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A Ukrainian drone hit a major oil depot in the southern Russian city of Sochi on Saturday night triggering a large fire, as Kyiv steps up its long-range drone strikes in response to Moscow’s escalating attacks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an evening address on Saturday that he was “grateful for our long-range operations on Russian territory”. He said he had been briefed by Ukrainian security chief Vasyl Malyuk on the strikes. “Each of them is tangible for the enemy, and our operations will continue,” Zelenskyy added.
Waves of Russian drones and missiles have regularly targeted the Ukrainian capital in recent weeks in some of the heaviest bombardment of the city in the 42-month full-scale war.
Ukraine has targeted Russian infrastructure with long-range strikes and on Sunday, Russian officials reported that the hit on the oil facility in the Adler area near the resort city of Sochi on the Black Sea. The mayor said there were no casualties.
“In the Adler region, fragments of a drone landed in a storage tank of petroleum products, resulting in a fire,” regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev said in a statement.
Videos shared on social media showed the moment of impact and a ball of flame rising above the facility. On Sunday morning, the Sochi mayor said the fire at the fuel reservoir had been put out, though the wider fire continued. The Sochi airport was temporarily closed.
The oil facility is owned by Russian state oil company Rosneft.
Ukrainian drones also targeted a Lukoil-owned oil facility in the Sochi area last week, killing two people, officials said. Other strikes have targeted oil facilities across central Russia.
Thirty-one people were killed in Kyiv on July 31 in one of the deadliest combined drone and missile attacks in the Ukrainian capital since the beginning of the year. Three hundred drones and eight missiles were launched that night on Ukraine, mainly targeting the capital.
The attack followed US President Donald Trump’s 10-day ultimatum to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to agree a ceasefire in Ukraine or face tighter sanctions.
A source in Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, said on Thursday that long-range drones had also targeted a military plant producing electronic communications equipment for anti-aircraft systems, artillery and mobile command posts in the city of Penza.
Ukrainian drones also hit two oil refineries, a railway substation as well as a Russian military airfield on the same night. The airfield is reportedly used to launch Iranian-designed kamikaze drones that have then gone on to hit Ukrainian cities in increasingly massive waves.
The escalating aerial battles come against the backdrop of Russia’s summer ground offensive in the south-east of Ukraine. There, Russian forces are advancing at the fastest rate since November and relentlessly attacking the key Ukrainian strongholds of Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka and Kupyansk and threatening encirclement of them.
DeepState, a Ukrainian military analytical group with ties to the defence ministry, assessed on Sunday that Russia had occupied 564 sq km of Ukrainian territory in July, which is approximately the same rate of advance as in June. It noted that Russian forces were still taking significant losses.
In Saturday, Russian forces also targeted and badly damaged a bridge in the southern regional capital of Kherson with a glided aerial bomb, according to local Ukrainian authorities. Videos published online showed significant damage to the bridge, and authorities urged residents living on the island to which it connects the central district of the city to evacuate due to difficulties supplying the area with aid.
Additional reporting by Christopher Miller
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