By Oleksandr Kozhukhar and Pavel Polityuk
LVIV/KIEV (Reuters) – Ukrainian officials said a Russian missile attack killed seven people in Lviv on Monday, the first civilian casualties in the city near the Polish border, as Ukrainian forces prevented Russia from taking control. of the port city of Mariupol, where the situation is “extremely difficult”.
Lviv Governor Maksym Kozytskyy said preliminary reports suggested four attacks on Lviv, which is just 60 kilometers from the Polish border: three on warehouses not being used by the military and another on a car service station.
“It was a barbaric attack on a service station, it’s a completely civilian facility,” he told a news conference.
Andriy Sadoviy, the mayor of Lviv, said the youngest victim among the seven dead was 30 years old. The blast also injured 11 people and shattered windows at a hotel housing Ukrainians evacuated from other parts of the country, he added.
“Seven peaceful people had plans for life, but today their lives were interrupted,” said the mayor.
Russia denies attacking civilians and rejects what Ukraine says is evidence of atrocities, saying Ukraine staged them to undermine peace talks. Moscow calls its action, launched nearly two months ago, a special military operation to demilitarize Ukraine and eradicate what it calls dangerous nationalists.
Western countries and Kiev accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of unprovoked aggression.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it hit hundreds of military targets in Ukraine overnight, and that it had destroyed 16 Ukrainian military installations in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolayiv regions in the south and east of the country with missiles launched from the Russian Federation. air.
It added that the Russian Air Force launched attacks against 108 areas where Ukrainian forces were concentrated and Russian artillery hit 315 Ukrainian military targets overnight.
Pushed back by Ukrainian resistance in the north, the Russian military refocused its ground offensive in the two eastern provinces known as the Donbass, while also launching long-range attacks on other targets, including the capital Kiev.
Now they are trying to take full control of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which has been under siege for weeks and would be a major strategic achievement, linking the territory of pro-Russian separatists in the east with the Crimea region, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner said on Monday that the number of civilians killed in the war in Ukraine had surpassed 2,000 since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, reaching 2,072 on April 17.
BATTLE BY MARIUPOL
The situation in Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, is “extremely difficult”, but the city has not been fully controlled by Russian forces, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Monday.
Spokesperson Oleksandr Motuzyanyk also stated that bombings from Russian military aircraft have increased by more than 50% in recent times and that Ukraine’s infrastructure has come under more attack.
Ukraine has asked Russia to facilitate a humanitarian corridor for those evacuated from Mariupol and a steel mill that is the last significant area of Ukrainian resistance in the city.
“We call for an urgent humanitarian corridor from the territory of the Azovstal factory for women, children and other civilians,” Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a post on the Telegram messaging service.
The Azovstal steel mill is one of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe, covering over 11 square kilometers and overlooking the Sea of Azov.
On the eve of the war, Mariupol was the largest city still occupied by Ukrainian authorities in Donbass, which Moscow demanded that Ukraine cede to pro-Russian separatists.
((Rio de Janeiro Newsroom Translation))
REUTERS PF
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