RUSSIAN president Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally in Moscow and praised his country’s troops on Friday as they pressed their lethal attacks on Ukrainian cities with shelling and missiles.

“Shoulder to shoulder, they help and support each other,” Putin said in a rare public appearance since the invasion three weeks ago that made Russia an outcast among nations. “We have not had unity like this for a long time,” he added to cheers from the crowd.

Moscow police said more than 200,000 people were in and around the Luzhniki stadium for the rally and concert marking the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, seized from Ukraine.

The event included well-known singer Oleg Gazmanov singing Made In The USSR, with the opening lines “Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, It’s all my country.”

As Putin prepared to take the stage, speakers praised him as fighting “Nazism” in Ukraine, a claim flatly rejected by leaders across the globe.

Meanwhile, Russian forces continued to pound the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, and launched a barrage of missiles on the outskirts of the western city of Lviv.

The early morning barrage of missiles on Lviv’s edge was the closest strike yet to the centre of the city, which has become a crossroads for people fleeing from other parts of Ukraine and for others entering to deliver aid or fight.

In city after city around Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought safety have been attacked. Rescue workers were still searching for survivors in the ruins of a theatre that served as a shelter when it was blasted by a Russian airstrike on Wednesday in the besieged southern city of Mariupol.

Ludmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, said on Friday that 130 people had survived the theatre bombing.

“As of now, we know that 130 people have been evacuated, but according to our data, there are still more than 1,300 people in these basements, in this bomb shelter,” Denisova told Ukrainian television. “We pray that they will all be alive, but so far there is no information about them.”

At Lviv, black smoke billowed for hours after the explosions, which hit a facility for repairing military aircraft near the city’s international airport, only four miles from the centre. One person was wounded, the regional governor, Maksym Kozytsky, said.

Multiple blasts hit in quick succession around 6am, shaking nearby buildings, witnesses said. The missiles were launched from the Black Sea, but the Ukrainian air force’s western command said it had shot down two of six missiles in the volley. A bus repair facility was also damaged, Lviv’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, said.

Lviv lies not far from the Polish border and well behind the front lines, but it and the surrounding area have not been spared Russia’s attacks. In the worst, nearly three dozen people were killed last weekend in a strike on a training facility near the city.

Lviv’s population has swelled by some 200,000 as people from elsewhere in Ukraine have sought shelter there.

Early morning barrages also hit a residential building in the Podil neighbourhood of Kyiv, killing at least one person, according to emergency services, who said 98 people were evacuated from the building. Kyiv mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said 19 were wounded in the shelling.

Two others were killed when strikes hit residential and administrative buildings in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko.

In Kharkiv, a massive fire raged through a local market after shelling on Thursday. One firefighter was killed and another injured when new shelling hit as emergency workers fought the blaze, emergency services said.

The World Health Organisation said it has verified 43 attacks on hospitals and health facilities, with 12 people killed and 34 injured.