A fire broke out on Saturday at an oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region after a drone attack, the regional governor said. “Last night, there were several drone attacks against regional oil refineries,” Governor Dmitry Azarov said in a regional government statement published on Telegram. One of those attacks caused a fire at the Kuibyshev oil refinery, he added, noting that there were no casualties.
One person was killed and two wounded in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Belgorod region on Saturday morning, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. Separately, the Russian defence ministry said it had neutralised overnight “12 Ukrainian drones” over the regions of Bryansk, Belgorod and Voronezh, all three of which border Ukraine, as well as over the region of Saratov.
Ukraine denied responsibility for an attack on a concert hall in Moscow in which more than 60 people were killed. “Ukraine certainly has nothing to do with the shooting/explosions in the Crocus City Hall,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidential administration, wrote on X.
Russia pounded Ukrainian power facilities on Friday in an attack described by Kyiv as the largest airstrike on its energy infrastructure in two years of war, and portrayed by Moscow as revenge for Ukrainian attacks during its presidential election. The missile and drone attack hit a vast dam over the Dnipro River, killed at least five people and left more than a million others without power, forcing Kyiv to seek emergency electricity supplies from Poland, Romania and Slovakia, Kyiv officials said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, said the strikes proved again that Russian attacks on infrastructure could be halted only with more air defence systems and that required political will from Ukraine’s allies. “Russian terror is only possible now because we don’t have enough modern air defence systems which, to be honest, requires enough political will to provide them,” Zelenskiy said.
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Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a Russian publication on Friday that Moscow saw itself as in a “state of war” because of the west’s intervention on Kyiv’s side. The comment marked a rhetorical break from the “special military operation” language that Moscow has used, an apparent move to prepare Russians for a longer and harder struggle.
With Reuters
