LAST UPDATE | 15 Aug 2023
RUSSIAN MISSILES HAVE killed three people in the Ukrainian city of Lutsk in the latest deadly strike on the west of the country.
The barrage of nearly three dozen missiles also tore through a playground in Lviv, western Ukraine’s largest city, sparking a blaze that left a five-storey residential building charred and its windows blown out.
The attack came as Russia’s defence minister said during a military conference in Moscow that Ukraine was running low on military resources, with Kyiv seeing slow battlefield progress.
His ministry said the missile strikes targeted “key” facilities of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, which “suffered significant damage”.
“All targets were hit”, it added, though Ukraine said it downed 16 of 28 missiles fired both from Russian territory and warships in the Black Sea.
One of the missiles hit a factory in Lutsk of the Swedish ball bearing maker SKF, killing three of its employees.
An SKF spokesman told AFP the factory produced bearings for heavy commercial vehicles, saying it was an “ordinary civilian activity”.
Lutsk had a prewar population of over 200,000 and is less than 100 kilometres from Ukraine’s border with Poland.
Deadly Russian strikes in western Ukraine had been sporadic: In March last year, four Ukrainian soldiers were killed and six wounded in Russian strikes on the Lutsk military airport.
But they have increased in recent weeks, and AFP journalists in the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk this week witnessed family members bury an eight-year-old boy killed by Russian cruise missiles targeting a western airbase.
Several missiles were downed over Lviv, where 19 people were wounded, regional governor Maksym Kozytskyi said.
“I feel terrible pain,” Olga Bura, a 64-year-old retired economist in the city, told AFP.
Her voice cracked with emotion as she surveyed the extensive damage to her home, broken glass crackling underfoot.
“The world simply does not realise the danger that comes from Russia, from Putin himself,” Bura said.
The powerful explosion left cars in the street outside Bura’s home coated with debris and mud.
Firefighters and policemen cordoned off a four-storey building nearby whose top floors caught fire, forcing evacuated residents to remain outside.
Charity workers, who pitched a tent outside the building, distributed sandwiches, biscuits and coffee to the stranded residents.
More than 100 apartments were damaged, a kindergarten was “destroyed” after a missile flew into its yard, and a supermarket ceiling collapsed, according to local authorities.
“Sometimes we forget there’s a war going on,” 17-year-old university student Dan Kvit told AFP, adding that “it’s a kind of shock. We thought we were far away.”
Lviv has mostly been spared the daily bombardments that have hit other parts of Ukraine.
Last month, 10 people were killed in what mayor Andriy Sadovyi called the biggest Russian missile attack on the city’s civilian infrastructure since the launch of the invasion in February 2022.
Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu made his assessment of Ukraine’s fighting capacity during a security conference in Moscow, from which Western firms were excluded.
“Despite comprehensive assistance from the West, Ukraine’s armed forces are unable to achieve results,” Shoigu said. “Preliminary results of the hostilities show that Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited his troops clawing back territory on the southern frontline near Melitopol in the Zaporizhzhia region.
The Ukrainian military said yesterday that it had pushed Russian forces out of pockets of territory in the east and made gains in the south, building on a gruelling counter-offensive launched two months ago.
Kyiv has acknowledged that progress against heavily fortified Russian positions has been slow, saying it had gained only a clutch of land around the war-battered city of Bakhmut last week.
The gains came as Russia claimed its forces had progressed in the eastern Kharkiv region, undermining Kyiv’s highly anticipated campaign.
Ukraine began its counter-offensive against Russian forces in June after building up assault battalions and stockpiling Western-donated weapons.
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