Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – Numerous explosions, apparently caused by missiles, struck the western Ukrainian city of Lviv early Monday as the country prepared for a total Russian attack in the east.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to “fight to the end” in strategically vital Mariupol, where the last known pocket of resistance to the devastated port city has been hidden in a sprawling tunnel-covered steel plant.
Clouds of thick black smoke rose over Lviv after the explosions were witnessed by AP officers. Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine are not immune, but are less affected by the fighting than other parts of the country and are considered a relative refuge.
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovi said on Facebook that five rockets had hit the city and that emergency services were responding to the blasts.
Alexander Kamyshin, chairman of the Ukrainian Railways, said the strikes were close to railway facilities and that there were no known casualties. Train traffic resumed with some delay, he said, promising to repair the damaged network.
With missiles and rockets hitting parts of the country, Zelensky accused Russian soldiers of torturing and abducting areas they controlled.
The fall of Mariupol, which was reduced to rubble in a seven-week siege, will give Moscow the greatest victory in the war. But Russia estimates that several thousand fighters held the giant 11-square-kilometer (4-square-mile) Azovstal steel plant.
“We will fight to the end, to victory in this war,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmihal promised on Sunday on ABC’s This Week. He said Ukraine was ready to end the war through diplomacy if possible, “but we have no intention of surrendering.”
Many civilians from Mariupol, including children, are also sheltered at the Azovstal plant, Mikhail Vershinin, the city’s patrol police chief, told Mariupol TV. He said they were hiding from Russian shelling and Russian soldiers.
Taking the city on the Sea of Azov would free Russian troops for a new offensive to take control of the Donbass region in Ukraine’s industrial east. Russia will also provide a fully overland corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, depriving Ukraine of a major port and valuable industrial assets.
Russia is seeking to take over Donbass, where Moscow-backed separatists already control part of the territory after its attempt to take the capital, Kyiv, failed.
“We are doing everything we can to ensure the defense of eastern Ukraine,” Zelensky said in his evening address to the nation.
As for besieged Mariupol, there seemed little hope of a military rescue. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that other Ukrainian troops and civilians there were mostly surrounded. He said they were “continuing to fight”, but that the city was virtually non-existent due to massive destruction.
According to Ukrainian estimates, the ruthless bombing and street fighting in Mariupol killed at least 21,000 people. A maternity hospital was hit by a deadly Russian air strike in the first weeks of the war, and about 300 people were killed in the bombing of a theater where civilians had taken refuge.
Approximately 100,000 people remained in the city from a pre-war population of 450,000 trapped without food, water, heat or electricity.
Footage from drones, transmitted by the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, shows miles after miles of destroyed buildings and a steel complex on the outskirts of the city, from which rising towers of smoke rise.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hana Malyar described Mariupol as a “shield defending Ukraine”.
Meanwhile, Russian forces have carried out airstrikes near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent effort to weaken Ukraine’s military capabilities ahead of an expected attack on Donbass.
After the humiliating sinking of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s flagship last week in what Ukrainians boasted of as a missile attack, the Kremlin has vowed to step up strikes on the capital.
Russia said on Sunday that it had attacked an ammunition factory near Kyiv at night with precision missiles, the third such strike in so many days. Explosions have also been reported in Kramatorsk, the eastern city, where rockets killed at least 57 people earlier this month at a station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate before the Russian offensive.
At least five people were killed in a Russian shelling in Kharkov, Ukraine’s second-largest city, on Sunday, regional authorities said. The barrage crashed into residential buildings. The streets were littered with broken glass and other debris.
The mayor of Kharkov, Igor Terekhov, in a passionate address on the occasion of the Orthodox Palm Sunday, attacked Russian forces for not stopping the bombing on such a sacred day.
Zelensky called the Kharkov bombing “nothing but deliberate terror.”
In his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky also called for a stronger response to what he said was the brutality of Russian troops in parts of southern Ukraine.
“Torture chambers have been set up there,” he said. “They are kidnapping representatives of local authorities and anyone who is considered visible to local communities.
He reiterated his call on the world to send more weapons and tougher sanctions against Moscow.
Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, said the Russians were launching air strikes on Mariupol and could prepare for a landing to bolster their ground forces.
The impending offensive in the east, if successful, will give Russian President Vladimir Putin a much-needed victory to sell to the Russian people amid growing casualties in the war and economic hardship caused by Western sanctions.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nechamer, 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 military logic” for Ukraine. In an interview with NBC’s Nehamer Press, he said he thought Putin believed he was winning the war, and “we need to look him in the eye and confront him with what we see in Ukraine.”
Zelenski also celebrated Easter on Sunday, saying on Twitter: “The Lord’s Resurrection is a testimony to the victory of life over death, of good over evil.”
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Chernov reported from Kharkov. Philip Crowther of Lviv, Jesitsa Fish of Kramatorsk, Ukraine, and journalists from the Associated Press around the world contributed to this report.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the war
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