San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Key western city targeted by Russian rocket attacks
LVIV, Ukraine — Several rockets struck the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Saturday while President Biden was visiting the capital of Poland, whose border is just 45 miles away. The powerful explosions frightened a city that had been a haven for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the Russian assault on other parts of Ukraine.
Thick black smoke rose from the first blast site on the city’s northeastern outskirts for hours before a second set of explosions were reported.
The regional governor, Maxym Kozytsky, said rockets hit an oil facility and a factory both linked to the military. Both are in areas that include residences. Earlier Saturday, Kozytsky said on Facebook there had been at least four explosions and at least five people were believed to be injured.
Lviv had been largely spared since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, although missiles struck an aircraft repair facility near the international airport a week ago.
The back-to-back attacks Saturday brought a chill to residents and displaced Ukrainians who had seen Lviv as a relatively safe place to rebuild their lives. Home to about 700,000 people before the invasion, the city has absorbed many more.
Russian forces have seemingly stalled on many fronts and are even losing previously taken ground to Ukrainian counterattacks, including around the capital of Kyiv. The Russians have bombed Kyiv from the air but not taken or surrounded the city. U.S. and French defense officials say Russian troops appear to have adopted defensive positions outside Kyiv.
With Russia continuing to strike and encircle urban populations, from Chernihiv and Kharkiv in the north to Mariupol in the south, Ukrainian authorities on Saturday dismissed statements from the Russian military suggesting that it planned to concentrate its remaining strength on wresting the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region from Ukrainian control. The region has been partially controlled by Russia-backed separatists since 2014.
“We cannot believe the statements from Moscow because there’s still a lot of untruth and lies from that side,” Markian Lubkivskyi, an adviser to the Ukrainian defense minister, told the BBC. “That’s why we understand the goal of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin still is the whole of Ukraine.”
That skepticism was underscored hours later when explosions rocked Lviv.
Britain’s defense ministry said Saturday that it doesn’t expect a reprieve for citizens of Ukraine’s bombarded cities anytime soon.
“Russia will continue to use its heavy firepower on urban areas as it looks to limit its own already considerable losses, at the cost of further civilian casualties,” the U.K. ministry said.
Previous bombings of hospitals and other nonmilitary sites, including a theater in Mariupol where Ukrainian authorities said a Russian air strike is believed to have killed 300 people last week, already have given rise to war crimes allegations.
The invasion has driven more than 10 million people from their homes, almost a quarter of Ukraine’s population. Of those, more than 3.7 million have fled the country entirely, according to the United Nations. Thousands of civilians are believed to have died.