A fire has erupted at a gas pumping station in the Russian region of Kursk bordering Ukraine, after a huge explosion rocked the site.
Both Kyiv and Moscow have denied responsibility for the attack, with both sides accusing the other of targeting the key facility near the Russian town of Sudzha.
Kursk has been the focus of fierce fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces in recent weeks, as Vladimir Putin’s forces push to retake territory seized by Ukraine in a daring assault last year.
Kyiv’s troops captured hundreds of square miles of the territory in western Russia, including Sudzha, when it launched an incursion in August last year - marking the largest attack on Russian territory since the Second World War.
The Ukrainian military and Russian war bloggers reported that Russian special forces walked for miles inside the gas pipeline itself to strike Ukrainian units from the rear in the region weeks ago.
The station has been a critical hub for Russian gas transit to Europe via Ukraine, before Kyiv refused to extend the agreement in January this year.
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Once it passed through the station, it entered Ukraine’s pipeline system into Slovakia, before going onto the Czech Republic and Austria.
In 2023, almost half of all Russian gas exports to Europe were pumped through the station.
Ukraine’s general staff denied its forces struck the key gas pumping station and instead said it had been “repeatedly shelled by the Russians themselves”.
The army accused Russia of seeking to pin the blame on Ukraine with “groundless” accusations its military was involved – all to undermine any truce and longer peace deal currently being negotiated by Donald Trump and the US.
“The Russian federation is intensifying its discrediting campaign against Ukraine,” it said.
“In particular, the enemy has accused the Ukrainian Defense Forces of shelling the Sudzha gas metering station. These accusations are groundless. On the contrary, the mentioned station has been repeatedly shelled by the Russians themselves.”
Russia accused Ukraine of being behind the attack, saying the station had been under the control of Kyiv's forces "until now" who had used it as a logistics base.
"The blowing up of an important Russian energy facility by Ukrainian army units retreating from the Kursk region is a deliberate provocation by the Kyiv regime," the defence ministry said in a statement.
"(This) should be viewed as part of a series of recent strikes against the energy infrastructure of the Russian Federation aimed at discrediting the peace initiatives of the president of the United States."
