The China Mail - Deadly strike disrupts relative safety of Ukraine's Lviv

Five "powerful" Russian missiles hit the western city of Lviv on Monday, killing seven people and wounding eight more, local officials say.

Next to the hotel, at least one missile hit a car repair shop overlooking the train tracks on the western edge of the city.

In the guest house's backyard, snowflakes fell on a glistening sea of glass shards below gaping windows.

A woman who appeared in her seventies said she had arrived just weeks ago at the hotel after being evacuated from the eastern region of Lugansk.

"We had just finished eating and wanted to go back to our rooms, when we heard an explosion," she said, without giving her name.

Lviv has largely been spared the Russian bombardment that has rained down on other parts of the country since Russia invaded on February 24.

The city and its surroundings have instead become a relatively safe haven for those seeking to escape the fighting further east.

On the first floor of the hotel, women and children in warm coats shifted their bags from one room to the next as they waited to hear if they should move location.

Their belongings included a cat carrier and scratching post.

- No 'safe places' -

In the hallway, a bank employee who gave her name as Natalia said she was looking into finding 20 new rooms somewhere else for families she had helped evacuate from the embattled east of the country.

"Our people were lucky that they were in the breakfast room," she said, dressed in a light blue coat.

She said she and other volunteers had thought Lviv was a safe location to shelter those escaping war.

"Today we understood clearly that we don't have any safe places in Ukraine. It's very dangerous," she said, before rushing off to the next room.

Iryna, the hotel's manager, said no one had been wounded in the hotel but she was still alarmed.

"We had many guests at the hotel from other cities of Ukraine," she said, without giving her second name.

When the air raid siren had rung out shortly before 0800 am, she said, some had ignored the siren because they thought warnings in Lviv were not as serious as in the regions they fled.

- 'Happened so fast' -

Hundreds of metres away, next to the smouldering tyre shop, firemen stood near the skeletons of scorched cars, peering into a crater in the road above the train track.

Municipal workers in orange jackets worked to clear white debris scattered all over the grassy slopes on either side of the railway.

Shortly after the end of a second air raid warning, a train slowly passed under the wreckage.

Passengers, including a young child, peered up the grassy knoll at all the journalists gathered opposite the strike site.

Across the road, policeman Orest Mazin waited for colleagues to come and inspect his family's silver Mercedes.

He had been driving to work along the railway when the missile suddenly came flying through the trees, he said.

"It flew right in front of me," he said, still feeling a little shell-shocked.

"It happened so fast, I didn't even hear the explosion."

He pointed to a hole in his windscreen, where a flying shard of metal had crashed through.

On the floor of the passenger seat still sat his packed lunch of potato stew and chicken breast.

S.Davis--ThChM