you re probably seeing right here, firing cruise missiles at strategic locations, areas they believe are important to the ukrainian war effort to try and disable those. we ve seen that in the past couple days. for instance, yesterday, we had a very similar situation to what you re seeing there right now in lviv when the russians actually hit a fuel depot to the south of kyiv, of the ukrainian capital, which they said at the time, the russians said, was the largest one that was still in operation by the ukrainian military. and they said that they had take than out. also yesterday, they also did hit the air force headquarters of the ukrainian air force as well, john. all right. fred pleitgen for us in kyiv. i do believe we have don lemon back. bear with us right now. communications are difficult. but don lemon at the scene of a russian air strike apparently at some kind of fuel storage facility in lviv. don, give us a sense of what s going on behind you, how close
something happening very far west. this is as far west as you can getting ukraine and this is 1.5 km north and northeast of the downtown center in lviv so huge development and you can see, looking at that picture the massive plumes of smoke, a communications tower. it is unclear how this could affect things in town or beyond with the war that is going on right now. neil: you point out, a lot of our top military officials have been theorizing that vladimir putin is trying to lockdown the land he has, folks in the houston part of the country, as close as you can be to poland on the other side but i m wondering if this is a way to keep people guessing and there is a strategy to that but folks
what message this is trying to send, how close it is to the border, you couldn t have picked a closer place with such a big city center than where we are in lviv. i don t know if this is a message or what this is big picturewise. a lot of people are talking about russian strategy. only one person knows the russian strategy and that is vladimir putin. if this is an example of we don t know what is next this is god to be it. this is 1.5 km north northwest of the city center which remained relatively untouched. we see soldiers, checkpoints, people from those impacted areas coming in but this is the first major escalation in terms of this war when it comes to the western part of this country. neil: and you are right, it is certainly a game changer, finding out what was hit.
and more and more frequently you hear from people that this could be a target. four miles out of the city center have been attacked. there is not a big military presence here in lviv so that s a serious concern for them and does worry a lot of people here and disappointed with nato and with international community. i spoke to an ex-military commander here who had quit the business to come back and train volunteers and he was disappointed with nato saying they re watching the russians kill our children, decimate the cities and not getting help and that s the feeling that not enough is being done to counter this onslaught on the country. not being given what they needed from nato. they want the no-fly zones that s not given. president zelenskyy asking for 500 tanks.
hear me. don can hear me right now. and if you could talk, don how close is this to a residential area? okay. don, we can t hear don s microphone, and it does appear like they re pushing people back from the fires right there, which is a reasonable thing to do. we are seeing this right now as we are seeing these fires burning in lviv. this is in western ukraine, not far from the polish border, an area that has been largely spared. we ll keep this picture up so people can see the fire blazing. you can see our don lemon on the scene now getting some reporting. don will chime in as soon as we get the communications equipment right. i m going to bring in fred pleitgen who s in the ukrainian capital of kyiv right now. fred, obviously, we have a situation ongoing here. you ve been in the capital where