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Weary, dust-covered rescuers were searching for bodies on Wednesday among the ruins of a devastating missile strike in eastern Ukraine, as Russia launched another deadly attack in the west that killed seven people in the historic center of the city of Lviv.
The latest Russian onslaught came as President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine planned the broadest shake-up in his cabinet since the war began in 2022. Half a dozen senior figures tendered their resignations, the speaker of Ukraine’s Parliament said, in what Mr. Zelensky described as an effort to bring “a new energy” to his government as Russia steps up its attacks.
The changes come at a precarious moment for Ukraine in the war, with heavy assaults by Russian ground troops near the transit hub of Pokrovsk and a stepped-up campaign of airstrikes on Ukrainian towns and cities. At the same time, Ukrainian forces are trying to hold on to several hundred square miles of territory they have seized inside western Russia.
Early Wednesday, Russia sent missiles and drones flying toward cities and regions across Ukraine, killing at least seven people and injuring dozens of others in the city of Lviv. The attack, near Ukraine’s western border, prompted neighboring Poland to put its air defenses on alert.
Here are other developments:
Poltava aftermath: The strikes on Wednesday came a day after a Russian missile attack on a military academy in Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, that officials said had killed 51 people and injured 271 others. On Wednesday, rescuers were continuing to pull debris and bodies from the ruins left by that attack, one of the deadliest in 30 months of full-scale war.
Bombardment goes on: The Russian military also bombarded the Kherson region, in southern Ukraine, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the head of the regional administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Telegram. The attacks hit high-rise buildings and killed three people, Mr. Prokudin said.
Cabinet reshuffle: While the upheaval in the Zelensky government was not expected to mean major policy changes at home or abroad, some critics worried that the changes could further concentrate power in the president’s office, depending on who is named to fill vacated posts.
Prominent diplomat: Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, a familiar face in allied capitals who had helped lead Ukraine’s lobbying for Western weapons to battle the Russian invasion, was the most prominent of the cabinet officials who have offered their resignations. Others include Oleksandr Kamyshin, the minister of strategic industries; Denys Maliuska, the justice minister; and Iryna Vereschuk, the minister for reintegration of temporarily occupied territories.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed ahead with his sweeping overhaul of the senior government ranks as the head of Ukraine’s ruling party released a slate of nine candidates for top cabinet positions on Wednesday evening.
If Parliament approves the new candidates, which is expected, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who resigned earlier on Wednesday, will be replaced by an experienced diplomat, Andrii Sybiha, according to David Arakhamia, the leader in Parliament of Mr. Zelensky’s Servant of the People Party.
Mr. Kuleba has been the diplomatic face of Ukraine for the entire war. A forceful advocate, he helped to lead the successful effort to convince the United States and Germany to supply Ukraine with the Patriot air-defense system to shoot down Russian missiles.
Mr. Sybiha had spent his career as a diplomat before joining the president’s office in 2021. Earlier this year, he joined the foreign ministry as the first deputy minister for foreign affairs under Mr. Kuleba, according to the ministry’s website.
The political upheaval came after a series of Russian missile attacks and battlefield gains in recent weeks and before a vital trip by Mr. Zelensky to Washington, where he plans to reveal a “victory plan” for the war.
Mr. Zelensky said Wednesday that he was acting to bring a “new energy” to state institutions, hours after rescue workers pulled bodies from the wreckage of an overnight missile attack that killed seven people in the historic city center of Lviv, near the Polish border.
More than a half dozen senior officials were asked to tender their resignations to the country’s Parliament this week, though many had been expected to remain in the administration with new portfolios.
Among the more notable changes, Alexander Kamyshin, the charismatic minister for domestic arms production, is slated to join the Presidential Office, where he “will continue to deal with weapons and infrastructure issues,” Mr. Arakhamia said.
Olha Stefanishyna, formerly Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, was expected to lead the Justice Ministry, a strong signal about the government’s commitment to battling corruption, analysts said.
But analysts also said the reshuffling did not appear to signal fundamental shifts in either domestic or foreign policy.
While the changes had been under consideration since February, said Mykhailo Minakov, a senior adviser on Ukraine for the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, Mr. Zelensky acted now because “Ukraine has to prepare for a new phase of the war and a new phase of diplomacy.”
Mr. Zelensky himself did not offer any explanation for the activity, beyond saying that he expects “certain areas of our foreign and domestic policies will have a slightly different emphasis.”
At the top of Mr. Zelensky’s priorities is American support for what he has described as his nation’s plan for victory.
Mr. Zelensky said last week that he intends to share the plan with President Biden when he travels to the United States at the end of the month. He said he would also pass the plan along to the presidential candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald J. Trump.
Some critics condemned the changes in the government as rash and ill-advised during a difficult moment in the war and as continuing a trend to concentrate power in Mr. Zelensky’s hands, especially if he installs loyalists reluctant to challenge him or the powerful head of the president’s office, Andriy Yermak.
The reshuffle could see “an increase of Yermak’s influence,” said Yevhan Mahda, a Ukrainian political analyst, who added that increased authority in the president’s office could come at the expense of the Parliament and cabinet ministers.
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Russia’s intense aerial assault on Ukraine in recent days has come at a time of significant developments on the battlefield. Here is a look at where things stand in the fighting, 30 months after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion.
In one of the most startling moments of the conflict, Ukraine began an incursion into Russia on Aug. 6, sending troops over the border into the Kursk region and seizing towns and villages. The offensive — the first on Russian soil since World War II — embarrassed President Vladimir V. Putin, exposing the weakness of Russia’s border defenses in that area and forcing the government to evacuate civilians.
Moscow has had to redeploy 30,000 troops for its effort to stop the offensive, according to Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said that the objective of the incursion was not to hold territory indefinitely, as Russia aims to do in Ukraine. Instead, he said, it was meant to give his government a bargaining chip in any talks on ending the war, to slow Moscow’s own push in eastern Ukraine and to make it clear that Mr. Putin prizes the seizure of Ukraine’s land more highly than he does the defense of ordinary Russians.
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To back up the point about the Kremlin’s focus on conquest, Mr. Zelensky also told journalists last month that Moscow had occupied more than a quarter of Ukraine since it first sent troops into the country a decade ago, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
The Kursk incursion has since slowed significantly, and military experts say it is too soon to tell whether it has been a success.
“The wider impacts of the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast on the war and any envisioned diplomatic solution to the war are not yet clear,” the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said in a report on Tuesday.
One problem facing Ukrainian forces is that fighting extends along a front line that stretches hundreds of miles, from the Kharkiv region in the northeast to the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south. The incursion into Kursk has made the front line even longer, which could stretch Ukraine’s forces more thinly, according to experts.
Since the new year, Russian forces have been on the offensive in eastern Ukraine, attempting to secure control of the whole of the Donbas, a heavily industrialized part of the country that is made up of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Early this year they seized two small cities, Avdiivka and Marinka, in the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Donetsk region. Both were in ruins after more than two years of Russian bombardment.
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In recent months, Russian forces have also advanced slowly toward the city of Pokrovsk, a rail and road hub important for Ukrainian military logistics in the east.
Ukraine has ordered the evacuation of civilians from the city and has fought a series of battles in the villages to the east, hoping to slow the Russian advance. The front line is now around eight miles east of the city, according to a map produced by a Ukrainian organization called Deep State using publicly available information.
At the same time, the advance poses a new threat to Ukraine’s defenses north of Vuhledar, a town that was the site of some of the most brutal fighting on the eastern front and has also been left in ruins.
One objective of the Kursk incursion was to force Moscow to redeploy troops away from the eastern front, but General Syrsky recently acknowledged that there was little evidence that this had happened.
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Ukraine’s nuclear energy operator said on Wednesday that recent Russian shelling of the country’s power grid had caused a complication at one nuclear plant that forced it to temporarily reduce energy production.
Russian bombardment of the grid has caused “significant fluctuations” in the flow of energy powering the operation of the facility, the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant, leading to a “defect” in one power unit, the operator, Energoatom, wrote in a statement.
Once the flow of power to the plant is normalized, the problem will be resolved, Energoatom wrote.
While the trouble at the plant appeared to be temporary, the statement underscored the threats to Ukraine’s nuclear plants as Russia repeatedly strikes the country’s infrastructure.
Rafael M. Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said on a visit to Kyiv this week that the Russian bombardment of the Ukrainian power grid posed a significant risk to the nuclear plants that supply around half of Ukraine’s energy.
“The safety of operating nuclear power plants is dependent on a stable and reliable connection to the electricity grid,” he said. “As a result of the war, the situation is becoming increasingly vulnerable and potentially even dangerous in this regard.”
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President Volodymyr Zelensky’s overhaul of his government did not appear to signal fundamental shifts in domestic or foreign policy, analysts said Wednesday. But it comes at a dynamic moment in the war, with Russia stepping up airstrikes and inching forward in eastern Ukraine, and weeks before Mr. Zelensky is expected to travel to the United States, where the outcome of November’s elections could affect Washington’s support for his military.
While a reshuffle had long been in the works — and it is not yet known who will be named to fill vacated posts — making the move now was a recognition by Mr. Zelensky that “Ukraine has to prepare for a new phase of the war and new phase of diplomacy and he would like to see some new managers for these processes,” said Mykhailo Minakov, a senior adviser on Ukraine for the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute.
He and other analysts noted that there had been unusual stability to this point in the president’s wartime team. The reshuffle, Mr. Minakov said, had been in the works for months, first discussed at the beginning of the year and again in the spring.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian leader said the changes would bring “a new energy” to his administration. “These steps are related to strengthening our state in various areas,” he said during a meeting in Kyiv with Prime Minister Simon Harris of Ireland. He declined to comment on where some of the ministers who tendered their resignations might end up in the reshuffle.
“This is Zelensky’s style of work,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political analyst. “When he sees stagnation in the work, he changes people,” he added. “He thinks that new people will be more motivated and will bring new ideas.”
Mr. Zelensky had previously dismissed only a handful of ministers since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Mr. Minakov said. That has created stability but also has led to charges of an insular leadership resistant to change. Mr. Zelensky, for his part, has been criticized for overreach in using his war powers to solidify his political standing.
Some analysts and critics of the administration warned that the cabinet moves could further concentrate the power in the president’s hands if he installs loyalists reluctant to challenge him or the powerful head of the president’s office, Andriy Yermak.
The reshuffle could see “an increase of Yermak’s influence,” said Yevhan Mahda, a Ukrainian political analyst, who added that more authority in the president’s office comes at the expense of the parliament and cabinet ministers, who are subject to parliamentary approval.
Mr. Minakov said he spoke to several lawmakers on Wednesday morning — after the speaker of parliament announced that a half-dozen senior figures had offered their resignations — who had no knowledge of the reshuffle until they read about it in the news media. That underscored the diminished role parliament has played since the outbreak of the full-scale war.
“By law, the cabinet and parliament are as important as the president but in practice we see all the decisions are made by the president’s office,” he said.
The apparent move to replace the foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was the most sensitive given his role in building diplomatic support and helping lead Ukraine’s effort to secure key Western arms.
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Mr. Minakov said that policy changes that have been debated in the president’s office for months include a strategic rethinking of the nation’s economic policy, which to this point has been cautious. The recent dismissal of the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Rostyslav Shurma, who was in charge of economic and energy policy, suggests that there may be new approaches to matters related to the stability of the economy.
And analysts said that new ministers could help the government deal with some of its most vexing problems, including corruption. As part of the reshuffle, Mr. Zelensky is expected to announce a new justice minister at the same time as he is shaking up the state body charged with investigating corruption issues, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, known as NABU.
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When Russian forces rolled across the border into Ukraine at the start of their full-scale invasion in February 2022, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, compared the assault to Nazi Germany’s in World War II.
“Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one,” Mr. Kuleba tweeted. Then he spelled out the country’s mission: “Stop Putin.”
That remained Mr. Kuleba’s central message for 30 months as he rallied wartime international support for Ukraine, courting allies old and new and becoming one of the most recognizable faces representing Kyiv’s cause.
Mr. Kuleba was the most senior of the cabinet officials who Ukraine’s parliament speaker said had offered to resign on Wednesday. It appeared to be the largest reshuffling of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s cabinet since the start of the war, a move Mr. Zelensky described as necessary to “achieve all the results we need.” Mr. Kuleba did not comment publicly on the matter.
As Ukraine’s top diplomat, Mr. Kuleba sought to drum up both military and political support. He was a forceful advocate in the monthslong effort — eventually successful — to convince the United States and Germany to supply Ukraine with the Patriot air-defense system in order to protect against Russian missile attacks.
“Ukraine is currently the only country in the world that is subject to ballistic missile attacks almost every day,” he said during a news briefing in March. “Patriots should be deployed here, in Ukraine, to protect real human lives, and not to remain in places where the missile threat is zero.”
Mr. Kuleba has also been active in advancing Ukraine’s most ambitious diplomatic goals: joining the NATO military alliance and becoming a member of the European Union. Both efforts faced resistance from some allies, who worried that granting membership to Ukraine would provoke the Kremlin to attack even more aggressively.
Mr. Kuleba is a career diplomat who joined Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry after graduating from Taras Shevchenko University in the capital, Kyiv, where he studied international law, according to his official biography. Along with postings to the European Council and a stint as ambassador at large, focusing on online diplomacy, he also briefly headed Ukraine’s foundation for cultural diplomacy.
He was 38 when he was named foreign minister in 2020. Mr. Kuleba was the first Ukrainian foreign minister to visit Africa, and he traveled to China in July.
In 2021, as Russia began moving troops toward its border with Ukraine, officials in Kyiv began sounding alarms about a possible invasion and Mr. Kuleba sought to shore up support in advance of a possible war. That year he visited Washington at least twice, meeting with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken as he worked to repair Ukraine’s relationship after what he described as “a difficult time” for bilateral ties under former President Donald J. Trump, who had been reluctant to take action against Russia.
On Tuesday night, before his resignation offer became public, Mr. Kuleba sat down with CNN for an interview in which his message remained consistent. On Wednesday morning, after the latest deadly attacks by Russia, he said on social media: “I urge all capitals, ministers, international organizations, and others to strongly condemn Russia’s war crime against civilians.”
Lara Jakes reports on diplomatic and military efforts by the West to support Ukraine in its war with Russia.
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The Russian strike on a military academy in Poltava in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday highlighted the growing importance of electronic warfare systems in the two-and-a-half-year conflict.
The facility that was hit, the Poltava Institute of Military Communications, offers training in radar and electronic warfare, according to Vladimir Rogov, a Kremlin-appointed occupation official in southern Ukraine.
The exact training regimen at the institute is unknown. But analysts at Janes, the British-based defense intelligence firm, said videos and other promotional information on the institute’s own website showed radio and electronic warfare equipment used for military purposes.
A Ukrainian official also confirmed that the facility was used for this purpose. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.
Electronic warfare refers to doing battle with electromagnetic waves, using radio signals to overwhelm communication links with drones and troops, locate targets, disrupt radar and trick guided weapons. While this is not a new form of fighting, swift advances in the technology have created what the Pentagon described in June as “emerging and persistent challenges” from a “continuously evolving electromagnetic interference landscape in Ukraine.”
Just months ago, experts said, Russia held a demonstrated advantage over Ukraine in jamming and spoofing incoming drones and missiles that are directed by radio-frequency and GPS systems. Ukraine and its allies have since stepped up efforts to counter Moscow’s electronic warfare tactics, and this past spring deployed 48 Shatro 50-1M systems to disable or divert Russian drones in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions.
The Shatro system, manufactured in Ukraine, disrupts the radio communications of incoming drones within a radius of about 275 yards. The systems were donated by Petro O. Poroshenko, a Ukrainian politician and former president.
“We are launching a new program — trench electronic warfare, which protects the military right at the front line,” Mr. Poroshenko said in a statement at the time. “It directly protects command posts, trenches and units.”
It was just one of a multitude of electronic warfare programs and systems to counter them that Ukraine has fielded in recent months, some made domestically and some donated by the West, Janes analysts said.
But the former chair of NATO’s military committee warned in May that the West was not yet prepared to counter Russia’s prowess in electronic warfare.
In Ukraine, “we’re now seeing the most dense and dangerous electromagnetic operating environment we’ve ever seen,” Stuart Peach, a retired British air chief marshal, said at a conference in Oslo. “Russia never stopped doing E.W., it never stopped continuing to invest. We need to learn from the Ukrainians who are fighting for their lives and their country.”
We’ve been speaking with people in Poltava, trying to learn more about why the Russian attack on the military academy yesterday had such a high death toll. Ihor Matsiuk, the training center’s director, told me that soldiers and cadets simply had too little time between missile strikes to reach the bomb shelter. “Those who were in the classrooms close to the shelter and managed to get there fast survived,” he said. He said that initial reports of an event that had brought soldiers together in one place were untrue. The missiles hit while lessons were in session and people were in classrooms, he said.
Russia’s attack on Poltava on Tuesday was the latest major strike in Ukraine in the 30 months since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion. Parts of the country lie in ruins. Aerial bombardment and ground fighting have taken a particular toll in eastern Ukraine, and many of the towns and cities that Russia has captured have been shattered. The New York Times recently took a closer look at the scale of that damage.
President Zelensky has just offered his first public comments today on the overhaul of his government, saying it is designed to bring “a new energy” to his administration. “These steps are related to strengthening our state in various areas,” he said during a meeting in Kyiv with Prime Minister Simon Harris of Ireland. Zelensky declined to comment on where some of the ministers who tendered their resignations, including the country’s foreign minister, might end up in the reshuffle.
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Here in Poltava, more than 24 hours after the missile strike on the Ukrainian military academy, emergency workers pulled a woman from under the rubble around noon. An ambulance brought the young woman, who was unconscious and had bruises on her face, to a hospital. As time goes on, the chances of finding living survivors are running low.
Just today, 255 people in Poltava have donated blood at the local blood center. “An hour after the explosion, there was already a line,” said Volodymyr Rudikov, a doctor there. “We were begging them to come on Monday as we will need blood then, too,” he said.
Drone footage shared by the State Emergency Service of Lviv reveals destruction caused by the Russian attack this morning on the western Ukrainian city. At least seven people were killed.
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A day after a devastating Russian missile attack that killed more than 50 people in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, bricks splayed out from the stricken military academy building as exhausted rescue workers searched for bodies in the rubble, stopping every so often to listen for cries for help.
Overnight into Wednesday morning, workers napped on the academy’s lawn, some using helmets as pillows, as rescue dogs sat nearby. The rescuers, their uniforms covered in concrete dust, appeared to glisten in the floodlights at the site.
The bombing injured 277 people, according to Valerii Parkhomenko, a deputy mayor, and local hospitals were flooded with casualties.
Emergency workers at the strike site appeared exhausted, walking from time to time to a nearby tent providing coffee and snacks. “A lot more clearing needs to be done before we reach the bottom,” said one, who asked to be cited only his first name, Vladyslav.
He asked for coffee.
“Anything else?” a volunteer handing out drinks and sandwiches asked.
“No, just coffee,” he said.
However horrible the scene, volunteers and firefighters said it had become an all-too familiar ritual in the 30-month war with Russia.
“I saw nothing new here,” said Maksym Luhivsky, a 25-year-old volunteer, as he urged emergency workers to eat something to sustain their strength. “I’ve seen it all. When people come up because they can’t find their loved ones, that’s when it’s emotional. Dead bodies are not shocking or emotional any longer.”
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The rescue was interrupted by 13 air-raid alerts on Tuesday and Wednesday, as Russia sent jets into the air that threatened to fire missiles; the activity triggers alerts even if no missile were fired.
A firefighter, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Dmytro, said the repeated alerts had slowed the rescue effort, but that he and his colleagues had learned to work while frequently leaving the site for short periods in case of a repeat attack. “We do this often,” he said.
Nearby, teachers at a kindergarten were still directing toddlers into a basement bomb shelter when explosions rocked the building.
“They are trained, they know: an alarm, run to put on shoes,” said Valeria Nor, 32, a mother who raced to check on her 3-year-old daughter. “But they are small, and it takes time.”
Nobody was hurt, but Ms. Nor said that when she arrived, the kindergartners were crying and frightened. In the neighborhood outside, soldiers and cadets from the military academy had fanned out, some drenched in blood.
They bandaged one another’s wounds, and residents helped, she said. Some soldiers had blood coming out of their ears.
Ms. Nor’s husband, a doctor, ran to treat the wounded while she bought water and juice for the shocked cadets.
“At the beginning of this war, we thought we would take the children and run if there were just one bang nearby,” she said. “But we didn’t run. We came to the epicenter to help.”
While several members of President Zelensky’s cabinet have offered to resign, political analysts said major policy changes were unlikely. Zelensky has fired only five ministers over the course of the war, and today’s moves had long been discussed, said Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political analyst. He said the president was trying to combat “stagnation” in key ministries: “He thinks that new people will be more motivated and will bring new ideas.”
Critics, however, worried that the changes could further concentrate power in Zelensky’s office, depending on who is named to fill vacated posts. The Ukrainian leader has only fired a handful of top officials during the course of the war, which has created stability but also led to charges of an insular style resistant to change. “In practice, we see that all the decisions are made by the president’s office,” Fesenko said.
While the Lviv region has come under repeated assault over the course of the war, attacks directed at the city's historic center — a UNESCO World Heritage site — have been rare. At least seven architectural monuments were damaged in the attack today, said the head of the Lviv military administration, Maksym Kozytskyi. At the Center for Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation, housed in a 19th-century villa, the shock wave blew away window frames and collapsed ceilings, he said.
Video of charred cars, damaged buildings and streets littered with rubble showed the scale of destruction in Lviv following Russia’s attack on the city.
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Ukraine’s Air Force said it had shot down about half the missiles and three-quarters of the attack drones Russia launched overnight, but these frequent barrages have stretched its defenses. On Tuesday, President Zelensky repeated his call for not only more air defense systems from Western allies but also the permission to strike at Russian missiles before they are fired.
The attacks on Wednesday came as Volodymyr Zelensky embarked on the most sweeping overhaul of his administration since Russia invaded in 2022, and as fighting along the front intensified, with Russian forces on an unrelenting campaign to advance in the eastern Donbas region.
Emergency workers were still sifting through the rubble for the victims of a deadly attack in Poltava when Russia launched another barrage of missiles and drones at Ukraine early Wednesday. The latest attacks killed at least seven people in Lviv, near the border with Poland.
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Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, offered to resign on Wednesday amid plans by President Volodymyr Zelensky to restructure his cabinet in the biggest shake-up since Russia invaded more than two years ago.
At least six other senior leaders in Mr. Zelensky’s government have offered to resign, said Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of Ukraine’s Parliament. More cabinet members were expected to offer their resignations on Wednesday, and a new list of ministers was to be presented on Thursday.
“Our state institutions must be set up in such a way that Ukraine will achieve all the results we need — for all of us,” Mr. Zelensky said in an address to the nation on Tuesday night. “To do this, we need to strengthen some areas in the government — and personnel decisions have been prepared.”
The restructuring appears to be the most far-reaching shake-up of Mr. Zelensky’s administration since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and it comes at a particularly precarious moment in the war, with Kyiv rushing reinforcements to its eastern front in an attempt to stabilize its defensive lines.
Mr. Stefanchuk said other government leaders who had submitted their resignations included Oleksandr Kamyshin, the minister of strategic industries; Denys Maliuska, the justice minister; Ruslan Strilets, the minister of environmental protection and natural resources; Vitaliy Koval, the head of the state property fund; Iryna Vereshchuk, the minister for the reintegration of temporarily occupied territories; and Olha Stefanishyna, the deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration.
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Russia bombarded a swath of Ukraine early Wednesday, killing at least seven people in the western city of Lviv, local Ukrainian officials said, a day after a ballistic missile attack in the eastern city of Poltava left dozens of people dead.
The victims in Lviv included a mother and her three daughters — aged 7, 18 and 21 — who were killed inside their apartment building during the strike, according to the city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi. The girl’s father, Yaroslav Bazylevych, was the sole survivor in the family.
Air raid sirens sounded in a number of places across Ukraine on Wednesday morning as guided missiles and drones flew in, with the authorities urging people to take cover or go to shelters.
Ukraine’s Air Force said the country had been targeted with two ballistic missiles, 11 cruise missiles and 29 drones overnight and that 22 of the drones and seven of the cruise missiles had been shot down.
In the Lviv region, the military administrator, Maksym Kozytskyi, said drones and cruise missiles were headed toward the city of Lviv and, later, that there was “very loud” impact. He posted a video on Telegram in which a heavily damaged building could be seen in the background and told residents to remain in shelters.
Footage aired by Ukraine’s public broadcaster showed Mr. Bazylevych amid the rubble with injuries to his face and hands, roaring in grief on the shoulder of an emergency worker.
The loss of Mr. Bazylevych’s wife and children reverberated through Lviv. The family was part of Plast, a Ukrainian scouting organization, which called for prayers on social media and shared photos of the family in their scouting uniforms throughout the years.
Yaryna, the family’s 21-year-old daughter, had been involved in the city’s youth empowerment initiatives, the mayor said. And her 18-year-old sister, Daryna, was a second-year student in the cultural studies program at the Ukrainian Catholic University, which said in a statement that the loss was “irreparable.”
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In her letter applying for a scholarship, Daryna had written that she wanted to share Ukrainian culture with the world and that her passion for it came from her family, the university said.
“My family is an inexhaustible source of support that cannot be compared to any other,” she wrote. “They are the greatest pillar in my life, helping me overcome any obstacles.”
The Russian strikes on Lviv had injured dozens of other people and damaged residential buildings, schools, and medical facilities, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on social media. He repeated a call for allies to provide more long-range weapons capability to enable the country to “respond justly to terror.”
The Russian military also bombarded the Kherson region, in Ukraine’s south, on Tuesday and Wednesday, the head of the regional administration, Oleksandr Prokudin, said on Telegram. The attacks hit a number of targets, including five high-rise buildings, and killed three people, Mr. Prokudin said.
The central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih was also targeted with attacks that damaged a hotel, high-rise buildings and educational institutions, injuring at least five people, according to Serhiy Lysak, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
On Tuesday, Russian missiles hit a military academy in Poltava, minutes after air raid alarms had sounded, giving people little time to seek shelter.
That attack left more than 50 people dead and wounded at least 271. Rescue work there was continuing, Mr. Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address on Tuesday.
Anushka Patil contributed reporting.
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The Russian missile strike Tuesday on a military academy and nearby hospital in eastern Ukraine, which killed more than 50 people, was one of the deadliest attacks since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
At least 11,520 civilians had been killed in the war as of July 2024, according to a United Nations report, which added that the actual tally may be higher. The number of troops killed is harder to pin down. U.S. officials said in August that nearly 500,000 soldiers had been killed or wounded on both sides, though they cautioned that Moscow likely undercounts its casualties, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures.
Here are some of the deadliest attacks of the past two years:
July 8, 2024: A Russian missile destroyed Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, in Kyiv, part of a barrage of bombings across the country that killed at least 38 people.
Jan. 24, 2024: A Russian military plane crashed near the border with Ukraine, killing 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war, Russian officials said. They accused Ukraine of striking the aircraft with missiles. Russia’s claims could not be independently verified.
Oct. 5, 2023: More than 50 people were killed in a strike in Hroza, a small Ukrainian village with no obvious military ties. Ukrainian officials blamed a Russian Iskander missile.
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Jan. 15, 2023: A Russian missile with a 2,000-pound warhead obliterated an apartment complex in Dnipro, killing 46 people, including six children.
Sept. 30, 2022: Russian missiles struck a convoy of vehicles transporting people fleeing fighting in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, killing at least 30 people and wounding 88 others, local Ukrainian officials reported.
July 9, 2022: An apartment complex in Chasiv Yar, a small city in Donetsk Province, was hit by a Russian strike, killing at least 43 people, according to local emergency services.
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May 17, 2022: Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said 87 people were killed in a Russian airstrike in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region.
April 8, 2022: Russian shelling killed more than 50 civilians at a train station in Kramatorsk, in Donetsk Province. This attack marked the start of Russia’s campaign to seize the Donbas region.
March 16, 2022: A Russian airstrike hit a theater in Mariupol with the word “children” written in large white lettering outside to signal that the building was sheltering civilians. Estimates about the death toll vary. Amnesty International, a British-based nonprofit, reported at least 12 people were killed but survivors told a reporter from The Times that between 60 and 200 people were killed.
March 13, 2022: Russian missiles hit a military base in Yavoriv, near the Polish border. The strike killed at least 35 people and injured at least 134 more, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed it killed 180 foreign fighters in the attack. The New York Times could not independently verify either claim.
