LVIV, Ukraine — A barrage of missiles that hit Lviv on Monday killed at least 7 and injured 11, including a child, breaking a relative calm in the western city that has been largely unscathed by Russian strikes as Ukrainian forces clung on in the battered southern port city of Mariupol.
They were the first deaths reported in the city since the beginning of Russia’s assault, Lviv regional officials officials told The Washington Post, though Russian forces struck a military facility in nearby Yavoriv last month.
Air raid sirens continued to sound in the city after the strikes, which sent a cloud of thick black smoke into the air, and locals headed into underground shelters. News that the deadly strikes occurred near the city’s train depot, the first stop for many families fleeing violence elsewhere, was interpreted as a clear message: Nowhere in Ukraine is safe from Russian attack.
Fighting in the strategic city of Mariupol — a key target of Russia’s ground assault in the country’s east — has largely focused on the city’s sprawling industrial complex that houses the Avozstal steel plant. Ukrainian forces holed up there showed no signs of surrendering on Monday more than 24 hours after a Moscow-imposed deadline to do so, and local authorities have warned that civilians also remain trapped there. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Sunday the last forces in Mariupol “will fight till the end."
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Lethal darts were fired into a Ukrainian neighborhood by the thousands
Return to menuBUCHA, Ukraine — At Svitlana Chmut’s house outside Kyiv, there are carrots in her garden and deadly Russian mini-arrows in her yard.
A pile of the sharp, finned projectiles rounded up by Chmut are now gathering rust in the spring’s fine mist. She combed her walled courtyard for them, she said, after a Russian artillery shell carrying them burst somewhere overhead last month, seeding the area with thousands of potentially lethal darts. Some were embedded in the tarp that covered her vehicle, as if someone nailed them to her car.
“If you look closely on the ground around my house, you will find a lot more of them,” said Chmut, 54.
These projectiles, called fléchettes, are rarely seen or used in modern conflict, experts have said. Many landed in the street in the strike, Chmut said, including some observed by Washington Post reporters, among fields of gear and the occasional liquor bottle or chocolate bar abandoned by retreating Russian soldiers.
At 3 centimeters in length, these fléchettes look like tiny arrows. They have a long history in war — a version of them was dropped from airplanes in World War I and used by the U.S. in Vietnam — but are not in common use today. Shells packed with fléchettes are primed to explode over infantry formations and spew projectiles in a conical pattern, with some versions dispersing fléchettes across an area three football fields wide.
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April 18, 2022 at 09:20PM
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Latest Russia-Ukraine war news: Live updates - The Washington Post
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