Three people were killed overnight in a Russian rocket strike on an industrial building in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk, part of one of the largest attacks aimed into the region near Poland for many months.
Other cruise missiles were aimed in and around Lviv as part of a bombardment in which Russia fired at least 28 rockets into eight regions of the country.
A fourth person was killed in the eastern city of Kramatorsk in a strike on a food warehouse added Oleksiy Kuleba, deputy head of the office of Ukraine’s president, who described the assault as an attempt “to sow panic and terror”.
Ihor Polishchuk, the mayor of Lutsk, which is about 60 miles from the Polish border, said that three people were killed and three more were wounded when a missile hit what he said was an industrial enterprise. Rarely targeted, before the war the city was best known for its medieval castle.
Western Ukraine was targeted heavily after the start of the full invasion in February last year, but as Russian missile stocks dwindled during the 18-month war, strikes in the region have dropped significantly.
Some of the missiles were intercepted, including one aimed around Lviv, Ukraine’s most important western city. Some people were injured when missile debris hit high-rise residential blocks, Kuleba added in his overnight report.
Nineteen people were wounded, including a 10-year-old and a 70-year-old, Lviv regional officials added, and six out of seven missiles aimed at the province got through. About 20 houses in the city’s railway district were destroyed.
Ukraine’s air force said the cruise missile attack took place at 4am, launched mostly from Russian bombers, although four were fired from a frigate in the Black Sea. Of the 28 launched, it said 16 were intercepted by the country’s air defences.
The country’s air defences remain relatively stretched and less effective outside Kyiv and other key cities, a fact that Russia’s broad targeting seems designed to exploit.
“The daily terror of the Russians has a single goal – to break us, our spirit to fight,” said Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on his Telegram channel. “This will not happen.”
Some of the cruise missiles, the Kh-101s, were made in Russia this year, Yermak added, which he said contained 30 western microchips despite import bans being introduced after the start of the full-scale invasion.
Ukraine has been lobbying for some months for further tightening of western sanctions on key components, and argued in June that as much as 80% of the trade in microchips is continuing via China.
Russia blamed the US for making the war worse. Vladimir Putin, speaking in a pre-recorded message at the Moscow Conference on International Security accused Washington of “pumping billions of dollars” into what he described as “the neo-Nazi regime” in Kyiv, which would only “ignite the conflict even more”.
The two countries have been in conflict since 2014, with the situation dramatically worsening in February last year when Russia launched a full invasion aimed initially at seizing Kyiv and overthrowing the government, but more recently at holding territory seized in the early weeks of the fighting.
