Missiles cause multiple explosions in western Ukrainian city
KYIV, Ukraine – Witnesses say multiple explosions caused by missiles struck the western Ukrainian city of Lviv early Monday.
Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine have been less affected by the fighting than other parts of the country, and the city was considered a relatively safe haven.
Lviv Mayor Andrey Sadovy said on Facebook that five missiles hit the city and emergency services were responding to the blasts. He said more details would follow.
This is a breaking news update. Below is an earlier story from AP.
KYIV, Ukraine — Prepared for an all-out Russian offensive in the east, Ukraine vowed to “fight all the way to the end” at the strategically important Mariupol, where the ruined port city’s last known pocket of resistance hides in a giant steel plant. It happened with tunnels.
With missiles and rockets also in other parts of the country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russian troops of torture and kidnapping in areas under his control.
The fall of Mariupol, which has been reduced to rubble in a seven-week siege, would bring Moscow the biggest victory of the war. But a few thousand fighters were, by Russia’s estimate, holding the huge, 11-square-kilometre (4-square-mile) Azovstal steel mill.
“We will fight to the very end to win this war,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denis Shmyal said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. He said Ukraine was ready to end the war through diplomacy if possible, “but we do not intend to surrender.”
The head of the city’s patrol police, Mikhail Vershinin, told Mariupol television that several Mariupol citizens, including children, were also taking shelter at the Azovstal plant. They said they were hiding from Russian shelling and from Russian troops.
Capturing the city on the Azov Sea would free up Russian troops for a new offensive to take control of the Donbass region in Ukraine’s industrial east. Russia will also fully secure a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, depriving Ukraine of a major port and prized industrial assets.
Russia is intent on capturing the Donbass, where Moscow-backed separatists already control some areas, after their attempts to take the capital Kyiv failed.
“We are doing everything we can to ensure the defense of eastern Ukraine,” Zelensky said in his address to the nation at night.
As far as the Siege of Mariupol was concerned, there appeared to be little hope of a military defense by the Ukrainian army any time soon. Foreign Minister Dimitro Kuleba told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the remaining Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were basically surrounded. They said they “continue their struggle,” but the city effectively no longer exists due to the massive destruction.
According to estimates from Ukraine, at least 21,000 people have been killed in Mariupol’s incessant bombings and street fighting. A maternity hospital was hit by a deadly Russian air raid in the early weeks of the war, and the bombing of a theater where civilians had taken refuge was reported to have killed nearly 300.
An estimated 100,000 people remained in the city out of a pre-war population of 450,000 stranded without food, water, heat or electricity.
Drone footage carried by the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti on Sunday showed buildings scattered for miles and a steel complex on the outskirts of the city, with plumes of smoke rising.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hannah Malayar described Mariupol as “the shield protecting Ukraine”.
Meanwhile, Russian forces conducted air strikes near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent attempt to undermine Ukraine’s military capability ahead of an anticipated attack on the Donbass.
After the humiliating sinking of the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet last week in what Ukrainians claimed was a missile attack, the Kremlin vowed to intensify attacks on the capital.
Russia said on Sunday it had attacked an ammunition plant near Kyiv with precision-guided missiles overnight, the third such strike in as many days. Explosions were also reported in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, where rockets killed at least 57 people at a railway station earlier this month, with a crowd of civilians trying to evacuate before a Russian attack.
At least five people were killed in Russian shelling on Sunday in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Barrage slammed into apartment buildings. The roads were littered with broken glass and other debris.
Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov, in an impassioned address marking Orthodox Palm Sunday, rebuked the Russian military for not abandoning a bombing campaign on such a holy day.
Zelensky called the bombing in Kharkiv “nothing but deliberate terror”.
In his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky also appealed for a strong response to the brutality of Russian troops in parts of southern Ukraine.
“Torture rooms have been built there,” he said. “They abduct representatives of local governments and anyone they deem visible to local communities.”
He again urged the world to send more weapons and impose tougher sanctions against Moscow.
Ukraine’s deputy defense minister Malayar said the Russians were carrying out air strikes on Mariupol and may prepare for an amphibious landing to strengthen their ground troops.
The invasion to the east, if successful, would give Russian President Vladimir Putin a much-needed victory to sell the Russian people amid mounting casualties of the war and economic hardship caused by Western sanctions.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehmer, who met with Putin in Moscow last week – the first European leader to do so since the invasion. 24 – said the Russian president is “in his war logic” over Ukraine. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Nehmer said that he thinks Putin believes he is winning the war, and that “we have to look him in the eye and we have to face him, What we see in Ukraine.”
Zelensky also marked Easter on Sunday, saying on Twitter: “The Lord’s resurrection is a testimony to the victory of life over death, of good over evil.”
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Chernov reported from Kharkiv. Yesika Fisch in Kramtorsk, Ukraine, and Associated Press reporters from around the world contributed to this report.
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