REVISES HEADLINE & LEDE; UPDATES WITH LATEST INJURY TOLL & ADDS STATEMENT BY RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY
By Burc Eruygur
ISTANBUL (AA) - At least seven people were killed and 64 injured on Wednesday in an overnight Russian airstrike on Ukraine’s western city of Lviv.
“We already lost seven people … Among them are three children. A terrible tragedy,” Lviv Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said on Telegram.
Kozytskyi said in a later statement that a regional sports and rehabilitation center and seven architectural monuments in the city were damaged.
He went on to say that search and rescue efforts in the city have been completed, adding that 64 people were injured, including eight children.
Elsewhere, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi wrote on Telegram that fires have broken out in a number of residential buildings near the city’s main rail station.
He said that two schools will also not be open in the city, adding that window panes in many buildings were shattered.
Ukraine’s Air Force claimed that the country’s air defenses downed seven out of 13 missiles of various types and 22 out of 29 attack drones launched by Russia overnight.
It said that Ukrainian air defenses worked overnight in the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernihiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Volyn, Ternopil, Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Poltava and Sumy regions, adding that a drone also crossed into neighboring Belarus.
A later statement by the Russian Defense Ministry said that on Wednesday morning the armed forces launched strikes on "enterprises of the Ukrainian defense industry located in the city of Lviv," where it claimed that aircraft and missile systems for the Ukrainian army are being produced and repaired.