Oct 6 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones killed two people and hit a major fuel depot overnight in one of the biggest attacks of the war on Moscow and the surrounding region, Russian military bloggers said.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Ukraine had launched more than 650 drones towards the capital, most of which were shot down.
Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region which surrounds the capital, said that 185 Ukrainian drones had been destroyed or brought down over his region. He said seven people had been injured and that 47 houses, 4 apartments and 3 cars had been damaged.
Prominent war blogger Yuri Podolyaka said an oil storage tank was hit at the Volodarskaya oil storage and distribution facility, the biggest in the Moscow region. The facility stores diesel, gasoline and jet fuel. There was no official confirmation that it had been hit.
Volodarskaya is one of the major hubs in the distribution system of state pipeline monopoly Transneft and is linked to Moscow’s main oil refinery. It supplies fuel to all three of the capital’s large airports.
A Ukrainian war blog, Supernova+, published video purporting to show a huge blaze at the site. Reuters could not immediately verify it.
Ukraine has increasingly targeted oil refineries, depots and export terminals in an effort to deprive Moscow of the revenues it needs to finance the war that Russia began in February 2022.
Podolyaka and other Russian bloggers said, without citing evidence, that Ukraine’s overnight attack was also intended to hit the Moscow oil refinery in the southeast of the capital, but that Russian air defences had prevented this.
The refinery, just inside the city ring road, has been hit several times, most recently on September 20, the main day of voting in Russia’s parliamentary election.
Russia has recently intensified attacks on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, sending waves of missiles and drones by night and day. Its latest targets have included bridges across the Dnipro river.
Vorobyov, the head of the Moscow region, said the body of a 71-year-old man had been pulled from under the rubble of a house and that a 20-year-old man had been killed in a nearby village.
The head of the town of Domodedovo, south of Moscow and home to the country’s third-largest airport, said work was under way to restore electricity to villages that had been hit by drones.
(Reporting and writing by Mark Trevelyan in London, Lucy Papachristou in Tbilisi and Jekaterina Golubkova in TokyoEditing by)
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