May 31 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones struck targets across several Russian regions overnight, including an oil pipeline pumping station, a refinery and a fuel depot, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday, in an escalating campaign of strikes against energy infrastructure often hundreds of miles inside Russia.
Ukraine’s General Staff said it had struck the Saratov oil refinery on the Volga river, causing a large fire. Saratov regional governor Roman Busargin said on Telegram that “civil infrastructure” had been damaged in the strike, but gave no more details.
“During the night, our soldiers applied Ukraine’s long-range sanctions against an oil refinery in Saratov, Russia. This is about 700 km from the front line,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Not all the drones struck their targets. Russia’s Defence Ministry said it had downed 216 drones overnight.
MAJOR FIRE BURNING AFTER DRONE HITS FUEL DEPOT
Kyiv said it had also struck the Lazarevo pumping station in the Kirov region, northeast of Moscow and around 1,300 km (800 miles) from Ukrainian-held territory, which serves the Surgut-Gorky-Polotsk pipeline, shipping Russian oil from Siberia to Belarus.
Kirov regional governor Alexander Sokolov said drones had hit a facility in the region, but gave no further information.
In the Rostov region, which borders Ukraine’s Donbas, the focus of fighting in the more than four-year-old war, authorities in the town of Matveyev Kurgan said a major fire was burning after drones hit a fuel depot in the town, which adjoins the Russian-held part of Donetsk region. Ukraine confirmed the strike.
Governors in the Voronezh and Belgorod regions, both of which border Ukraine, also reported damage, with three civilians injured in Belgorod.
On the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula, Moscow-backed governor Sergei Aksyonov said authorities were introducing restrictions on sales of petrol.
He did not say why, but Ukraine has for months been attacking fuel infrastructure in southwestern Russia, close to Crimea.
ALLEGED STRIKE ON NUCLEAR PLANT
Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 229 drones overnight, 212 of which were downed over northern and eastern Ukraine.
Russia accused Ukraine of hitting a garage at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in occupied Ukrainian territory on Sunday. Ukraine’s foreign ministry denied the allegation, which followed a separate accusation of a strike on the plant yesterday, which Ukraine also denied.
The U.N.’s nuclear energy watchdog, which has inspectors at the Russian-occupied and administered plant, said on Sunday its team observed damage to a turbine building caused by drones on Saturday, but did not specify whose drones.
It said that radiation levels at the site remained normal.
(Reporting by Felix Light and Max Hunder; Editing by Kevin Liffey and David Holmes)
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