Russia intensifies its attacks in Ukraine and causes the first deaths in Lviv

Yesterday, the Russian Army intensified its attacks in Ukraine with the bombing of Lviv, the cultural capital of the country, located very close to the border with Poland, and at the same time, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in the afternoon, began his great offensive to seize all of Donbas, the strategic eastern region. “A large part of the entire Russian military is now focused on this offensive,” Zelensky said in a video address. “The battle has begun. It doesn’t matter how many Russian soldiers are brought here. We will fight and defend ourselves », he assured.

Since the war began in Ukraine, the western city of Lviv, the cradle of Ukrainian nationalism, has served as a logistics center to supply the rest of the country and a moderately safe refuge for hundreds of thousands of displaced people, who have temporarily settled on its borders or they have used it as a transit point before leaving Ukraine for the Polish border, located just 70 kilometers away. Russian strikes had left it largely unscathed, a pattern broken yesterday, when at least four missiles landed on the city in the early morning hours. Seven people were killed in the bombing and another dozen were injured, according to the authorities. “There are no safe places left in Ukraine,” the city’s mayor said.

That is the main reading of the attack, which has left the first deaths in Lviv since the beginning of the invasion Russian. Previously, her war machine had attacked a gasoline depot and a tank repair depot without causing any casualties. And, before that, a military base several kilometers from the city, where there were 35 dead. This time the kremlin missiles reached three military installations (including supposedly empty warehouses), as well as a mechanical workshop where the victims were, according to local authorities. “The Russians continue to barbarously attack Ukrainian cities from the sky, while cynically declaring to the whole world their ‘right’ to kill Ukrainians,” said adviser to the Ukrainian president, Mykhailo Podolyak.

Preliminary conclusions from kyiv suggest that the missiles were launched from war fighters in the caspian sea, located more than 2,000 kilometers from Lviv. “What is the logic here? Are they really that stupid?” the Russian opponent wrote on Twitter, Ivan Zhdanovafter concluding that the cost of the Kalibr missile that destroyed the tire spare parts workshop is around six million euros.

that same Fire rain was repeated in numerous Ukrainian regions. Not for nothing, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, the aviation of him launched over a hundred air strikes during the morning, as well as 315 artillery salvoswhich would have destroyed 16 military targets in the Dnipro regions, DonetskZaporiya or Kharkiv. In the capital of the latter, the country’s second largest city, there were at least two deaths, both civilians, after a projectile fell “near several residential buildings,” according to local authorities.

Everything indicates that the intensity of the bombardments has intensified ever since Russian troops withdrew from northern Ukraine, unable to take a single one of its big cities, to consolidate their positions in the south and overcome the resistance they continue to encounter in the industrial east from the country. The advance of his troops on both axes is being combined with air strikes across the countryfrom kyiv to Lviv, attacks that have increased by 50% in recent days, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

The donbasmining and industrial, with more ethnically Russian population than other areas of the country, is now the priority of the Russian Army and its allies in the secessionist region, engaged in a long war of attrition since 2014. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense continues to dispute that the Russian forces have taken complete control of Mariupol. He maintains that his soldiers continue to resist in the Azovstal plantone of the largest metallurgical companies in Europe, with an area of ​​11 square kilometers.

Experts consulted by the BBC assure that in the city, brutally punished by the Kremlin offensive, there could be between 600 and 800 Ukrainian soldiers, most of the controversial Azov Battalion. “The plant has nuclear bunkers and tunnels. It was built to survive a nuclear conflict, so it’s well prepared to be defended,” said Justin Crump, a military expert at consultancy Sybilline. “They’ve had more than 50 days to fortify it and build exit passageways. I suspect that unless the Russians raze it, they will be able to hold out for a long time.”

Although the war continues unabated, thousands of Ukrainians continue to return to their country after having put land in the middle since the beginning of the invasion. They have already returned more than a million people, according to the customs authorities. On April 16, the number of Ukrainians who entered the country for the first time exceeded those who left on the same day.