Russian airstrike hits base in western Ukraine, kills 35

LVIV, Ukraine — Waves of Russian missiles pounded a military training base in western Ukraine on Sunday, killing 35 people in an attack on a facility that has served as a crucial hub for cooperation between Ukraine and the NATO countries supporting it in its defense against Moscow’s grinding assault.

More than 30 Russian cruise missiles targeted the sprawling facility, which lies not far from the border with NATO member Poland and that has long been used to train Ukrainian military personnel, often with instructors from the U.S. and other countries in the western alliance.

Poland is also a transit route for Western military aid to Ukraine, and the strikes followed Moscow’s threats to target those shipments. An attack so close to the border was heavy with symbolism in a conflict have has revived the old Cold War rivalries that gave birth to NATO and threatened to rewrite the current global security order.

Since Russia’s invasion more than two weeks ago, thousands are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, and millions have fled their homes amid the largest land conflict in Europe since World War II. Despite its superior firepower, Russia has struggled in its advance across Ukraine, in the face of stiffer than expected Ukrainian resistance, bolstered by Western weapons support. Instead, it has besieged several cities and pummeled them with strikes, repeatedly hitting medical facilities and leading to a series of humanitarian crises.

Many civilians have been caught in the barrage, and Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s office said Sunday that at least 85 children have been killed so far. An American journalist was killed and another wounded when their car was fired upon at a Russian checkpoint Sunday, according to police. Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden is sending his national security adviser to Rome to meet Monday with a Chinese official amid concerns that country is amplifying Russian disinformation, and Pope Francis called for peace.

The attacked training base near Yavoriv is less than 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the closest border point with Poland, according to the governor of Ukraine’s western Lviv region, and appears to be the westernmost target struck during Russia’s 18-day invasion.

The base has hosted international NATO drills and a senior NATO official, Admiral Rob Bauer, previously hailed it as embodying “the spirit of military cooperation” between Ukraine and international forces. As such, the site symbolizes Russia’s longstanding concerns that the 30-member Western military alliance poses a threat to Moscow by operating so close to its territory.

One of Moscow’s demands for ending the hostilities in Ukraine is for the country to drop its ambitions to join NATO.

Lviv governor Maksym Kozytskyi said most of the Russian missiles fired Sunday “were shot down because the air defense system worked.” The ones that got through killed at least 35 people and wounded 134, he said.

Russian fighters also fired at the airport in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk, which is less than 150 kilometers (94 miles) north of Romania and 250 kilometers (155 miles) from Hungary, countries that also are NATO allies. The airport, which includes a military airfield as well as a runway for civilian flights, also was targeted Friday.

NATO said Sunday that it currently does not have any personnel in Ukraine, though the U.S. has increased the number of American troops deployed to Poland. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the West would respond if Russia’s armaments travel outside Ukraine and hit any NATO members, even accidentally.

Biden “has been clear, repeatedly, that the United States will work with our allies to defend every inch of NATO territory and that means every inch,” Sullivan said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

Sullivan is headed to Rome on Monday to meet with senior Chinese foreign policy adviser Yang Jiechi. Their talks will center on “efforts to manage the competition between our two countries and discuss the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine on regional and global security,” said Emily Horne, speaking for the White House national security council.

The city of Lviv itself so far has been spared the scale of destruction unfolding to its east and south. Its population of 721,000 has swelled during the war with residents escaping other bombarded population centers and as a waystation for the nearly 2.6 million people who have fled the country.

Ukrainian and European leaders have pushed with limited success for Russia to grant safe passage to civilians trapped by fighting. Ukrainian authorities said more than 10 humanitarian corridors would open Sunday, with agreement from Russia, including from the battered and besieged port city of Mariupol, where the city council said 2,187 people have been killed in fighting so far.

The port city has been the site of some of the worst desperation of the war, and the council said on Telegram that there were 22 bombardments of the city over the past day.

“The invaders are cynically and purposefully hitting residential buildings, crowded places, completely destroying children’s hospitals and completely destroying the city’s infrastructure,” the statement said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address that a convoy carrying 100 tons of humanitarian aid was on its way to Mariupol, and all necessary diplomatic efforts have been taken to make sure it reaches those in need.

Capturing Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.

Previous efforts to get supplies into besieged cities or civilians out have often fallen apart, with Ukrainian officials accusing Russia of failing to honor pledges to withhold fire along temporary evacuation routes. Zelenskyy said Ukrainian authorities still have managed to evacuate nearly 125,000 people from areas where hostilities are ongoing.

But continued fighting on multiple fronts heaped further misery on the country Sunday and provoked renewed international outrage.

In the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea, authorities reported nine people killed in bombings. Russian forces advancing from Crimea attempted to circumvent Mykolaiv on what appeared to be a westward push toward the Black Sea port of Odesa, Britain’s Defense Ministry said.

Ukrainian authorities said Russian airstrikes on a monastery and a children’s resort in the eastern Donetsk region hit spots where monks and refugees were sheltering, wounding 32 people.

Another airstrike hit a westward-bound train evacuating people from the east, killing one person and wounding another, Donetsk’s chief regional administrator said.

To the north, in the city of Chernihiv, one person was killed and another wounded in a Russian airstrike that destroyed a residential block, emergency services said.

Around the capital, Kyiv, a major political and strategic target for the invasion, fighting also intensified, with overnight shelling in the northwestern suburbs and a missile strike Sunday that destroyed a warehouse to the east.

Kyiv Region police said American video journalist Brent Renaud died and another journalist was wounded when they were attacked by Russian forces in Ukraine. The police force said on its official website that Russian troops opened fire on the car. It said the wounded journalist was being taken to a hospital in Kyiv.

Chief regional administrator Oleksiy Kuleba said Russian forces appeared to be trying to blockade and paralyze the capital with day and night shelling of the suburbs.

He vowed that any all-out assault would meet stiff resistance, saying: “We’re getting ready to defend Kyiv, and we’re prepared to fight for ourselves.”

Zelenskyy also alleged that Russians were using blackmail and bribery in an attempt to force local officials in the southern Kherson region to form a “pseudo-republic” like those in the two eastern regions where Russian-backed separatists began fighting Ukrainian forces in 2014.

Zelenskyy reported Saturday that 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the war. The Russians have not given a similar count in several days.

In some of his strongest denunciations yet of the war in Ukraine, Pope Francis on Sunday decried the “barbarianism” of the killing of children and other civilians and pleaded for the attacks to end “before cities are reduced to cemeteries.” Francis said Mariupol, the southern city which “bears the name” of the Virgin Mary, has “become a city martyred by the heartbreaking war that is devastating Ukraine.”

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Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov in Mariupol and other reporters around the world contributed.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine