June 8 (Reuters) – A Ukrainian drone struck a train in Crimea, killing its assistant driver and injuring the driver, the peninsula’s Russian-installed governor Sergei Aksyonov said in a Telegram post early on Monday.
Passengers on the train, commuting between Moscow and Simferopol, the main city of the Russia-annexed Black Sea Crimea peninsula, were not harmed, Aksyonov added. The train connection in Crimea was suspended, Interfax news agency reported.
Russia seized and annexed Crimea in 2014 – long before its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine – after public protests in Kyiv prompted a Moscow-friendly president to flee Ukraine. Crimea is a popular destination for Russian tourists.
Drone raid sirens were sounded in the early hours of Monday in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, a major export hub for oil and grains in Russia’s Krasnodar region about a two-hour drive from the bridge Moscow built to connect to Crimea, local authorities said on Telegram.
The most recent Ukrainian drone strikes, attacking fuel infrastructure, have forced the Russian-controlled Crimea to tighten its rationing of fuel supplies.
In the Crimean port of Sevastopol, the peninsula’s second-largest city where the Russian Black Sea fleet is stationed, the local Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram that fuel rationing would continue.
“The number of (electronic) codes issued for (fuel refill at) the gas stations for tomorrow was bigger than yesterday. Those were gone in just a few dozen seconds,” he said on Monday.
“Those who received a code today will not be able to get the new one for the next seven days.”
Reuters could not independently verify all the reports.
(Reporting by Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo; Editing by Sonali Paul and Jacqueline Wong)
