BBC:
A 23-year-old female police officer has been killed and 25 people injured in what Ukrainian officials have called a terror attack in the western city of Lviv.
Two homemade explosive devices detonated after police crews responded to a reported break-in shortly after midnight on Sunday, the National Police of Ukraine said. The devices were planted in waste bins, it added.
President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed “an individual suspected of carrying out the terrorist attack” had been detained. Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said she was a Ukrainian woman.
The police later said the 33-year-old suspect had made and planted the explosives on the “instruction” of an agent of Russia’s special services.
The victim of the attack was named as Viktoria Shpylka.
“She was only 23 years old and had begun her service at the start of the full-scale invasion of the Kherson region,” the police wrote on Telegram on Sunday morning.
Police said the first blast occurred after a police car arrived at the scene of the reported break-in at a shop in the city centre.
“Later, when a second crew arrived, another explosion went off,” it added.
Eleven people were admitted to hospital, six of whom were law enforcement officers in serious conditions.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said police and the Security Service of Ukraine had detained the suspect, a resident of the north-western Rivne region.
“We are identifying other persons involved in committing this crime,” he wrote on Telegram.
Meanwhile, the regional prosecutor’s office said it had started an investigation into the “act of terrorism that led to grave consequences”.
Elsewhere, Ukraine faced another night of overnight Russian strikes ahead of the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion on Tuesday.
Kyiv said its air defences had countered 50 Russian missiles and nearly 300 drones overnight. The attacks targeted the energy sector, residential buildings, and railways, Zelensky said.
At least one person was killed in the Kyiv region, top local official Mykola Kalashnyk said, while a woman and a child were taken to hospital with injuries.
The latest aerial attack comes two days before the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin has become the biggest war in Europe since World War Two, with hundreds of thousands of military casualties -killed, wounded and missing – believed to be on each side.
Western military experts estimate that Russian combat losses have been much higher than Ukraine’s.
Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory, including the southern Crimea peninsula it annexed in 2014.
