LVIV: At least five people were wounded Saturday in strikes that targeted a fuel storage facility near Lviv, officials said, in a rare attack on the west Ukraine city one month into Russia’s invasion.
“There were two missile strikes within Lviv,” the regional governor Maksym Kozytsky said on social media, adding that, “according to preliminary data, five people were injured”.
The city’s mayor Andriy Sadovy said in a later post that “an industrial facility where fuel is stored caught fire” as a result of the attack.
“No residential buildings were damaged. All relevant departments are working on site,” he wrote, urging residents to remain indoors until air sirens had halted.
Plumes of thick smoke could be seen in the city centre and Lviv residents were standing outside their homes to observe the dark clouds billowing in the wind.
Twenty-one-year-old Taras, who lives 10 kilometres (6 miles from the strikes, said he hear a loud whistling sound at around 4:30 pm (1430 GMT)
“After that I heard other passers-by shout ‘missile’. Then I heard two explosions, one with a very loud boom that echoed in the sky and the other, with a weaker sound,” he said.
Olga, 44, a bank employee displaced from Kyiv who was several kilometers from the affected site, said she was walking when she heard two loud explosions.
“Very black smoke began to raise up. It was clear that something holding fuel had been hit. Ambulances, police cars and fire engines drove quickly towards the bombed site,” she told AFP by telephone, declining to give her surname.
Kozytsky, the governor, added in a later post that he had visited the scene of the strikes and that the situation was “under control”.