Air raid siren activated across eastern, central and western Ukraine as air force warns of Russian missile attacks.
Russia launched a large-scale air attack on Ukraine’s western region of Lviv and the northwestern region of Volyn, hitting buildings, wounding civilians and forcing evacuations, officials said.
“Many missiles were shot down, but there were also hits in Lviv,” the city’s Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said on the Telegram messaging app on Tuesday morning, adding that orders were given to evacuate at least one burning apartment building.
The full scale of the attack and the extent of damage in Lviv was not immediately clear.
Earlier, the Lviv region’s governor, Maxim Kozitsky, said that “groups of Russian missiles” were headed towards the region.
A business enterprise was also hit, injuring at least two people, in Russia’s air attack on the city of Lutsk, in the Volyn region, local authorities said on the Telegram. The Volyn region, north of Lviv, also borders Poland.
At least one person was also wounded as a result of Russia’s attack on Ukraine’s southwestern region of Dnipropetrovsk, where an enterprise was hit and a fire broke out, Serhiy Lisak, the governor of the region said on the Telegram.
Air raid alerts were issued across Ukraine for about two hours, starting at about 2am local time (23:00 GMT on Monday) on Tuesday.
Local news media, The Kyiv Independent, reported earlier that the Ukrainian Air Force had warned that western regions of the country were threatened by Russian missile attacks.
Explosions were also heard in the western Khmelnytskyi region of the country, according to local military administration officials, The Kyiv Independent reported.
Until July, the Lviv region which is far from the front lines and which borders NATO-member Poland to its west, had been spared most Russian air attacks. But in July, seven people were killed when a missile slammed into a residential building.
Ukrainian media reported that, according to preliminary information, Tuesday’s attack was the largest air assault on the Lviv region since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
