Russian drone strikes damage historic church, monastery in Lviv ahead of Holy Week

LVIV, Ukraine (OSV News) — A historic Bernardine monastery complex and the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in the western Ukraine city of Lviv were hit by aerial drone strikes March 24, just ahead of the observance of Holy Week.

They are the newest sacred space casualties of Russian attacks and part of what is described by officials as the largest attack in a single 24-hour period since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

Local authorities confirmed that historic apartment buildings near the 16th-century Bernardine monastery — part of the city’s historic center listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site — were struck and caught fire and the tower of the monastery also experienced damage.

The Church of St. Mary Magdalene also was damaged during the aerial strike, with windows broken and glass shattered around the church floor March 24, as shown in a video shared by Vatican News.

“Thank God … it happened in the afternoon,” Archbishop Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki of Lviv told Vatican News. “People were still at work, children had not yet returned from school, and there were no fatalities. There are only injured people,” he emphasized.

As Russia fired almost 400 long-range drones on the war-torn country overnight, six people were killed and 46 injured, The Associated Press reported, citing Ukrainian officials.

Elsewhere, in the neighboring Ivano-Frankivsk region, a maternity hospital was hit.

In a March 25 statement, UNESCO said it was “deeply alarmed” by the strikes, noting that “cultural property is protected under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention.”

The agency added it “stands ready to support the authorities with assessments, protection measures and emergency assistance.”

In a March 24 Facebook post, Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv — located just over a mile from the site of the attack — recapped the impact of the strikes across the nation, adding, “We express our condolences to all the victims. Eternal memory to the innocently killed.”

“The attack by ‘shaheeds’ in Lviv shows that the enemy chooses densely located residential buildings,” the university said in the post, referring to Iranian-designed Shahed drones.

According to the BBC, in his video address on March 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the scale of the latest attacks “clearly shows that Russia has no intention of really ending this war.”

Russia’s military has not publicly commented on the attacks.

Archbishop Mokrzycki said that the war, now in its fifth year, is taking a heavy toll among Ukrainians, used to aerial alarms and mourning large numbers of killed soldiers daily in cities across Ukraine.

“This war is also ongoing on another front,” Archbishop Mokrzycki told the Polish section of Vatican News. He pointed out the experience of war affects residents not only during moments of attacks, but also in everyday life, marked by loss and uncertainty.

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