Ukraine said on Monday Russia had started an anticipated new offensive in the east of the country while a Russian missile attack killed seven people in Lviv, the first civilian victims in the western city about 60 km (40 miles) from Poland.
Ukrainian officials said Russian shelling killed another four people in the eastern Donetsk region on Monday, while a man and a woman were killed in Kharkiv, in the northeast, when shells hit a playground near a residential building.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russian forces had begun the “Battle of Donbas” after senior officials said Moscow had begun a new offensive push along most of Ukraine’s eastern flank.
“A very large part of the entire Russian army is now focused on this offensive,” Zelenskiy said in a video address, adding: “No matter how many Russian troops they send there, we will fight. We will defend ourselves.”
Ukrainian media reported a series of explosions, some powerful, along the front line in the Donetsk region, with shelling taking place in Marinka, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. Ukrainian officials and local media also said further explosions were heard in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv in the south and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
Reuters was not immediately able to verify the reports.
Earlier, Ukraine’s top security official, Oleksiy Danilov, said Russian forces attempted to break through Ukrainian defences on Monday “along almost the entire front line of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv regions.”
Zelenskiy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak called it “the second phase of the war” and assured Ukrainians their forces could hold off the offensive. “Believe in our army, it is very strong,” he said.
Maksym Kozytskyy, the governor of Lviv, said preliminary reports suggested there were four strikes there, three on warehouses and another on a car service station.
“It was a barbaric strike at a service station, it’s a completely civilian facility,” he told a news conference.
The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadoviy, said the blast also wounded 11 and shattered windows of a hotel housing evacuees from elsewhere in the country.
“Seven peaceful people had plans for life, but today their life stopped,” he said.
Driven back by Ukrainian resistance in the north, Moscow 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.
The regional governor of Kharkiv said authorities were continuing to evacuate people from two areas where they expect fighting to take place.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had hit hundreds of military targets in Ukraine overnight. It said air-launched missiles had destroyed 16 military facilities across Ukraine.
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.
