April 18 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones struck a handful of Russia’s oil facilities overnight, including two oil refineries in the Samara region, an oil depot in Crimea and a Baltic Sea port that exports petroleum products, Russian local governors and a Ukrainian army official said on Saturday. Kyiv’s troops have in recent weeks stepped up attacks on Russian oil depots and refineries – key sources of revenue for Moscow’s war budget – sometimes targeting sites thousands of kilometres from Ukraine’s borders. In the Leningrad region, which surrounds St Petersburg and borders Finland, Governor Alexander Drozdenko said a fire had been extinguished at the Vysotsk port, which houses a terminal operated by Lukoil handling exports of fuel oil, naphtha, diesel and vacuum gas oil.
In a statement on the Telegram messaging app acknowledging the port attack, Ukraine’s drone forces commander, Robert Brovdi, said Ukrainian forces also attacked oil refineries in the cities of Novokuibyshevsk and Syzran in the Samara region. Both sites have been repeatedly struck in the course of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Make Russian Oil Great Again,” he wrote sarcastically.
Brovdi also criticised the U.S. decision to renew a waiver allowing countries to buy sanctioned Russian oil at sea. Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, the Samara regional governor, said industrial targets came under attack. He did not name the facilities.
On the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula, the Moscow-backed governor of Sevastopol said that 22 drones had been downed, with incidents of damage across the city, including a fire at a fuel tank. Ukraine’s Brovdi said Kyiv had targeted an oil depot.
Ukraine’s SBU security service said it also struck two Russian landing ships and a warship based on the peninsula. According to Brovdi, a series of recent strikes on Russia’s oil logistics at Primorsk, Ust-Luga, Sheskharis and Tuapse reduced total daily oil shipments by about 880,000 barrels. Reuters could not immediately verify the figure.
Separately, authorities in the southern Krasnodar region said on Saturday that a fire at an oil depot in Tikhoretsk, and another at an oil terminal at the Black Sea port of Tuapse, which had burned since Thursday, have been extinguished. Both fires, authorities have said, were caused by Ukrainian drone strikes.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Felix Light; Editing by Louise Heavens and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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