Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russia makes gains near Kyiv, strikes military base near Poland border

Russian forces struck a Ukrainian military training facility, local officials said Sunday, in an attack that appeared to mark an escalation in hostilities in the country’s west, close to the Polish border.

Eight Russian missiles fell on the Yavoriv military range near Lviv — about 15 miles from the Polish border, Maksym Kozytskyi, the head of the Lviv regional military administration, said in a statement. The message was posted Sunday on the Ukrainian parliament’s official Telegram page.

Also known as the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security, the military range has for years been used by the United States and other NATO forces for joint exercises with Ukrainian troops. Members of the Florida Army National Guard trained there with Ukrainian forces as recently as February, during the buildup to the Russian invasion.

There is no information yet about any victims or the destruction caused by what local officials are describing as a rocket attack.

“According to preliminary data there are no dead, but information about the injured and wounded is being clarified,” Anton Mironovich, spokesman for the Ukrainian military’s Academy of Land Forces, told the Interfax Ukraine news agency.

A centuries-old Orthodox Christian monastery in eastern Ukraine was damaged in an airstrike Saturday evening, leaving several people hurt, Ukraine’s parliament said.

More than 500 refugees — including 200 children — were sheltering at the monastery, the Holy Dormition Svyatogorsk Lavra, in the Donetsk region. The refugees and monks were evacuated to the monastery’s basement Saturday, the parliament said in a post on Telegram.

The monastery posted a similar statement on its website.

The airstrike happened about 10 p.m. local time, according to the statements. No one was killed in the attack. The injured were treated at a nearby hospital or in the monastery.

“Window frames flew out as a result of the terrible force of the explosion in the Lavra’s temples,” according to the parliament’s statement. “An explosive wave smashed all the windows and doors in the Lavra hotels.”

The monastery is at least 495 years old, with the first mention of its existence recorded in 1526, the parliament said.

IRPIN, Ukraine — For days, I have witnessed the scenes of nightmares: frightened people fleeing in snow flurries, the elderly carted in wheelbarrows, desperate children clinging to stuffed toys, frightened families cuddling their pets. And on Thursday, bodies of the dead from both sides of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Every journalist I have met, even those with decades of experience covering war, is shocked by what they are witnessing and fearful of what is ahead.

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In Mariupol, Ukraine, Russian tanks take aim at apartment buildings. Blocks of high-rises are smoldering. Fields are pockmarked from artillery rounds. Doctors dodge sniper fire. The dead are buried in mass graves.

These are among the terrifying scenes and snapshots that have emerged in recent days from the city on Ukraine’s southeastern coast, an important port coveted by Moscow, which hopes to seize control and use it as a launchpad for troops and supplies. The Kremlin’s forces have surrounded the city for at least 10 days, cutting off from sources of water, electricity and heat, with temperatures plummeting and food running low. Attempts to evacuate have been stalled for days.

On Saturday, after Russian troops captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, additional footage and photographs surfaced, shedding more light on the scope of the devastation there — a city under siege and suffering. Video from an Associated Press journalist still in the city shows Russian tanks repeatedly firing on a nine-story apartment complex. The shells collide with the building and ignite fires inside.

The AP reporter was shadowing a group of medical workers who came under fire while treating the injured, the news service said.

In the corridors of a hospital, Anastasia Erashova held a sleeping child and wept. She and her family were sheltering at her brother’s home when it was shelled, she told the AP, and two children were killed. She had blood on her head and a cut on her hand.

“I don’t know where to run to,” Erashova cried. “Who will bring back our children, who?”

PHILADELPHIA — President Biden and his party have moved in recent days to reorient their election-year pitch to voters around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — seeking to shift blame for struggles to tame rising prices onto Vladimir Putin and promoting the White House strategy to punish the Kremlin as a muscular response to a geopolitical threat.

Democrats said they hope the message, which they honed in political meetings over the past week, will help address some of their biggest liabilities ahead of the November midterm elections. Chief among them are Biden’s low approval ratings and a widespread perception that Democrats are at fault for a sharp increase in inflation.

Now, Biden is repeatedly bringing up “Putin’s price hike” at the pump. White House officials have distributed talking points to allies urging them to echo this line. And Democrats are touting the economic sanctions Biden has leveled on Russia, contrasting them with former president Donald Trump’s praise for Putin.

Amid the stately beiges of Geneva’s Palais de Nations last week, United Nations diplomats from Ukraine and Russia were launching strikes.

Ukraine was chastising Russia not over the country’s ongoing invasion but a more abstract topic: autonomous weapons.

The comments were a part of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, a U.N. gathering at which global delegates are supposed to be working toward a treaty on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, the charged realm that both military experts and peace activists say is the future of war.

Autonomous weapons — the catchall description for algorithms that help decide where and when a weapon should fire — are among the most fraught areas of modern warfare, making the human-commandeered drone strike of recent decades look as quaint as a bayonet.

Proponents argue that they are nothing less than a godsend, improving precision and removing human mistakes and even the fog of war itself.

The weapons’ critics — and there are many — see disaster. They note a dehumanization that opens up battles to all sorts of machine-led errors, which a ruthless digital efficiency then makes more apocalyptic. While there are no signs such “slaughterbots” have been deployed in Ukraine, critics say the activities playing out there hint at grimmer battlefields ahead.

MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Russian forces continued to grind their way toward Ukrainian cities on Saturday, making limited gains in their attempts to surround Kyiv and capturing a minor city in the country’s south. Despite mounting losses and stiff resistance from Ukrainian forces, Russia showed no signs of letting up, and President Vladimir Putin rejected direct appeals from French and German leaders to de-escalate attacks.

The humanitarian crisis is deepening across the country, with convoys of food and medicine still unable to reach hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped behind Russian lines in the southern city of Mariupol. Polish officials warned that they are running out of capacity to care for the over 1.5 million refugees who have streamed across its borders.

Russian forces captured the city of Volnovakha, a key strategic point on their advance toward Mariupol, with the city’s mayor saying on the Telegram social media app that the city “no longer exists” after withering Russian bombardments. Missiles, bombs and artillery continued to pound Ukrainian cities from Kyiv, the capital, to Kharkiv in the east and Mykolaiv in the south.