Ukraine has kept up its attacks on Russian oil export and production infrastructure, hitting facilities in two regions, while widespread Russian drone attacks on Ukraine killed at least one civilian overnight and fighting persisted at the front, officials said.
The August 5 attacks came at a time when US-led negotiations to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has now passed the 1,500-day mark, have been stalled amid the US-Israeli war with Iran.
Ukrainian drones struck Primorsk, a key Russian oil export hub on the Baltic Sea, and the NORSI oil refinery in the Nizhny Novgorod region, near the Volga River east of Moscow, Ukrainian drone forces commander Robert Brovdi said.
Leningrad region Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko initially said a pipeline at Primorsk was damaged but retracted that in a subsequent Telegram post and said a fuel reservoir in the port area was damaged by shrapnel.
A fire broke out at NORSI, Russia’s fourth-largest oil refinery, after two facilities there were hit during a drone attack, the Nizhny Novgorod region’s governor, Gleg Nikitin, said on Telegram.
Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks on Russian oil facilities in recent weeks, curtailing exports and hampering Moscow’s capacity to take advantage of a spike in global energy prices prompted by the Iran war and Tehran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Primorsk was also hit on March 23.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on April 5 that air defense systems had downed five guided bombs and 293 Ukrainian drones in the previous 24 hours.
The Ukrainian Air Force said Ukrainian defenses had neutralized 76 Russian attack drones fired since the previous evening, and that 17 others had hit at 10 different locations, while fragments of downed drones struck three locations.
One person was killed and a 60-year-old woman was badly wounded in a drone attack in Nikopol, a city in the Dnipropetrovsk region, regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said on Telegram. Authorities said five people were killed in a drone strike on a market in Nikopol on April 4.
An apartment building and other civilian infrastructure was damaged in the southern Odesa region, a frequent target of Russian attacks, and the Poltava region was also among those hit.
Fighting continued on several sections of the front in eastern and southern Ukraine, with Russian forces mounting dozens of attacks, the Ukrainian military said.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, eight years after seizing control of the Crimean Peninsula and fomenting war in the Donbas, which comprises the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine.
Russia now occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory and is demanding Kyiv cede the portion of the Donetsk region that Moscow’s forces have failed to capture in years of heavy fighting.
Control over the Donbas is one of the main sticking points in US-brokered efforts to end the war.
Several rounds of US-Ukraine-Russia talks have taken place over the last several months, but no trilateral or bilateral Ukraine-Russia meetings have been held since before the Iran war began on February 28.
