Ukrainian drones struck Russia's largest oil refinery in Omsk, deep in Siberia, on Monday in what would be one of Ukraine's longest-range attacksof the war, Kyiv's military said on Monday. Local Russian authorities confirmed the strike.
In a statement, Ukraine's General Staff said that the strike had caused a fire at the Omsk refinery, located around 2,700km (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.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking in his nightly video address, described the attack as "an important achievement for the Armed Forces of Ukraine...Siberia, too, is now within reach of Ukrainian precision strikes."
The Ukrainian defence technology company Fire Point said its upgraded FP-1 drones carried out the attack and described it as a record for strike drones "not only in Ukraine, but worldwide. Prior to this, the Omsk oil refinery had remained out of reach for Ukrainian drones."
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"The Omsk refinery had remained one of only two refineries in the top 10 that had never been hit by Ukrainian drones," Fire Point CEO Iryna Terekh said in a statement.
"The other is the Angarsk Petrochemical Company in Irkutsk Oblast. Both are beyond the Urals. It was counted on to balance out the fuel crisis after the successful campaign by Ukraine’s Defense Forces."
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, at times causing 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.
