Kyiv said Sunday it carried out a wave of strikes targeting Russia’s oil export infrastructure, including an attack on a key Baltic Sea loading port and multiple tankers it said were illegally used to move Russian crude.
Ukrainian officials said a nighttime drone strike triggered a fire at Russia’s largest oil exporting port on the Baltic Sea, the port of Primorsk, according to Russian regional Gov. Alexander Drozdenko. Drozdenko said the drone strike did not cause an oil spill, though he gave no immediate further comment on casualties or damage.
Drozdenko said Primorsk, which is operated by Russia’s state oil firm Transneft, is capable of handling hundreds of thousands of barrels per day. Ukraine’s attack was carried out despite Primorsk being more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from Ukraine, a distance that the AP story noted separates the port from Kyiv.
In his Sunday posting on Telegram, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces destroyed several military and other targets, while also inflicting significant damage on oil port infrastructure. Zelenskyy wrote that “One more Russian carrier of Kalibr missiles is out of action,” attributing the report of the destruction of targets in the Primorsk port to Major General Yevhen Khmara.
Zelenskyy also said that Ukrainian drones hit additional maritime and support targets, including a Karakurt missile ship and a patrol boat. He further said drones struck a tanker belonging to Russia’s so-called shadow oil fleet, which Ukraine describes as a way of evading Western sanctions and price caps on Russian energy.
Earlier on Sunday, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces also struck two more “shadow fleet” tankers near the entrance of the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. He said, “These tankers were actively used to transport oil. Now they won’t,” and added that the operation was led by Andrii Hnatov, the chief of Ukraine’s general staff.
Moscow did not immediately acknowledge Zelenskyy’s claims regarding either the Primorsk strike or the reported attacks near Novorossiysk.
In Ukraine, the AP report said Russian drones killed two people and injured three others in the southern Odesa region overnight into Sunday, according to Ukraine’s Emergency Service. The service said the attack damaged three residential buildings, and that drones also hit port infrastructure, sparking a fire that emergency teams later extinguished.
Elsewhere, the report said Russian strikes wounded six people in the Dnipropetrovsk region in central Ukraine. It said a passenger bus transporting 40 children was damaged, and that no one inside was injured.
The AP report also described damage in Russia from debris from a Ukrainian drone strike west of Moscow, saying a 77-year-old man was killed near the town of Volokolamsk and that six drones were shot down in Russia’s Moscow region, which surrounds but does not include the capital. In Russia’s Smolensk region, the report said a man, woman and child were injured after Ukrainian drone debris flew into an apartment block, according to local Gov. Vasiliy Anokhin.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Sunday that a total of 334 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles were downed overnight over Russia and occupied Crimea. It also said that overnight into Sunday, Russia attacked Ukraine with 269 drones and ballistic missiles; the Ukrainian Air Force said Ukraine shot down and repelled 249 drones and recorded hits from ballistic missiles and 19 drones in 15 locations.