Fire blazes from the roof of a residential building next to Lviv’s Bernardine Monastery complex, in western Ukraine, 24 March 2026. Photo: EPA / Mykola Tys
The Russian military launched a massive daytime attack on Ukraine on Tuesday, firing over 550 drones at targets across the west of the country that killed several people and injured dozens more, regional administrations have reported.
Among the worst affected was the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, where 27 people were injured in multiple drone strikes on different parts of the city, Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said on Wednesday. Though he stressed that nobody had been killed, Sadovyi said of the 27 injured, seven had been hospitalised overnight.
Lviv’s historic Bernardine Monastery complex, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was among the buildings damaged in Tuesday’s strikes, with photographs showing fires blazing from the roof of a building next door.
In his nightly address to the nation on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the use of Iranian Shahed drones to strike a church in Lviv as “utterly perverse” and called it something “only the likes of Putin could take pleasure in”.
A separate Russian airstrike on the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk killed a member of the country’s National Guard and his newborn daughter and injured four others, Mayor Ruslan Martsinkiv told RBC Ukraine. In the western Vinnytsia region, one person was killed and another 13 were injured, the head of the regional military administration said on Tuesday evening.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that Russia had launched 556 drones at Ukraine throughout the day on Tuesday, making it “one of its most massive attacks” to date. The unusual daytime strikes came after Russian forces launched 34 missiles and 392 drones at Ukraine overnight on Monday, killing two people in the Poltava region, one in the Zaporizhzhia region and one in the Kharkiv region, and meaning that in total Moscow launched nearly a 1,000 drones at Ukraine in a 24-hour period.
“The scale of today’s attack strongly indicates that Russia has no intention of really ending this war,” Zelensky said in his nightly address on Tuesday, adding that “the fact that sanctions against Russia have been partially eased serves Russia’s interest to continue the war” and noting that the additional $2 billion Russia is set to earn from rising oil prices was “dangerous for everyone”.
Posting a photograph of Lviv’s Bernardine Monastery in flames on X on Tuesday evening, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha addressed the organisers of the Venice Biennale, in which Russia is planning to participate later this year. “This is the ugly face of barbaric Russia — destroyed UNESCO World Heritage in the protected center of Lviv. This is the barbarism you wish to normalize at the Biennale. Get real!”
