KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine on Sunday launched a wave of strikes against Russia’s oil export infrastructure, hitting a key loading port on the Baltic Sea and two tankers that Ukraine alleges were illegally used to transport Russian crude.
A nighttime drone strike sparked a blaze at Russia’s largest oil exporting port on the Baltic Sea, according to Russian regional Gov. Alexander Drozdenko.
The port of Primorsk, operated by Russia’s state oil firm Transneft, is capable of handling hundreds of thousands of barrels per day. The port, which was targeted multiple times in March, lies over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from Ukraine, between the Russian-Finnish border and Russia’s second-largest city of St. Petersburg.
Local Gov. Drozdenko said that the drone strike did not cause an oil spill, but gave no immediate further comment regarding casualties or damage.
Ukraine did not immediately comment on the attack on Primorsk.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that Ukrainian forces had hit two Russian tankers near the entrance of the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
“These tankers were actively used to transport oil. Now they won’t,” he said. He said the operation was led by the chief of Ukraine’s general staff, Andrii Hnatov.
Zelenskyy alleged that the tankers belonged to Russia’s so-called shadow oil fleet, used to evade Western sanctions and price caps on Russian energy exports. Moscow did not immediately acknowledge his claims.
Elsewhere, two people were killed and three others wounded as Russian drones struck Ukraine’s southern Odesa region overnight into Sunday, Ukraine’s Emergency Service reported. It said the attack damaged three residential buildings.
The drones also hit port infrastructure, causing a fire that was later extinguished by emergency teams, the emergency service reported.
Nighttime Russian strikes also wounded six people in the Dnipropetrovsk region in central Ukraine, the agency said. A passenger bus transporting 40 children was damaged, but no one inside was injured, it added.
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