Dhe Russian army attacked the area around the airport in the western Ukrainian city of Lemberg (Lviv) on Friday morning with several cruise missiles. “Several rockets fell on a factory where airplanes are repaired,” wrote the mayor of the city near the Polish border on Facebook. The building was destroyed by the shelling. According to the information, there were no victims because operations had already been discontinued. Lviv is the destination of many people fleeing the fighting in the east of the country, often just as a way station on their way to western countries.
The Ukrainian army said a total of six missiles were fired from a submarine in the Black Sea, but the air defenses were able to shoot down two of them. A spokesman for the US Department of Defense announced on Thursday evening that movements by the Russian fleet in the Black Sea had been detected, but had linked them to a possible landing operation near the Ukrainian port of Odessa.
The Russian invading army continued its attacks on other Ukrainian cities on Friday. According to the Ukrainian authorities, two people were killed and six injured in the city of Kramatorsk when rockets hit a residential and administrative building on Friday morning. According to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, a person was killed in a rocket attack on a residential area in Kyiv. 19 other residents were injured, he said in a video distributed on Telegram. According to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army, the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv is also still under fire from Russian artillery. The city has been attacked by the Russian army for weeks, and the humanitarian situation is considered catastrophic.
The situation is similar in the city of Mariupol, which is under siege by the Russian army and pro-Russian fighters. The Russian army announced on Friday that its own troops had advanced into the center of the city, where fighting was raging. It is still not clear how many people died in the destruction of the theater on Wednesday.
More than 1,000 people are said to have stayed in the air-raid shelter under the building, which is said to have survived the bombardment. “Hundreds of people” are still under the rubble, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday afternoon. Russia denies the attack. Zelenskyy also accused the Russian army of blocking humanitarian corridors into the city, where supplies to the people have collapsed.
Both warring parties claim to have achieved successes. The Russian army announced on Friday that the forces of the so-called People’s Republic of Luhansk, which it supports, have now taken around 90 percent of the administrative area under their control. Before the Russian attack on Ukraine, it was only a fraction of that. The Ukrainian army, in turn, claims to have stopped Russian advances. Rather, they have gone over to cleansing the suburbs of Kyiv from Russian troops. In addition, they have again destroyed a large number of Russian military equipment.
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According to Western estimates, the Russian attackers have actually only been able to gain minimal ground in the past week. British intelligence said on Friday that Moscow was having trouble getting supplies of fuel and food to the army. A report by the Ukrainian general staff says that Russia has recruited around 1,000 volunteers from the army of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian Hizbullah militia. None of the information can be independently verified.
In the morning, Chancellor Olaf Scholz intervened in diplomatic efforts to end Russian aggression. A spokeswoman said he spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone. Chancellor Scholz “urged that there be a ceasefire, an improvement in the humanitarian situation and progress in the search for a diplomatic solution to the conflict as soon as possible,” it said.
“The aim of the federal government is for the Russian leadership to change its behavior and end the war in Ukraine immediately, end its aggression immediately and then seek a negotiated solution,” said deputy government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann. Scholz also invited the G-7 countries to a Ukraine summit on Thursday.
The Kremlin said it was a “tough” conversation. The Russian President pointed out to Scholz war crimes by the Ukrainian army, which shelled residential areas in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Makiivka. In this sense, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry said that a rocket attack on the city of Melitopol was repelled on Friday night. The missiles were loaded with cluster munitions, he claimed. Russia repeatedly raises such allegations without presenting independently verifiable evidence.