Drones sent by Ukraine struck two Rosneft-owned oil depots in Russia’s Smolensk region in an overnight attack on Wednesday.
Russian regional officials said that fires had broken out at the facilities following the drone attack.
As the emergency services worked on sites, some residents were evacuated from parts of Lipetsk in Russia’s southwest after a drone there fell on an industrial park.
There were no casualties reported in the attack, Vasily Anokhin, the governor of the Smolensk region, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app.
Energy site attacks threaten ‘international peace and security,’ UN’s Grossi tells CBC News:
With Russia’s full-scale invasion in its third year, Ukraine has increasingly focused on targeting Russian oil and energy facilities with long-range drones.
Kyiv considers oil refineries as legitimate targets, despite calls from allies led by the U.S. to halt strikes in order to avoid Russian retaliation and hikes in global oil prices.
As of the end of March, around 14 per cent of Russia’s primary oil refining capacity had been knocked out by Ukrainian drone attacks, according to Reuters calculations.
Energy grid attacks have been a feature of the two-year-war, with Russia by March 2022 having gained control of the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
This year, Russia has stepped up combined missile and drone strikes targeting Ukraine’s grid system since mid-March.
“This has become an issue that is threatening international peace and security,” International Atomic Energy Agency director general Rafael Mariano Grossi told CBC’s Rosemary Barton Live in an interview that aired on April 21.
Ukraine’s energy grid has received emergency power imports from Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Moldova as the system struggles to meet demand amid the attacks, national grid operator Ukrenergo said on Monday.
The European Union and Ukraine linked electricity grids after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The link was designed to open avenues for emergency help in the face of Russian strikes on critical infrastructure.