Russia widens attack with airstrikes on western Ukraine cities

The raids hit airfields in Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk, far from the main areas of conflict, and residential buildings in the strategically important city of Dnipro, which sits on the Dnieper River.

The air raids came as new satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that a 40-mile convoy that had been approaching the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, had dispersed as tanks and artillery moved to what appeared to be firing positions to the north-west of the city.

The airstrike on the Lutsk military airfield early on Friday left two members of the Ukrainian forces dead and six people wounded, according to the head of the surrounding Volyn region, Yuriy Pohulyayko.

Images of the aftermath showed what appeared to be a massive explosion that set fire to what looked like fuel storage tanks and cratered the runway.

The strikes also targeted an airport near Ivano-Frankivsk, where residents were ordered to shelters after an air raid alert, the mayor, Ruslan Martsinkiv, said.

Three Russian airstrikes also hit the eastern industrial city of Dnipro early on Friday, killing at least one person, according to the Ukrainian interior ministry adviser, Anton Heraschenko. They hit an area near a chemical plant, leaving a shoe factory completely destroyed, and breaking the windows on a nearby kindergarten.

The new wave of strikes came as clear skies on Friday made Russian air operations easier.

The latest strikes came amid contradictory assessments of Russian progress around Kyiv, with the Ukraine general staff saying the Russian advance had been halted and the Pentagon suggesting that it had moved forward about 3 miles in the north-west.

The satellite photos of Russian concentrations around Kyiv, meanwhile, appeared to show a massive convoy previously detected outside the Ukrainian capital had fanned out into towns and forests near the city with artillery pieces raised for firing, in another potentially ominous movement.

A US defence official speaking on condition of anonymity said Russian forces moving toward Kyiv had advanced about 3 miles (5km) in the past 24 hours, with some elements as close as about nine miles from the city.

It appeared the convoy forces were moving west around the city, trying to encircle it to the south, according to Jack Watling, a research fellow at British defence thinktank the Royal United Services Institute.

While a move to a more static approach of shelling Kyiv from outside might be less costly for Russian forces in the first instance, it is not without risk.

The Ukrainian use of Turkish-supplied combat drones has been effective against Russian vehicles, and more static positions would be vulnerable to other Ukrainian aircraft, perhaps explaining the recent stepped up effort to knock Ukrainian airfields.