Ukraine Claims Drone Attacks on Two Russian Oil Refineries
(Bloomberg) -- Ukraine’s military claimed strikes on two oil refineries and other infrastructure in Russia in what it said was a response to recent deadly attacks by Kremlin forces on Ukrainian cities.
The Novokuibyshevsk plant in the Samara region and the Ryazan refinery were hit, the Ukrainian General Staff said in a Saturday Facebook post. Ukrainian drones also struck a fuel depot in Russia’s Voronezh region and an electronics facility in Penza, it said. All the targets were part of Russia’s war apparatus, the military said.
The Ukrainian state security service said its long-range drones also attacked a military airbase in the Krasnodar region in Russia’s southwest, where storage and launch sites of Shahed drones were hit.
It wasn’t possible to independently verify the claims. Rosneft PJSC, owner of the Ryazan and Novokuibyshevsk refineries, didn’t immediately reply to a WhatsApp message seeking comment on Saturday.
Ukrainian authorities said that at least 31 people were killed in a combined drone and missile barrage on Kyiv on Thursday that lasted for several hours. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said another 159 people were injured, including 16 children, in one of the deadliest strikes on Kyiv for the war to date.
Samara regional Governor Vyacheslav Fedorischev said in social media posts that an industrial facility had been attacked and that one man had been killed by falling drone fragments. Ryazan regional Governor Pavel Malkov said on Telegram that debris from a unmanned aerial vehicle had fallen on the premises of an enterprise, without providing more detail. Three people were killed in the various incidents, Russian officials said.
With the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine almost halfway through its fourth year, Kyiv’s forces have repeatedly targeted energy infrastructure, including some Rosneft facilities, in a move to curtail Russia’s ability to send fuel to the front line and limit Moscow’s revenue from oil sales.
The Ryazan refinery, about 120 miles (193 km) southeast of Moscow, is one of the largest in Russia and has a design processing capacity of about 340,000 barrels of crude a day. The Novokuibyshevsk plant has a design processing capacity of over 177,000 barrels a day and the two facilities account for less than a tenth of Russia’s total refinery capacity.
Separately, explosions damaged a gas pipeline that carries fuel from Turkmenistan in Central Asia to Russia’s Volgograd region, said a Ukrainian military official who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive issues. The damaged segment carries fuel to Russian military plants, the official said. Bloomberg cannot independently verify the claim.
(Updates with Ukraine’s state security comment in third paragraph, gas pipeline damage in final paragraph.)
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