Ukraine Drones Cause Fire at Russian Petrochemical Plant
(Bloomberg) -- A Ukrainian drone strike ignited a fire at Gazprom PJSC’s Neftekhim Salavat petrochemical plant in Russia, marking the the second attack on the facility in less than a week.
Local authorities are assessing the extent of the damage, regional governor Radiy Khabirov said on Telegram. Emergency services are working to extinguish the fire, he said, without giving details on which units had been hit.
The strike damaged one of the plant’s primary processing units, Ukraine’s General Staff said on Telegram. The unit has a design capacity of 6 million tons of crude per year, equivalent to 120,000 barrels a day, according to the facility’s website. Bloomberg could not independently verify the claims.
The entire facility in Russia’s Bashkortostan region is designed to have a crude-processing capacity of about 200,000 barrels a day, and last week Ukraine claimed to have hit the primary-processing unit with a capacity of 80,000 barrels a day.
Ukraine has been intensifying drone strikes on Russian energy infrastructure since the start of last month as talks over a peace deal between the two countries stall. The Kremlin has been showing little intention of reaching a compromise to end the war.
The strikes have affected at least 7% of Russia’s crude-processing capacity, according to Bloomberg estimates, and resulted in a growing domestic car-fuel shortage. To keep a lid on wholesale diesel and gasoline prices, which are near historic highs, Moscow is considering some restrictions on diesel exports and an extension of a ban on gasoline shipments.
Separately, Ukrainian drones attacked two crude-pumping stations in Russia’s Volgograd region, including a facility that pumps crude toward the Novororssiysk oil terminal, according to the General Staff statement on Telegram. The station is located more than 900 kilometers (560 miles) away from Novorossiysk.
US President Donald Trump, who has previously sought to mediate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, reiterated Tuesday that he was “fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs” if Russia doesn’t take steps to end the war. European nations “would have to join us in adopting the exact same measures,” he said.
In an attack last Friday, Ukrainian drones hit one of the primary processing units at the Salavat facility, a person familiar with the matter said at the time. The unit can process about 80,000 barrels of condensate a day.
(Updates with details of the damage in the third, seventh paragraphs.)
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