LVIV, Ukraine — Russian missiles struck Lviv on Monday, killing at least seven people in the first reported deaths of the war in the western city, where hundreds of thousands of people fled to escape the fierce fighting in other parts of Ukraine.
The head of Lviv's military administration, Maksym Koztyskyy, said three missiles hit empty military warehouses while a fourth hit a garage. He didn't say whether all of the casualties were caused by the strike on the garage.
Gray smoke billowed from what was left of the red roof of a long, concrete garage with a sign reading carwash and tire replacement. The hole in the roof indicated that the building on the western side of the city, overlooking a railway line, had suffered a direct hit from a missile. As another air raid siren sounded, firefighters tried to extinguish the flames while ambulances ferried away the wounded.
As the garage burned, a train from the eastern city of Dnipro rumbled slowly by on its way to the nearby Lviv train station, carrying passengers fleeing the fighting in Dnipro and heading for the city of Truskavets in western Ukraine. It stopped briefly in Lviv and one of the conductors said he had tried to reassure passengers as they started hearing about the airstrikes by phone.