Volodymyr Zelenskyy vows strong response to Russian strike on Lviv

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Ukraine’s president has vowed to retaliate after a Russian missile attack on Lviv in the early hours of Thursday killed at least four people, destroyed apartment buildings and shattered the relative calm in the western city that sits near the EU border.

“There will definitely be a response to the enemy. A strong one,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote in a tweet, sharing drone footage of the aftermath.

Lviv. Consequences of the night attack by Russian terrorists. Unfortunately, there are wounded and dead. My condolences to the relatives!

There will definitely be a response to the enemy. A strong one. pic.twitter.com/9yl1MT6Eu4

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) July 6, 2023

The governor of Lviv, Maksym Kozytskyi, confirmed at that at least four people were killed in the in the attack and at least 34 people injured.

“This is the largest attack on the civilian infrastructure of Lviv since the beginning of the full-scale invasion,” said the city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi. He posted videos showing rescuers sifting through debris of a destroyed four-story residential building and a photograph of men carrying a body bag. About 60 apartments and 50 vehicles were damaged, he said, adding that displaced residents had been moved to a local hotel.

“The city that meets Europeans every day on the border with Poland and has become a refuge for thousands of Ukrainians since the beginning of the war” had been deliberately targeted, said Serhiy Kruk, head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, as his workers searched for survivors in the rubble. “The Russians have again acted vilely and cynically, shelling a border city of Ukraine, for the sake of possible intimidation of Europe.”

Ukraine’s air force said the Russian Kalibr cruise missiles had been launched from warships and a submarine in the Black Sea in the dark of night, travelling north through the Dnipro river channel before veering west to Lviv. Ukraine’s air defence units destroyed seven out of 10 missiles, but three hit their targets.

“We need F-16s!” the air force pleaded, reiterating Kyiv’s demand for western fighter jets to better defend itself from Russian air attacks.

Western air defence systems, including American-made Patriot systems, have performed well since they arrived in April, saving the Ukrainian capital from 18 large missile barrages in May alone. But there are not enough of the systems to cover the entire country.

Zelenskyy and his government have pleaded for F-16 fighter jets since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February last year, pointing to their enemy’s advantage, though not total superiority, in the skies. It was more than a year before President Joe Biden said in May that the US would support a western coalition to provide the American-made aircraft and train Ukrainian pilots on them.

But Nato countries are unlikely to deliver the jets to Ukraine in time for them to be used in its counteroffensive to reclaim lost territory, which Kyiv launched in earnest last month.

In an interview with CNN this week, Zelenskyy acknowledged that the counteroffensive was moving more slowly than he had hoped and said his army would be able to move faster had the US and European leaders sent “all the weapons and materiel for that” earlier.

Western battle tanks, engineering equipment and artillery systems have flowed into the country in recent months. But many of Ukraine’s bigger requests, such as greater air support, have lagged.

Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of the military committee of Nato, said this week that the jets would arrive in autumn at the earliest.

“Militarily it makes sense, but because of training [and] logistics it is not realistic in the short term,” he said.

Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a local TV interview on Monday that his country would probably not receive the first F-16s until early next year. He said that two unspecified western countries had agreed to train Ukrainian pilots but had delayed the training which was set to begin last month.

At a press conference last week in Kyiv with Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, Zelenskyy blasted Ukraine’s western partners over the delay.

“I believe that some partners delay it,” he said without naming names. “I don’t know why they do it.”