LVIV, Ukraine — Airstrikes hit an aircraft repair facility outside the city of Lviv on Friday, bringing the war closer to a relative safe haven in western Ukraine that has become a center of refugee transport and humanitarian aid.
The four missiles, which landed before sunrise at the decommissioned repair center outside the Lviv airport — currently in use only for military flights — caused at least one injury, according to Mayor Andriy Sadovyi.
In a Facebook post, Sadovyi said the strikes destroyed the building. He warned residents, who have become accustomed to daily air-raid sirens but often ignore them because their city has been largely spared from shelling, to be more vigilant in looking out for danger.
“Be careful, follow instructions when air-raid sirens alert,” he said.
Hours after the attack, plumes of smoke were still rising from the stricken facility on the western edges of Lviv. Several military vehicles converged on the site.
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russian forces launched six missiles from the Black Sea, two of which were intercepted.
Friday’s strikes marked the second time in a week that missiles have struck the Lviv area, which has been largely insulated from the war raging in the vicinity of the capital, Kyiv, and elsewhere in the country. A swarm of Russian cruise missiles early Sunday hit a military training facility northwest of Lviv, killing at last 40 Ukrainian military personnel.
In Kyiv, residents awoke Friday to another airstrike that hit an apartment building. According to Ukraine emergency service officials, one person was killed and 19 were injured in a fire that engulfed the building after the attack on Podilskyi, a district northwest of the city center.
Ukrainian officials said Friday that they had agreed with Russia on opening nine humanitarian aid and evacuation corridors in areas including the hard-hit southeastern city of Mariupol, where an airstrike injured at least 130 in a crowded bomb shelter this week, and the eastern city of Sumy, from which thousands of people have already escaped.
Some of the evacuation routes have routinely been blocked over the last several days, according to Ukraine. On Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said more than 2,000 people were bused out of Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia, about 150 miles away. That represents only a tiny fraction of Mariupol residents wishing to flee their blockaded city, where living conditions have grown increasingly desperate.
Negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have taken place every day this week, with no agreement on an end to the fighting. Earlier in the week, representatives for both sides cited progress in the talks, but in a call Friday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Putin accused the Ukrainians of stalling. A readout of the conversation in TASS, the Russian state-owned news agency, said the Russian leader accused the “Kyiv regime” of trying to delay negotiations by “putting forward more and more unrealistic proposals.”
Putin has insisted that his own demands — including Ukraine’s “de-militarization” and its renunciation of any intention to join NATO or the European Union — be completely fulfilled before any cessation of armed hostilities.
Throughout three weeks of bombardment, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have fled their country’s eastern regions for Lviv, Kyiv and other areas in the west. But local residents say the daily rocket attacks on the capital’s residential neighborhoods have made them feel less safe even as Russian forces are stalled outside the city. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a kindergarten and a school were damaged, along with at least six other buildings, in Friday’s strike on a residential building.
The explosion’s impact in the Podilskyi district could be seen far beyond the large crater it left in the central courtyard outside a number of apartment buildings. That courtyard was carpeted with glass granules, hunks of masonry and metal. The shock wave ripped through the buildings around it, popping window frames out of the walls, pulverizing glass and turning furniture into jumbles of wood and metal.
A supermarket more than 500 feet away from the crater had its windows blown out, with shelves laden with syrup bottles and gumdrops displaced by the force of the explosion.
Residents packed bags to evacuate. Evgenia Gavrylenko, a bank teller who lived on the fourth floor of one building, had her suitcases laid out on the bed of her guest room, the one area that seemed to have escaped the destruction. She used an expletive to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin as she took a drag of her cigarette and looked around her apartment.
On the floor above, one man was boarding up his residence while Skyping with his wife and daughter to show them the destruction. Outside, others lugged bags and suitcases.
The war, now in its 23rd day, has sent more than 3 million people fleeing Ukraine.
The United Nations has counted at least 726 people killed — 52 of them children — since the Feb. 24 invasion started. U.N. officials acknowledge that the real number is likely far higher.
The mounting civilian death toll has led to accusations by the West of Russian war crimes. The U.S. said it was initiating a legal process to document any such atrocities, which could later be presented as evidence to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
“Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said. “After all the destruction of the past three weeks, I find it difficult to conclude that the Russians are doing otherwise.”
____
(McDonnell reported from Lviv, Bulos from Kyiv and Kaleem from London.)
