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01-02-2025
MOSCOW: A Russian oil refinery in the southern Volgograd region caught fire after being hit by debris from a Ukrainian drone attack.
Regional Governor Andrei Bocharov confirmed the overnight attack, saying on Friday that the blaze was “promptly extinguished” and one injured worker was hospitalized.
The attack was Ukraine’s latest salvo in its campaign to destroy refineries, oil depots and industrial sites underpinning Russia’s war efforts.
Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, described the Volgograd refinery as one of the largest in Russia.
Earlier this week, Kyiv claimed to have struck and set on fire a Lukoil refinery in the Nizhny Novgorod region, east of Moscow. A drone attack last week forced a refinery in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, to suspend operations.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said on Friday that 49 Ukrainian drones had been downed overnight, including 25 in the southern Rostov region and eight in the Volgograd region.
Attack on Odesa
Overnight, Russia launched a volley of drones at Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, injuring four people in the city of Chornomorsk, according to regional Governor Oleh Kiper.
The attacks also partially disrupted electricity supplies in the city and damaged its hospital, administrative building, grain warehouse, a house and several trucks, he said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s air force said its defence systems shot down 59 of 102 Russian drones overnight.
The attack came one day after Russian drones killed nine people in a strike on a residential block in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy.
After the attack, Andriy Yermak, head of the presidential office, accused Russia of launching Shahed drones charged with shrapnel “to increase the number of civilian casualties”.
Trading accusations
On Friday, Russia’s Investigative Committee said it was probing the killing of 22 people between September and November in an occupied Russian village. It said the figure includes eight women who were allegedly raped before being killed.
Investigators said one of the Ukrainian soldiers allegedly responsible for the killings was arrested in the western region of Kursk, where Ukraine controls dozens of border towns since launching an offensive last year.
Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of killing civilians since the conflict began nearly three years ago, the latter claiming Moscow’s forces murdered hundreds of civilians in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.
Moscow rejected the allegations and accused Kyiv of staging the footage, a claim denied by several independent fact-checking organizations and media outlets.
Valentyna beams when she talks about her new vocation, a “witch of Bucha”.
That’s the unofficial moniker of almost 100 women aged 19 to 64 who are volunteers in part-time military service in air defence units in the suburban community northwest of Kyiv.
Each “Bucha witch” trains to handle assault rifles and machineguns to shoot down Russian drones that swarm above their homes several times a month.
The weapons fly towards Kyiv to blow up buildings, prompting Ukrainian air defence forces to launch pricey Western-supplied missiles at them. (Int’l News Desk)
