Ukrainian drone strikes caused fires at more Russian oil facilities overnight into Saturday, Russian officials said, in what appeared to be the latest attack on Moscow’s vital oil industry.
Authorities in Russia’s Rostov region said falling drone debris sparked a fire that damaged an oil depot and tanker in the port of Taganrog, while officials in the neighboring Krasnodar region reported a fire breaking out at an oil depot in Armavir for the same reason.
“Another facility of Russia’s oil industry has been reached — Armavir,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X, referring to the Krasnodar attack, and noting that Armavir is “500 kilometers from our state border.”
“We are rightfully bringing the war back to where it came from,” he wrote.
Ukraine has expanded its mid- and long-range strike capabilities, deploying drone and missile technology that it has developed domestically to battle Russia’s 4-year-old invasion. Attacks on Russian oil assets that play a key part in funding the invasion have become almost daily occurrences.
For its part, Russia has used its long-range ballistic missiles to damage Ukraine’s power grid and hammer its cities. The Ukrainian capital is bracing for further heavy bombardments after what the Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier this week would be upcoming “systemic strikes” on Kyiv.
Zelenskyy said Thursday that he’s being “very persistent” in pressing the United States to provide his country with more Patriot air defense missiles that can counter devastating Russian ballistic missile attacks.
The attacks on Russian oil infrastructure came a day after a Russian drone that was part of an attack on Ukraine struck an apartment building in eastern Romania, injuring two people in the NATO member country. The incursion added to concerns that the war could spread across the alliance’s borders, and drew strong condemnation across Europe.
Meanwhile, Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom said Saturday that a Ukrainian drone struck the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
There was no damage to key equipment, but the attack left a hole in the wall of a turbine hall, Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev said. He was quoted as saying by Russian state media that the fact that the drone was controlled via fiber optics “completely rules out the possibility of an accidental impact.”
Ukraine did not immediately comment on the incident.
The plant is in an area under Russian control since early in Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is not in service, but it needs reliable power to cool its six shutdown reactors and spent fuel to avoid any catastrophic nuclear incidents.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly expressed alarm about the nuclear plant, Europe’s biggest.
