KYIV: Ukraine launched British Storm Shadow missiles and its domestically produced long-range drones to hit several Russian oil and gas facilities, Ukrainian military and security officials said on Thursday. Ukraine has previously used the British-made missiles to attack Russian industrial targets that it says help Moscow's war.
The Ukrainian General Staff said that the air force used Storm Shadow cruise missiles to strike the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in Russia's Rostov region. "Multiple explosions were recorded. The target was hit," the General Staff said on the Telegram app on Thursday. It said the refinery was one of the biggest oil product suppliers in southern Russia and was supplying diesel and jet fuel to the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine.
Ukraine's SBU security service said that the locally made long-range drones hit oil product tanks in the Russian port of Temryuk in the Krasnodar region and a gas processing plant in Orenburg in southwestern Russia. The Orenburg gas processing plant, the largest facility of its kind in the world, is located about 1,400 km (about 870 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
In the Krasnodar region, Russian regional authorities said that two oil product tanks caught fire at the southern port of Temryuk after the drone attack. Flames covered an area of about 2,000 square metres, authorities at the Krasnodar operational headquarters said on the Telegram app. As Russia's war in Ukraine approaches its four-year mark and diplomatic efforts to end it have so far failed to produce any tangible results, both Kyiv and Moscow have stepped up their drone and missile attacks on energy facilities.
Kyiv has increased its strikes on Russia's oil refineries and other energy infrastructure since August as it seeks to cut Moscow's oil revenues, a key source of funding for its war effort. The Ukrainian General Staff also said that Ukrainian troops hit a military airfield in the Russian city of Maikop in the republic of Adygea in the North Caucasus region.
Meanwhile, Kremlin is analysing the documents on ending the war in Ukraine which were brought to Moscow by special envoy Kirill Dmitriev from the United States, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. Russia's Defence Ministry said that its forces had captured the settlement of Sviato-Pokrovske in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday, citing the ministry.
Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield report.
Russian air defence units downed 25 Moscow-bound Ukrainian drones throughout the day Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. Sobyanin, in a series of posts on the Telegram messaging app, said the drones were repelled over a period of about 23 hours. Emergency crews were examining fragments where they hit the ground, but no damage was reported. Nine of the drones were repelled from just after 11 pm onward. Two of the four major airports servicing the capital limited operations for a time, Russia's civil aviation authority said on Telegram.
The Russian Defence Ministry said its air defence units had destroyed 29 Ukrainian drones nationwide in a three-hour period ending at 11 p.m. It was not immediately clear whether these included Moscow-bound drones cited by Sobyanin. The ministry had earlier said its air defence units destroyed 172 Ukrainian drones overnight, nearly half of them over regions bordering Ukraine. Ukraine's military said its drones overnight had struck the Yefremov synthetic rubber plant in Russia's Tula region south of Moscow and a storage facility for marine drones in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Tula regional Governor Dmitry Milyaev said debris from a downed Ukrainian drone sparked a fire at an industrial site. He did not identify the facility. He said that Russian air defence units destroyed 12 Ukrainian drones over the region. Ukraine has stepped up drone strikes deep inside Russia, saying it is targeting military, energy and logistics sites to disrupt Moscow's war effort, in response to Russia’s continued strikes on Ukraine. — Reuters
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