Ukraine Says It Hit Rosneft’s Refinery in Russia’s Saratov
(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian forces struck Rosneft PJSC’s refinery in Russia’s Saratov overnight as part of a record barrage of drones as it continues to target its foe’s fuel producing industry on a near-daily basis.
Separately, Moscow claimed a Ukrainian drone struck the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, occupied by Russian forces since 2022, near one of the facility’s power units. Ukraine hasn’t commented.
The Saratov attack resulted in a fire at the refinery, Ukraine’s General Staff said in a Telegram statement. Ukraine’s forces also struck Engels airfield in the Saratov region, about 730 kilometers (450 miles) southeast of Moscow and over 1,000 km east of Kyiv, according to the statement.
The Engels air base is a critical operating hub for Russian warplanes including the Tu-95 long-range strategic bomber, which has been used to launch cruise missile strikes against Ukraine, the General Staff said.
Regional authorities said there was damage to civilian infrastructure in Saratov and Engels following the attack, which also killed two people. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv’s forces also hit an oil depot in Russia’s Kaluga region and on a drone storage facility in the Bryansk region.
Images of the Saratov refinery captured Sunday by NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System show fresh heat anomalies that may indicate active fires.
Rosneft didn’t immediately respond to a Bloomberg request for a comment sent via WhatsApp outside normal business hours.
The Saratov refinery, which has a design capacity of processing about 140,000 barrels of crude a day, was previously hit on July 8 and had restored operations after that attack.
Ukraine’s forces intensified strikes on Russia’s refineries, including facilities far from the nations’ border, in the final days of July after a short lull over the previous couple of weeks. On Friday, Kyiv hit the Volgograd refinery, one of Russia’s largest, while attacks on Saturday targeted Ufa, home to three Bashneft refineries, in Russia’s Bashkortostan republic.
Earlier on Sunday another drone attack on the republic’s industrial facilities sparked a fire at an industrial area in Ufa, Radiy Khabirov, head of Bashkortostan, said without providing details.
Intensified attacks threaten to disrupt fuel supplies in Russia again, just as many regions across the country were increasing limits for gasoline and diesel sales at filling stations or even lifting them after a period of shortages. Following the attack on the Volgograd refinery, filling stations of Lukoil PJSC and Gazprom PJSC temporarily introduced gasoline rationing in the Volgograd region, according to regional authorities.
In the past 24 hours, 1,158 unmanned aerial vehicles were shot down by Russia’s air defense systems, the Defense Ministry said in a statement after midday Moscow time. That was Ukraine’s record for the number of drones launched in a single day, according to estimates from Agentstvo. Novosti, an independent media outlet. The previous record was on June 18, when 992 Ukrainian drones were shot down, it said.
While Ukraine continues so successfully target Russian oil infrastructure, Zelenskyy said certain Russian enterprises not currently subject to Western sanctions are working to step up production of drones, missiles and guided aerial bombs.
“The aggressor is investing more and more in its ballistic weapons capability and is trying to ramp up production,” Zelenskyy said on X. “Pressure is needed on every segment of Russia’s defense-industrial complex.”
Alexey Likhachev, chief executive officer of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, said a Ukrainian drone hit a passageway that connects six power units at the Zaporizhzhia plant overnight, several meters from the reactor compartment of the third unit. There was no explosion, he said, according to Rosatom’s in-house media service’s Telegram.
Likhachev said Rosatom hopes Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, will visit the Zaporizhzhia facility in the near future. Grossi has visited the plant several times since 2022.
The IAEA hasn’t commented on Likhachev’s claims, which couldn’t be independently verified.
On Saturday, the UN’s nuclear watchdog said the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeast Ukraine lost off-site power for the 23rd time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. During the outage emergency diesel generates provided back-up power for reacting cooling and other safety functions.
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