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

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