Kyiv, Ukraine: Six people were killed and 11 injured, including a child, in a rocket attack on the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Monday morning, regional governor Maksym Kozystkiy said.
Three missiles hit military infrastructure, he said, while one hit a tire replacement facility.
Witnesses said several blasts believed to be caused by rockets hit Lviv as the country braced for a full-scale Russian attack in the east.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed to “fight absolutely to the end” in strategically important Mariupol, where the devastated port city’s last known pocket of resistance was entrenched in a sprawling steel mill riddled with tunnels.
Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine were less affected by the fighting than other parts of the country, and the city was considered a relatively safe haven.
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said on Facebook that five rockets hit the city and that emergency services responded to the blasts. He said more details would follow.
As rockets and rockets pounded various parts of the country, Zelensky accused Russian soldiers of torture and kidnappings in areas they controlled.
The fall of Mariupol, reduced to rubble in a seven-week siege, would give Moscow its greatest victory of the war. But a few thousand fighters, by the Russian estimate, held on to the huge, 11 square kilometer (4 sq mi) Azovstal Steelworks.
“We will absolutely fight to the end in this war to win,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal vowed on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. He said Ukraine is ready to end the war through diplomacy if possible, “but we have no intention of surrendering.”
Many Mariupol civilians, including children, are taking refuge in the Azovstal plant, Mikhail Vershinin, head of the city police patrol, told Mariupol TV. He said they are hiding from Russian shelling and from Russian soldiers.
The capture of the city on the Sea of Azov would free Russian troops for a new offensive to seize control of the Donbass region in Ukraine’s industrial east. Russia would also fully secure a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula that it seized from Ukraine in 2014, depriving Ukraine of a major port and valuable industrial assets.
Russia is determined to seize the Donbass, where Moscow-backed separatists already control some areas after its failed attempt to take the capital Kyiv.
“We are doing everything to ensure the defense” of eastern Ukraine, Zelenskyy said in his late-night address to the nation.
As for the besieged Mariupol, there seemed little hope of any immediate military rescue by Ukrainian forces. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday that the remaining Ukrainian troops and civilians there were virtually surrounded. He said they “continue their fight” but that the city is virtually non-existent due to the massive destruction.
The relentless bombing and street fighting in Mariupol has killed at least 21,000 people, according to Ukrainian estimates. A maternity hospital was hit by a deadly Russian airstrike in the first weeks of the war, and about 300 people were reportedly killed in the bombing of a theater where civilians had taken shelter.
An estimated 100,000 people remained in the city out of a pre-war population of 450,000, trapped without food, water, heat or electricity.
Drone footage transmitted by Russia’s RIA-Novosti news agency on Sunday showed miles of destroyed buildings and the steel complex on the outskirts of the city, from which plumes of smoke were billowing.
Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Hanna Malyar described Mariupol as a “shield in defense of Ukraine”.
Russian forces, meanwhile, carried out airstrikes near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent attempt to weaken Ukraine’s military capacity ahead of the expected attack on Donbass.
After the humiliating sinking of the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet last week in a rocket attack that Ukrainians praised, the Kremlin had pledged to step up attacks on the capital.
Russia said Sunday it had attacked a munitions factory near Kyiv with precision-guided missiles overnight, the third such attack in as many days. Explosions were also reported in Kramatorsk, the eastern city where rockets earlier this month killed at least 57 people at a train station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate ahead of the Russian offensive.
At least five people were killed by Russian shelling in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, on Sunday, regional officials said. The barrage hit homes. The streets were littered with broken glass and other debris.
Kharkiv Mayor Igor Terekhov, in an impassioned speech on Orthodox Palm Sunday, slammed Russian forces for not halting the bombing campaign on such a holy day.
Zelenskyy called the Kharkiv bomb attack “nothing but premeditated terror”.
In his nightly address to the nation, Zelenskyy also called for a stronger response to what he described as brutality by Russian troops in parts of southern Ukraine.
“Torture chambers are being built there,” he said. “They kidnap local government officials and anyone visible to the local communities.”
He again urged the world to send more arms and impose tougher sanctions on Moscow.
Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, said the Russians would bombard Mariupol with airstrikes and could prepare for an amphibious landing to reinforce their ground forces.
The looming offensive in the east, if successful, would give Russian President Vladimir Putin a much-needed victory to sell to the Russian people amid mounting casualties from the war and economic hardship caused by Western sanctions.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Putin in Moscow last week – the first European leader to do so since the February 24 invasion – said the Russian president was “in his own war logic” towards Ukraine. In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Nehammer said he believed Putin believed he was winning the war and “we have to look him in the eye and confront him with what we’re seeing in Ukraine.”
Zelensky also celebrated Easter on Sunday and said on Twitter: “The resurrection of the Lord is a testimony to the victory of life over death, of good over evil.”
