Poland's Deputy Defense Minister, Cezary Tomczyk, wrote on social media that it was one of the largest attacks of the kind since the beginning of the war, with particularly strong focus on Lviv, just 65 km from the Polish border.
Both drones and missiles were used by the Russian invaders - and the vast majority of targeted infrastructure was non-military, which constitutes yet another war crime committed with impunity by Putin's forces.
In the Lviv region at least two people were killed and several others were injured - its governor, Maksym Kozycki, announced on social media. Russian airstrikes caused several fires across the city - including in a number of residential buildings and in the Vrobel Industrial Park. "This is a civilian facility, with no military component" - emphasized Lviv mayor, Andriy Sadovyi.
Paweł Kowal, the Polish government's plenipotentiary for the reconstruction of Ukraine, also emphasized that these were "the largest Russian attacks on Lviv and western Ukraine since the beginning of the war". According to eyewitness reports, explosions were heard in Lviv for five hours - and reports indicate that Shahed drones and Kinzhal hypersonic missiles were among the means used to hit civilian targets in the city.
In Zaporizhzhia, residential buildings were among the infrastructure destroyed in the attack. At least one civilian was killed and at least ten were wounded. Russia also struck Ivano-Frankivsk, Odessa, Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Zhytomyr. Airstrike threats continue in many regions, as Putin's forces launched another group of long-range drones into Ukraine this morning.
Russia first illegally invaded Ukraine in 2014 - and has occupied its entire region of Crimea and large chunks of its Donbass and Luhansk regions ever since. On February 24, 2022, Moscow took things further - mounting an unlawful and unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and starting the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II.
Numerous reports from a variety of reliable sources clearly confirm that from the start Russians have been committing countless war crimes in Ukraine - breaking the Geneva convention on a daily basis and harming tens of thousands of civilians, both in the occupied areas and through daily missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities.
The list of well-documented Russian transgressions includes regular attacks on non-military targets, notwithstanding hospitals, cultural institutions and housing. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started, Moscow's troops have been found to be murdering and torturing both war prisoners and civilians en masse, also kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children into Russia and using internationally forbidden weapons on a regular basis.
Sunday is day 1320 of Ukraine's heroic resistance against full-scale Russian war of aggression.
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Source: IAR, PAP