Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign pushed into Russia’s interior late Wednesday, with Ukrainian officials describing a new strike near the city of Perm that they said set an oil facility on fire.
Ukraine’s Security Service, known as the SBU, said it hit an oil pumping station near Perm as part of efforts to target Russia’s energy infrastructure, and said the facility’s location was more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from Ukraine. The SBU said the Perm site was owned by Russia’s pipeline operator Transneft and described most oil storage tanks at the facility as ablaze, but those details were not independently verified.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attack was part of a broader effort to expand Ukraine’s long-distance striking capability. Zelenskyy posted a video on Telegram showing a large plume of black smoke rising in a rural area near a built-up zone, and said Ukraine was expanding the range of its long-distance strikes. He called the effort a new phase aimed at limiting Russia’s ability to wage war by denying it crucial oil revenue.
Russian officials offered a narrower account of what happened near Perm. Russian media reported an attack, and Perm Gov. Dmitry Makhonin said only that a drone hit an unspecified industrial facility and sparked a fire. The report said Russian officials have not been forthcoming about Ukrainian claims of increasingly accurate domestically developed drone attacks.
The episode came amid continuing strikes targeting energy-related sites. The report said the Perm incident followed a day after Ukraine struck the Tuapse oil refinery and terminal on the Black Sea for the third time in less than two weeks, which Russian President Vladimir Putin said could bring “serious environmental consequences,” according to a report of his remarks.
Ukraine’s long-range drone strategy has also drawn analysis from external observers. The Institute for the Study of War said the escalation of long-distance strikes against Russian oil facilities is intended to stop Moscow from benefiting from a U.S. waiver on sanctions amid global supply restrictions attributed in the report to the Iran war. The institute said Kyiv is exploiting vulnerabilities created by Russia’s large land mass.
In a late Tuesday assessment, the Institute for the Study of War said “Ukrainian forces will likely continue to exploit the large attack surface of Russia’s deep rear and overstretched Russian air defenses” to carry out more frequent and larger strikes against Russian oil infrastructure and military assets. The institute added that its outlook is supported by increased Ukrainian domestic drone production. It also said that advanced drone technology has become a defining feature of the war as Russia presses its more than four-year invasion.
On the Russian side, the report said the Russian Defense Ministry stated Wednesday that air defenses intercepted 98 Ukrainian drones overnight over Russian regions and Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. In Ukraine, the report said the air force stated it shot down 154 of the 171 drones Russia launched overnight.
Ukraine’s leadership also indicated an outward-facing shift in its drone capability. Zelenskyy said Ukraine is producing a surplus of up to 50% in some types of weapons and that military cooperation “is already underway” with countries in the Middle East, the Gulf, Europe and the Caucasus. He said deals involve the production and supply of drones and missiles as well as software and technology, and he added that Kyiv had handed a proposal to the United States for cooperation on drones, defense systems and other weapons for use in the air, on land and at sea.
At the same time, the report said Russia did not ease its long-range attacks on civilian areas in Ukraine overnight. In the northeastern Kharkiv region, the regional prosecutor’s office said eight people were injured, and in the northeastern Sumy region, officials said a 60-year-old woman died of carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of an attack. In the southern Odesa region, local officials said Russian forces struck Izmail, damaging infrastructure facilities and a district hospital building.
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