KYIV: Russia said on Monday it had hit hundreds of military targets in Ukraine overnight, destroying command posts with air-launched missiles, while a missile strike in the western city of Lviv killed six.
The Russian defence ministry said in a statement it had destroyed 16 Ukrainian military facilities in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and in the port of Mykolayiv.
It added that the Russian air force had launched strikes against 108 areas where Ukrainian forces were concentrated and Russian artillery struck 315 Ukrainian military targets overnight.
Driven back by Ukrainian resistance in the north, the Russian military has refocused its ground offensive in the two eastern provinces known as the Donbas, while launching long-distance strikes at other targets, including the capital, Kyiv.
It is now trying to take full control of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, which has been besieged for weeks and which would be a huge strategic prize, linking territory held by pro-Russian separatists in the east with the Crimea region annexed in 2014.
Ukrainian authorities said missiles struck military facilities and a car tire service point in Lviv, which is just 60 km from the Polish border. Lviv mayor Andriy Sadoviy said seven people were killed and 11 were wounded. The blast shattered windows of a hotel housing Ukrainians evacuated from elsewhere in the country, he added.
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Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said troops in Mariupol were still fighting on Sunday, despite a Russian demand to surrender. “The city still has not fallen,” he said in an interview, adding that Ukrainian soldiers continued to control some parts of the southeastern city.
On the eve of the war, Mariupol was the biggest city still held by Ukrainian authorities in the Donbas, which Moscow has demanded that Ukraine cede to pro-Russian separatists.
Taking Mariupol would unite Russian forces on two of the main axes of the invasion, and free them up to join an expected new offensive against the main Ukrainian force in the east.
The governor of the Luhansk region Serhiy Gaidai said street fighting had begun between Ukrainian and Russian troops as he repeated a plea for people to evacuate. He said Russian forces advanced overnight and taken Kreminna and authorities could no longer take people out of the town.
Ukraine and Russia have failed to agree about humanitarian convoys for the evacuation of civilians from war-affected areas for the second day, Ukraine’s deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
About 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, cities have been shattered and thousands have died since the start of the invasion. Shmyhal said Ukraine’s budget deficit was about $5 billion a month and urged Western governments for more financial aid.
