Ukraine said a Russian missile attack killed seven people in Lviv on Monday, the first civilian victims in the western city, and the commander of Ukrainian forces holding out in the devastated port city of Mariupol appealed to the pope for help, Reuters reported.

Maksym Kozytskyy, the governor of Lviv which lies 60 km (40 miles) from the Polish border, said preliminary reports suggested there were four strikes, three on warehouses that were not in use by the military and another on a car service station.

"It was a barbaric strike at a service station, it's a completely civilian facility," he told a news conference.

Andriy Sadoviy, mayor of Lviv, said the youngest victim among the dead was aged 30. The blast also wounded 11 and shattered windows of a hotel housing Ukrainians evacuated from elsewhere in the country, he added. read more

"Seven peaceful people had plans for life, but today their life stopped," the mayor said.

A man and a woman were killed in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Monday when shells hit a playground near a residential building, the local prosecutor's office said in a post on Telegram messaging service.

Russia denies targeting civilians in what it calls a special operation to demilitarise Ukraine and eradicate what it calls dangerous nationalists. It rejects what Ukraine says is evidence of atrocities, saying Ukraine has staged them to undermine peace talks.

Western capitals and Kyiv accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin of unprovoked aggression.

Russia's defence ministry said it had hit hundreds of military targets in Ukraine overnight. It said air-launched missiles had destroyed 16 military facilities in the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions and in the port of Mykolayiv, which are locations in the south and east Ukraine.

It added that the Russian air force had launched strikes against 108 areas where Ukrainian forces were concentrated and Russian artillery struck 315 Ukrainian military targets.

Driven back by Ukrainian resistance in the north, Moscow has refocused its ground offensive in the two eastern provinces known as the Donbas, while launching long-distance strikes at other targets, including the capital, Kyiv.

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