Ukraine round-up: Lviv counts civilian dead and credible sinking warship video
- Published
A Russian missile attack on the western city of Lviv has left at least seven people dead, city officials say, on a day the Russians intensified strikes across Ukraine.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had now started its assault to seize Ukraine's Donbas region in the east.
Mr Zelensky's remarks came after Russia said it had hit 300 targets across Ukraine, however.
Up until now the picturesque Ukrainian city had escaped largely unscathed from the worst of the Russian invasion.
One of the missiles there struck a garage where workers were meeting for coffee before work, officials said.
"Everyone is unsafe," Lviv's mayor said.
Yury Buran, a 26-year-old IT worker, was one of those killed when a missile struck.
"Humans cannot do such things. They are not humans, they are barbaric invaders." his father Anatoly said to the BBC.
Read Toby Luckhurst and Mariana Maglych's full report from the site of the attack in Lviv.
Mariupol's last defenders
The final Ukrainian fighters preventing Russia from taking full control of Mariupol will not lay down their arms, the country's prime minister has said.
"They will fight until the end. And as for now, they are still in Mariupol," Ukrainian PM Denys Shmyhal told a US TV network.
Russia's military says it controls almost all of Mariupol, while Ukraine's Azov Battalion is still holding out in Azovstal, a huge steelworks overlooking the Azov Sea.
They've been camped out in a network of underground bunkers and tunnels running beneath Mariupol's massive Azovstal steel complex, ignoring multiple Russian ultimatums to surrender.
Image of missile cruiser burning
Credible footage of the Moskva warship in the hours before it sank appears to show the missile cruiser listing heavily with black smoke billowing into the sky.
Last week Russia blamed the loss of its Black Sea flagship on an unexplained fire, but Ukraine claimed it hit the warship with two missiles.
Now the new footage has emerged, the BBC asked military experts what they thought of it.
They agreed it probably showed the Moskva and that the damage was consistent with that from a missile strike, but stressed it wasn't possible to draw definitive conclusions from the grainy footage.
Captured Britons' camera appeal
Two British men reportedly captured by Russian forces while fighting in Ukraine have appealed on Russian state television for Boris Johnson to help free them, but its unclear whether the pleas were made under duress.
Shaun Pinner, 48, and Aiden Aslin, 28, were shown in two separate videos asking to be swapped in a prisoner exchange with a pro-Kremlin politician being detained in Ukraine.
Families of both men have appealed for their Russian captors to treat them humanely.
Mother and son's reunion
After a 2,000 mile (3,128 km) journey that lasted 35 hours, the mother and severely disabled aunt of a BBC journalist have made it safely to Reading in the UK.
But the journey was only possible because BBC Monitoring's Russia editor Vitaliy Shevchenko shared the story of the danger his family was facing back in Zaporizhzhia on an episode of the BBC's Ukrainecast, prompting two listeners to work together to help pull off the rescue.
Listen to Vitaliy's family thanking the man who was able to aid their escape.
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- Published18 April 2022
- Published18 April 2022