Russian forces fired more than three dozen missiles across Ukraine on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said, in a wave of assaults that killed at least five people, including in western areas far from the front lines.
Russian cruise and ballistic missiles hit both residential and industrial buildings, said Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling them “deliberate large-scale attacks on civilians.”
One overnight attack hit the factory of the Swedish manufacturer SKF in the city of Lutsk in northwest Ukraine, about 55 miles from the border with Poland. Three employees were killed, the company said. Regional authorities said that another three employees were injured, including one buried by rubble, and that the facility was not part of any military infrastructure.
Also badly hit was the city of Lviv, where a missile landed in the yard of a kindergarten and near apartment blocks, sparking a fire and damaging more than 100 homes, according to the mayor, Andriy Sadovyi. A total of 19 people, many of them elderly, were injured in additional strikes around the region, said Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the regional military administration.
Lviv is among several cities in western Ukraine that had become a haven for people fleeing fighting in the country’s east and south. But Russia has periodically shattered that sense of security with far-reaching missile strikes, including one that killed at least six people last month.
“These are the parts of the country where millions of people are seeking safety and refuge after fleeing the horrors of Russia’s invasion,” the United Nations’ top official in Ukraine, Denise Brown, said in a statement on Tuesday calling for an end to “this brutal pattern of civilian harm.”
Russian strikes in the eastern region of Donetsk, southern region of Kherson and southeastern region of Dnipropetrovsk also killed at least two people and injured eight others on Tuesday, according to the regional military administrations.
