July 6 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s Omsk refinery, the country’s largest and located deep in Siberia, in what would be one of the longest-ranged Ukrainian strikes since the beginning of the war, Kyiv’s military said on Monday, with local Russian authorities also confirming a strike.
In a statement, Ukraine’s General Staff said that the strike had caused a fire at the Omsk refinery, which is located around 2,700 km (1,700 miles) from Ukrainian-held territory and close to Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.
Vitaly Khotsenko, governor of the Omsk region, said Ukraine had attacked the refinery and said that Russian air defences had destroyed most of the drones involved in the strike.
There were no casualties and emergency services were working at the scene, Khotsenko said in a post on the Russian messaging app MAX. It was not immediately clear how much damage the refinery had sustained.
Sources told Reuters that the Gazpromneft-owned Omsk refinery processed around 23 million metric tons last year, or around 460,000 barrels per day.
Ukraine has been escalating a campaign of strikes against Russian oil refineries, causing sometimes acute fuel shortages across the country’s 11 time zones.
Aside from Omsk, Ukraine’s military overnight hit Russia’s Ust-Luga and Vysotsk ports, which handle oil exports on the Baltic Sea, as well as targets in the Kaluga and Yaroslavl regions, local governors said.
In Crimea, which Russia seized and annexed from Ukraine in 2014, one woman was killed in a strike on the port of Kerch, Russian-installed authorities said. Sevastopol, the peninsula’s largest city, suffered a blackout, they said.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Felix Light and Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Alexandra Hudson, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Sharon Singleton)
