Around 35 people were killed when waves of Russian missiles pounded a military training base close to Ukraine’s border with Poland. The attack followed Russian threats to target foreign weapons shipments that are helping Ukrainian fighters defend their country against the Kremlin-led invasion.
More than 30 Russian cruise missiles targeted the sprawling training facility in Yavoriv, less than 15 miles from the closest border point with Poland, according to the governor of Ukraine’s western Lviv region. Poland, a member of Nato, is a key location for routeing Western military aid to Ukraine.
Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov warned other nations that sending equipment to bolster Ukraine’s military is “an action that makes those convoys legitimate targets”.
Lviv had largely escaped destruction unfolding further east and become a destination for residents escaping bombarded cities and for many of the nearly 2.6 million refugees who have fled the fighting. The training centre appears to be the most westward target struck so far in the 18-day invasion.
The facility, also known as the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre, has long been used to train Ukrainian military personnel, often with instructors from the United States and other Nato countries. Lviv governor Maksym Kozytskyi said most of the missiles fired on Sunday “were shot down because the air defence system worked”.
The ones that got through killed at least 35 people and injured 134 others, he said. Russian fighters also fired at the airport in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk, 155 miles from Ukraine’s border with Slovakia and Hungary, an attack the city’s mayor said was intended “to sow panic and fear”.
Fighting also raged in multiple areas of the country overnight. Ukrainian authorities said Russian air strikes on a monastery and a children’s resort in the eastern Donetsk region hit places where monks and refugees were sheltering, injuring 32 people.
Another air strike hit a westward-bound train evacuating people from the east, killing one person and wounding another, Donetsk’s chief regional administrator said. To the north, in the city of Chernihiv, one person was killed and another injured in a Russian air strike that destroyed a residential block, emergency services said.
Around the capital, Kyiv, a major political and strategic target for the invasion, fighting also intensified, with overnight shelling in the north-western suburbs and a missile strike on Sunday that destroyed a warehouse to the east. Chief regional administrator Oleksiy Kuleba said Russian agents are operating in the capital and its suburbs, marking out possible future targets.
For more stories from where you live, visit InYourArea.
