A Ukrainian drone attack set fire to the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery in Rostov-on-Don, southern Russia, forcing it to halt operations, the regional governor said early on Thursday. The plant is considered one of the most important oil refineries in southern Russia. Located around 10km (six miles) east of the border, it has been targeted by Ukrainian attacks several times. “Work was suspended due to a repeated attack, and personnel were withdrawn to a safe distance,” said Vasily Golubev, the governor.
Another drone strike in Russia overnight destroyed an oil tank at a depot in Stary Oskol, north of the Ukrainian border, said the Belgorod regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. Ukraine suffers regular attacks on its energy systems and hits back at sites in Russia, both in retaliation and to hinder the Russian war effort.
Ukraine’s power grid operator, Ukrenergo, ordered cuts in 12 regions on Wednesday evening due to critical shortages. Ukrainians have been warned to limit consumption after Russian airstrikes in recent weeks inflicted serious damage on generating capacity. “In view of repairs to units and the latest destruction, we are catastrophically short of electricity for our needs,” said Serhii Kovalenko, head of Yasno, the largest private power company in Ukraine. Russia has either destroyed or captured 50% of Ukraine’s power generation, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The United States is expected to announce a new $225m weapons package for Ukraine this week, sources have told Reuters. The US president, Joe Biden, was due to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president, on Thursday in Normandy at the 80th anniversary commemoration of the D-day invasion.
France is to provide Ukraine with €650m in loans and grants to support local authorities and critical infrastructure, particularly energy facilities, targeted by Russia. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, will attend the Swiss conference on Russia’s war against Ukraine on 15-16 June, his office said on Wednesday. Macron and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, are due to sign the loans and grants deal in Paris on Friday.
A Moscow court has sentenced Russian blogger Anna Bazhutova to five and a half years in jail for livestreaming witness testimony about alleged Russian atrocities during the occupation of the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “It’s disgusting and vile. It’s messed up,” the 30-year-old defendant said from the dock said in reaction to the ruling. Her lawyer promised an appeal. In April 2022, Bazhutova did a live broadcast including witnesses directly accusing the Russian military of carrying out killings. Vladimir Putin’s regime has made criticism of the military illegal.
Vladimir Putin has said Russia could supply arms to other countries to attack western targets, Pjotr Sauer writes. His comments came after a US senator and a western official confirmed that Ukraine has recently used US weapons to strike inside Russia. The weapons were used under recently approved guidance from Joe Biden allowing American arms to be used to strike inside Russia for the defence of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
The Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a member of the Senate armed services committee, confirmed strikes with US weapons inside Russia but did not say how he was briefed. According to a 3 June report from the Institute for the Study of War, Ukrainian forces struck a Russian S-300/400 air defence battery in Russia’s Belgorod region, probably with a high mobility artillery rocket system, or Himars, on 1 or 2 June.
French prosecutors launched an terrorism investigation after a Ukrainian-Russian man detonated explosive materials in a hotel room north of Paris. The suspected was reportedly from the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, part of which has been occupied by pro-Russian and Russian forces since 2014. A source at the French anti-terrorism prosecutors office (PNAT) said that on Monday night the 26-year-old man received “significant burns after an explosion” in a hotel in the Val-d’Oise, north of Paris. A search uncovered “products and materials intended for the manufacture of explosive devices”.
