two months ago, on February 24.

‘At the moment we are able to confirm that six are dead and eight injured. A child was among the victims,’ Lviv’s regional governor Maksym Kozytsky said.

Footage of the aftermath of the attacks showed smoke rising above the city, while one video filed by a civilian appeared to show a cruise missile flying overhead.

Two people also died and four were wounded in Monday attacks on the towns of Marinka and Novopol, west of Donetsk – regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Telegram – and an air strike hit an armaments factory in the capital Kyiv. 

In the country’s second city of Kharkiv, at least five people were killed and 20 wounded in a series of strikes just 13 miles from the Russian border.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had destroyed four arms and military equipment depots in Ukraine overnight with Iskander missiles, the TASS news agency reported on Monday. Russian forces had hit 315 Ukrainian targets in total overnight, it added.

However, according to Euan MacDonald – a reporter for the New Voice of Ukraine – one of the Lviv strikes hit a tire servicing centre, and another landed near a railway station. He said it appeared Russia was trying to stop the flow of western weapons being delivered to Ukraine to bolster its resistance.

Since the war began, Russia has insisted it is not targeting civilians – despite thousands of deaths and mounting evidence on the contrary. On April 1, a double-Russian missile strike hit Kramatorsk train station, killing dozens of evacuees.

The attacks came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of wanting to ‘destroy’ the entire eastern region of Donbas, as the remaining forces in Mariupol prepared Monday for a final defence.

Monday also saw reports of a Ukrainian counter-attack near the eastern city of Izyum, close to the Russian border and where Moscow’s forces are said to be building up in preparation for an assault on Donbas.

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The president vowed to ‘fight absolutely to the end’ in Mariupol – a strategically vital port city and where the last known pocket of resistance was holed up in a sprawling steel plant laced with tunnels. 

Moscow is pushing for a major victory in the southern city as it works to wrest control of Donbas and forge a land corridor to already-annexed Crimea.

But Ukraine has pledged to fight on and defend the city, defying a Russian ultimatum Sunday that called on the remaining fighters inside the encircled Azovstal steel plant to lay down their arms and surrender.

Elsewhere, the first images of the sunken Russia flagship Moskva after it was blown up by Ukrainian missiles last week and before it sunk to the bottom of the Black Sea have emerged.

The pictures, which appeared to have been taken from a rescue vessel alongside the stricken warship, showed damage its left side along with flames burning below deck and a thick pall of black smoke rising into the sky.

The images are largely consistent with Ukrainian descriptions of the sinking – that the Moskva was hit by two missiles on its port side which sparked a fire and caused it to roll – and contradict Russia’s account which was that the ship suffered a fire and internal explosion in rough seas. 

Russian forces also carried out aerial attacks near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent effort to weaken Ukraine’s military capacity ahead of the anticipated assault on the Donbas. After the humiliating sinking of the Moskva, the Kremlin had vowed to step up strikes on the capital.

Russia said Sunday that it had attacked an ammunition plant near Kyiv overnight with precision-guided missiles, the third such strike in as many days. 

Explosions were also reported in Kramatorsk, the eastern city where rockets earlier this month killed at least 59 people at a train station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate ahead of the Russian offensive. 

In recent weeks, Ukrainian authorities have urged people in the eastern Donbas region to move west to escape a large-scale Russian offensive to capture its composite regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.

‘Russian troops are preparing for an offensive operation in the east of our country in the near future. They want to literally finish off and destroy Donbas,’ Zelensky said in an evening statement.

Mariupol has become a symbol of Ukraine’s unexpectedly fierce resistance since Russian troops invaded the former Soviet state on February 24. ‘The city still has not fallen,’ Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said.

‘There’s still our military forces, our soldiers. So they will fight to the end,’ he told ABC’s ‘This Week’. ‘We will not surrender.’

While several large cities were under siege, he said, not one – with the exception of Kherson in the south – had fallen, and more than 900 towns and cities had been re-captured.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk has urged Russian forces to let people flee besieged Mariupol, saying that humanitarian corridors allowing civilians to escape would not open on Sunday after failing to agree terms with Moscow forces. But Lugansk governor Gaiday said he had proceeded with evacuations.

‘At our own peril and risk, we took out several dozen people anyway, but it’s already dangerous,’ he told Ukrainian media.

The UN World Food Programme says that more than 100,000 civilians in Mariupol are on the verge of famine and lack water and heating.

And Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov said the city was on ‘the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe’, saying they were compiling evidence of alleged Russian atrocities there.

‘We will hand everything over to The Hague. There will be no impunity.’

In Mariupol, there appeared to be little hope of military rescue. 

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday that the remaining Ukrainian troops and civilians there are basically encircled. 

He said they ‘continue their struggle,’ but that the city effectively doesn’t exist anymore because of massive destruction.

The relentless bombardment and street fighting in Mariupol have killed at least 21,000 people, by Ukrainian estimates. A maternity hospital was hit by a lethal Russian airstrike in the opening weeks of the war, and about 300 people were reported killed in the bombing of a theater where civilians had taken shelter.

An estimated 100,000 people remained in the city out of a prewar population of 450,000, trapped without food, water, heat or electricity.

Drone footage carried by the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti showed mile after mile of shattered buildings and, on the city’s outskirts, the steel complex, from which rose towering plumes of smoke.

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar described Mariupol as a ‘shield defending Ukraine.’ 

The mayor of Bucha – a town near Kyiv where the discovery of dead civilians sparked international condemnation and war crimes accusations – said Russian troops had raped men as well as women and children there.

Zelensky said he had invited his French counterpart to visit Ukraine to see for himself evidence that Russian forces have committed ‘genocide’ – a term President Emmanuel Macron has avoided.

‘I talked to him yesterday,’ Zelensky told CNN in an interview recorded on Friday but broadcast Sunday.

‘I just told him I want him to understand that this is not war, but nothing other than genocide. I invited him to come when he will have the opportunity. He’ll come and see, and I’m sure he will understand.’

Zelensky, describing the situation in Mariupol as ‘inhuman’, has called on the West to immediately provide heavy weapons.

But Russia has warned the United States this week of ‘unpredictable consequences’ if it sent its ‘most sensitive’ weapons systems to Ukraine.

Its defence ministry claimed Saturday to have shot down a Ukrainian transport plane in the Odessa region, carrying weapons supplied by Western nations.

On Sunday, spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Russian missiles had destroyed ammunition, fuel and lubricant depots in eastern Ukraine and 44 Ukrainian military facilities, including command posts.

Russian air defence systems shot down two Ukrainian MiG-29 aircraft in the Kharkiv region and a drone near the city of Pavlograd, he added.

Maksym Khaustov, the head of the Kharkiv region’s health department, confirmed the five deaths there following a series of strikes that AFP agency journalists on the scene said had ignited fires throughout the city and torn roofs from buildings.

‘The whole home rumbled and trembled,’ 71-year-old Svitlana Pelelygina told AFP as she surveyed her wrecked apartment. ‘Everything here began to burn. I called the firefighters. They said, ‘We are on our way, but we were also being shelled.”

In the eastern city of Kramatorsk, Orthodox Palm Sunday granted its residents some respite before the expected Russian onslaught.

In the Orthodox Svyato-Pokrovsky church, around 40 people – mostly women wearing colourful headscarves – attended the service.

‘It’s very hard and scary right now,’ said a congregant as she arrived at the red-brick church topped with four gleaming domes.

One young mother, Nadia, said she refused to be evacuated for fear of travelling alone with her two children and leaving her relatives in Kramatorsk.

‘We don’t go to the basement each time there’s a (bomb) siren. It’s too stressful for them (the children),’ she said.

‘We have our spot in the basement just in case, but we prefer to stay in the house if possible. We dim the lights.’

And in Kharkiv, the city’s metro stations are now home to residents of the eastern metropolis fearful of the battle raging above. Those impromptu living spaces have become host to makeshift stages, where poets and puppeteers work to lift spirits.

‘A person cannot live only with war,’ Serhiy Zhadan – a literary celebrity in poetry-obsessed Ukraine – said. ‘It is very important for them to hear a word, to be able to sing along, to be able to express a certain emotion.’