Ukrainian attack triggers fire at Russian oil terminal

Officials in Russia’s Krasnodar region said a drone attack in Ukraine sparked a fire at another Russian oil terminal, in what appeared to be the latest attack on Moscow’s vital oil industry.

Officials in the city of Novorossiysk said crashed drone debris caused a fire at an oil terminal and injured two people, without naming the facility.

Russia’s Astra news outlet reported that Ukrainian drones hit the Sheskharis oil terminal and warehouse, the terminal for Russian state-controlled pipeline company Transneft’s main oil pipelines in the region.

In the images published by Astra, smoke was seen rising above the oil terminal, but these could not be confirmed.

Ukraine did not immediately comment on the attack.

Ukraine has expanded its medium and long-range attack capabilities using domestically developed unmanned aerial vehicle and missile technology against Russia’s four-year-long occupation.

Attacks on Russian oil assets, which played a key role in financing the occupation, became almost daily events.

Meanwhile, officials in Moscow said the death toll in a Ukrainian drone attack on a university dormitory building in Starobilsk, a city in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Luhansk region, by Friday had risen to 11.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday condemned the attack on the homeland as a “crime” and ordered the military to submit proposals for retaliation.

He said there were no military or law enforcement near the university.

At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on the strike at the request of Russia, Ukrainian Ambassador Melnyk Andrii rejected his Russian counterpart’s accusations of war crimes, calling them “purely a propaganda show” and asserting that the May 22 operations “exclusively targeted the Russian war machine.”