Ukrainian drones spark fire at Russian Sochi oil depot

An overnight Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire at an oil depot in Sochi, the Russian resort that hosted the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, around 400 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, authorities said. Ukraine has regularly hit Russian oil and gas infrastructure in response to attacks on its own territory since Russia began its offensive in February 2022. “Sochi suffered a drone attack by the Kyiv regime last night”, the governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratiev, said on Telegram. He said drone wreckage hit an “oil tank, which caused a fire”.
Sochi’s mayor, Andrei Proshunin, said there were no victims and “The situation is totally under control”, adding that firefighters were continuing to extinguish the blaze. Images, broadcast by Russian media showed flames and a thick plumes of black smoke rising from the site. Air traffic was briefly suspended at Sochi airport but resumed shortly afterward, Russia’s air transport regulator Rosaviatsia said. Ukraine authorities had not commented on the fire. Air strikes on Sochi are relatively rare compared to some other Russian cities. However, Ukrainian drone attacks killed two people there late last month, according to local authorities.
Kyiv has said it will intensify its air strikes against Russia in response to an increase in Russian attacks on its territory in recent weeks, which have killed dozens of civilians. The Russian defence ministry said meanwhile that three Ukrainian drones had been intercepted in the Leningrad region, which includes the Baltic seaport of Saint Petersburg.
Overnight strikes by Russia inside Ukraine’s south and north also left several people injured, authorities said. One missile wounded seven people in a residential district of Mykolaiv, a city near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said. Three other people were injured in the northeastern Kharkiv region, she added, while local authorities also reported injuries in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south. “The Russians continue to wage war not against Ukrainian forces, but against Ukrainian civilians”, Svyrydenko said.
Last week, US President Donald Trump gave his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a ten-day ultimatum, until next Friday, to end the conflict in Ukraine. The air strikes and fighting have not abated, however and the Kremlin has rejected the idea of a lasting ceasefire in Ukraine, which it sees as a gift to Kyiv’s troops.
Ukraine said on Saturday it hit military targets and a gas pipeline in drone attacks in Russia, where local authorities said three people were killed and two others wounded. Ukraine’s SBU security service said the strikes, carried out by long-distance drones, hit a military airfield in the southwestern town of Primorsko-Akhtarsk. They caused a fire in an areas where drones were stored, the SBU said. It said the strikes also hit a company, Elektropribor, in Russia’s southern Penza region, which it said “works for the Russian military-industrial complex”, making military digital networks, aviation devices, armoured vehicles and ships.
The governor for the Penza region, Oleg Melnichenko, said on Telegram that one woman had been killed and two other people were wounded in that attack. Russia’s defence ministry said its air-defence systems had destroyed 112 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory — 34 over the Rostov region — in a nearly nine-hour period, from Friday night to Saturday morning.
An elderly man was killed inside a house that caught fire due to falling drone debris in the Samara region, governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev posted on Telegram. In the Rostov region, a guard at an industrial facility was killed after a drone attack and a fire in one of the site’s buildings, acting Rostov governor Yuri Sliusar said. “The military repelled a massive air attack during the night”, destroying drones over seven districts, Sliusar posted on Telegram.
An analysis published on Friday showed that Russia’s forces in July launched an unprecedented number of drones, 6,297 of them.
The figure included decoy drones sent into Ukraine’s skies in efforts to saturate the country’s air-defence systems. In Ukraine’s central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian drone attacks on Friday night wounded three people, governor Sergiy Lysak wrote on Telegram. Several buildings, homes and cars were damaged, he said. — AFP