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Jet repair facility in Lviv hit by Russian missile: NPR

Smoke rises on a street near the airport in Lviv after Russian air strikes hit a jet repair facility.

Claire Harbage / NPR


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Claire Harbage / NPR


Smoke rises on a street near the airport in Lviv after Russian air strikes hit a jet repair facility.

Claire Harbage / NPR

LVIV, UKRAINE – A fighter aircraft repair facility in Lviv was hit by a Russian missile early Friday morning, the city’s mayor said.

The attack on the Lviv State Aircraft Repair Factory is the closest to the western city of Lviv, which has served as a relative safe haven since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began last month.

Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said: “Several missiles hit the aircraft repair facility. Its buildings were destroyed by the air strikes. Active work at the plant was stopped in time. So there are no casualties.”

Minutes before the attack, air raid sirens sounded throughout the city. A cloud of smoke can be seen over the airport at sunrise. Hours later, the base area was still smoky.

Authorities said Russia launched six cruise missiles at the facility, two of which were intercepted by Ukraine’s defense forces.

Maksym Kozytskyy, head of Lviv’s military administration, said: “The missiles, fired from the Black Sea region, were partially shot down. But four of them hit the repair plant. plane”.

An archived version of the website of the Lviv State Aircraft Repair Factory describes it as “Ukraine’s leading aircraft maintenance company.” Operated by Ukrainian defense company Ukroboronprom, the facility primarily serves MiG-29s, a Soviet-made fighter jet used by the Ukrainian air force.

Friday’s strike was just over four miles from downtown Lviv, by far the closest the fighting has come to the western city. The facility is located on the edge of Danylo Halytskyi International Airport, a civil airport in Lviv.

With much of the fighting concentrated in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, Lviv has become a relatively normal bastion in a war-torn country and a central station for humanitarian and humanitarian aid. Refugees.

Area residents told NPR that the prospect of upcoming violence was also frightening.

“We all heard an explosion, and as soon as we did, we all ran into a bomb shelter,” said Yevhen Halakhov, a resident of a building near the airport. The resident of a building near the airport, added that he was awoken by family members screaming in another room. However, he has no plans to move, he said, pushing his nephew on a swing a few hours after the strike.

The number may differ from the more than 200,000 people who have arrived in Lviv after fleeing violence in other parts of Ukraine.

“We left Kyiv because it was very hot there, so we came here instead. But obviously we can’t stay here now, because we don’t know what will happen next.” said the woman. Diana.

She and her daughter are staying with her family in an apartment near the airport, she said. But the early morning strike – “the whole building shook, the glass and windows shook”, she said – made her consider leaving the country altogether, as 3 million other Ukrainians didaccording to the UN

Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russian missile attacks and shelling continued into Thursday night and Friday morning, including in the capital, Kyiv. In Kharkiv, which has been under near-constant bombardment since the invasion began nearly a month ago, Ukrainian authorities reported that shelling killed at least 10 people overnight.

And apartment buildings in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donbas region, were also hit by rockets, according to regional officials.

Additional reporting by NPR Julian Hayda in Lviv.

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