Russia has again directed a missile and drone strike at Ukraine overnight, a pattern that has been repeated several times in the past week after a period of relative calm. The new wave of missiles, aimed mainly at Kyiv and Odessa, comes a day after Moscow accused Ukrainian forces of trying to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin with a drone attack on the Kremlin, something Kyiv denies. The matter caught the Ukrainian president, VolodÃmir Zelenski, in the middle of a trip to the Nordic countries, which includes a visit to The Hague.
While all the drones launched against the Ukrainian capital were shot down by the defense units, three of the 15 directed at Odessa, in the south of the country, hit a student residence without causing injuries. In total, Russia fired 24 Iranian-made Shahed 136/13 suicide drones from the northern Briansk region and the southern eastern coast of the Azov Sea, the Ukrainian Air Defense said. Fragments of the drones found in Odessa had written the message “for Moscow” and “for the Kremlin”, in reference to the alleged “terrorist attack” against Putin yesterday, according to reports by The Guardian journalist Peter Beaumont.
Russia has bombed Ukraine regularly since October last year, with the aim first of destroying the country’s energy infrastructure to leave the population without heat, but recently the attacks have been more directed against residential buildings. The latest explosions were reported less than 24 hours after Kyiv claimed 23 people were killed in a Russian attack in the city of Kherson targeting a supermarket, train station and residential buildings. Last week, 23 civilians also died in another bombardment against the city of Uman.
Separately, a drone strike set fire to product storage facilities at one of the largest oil refineries in southern Russia, but emergency services extinguished the fire just over two hours later and the plant was operating normally, it reported. the Russian news agency TASS.
The Ilsky refinery, near the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk in the Krasnodar region, has a processing capacity of about 6.6 million tons per year. A day earlier, a fuel depot further west caught fire near a bridge linking the Russian mainland to the occupied Crimean peninsula. “A second turbulent night for our emergency services,” Krasnodar Governor Veniamin Kondratyev wrote on Telegram. No casualties were reported.
Ukraine rarely takes responsibility for what Moscow says are frequent drone strikes against infrastructure and military targets, particularly in regions close to Russia.
Moscow blamed Ukraine for an attack on April 29 that set fire to an oil depot in Sevastopol. Kyiv’s military says undermining Russia’s logistics is part of preparations for a long-awaited counteroffensive.
