Symbolic imageUkraine's drone campaign on Russian oil infrastructure widened overnight into Thursday, setting the Yaroslavneftorgsintez refinery in Yaroslavl on fire; Russia's Defence Ministry says 605 drones were downed. Around a third of refining capacity is already offline.
This topic follows the pressure on Russia's fuel and logistics infrastructure as Ukraine extends its long-range drone strikes into Russian territory. Refineries are among the targets: Ukraine says its forces hit a major Rosneft plant in Ryazan, one of the country's refining hubs. The strikes are not limited to energy sites, as Ukrainian drones also set alight a warehouse of the retailer Wildberries in Ryazan and damaged an apartment building in Taganrog, killing one person. Damage assessments in such cases usually rest on Ukrainian claims and on photos and videos from the scene rather than on Russian official figures, so the scale of the losses often stays unconfirmed. Separately, Russia's Investigative Committee branch in Tula reported that a gunman tried to shoot the head of a Russian drone company in an apartment stairwell, pointing to violence around the drone industry inside Russia itself.
Ukraine struck oil facilities deep inside Russia overnight into Thursday, setting the Yaroslavneftorgsintez refinery in Yaroslavl on fire. Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences downed 605 drones over Russian regions, occupied Crimea and the Black and Azov seas.
A Ukrainian drone and missile attack on an industrial facility in Russia's Kursk region killed four people and injured several others, regional governor Alexander Khinshtein said on Wednesday. Meduza, reviewing 40 days of the campaign, counts at least 20 Wildberries warehouses and at least 25 oil refineries and other oil and gas sites hit, knocking out a third of Russia's refining capacity.
Ukrainian drones killed five people in an industrial zone in the Moscow region overnight into Tuesday and set a Wildberries logistics warehouse ablaze in the Leningrad region. A day earlier, a drone came down on a packed beach near Gelendzhik, killing seven, among them children.
Sellers on the Russian marketplace Wildberries may have lost 215 to 280 billion roubles because of Ukrainian drone strikes on the company's warehouses, according to an estimate by analyst Sergei Semko cited by Forbes Russia. Bloomberg reported that Kyiv's shifting pattern of strikes is adding uncertainty around Russian oil.
Ukrainian drone attacks on more than a dozen Russian regions killed at least nine people on Sunday, among them a 13-year-old girl in Belgorod region. Russian strikes on Ukraine killed at least five the same day.
Rosatom said its civilian vessel Yanina sank in the Black Sea after a Ukrainian drone attack and that the entire crew survived, Reuters reported. Rosatom chief Alexey Likhachev called the strike an act of maritime piracy, saying the container ship was carrying civilian goods in international waters, while Kyiv had said earlier that the attack was not intentional, according to Politika.
Ukraine's military struck a refinery in Volgograd and set warehouses of the online retailer Wildberries on fire, part of a campaign increasingly aimed at Russian oil infrastructure and logistics centres, FAZ reported; the rival retailer Ozon had to evacuate a warehouse. Wildberries founder and CEO Tatyana Kim addressed sellers in a video on Friday after two weeks of strikes, said foreign entrepreneurs had lost billions, called the attacks force majeure and described them as terrorist attacks.
Ukrainian drones struck Rosneft's Ryazan refinery on Wednesday, forcing one of Russia's largest plants offline for what sources told Reuters will be about two weeks. Overnight into Thursday drones burned three more Wildberries warehouses, one of them 1,400 kilometres from the border, and hit two tankers at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal near Novorossiysk. Oil prices rose after the Black Sea attacks, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Ukraine said it struck a major Rosneft refinery in Ryazan, and Ukrainian drones set a Wildberries warehouse in the same city ablaze on the morning of 29 July, with photos and videos showing a large fire and part of the building collapsed. Ukrainian drones also damaged an apartment building in Taganrog, killing one person, and in Tula a gunman tried to shoot the head of a Russian drone company in the stairwell of an apartment building, the regional branch of Russia's Investigative Committee reported.