Russia struck two Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones early Friday, killing two people, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the attacks were escalating. Ukraine hit back with drone strikes on Russia's Tula and Kursk regions, killing three people, while both sides continued targeting each other's economic infrastructure.
Russia attacked two Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones early on Friday, killing two people in an escalation of strikes President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as intensifying. Ukraine answered with its own drone attacks on Russia, killing two people in the Tula region overnight and one on Friday in the Kursk region, according to local officials.
More than four and a half years into the war, fighting on the front line has largely stalled. As a result, Moscow and Kyiv have increasingly struck logistics and other economic targets in recent weeks to try to damage each other's war effort.
Kyiv under jet-drone barrage
Russia has for two weeks been carrying out almost constant attacks with faster jet-powered drones that have killed a number of Kyiv residents and disrupted daily life in the capital. The attacks paused while U.S. peace negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Kyiv over the weekend, then resumed. According to Reuters: "Russia's escalation with jet-powered 'shaheds' is gradually becoming increasingly terrorist in nature," Zelenskiy said on X. Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war, which began with Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The two people killed in Kyiv were at one of the two petrol stations attacked, officials said, one of them hit by a double-tap strike. Friday's strikes followed what appeared to be the first attack on a Kyiv petrol station a day earlier. In recent months, Russia has hit some 300 petrol stations, mainly in or near Ukraine's frontline regions.
A further 12 people, including a 12-year-old boy, were injured in Kyiv on Friday, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. An attack on a Kyiv residential block injured eight people overnight. Zelenskiy said Russia had also hit a building used by mobile operator Kyivstar in Kyiv, with strikes reported in eight other Ukrainian regions; Kyivstar said its network kept operating. A woman was killed in the Kyiv region surrounding the capital, the regional governor said.
Ukraine strikes Russian refineries and logistics hubs
Ukraine has in turn attacked Russia's largest online retailers and oil refineries, often deep inside the country, along with energy and fuel logistics in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces had hit an enterprise and an oil industry facility in the Saratov and Volgograd regions, along with unnamed targets in other regions and the Black Sea.
Tula region governor Dmitry Milyayev said two people had been killed and three injured in Ukrainian drone attacks overnight. The Kursk region governor reported a 37-year-old man killed in a separate strike. Russian e-commerce company Ozon said a drone attack caused a fire at its logistics hub in Saratov, one of more than two dozen warehouses owned by Ozon and Wildberries hit in recent attacks, which Kyiv casts as part of a campaign against the economic infrastructure underpinning Russia's war effort. Ukraine's military said it had hit a Russian oil refinery in Saratov.
A missile attack in Volgograd injured two people and damaged two residential buildings and an industrial facility, local authorities said. The Volgograd oil refinery run by Lukoil sits on the outskirts of the city. In Russia's Perm region in the Ural Mountains, the governor said two industrial facilities had been struck by drones.
Source: Investing.com
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