LVIV, Ukraine — Mariana Vladimirtsova was eventually settled in western Ukraine after the evacuation of her native Kharkiv, which has been ravaged by Russian bombs since the early days of the war. Now she and her family are on the run again because their new makeshift home in Lviv is near one of the many targets hit by Russian missiles on Saturday night, shattering the region’s sense of security.
“We’ve only just started to feel settled here,” she said as she stood on the platform of the Lviv train station with her husband, her two children and her husband’s mother on Sunday evening, about to board for Przemysl, just over the border in Poland. They were still deeply shocked by the memory of what they experienced in Kharkov, in northeastern Ukraine. “We were so close to the explosions there,” she said.
She regretted their departure, especially the fact that she would have to leave her husband behind because martial law prevents men of military age from leaving the country. But they had decided it would be safer for the children if Mrs. Vladimirtsova took them across the border.
Until Saturday, the only target near Lviv hit was an aircraft repair factory near the city’s airport. Before that, the closest attack had taken place at a military training base near Yavoriv, more than an hour away.
But now the war was drawing closer to their door. On Sunday, Mrs. Vladimirtsova and others living in Lviv woke up and began investigating damage from a nighttime barrage of rocket attacks on a fuel depot and tank repair facility. Lviv regional governor Maksym Kozytsky said the fuel site in the northeast of the city was completely destroyed.
The new strikes have reinforced fears that the city in western Ukraine may no longer be a safe haven. “It’s one thing to see the war on television and it’s another to experience it and feel it’s much closer now,” said Yuliya Kuleba, 38, who lives near the fuel depot. “We are concerned about our children.”
Nataliya Tatarin swept broken glass from the small shop she runs near the fuel storage facility as firefighters hauled hoses to the site.
“We heard three big explosions and everything started shaking and falling off the shelves,” said Mrs. Tatarin, 42. She ran to her nearby house, where her three children were sheltering.
“There was a lot of fog and it was all just black,” she said. “My 7-year-old daughter was shaking and vomiting most of the night,” she added as tears welled up in her eyes. The roof of the shop was cracked and she feared it would collapse.
By early Sunday, most of the fires in Lviv were extinguished. Local authorities said the rockets were fired from Sevastopol, a port in the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Saturday night’s attacks came as President Biden delivered a fiery speech in Warsaw denouncing Russia for its invasion. Lviv is about 35 miles from Poland.
“I think with these attacks the aggressor wants to say hello to President Biden,” Lviv mayor Andriy Sadoviy said Saturday evening.
An independent Russian website calculated that Russian forces had sent a record 52 rockets on Saturday from the occupied Black Sea port city of Sevastopol, and at least 18 from Belarusian territory. The website, The Insider, found that of the 70 missiles, at least eight landed, meaning Ukraine had also repulsed a significant number. Those figures could not be independently verified.
Russia’s defense ministry said on Sunday that its army has attacked 67 “military objects” in Ukraine in the past 24 hours. It said it had also destroyed a military installation in Lviv that helped upgrade and modernize missile systems, radar stations and electronic warfare equipment. The Ukrainian authorities have not confirmed this and it could not be independently verified.
Some people in Lviv said a tank repair factory was hit during Saturday’s strike. The uniformed men guarding the grounds declined to provide any information on Sunday afternoon. At a small shop nearby, a man in disguise was overheard telling a shopkeeper how he and his comrades saw the missiles flying in the sky and hiding under the tanks at the facility.
Since the war started in late February, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have fled west, to Lviv and beyond, trying to escape the worst fighting, which has centered in the east.
Alyona Puzanova arrived in Lviv on March 11 after two harrowing weeks in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, the capital, where fierce fighting with Russians was ongoing.
“When they hit Lviv yesterday, the place where I felt safe, I started to worry that it would be another Bucha,” said Ms Puzanova, 35, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
Despite her fears, Ms Puzanova said she wanted to stay in Lviv and volunteer, rather than accompany her mother to a village a few miles from the city center that she hopes will be safer.
“I want to help here, there is so much to do,” said Ms. Puzanova, who previously worked as a waitress and restaurant manager.
Before Saturday, many people ignored the sirens of air strikes in Lviv. Taking no shelter, they could be seen strolling across UNESCO-listed Rynok Square and the ancient heart of the city, unshakably raising their coffee cups.
But in the Dovzhenka Center, a former cinema that now houses people who have been displaced, the families residing there take the sirens seriously. Everyone gathered behind the stage on Saturday as the sirens blared, said Julia Muzhik, a volunteer at the bomb shelter.
Violetta Kalashnikova said after she went to Kharkov, where she left two apartments and her beauty salon, the sound of every plane made her shudder.
But she was grateful to be far from that city where bombs are dropping indiscriminately, and which is only 50 kilometers from the Russian border.
“In Lviv,” she said, “at least you are far enough away from where the missiles are being fired, be it the Black Sea or Belarus, that you have time for the system to detect the missiles and 15 or 20 minutes to hide.”
At the fuel storage facility, Ms. Kuleba said the soil in her yard, where she had planted vegetables, was covered with oil. She said she hoped this would be the last rocket attack and that the oil would be cleaned up soon.
Mrs. Tatarin, the shop owner, was inconsolable. She showed a video of her daughter asking Russian troops not to attack children. The young girl was holding a heart-shaped piece of paper that she had colored with yellow and blue, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Ms Tatarin said her pro-Russian mother-in-law, who lives in Crimea from which the rockets were allegedly fired, now sees her son as a “traitor” and believes he has been “brainwashed” by his wife.
“We’re all alone now, my husband and I,” she said. “And every air raid siren stops my breath.”
Anna Ivanova contributed from Lviv.