Ukraine has struck a large Russian oil refinery and key port, hitting a ship that had been transporting drone parts and ammunition from Iran, its military has confirmed.
Kyiv said on Friday that Ukraine struck the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region in an overnight attack and also hit the Caspian Sea port of Olya in the Astrakhan region the previous day, including the cargo vessel travelling to Russia.
The strikes came hours before US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin meet for a crucial summit in Alaska to discuss the war in Ukraine – to which Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has not been invited – and as Russia grinds out gains in Ukraine’s east.
Facing regular Russian missile and drone attacks, Ukraine has directed the majority of its deep strikes against Russian oil refineries and unspecified “storage facilities” this year, according to new general staff data published on Friday.
The Ukrainian military, as usual, did not confirm if it used drones for its latest two long-range attacks. It says its deep strike campaign aims to degrade Russia’s capacity to wage the full-scale war it launched in February 2022. The Ukrainian military’s claims could not be independently verified.
In a statement on the Telegram messaging app, Kyiv’s military said its strike caused a fire and explosions at the Syzran refinery, which it said produces a range of fuels and is one of the biggest in oil company Rosneft’s network.
Samara’s regional governor said a drone attack caused a fire at an unspecified “industrial enterprise” in his region, but that it had been put out quickly. The Russian defence ministry said it had shot down Ukrainian drones over nine regions.
The Ukrainian military also said it struck the Caspian port of Olya in Russia’s Astrakhan region on Thursday, hitting a ship that had been transporting drone parts and ammunition from Iran.
The vessel “Port Olya-4” regularly transits the Caspian Sea, bringing cargo between Iran and Russia, according to the US treasury department and Ukrainian military intelligence.
Russia uses the Olya port as an important logistics hub for the supply of military goods from Iran, the Ukrainian military said in a statement on Friday.
Meanwhile, Moscow’s forces breached Ukrainian lines in a series of infiltrations in the country’s industrial heartland of Donetsk this week.
The advances amount to only a limited success for Russia, analysts say, since it still needs to consolidate its gains before achieving a true breakthrough – but it is still seen as a potentially dangerous moment for Ukraine.
In other developments, Russian strikes in Ukraine’s Sumy region overnight on Wednesday resulted in numerous injuries, Ukrainian regional officials said. A missile strike on a village in the Seredyna-Budska community wounded a 7-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man, according to regional governor Oleh Hryhorov. The girl was taken to hospital in a stable condition.
In Russia, a Ukrainian drone attack damaged several apartment buildings in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, near the border with Ukraine, where 13 civilians were wounded, according to acting governor of the region, Yuri Slyusar. Two of the wounded were hospitalised in serious condition, he said.
