Ukraine has launched its second major drone attack in a week against Russian oil refineries hundreds of miles from its borders.
Drone strikes were reported by local officials across seven Russian regions as footage appeared on social media showing explosions and fires at the Lukoil refinery in the southern Volgograd area. It is more than 260 miles from the nearest Ukrainian forces.
Intelligence sources said the refinery had been hit by four Ukrainian drones, causing “significant damage”.
The Ukrainian military, claiming responsibility for the strike in partnership with the country’s intelligence services, said the refinery was “involved in supplying the Russian army”.
Volgograd governor Andrei Bocharov acknowledged the attack but claimed all the drones had been shot down. He added that the debris from one of the downed drones had struck the facility and caused a small fire that was “promptly extinguished”. He added that one refinery worker was hospitalised.
In the Smolensk region west of Moscow, governor Vasily Anokhin claimed there had been a "massive drone attack" on civilian infrastructure. He said one drone was intercepted while attempting to strike a nuclear energy facility.
Nearby, air defences also destroyed several drones around the town of Andreapol, home to approximately 8,000 people, in the Tver region, according to the local governor.
Russia's defence ministry said in a statement on Friday that 49 Ukrainian drones had been downed over the country overnight, including 25 in the southern Rostov region and eight in the Volgograd region.
Ukraine has targeted the Lukoil refinery in Volgograd before. Last May, an early morning drone strike claimed by Ukraine’s intelligence services caused a fire in some of the facility’s oil processing units.
It is also the second time the refinery has been affected by fires this month. In the early hours of 15 January, an explosion and then fire broke out in the area due to what local authorities claimed was an internal issue.
At the start of the year, Ukraine’s intelligence services also conducted a cyberattack on Lukoil, which is one of Russia’s largest oil and gas companies, preventing customers from making payments at gas stations via the mobile app.
Ukraine has carried out frequent air attacks on Russian refineries, oil depots and industrial sites in an attempt to cripple key infrastructure underpinning Russia's war effort.
More than a dozen refineries have been hit in the past two months, many of which are located hundreds of miles inside Russia.
This week, Ukrainian forces claimed to have struck and set on fire a Lukoil refinery, Russia's fourth largest, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, east of Moscow.
A Ukrainian drone attack last week also forced a refinery in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, to suspend operations.
Russia is currently feeding more crude oil through its refineries in the hope of boosting fuel exports after new US sanctions on Russian tankers and traders made exports of unprocessed crude more difficult, sources told Reuters this week.
Elsewhere, the Ukrainian military said on Friday its missile and artillery forces had hit a Russian army command post in the Russian region of Kursk – where Ukraine is trying to hold a swathe of territory taken in two surprise offensives in the past few months – as a part of its effort to disrupt Moscow's troops operations and logistics. "As a result of the coordinated and precision strike, the enemy's command and control post was destroyed," the general staff said on Telegram.
Meanwhile, Russia launched a barrage of drones on Ukraine in an overnight attack on Friday, injuring four people and damaging a hospital and a grain warehouse in the southern Odesa region, officials said.
Ukraine's air defences shot down 59 of 102 Russian drones, the air force said. It said that 37 drones were “lost”, referring to the use of electronic warfare to redirect them.
Russian drones damaged the northeastern Sumy region, the Odesa region in the south, and the central Cherkasy region.
Oleh Kiper, the Odesa regional governor, said that four civilians, including a doctor, were injured in drone attacks targeting the city of Chornomorsk.
The strikes also partially disrupted electricity supplies in the city and damaged the city's hospital, an administrative building, a grain warehouse, a residential house, and several trucks, he said on the Telegram app.
