Missiles hit western city of Lviv
Several missiles hit an aircraft repair center on the outskirts of Lviv, western Ukraine, the city’s mayor said Friday.
The attack suggests Russian forces are continuing to widen their attack. Many Ukrainians have fled their homes elsewhere in the country to the relative safety of Lviv. The city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, has had to take action to stop landlords raising their rents as refugees flood into the city.
In a series of Telegram posts Friday morning, Sadovyi said Russian missiles had hit the area near Lviv airport.
“Several missiles hit the aircraft repair plant. Its buildings were destroyed by the blows,” he said, according to an NBC News translation. “The active work of the plant was stopped in advance, so there are no casualties now. Rescuers and relevant utilities are working on the site.”
He also clarified that the airport itself had not been hit.
NBC reporters on the ground in Lviv said an air alarm sounded in the city just after 6 a.m. local time, and three explosions were heard from the outskirts of the city at around 6:25 a.m.
— Chloe Taylor
Read CNBC’s previous live coverage here:
Chinese state media continues to blame U.S. ahead of Xi-Biden call
Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden are set to speak Friday evening Beijing time, Chinese state media announced Thursday. The reports did not specifically mention Ukraine by name.
In the run-up to the call, Chinese state media have tacked away from primarily pro-Russian coverage of the war in Ukraine. Even Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., said up front in a op-ed in the Washington Post on Wednesday that the conflict is not good for China, and Beijing would have tried to prevent it if they had known ahead of time.
But one of the consistent state media messages has stuck to blaming the U.S. for making the tensions worse.
People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, put a headline about the upcoming Xi-Biden call in a prominent spot on its website’s front page on Friday. Several lines below it was a headline for an editorial blaming the U.S. for holding double standards.
— Evelyn Cheng