LVIV, Ukraine, Apr 18 (AP) \u2014 Russian forces launched missile attacks on the western city of Lviv and pounded other targets across Ukraine on Monday in an intensified bid to wear down the country\u2019s defenses ahead of an all-out assault on the east.
\nAt least seven people were reported killed in Lviv, where plumes of thick black smoke rose over a city that had become a relative haven for people fleeing intense fighting farther east during almost two months of war.
\nUkrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, meanwhile, vowed to \u201cfight absolutely to the end\u201d in strategically vital Mariupol, where the last known pocket of resistance in the seven-week siege consisted of Ukrainian fighters holed up in a sprawling steel plant laced with tunnels. The holdouts ignored a surrender-or-die ultimatum from the Russians on Sunday.
\nThe governor of the Lviv region, Maksym Kozytskyy, said the Russian missile strikes hit three military infrastructure facilities and an auto mechanic shop. He said the wounded included a child, and emergency teams battled fires caused by the attack.
\nA hotel sheltering Ukrainians who had fled fighting in other parts of the country was among the buildings badly damaged, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said.
\n\u201cThe nightmare of war has caught up with us even in Lviv,\u201d said Lyudmila Turchak, 47, who fled with two children from the eastern city of Kharkiv. \u201cThere is no longer anywhere in Ukraine where we can feel safe.\u201d
\nA powerful explosion also rocked Vasylkiv, a town south of the capital of Kyiv that is home to a military airbase, according to residents. It was not immediately clear what was hit.
\nMilitary analysts say Russia is increasing its strikes on weapons factories, railways and other infrastructure targets across Ukraine to wear down the country\u2019s ability to resist a major ground offensive in the Donbas, Ukraine\u2019s mostly Russian-speaking eastern industrial heartland.
\nThe Russian military said its missiles struck more than 20 military targets in eastern and central Ukraine in the past day \u2014 including ammunition depots, command headquarters and groups of troops and vehicles. It claimed artillery hit an additional 315 Ukrainian targets, and warplanes conducted 108 strikes on Ukrainian troops and military equipment. The claims could not be independently verified.
\nGen. Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British Army, told Sky News the strikes were part of a \u201csoftening-up\u201d campaign by Russia ahead of a planned ground offensive in the Donbas.
\nUkraine\u2019s government halted civilian evacuations for a second day on Monday, saying Russian forces were shelling and blocking the humanitarian corridors.
\nDeputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Ukraine had been negotiating passage from cities and towns in eastern and southeastern Ukraine, including Mariupol and other areas in the Donbas. The government of the Luhansk region in the Donbas said four civilians trying to flee were shot and killed by Russian forces.
\nVereshchuk said Russia could be prosecuted for war crimes over its refusal to allow civilians to leave Mariupol.
\n\u201cYour refusal to open these humanitarian corridors will in the future be a reason to prosecute all involved for war crimes,\u201d she wrote on social media.
\nThe Russians, in turn, accused \u201cneo-Nazi nationalists\u201d in Mariupol of hampering the evacuation.
\nRussia is bent on capturing the Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists already control some territory, after its attempt to take the capital failed.
\n\u201cWe are doing everything to ensure the defense\u201d of eastern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address to the nation on Sunday.
\nThe looming offensive in the east, if successful, would give Russian President Vladimir Putin a badly needed victory to point to amid the war\u2019s mounting casualties and the economic hardship caused by Western sanctions.
\nThe capture of Mariupol is seen as a key step in preparations for any eastern assault since it would free Russian troops up for that new campaign. The fall of the city on the Sea of Azov would also hand Russia its biggest military victory of the war, giving it full control of a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized in 2014, and depriving Ukraine of a major port and prized industrial assets.
\nUkrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar has described Mariupol as a \u201cshield defending Ukraine.\u201d
\nThe city has been reduced to rubble in the siege, but a few thousand fighters, by Russia\u2019s estimate, are holding on to the giant, 11-square-kilometer (4-square-mile) Azovstal steel mill.
\nThe relentless bombardment of Mariupol \u2014 including at a maternity hospital and a theater where civilians were sheltering \u2014 along with street fighting have killed at least 21,000 people, by Ukrainian estimates. An estimated 100,000 people remain in the city out of a prewar population of 450,000, trapped without food, water, heat or electricity.
\nA pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who was arrested last week on a treason charge appeared in a video offering himself in exchange for the evacuation of Mariupol\u2019s trapped civilians. Ukraine\u2019s state security services posted the video of Viktor Medvedchuk, the former leader of a pro-Russian opposition party with personal ties to Putin.
\nIt was not clear whether Medvedchuk was speaking under duress.
\nThe eastern city of Kharkiv was hit by shelling on Monday that killed at least three people and wounded three others, according to AP journalists on the scene. One of the dead was a woman who appeared to be going out to collect water in the rain. She was found lying with a water canister and umbrella by her side.
\nPutin repeated his insistence that the Western sanctions \u201cblitz\u201d against Russia had failed.
\nThe Russian leader said the West had not managed to \u201cprovoke panic in the markets, the collapse of the banking system and shortages in stores,\u201d though he acknowledged a sharp increase in consumer prices in Russia, saying they rose by 17.5%.<\/p>\n
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