A drone attack at an oil and products depot on Friday set alight four large storage tanks containing hydrocarbons in the town of Klintsy, in Russia’s Bryansk region near Ukraine, according to a video released by a regional department of the country’s Emergency Situations Ministry.
The attack in Klintsy was the first major successful assault – widely believed to be organised by Ukraine but not officially confirmed by Kyiv – on Russian oil distribution infrastructure this year.
Regional governor Alexander Bogomaz has blamed the attack on a Ukrainian drone and said the local air defence had worked to try to neutralise.
“An airplane-style drone was brought down by the defence ministry using radio-electronic means. When the aerial target was destroyed, its munitions were dropped on the territory of the Klintsy oil depot,” Bogomaz wrote in his social messaging channel.
No one was hurt in the attack, according to the governor.
The ministry’s video showed firefighters working to control the fire to avoid it spreading to storage tanks nearby that had not been damaged in the attack.
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Regional authorities had not yet reported by Friday evening whether the blaze had been extinguished. A local social messaging channel in Klintsy posted new pictures of the scene around midday on Friday, showing a huge plume of black smoke continuing to rise from the site.
Russian state news agency Tass said the fire at the oil depot covered an area of around 1,000 square metres with other reports suggesting it was getting bigger.
St.Petersburg attempted attack
On Thursday, the Russian Defence Ministry said in a statement that it successfully shot down a drone near the country’s second largest city, St. Petersburg, where Russian President Vladimir Putin was born and spent years of his career.
St.Petersburg-based news outlet Fontanka said remains of the drone have been found near Petersburg Oil Terminal, a key regional oil and products export and import facility and part of a larger business empire, where current executive board chairmen of gas giant Gazprom and oil producer Gazprom Neft Alexei Miller and Alexander Dyukov worked in the second half of 1990s.
A Russian government official appointed to oversee the integration of occupied Ukraine’s eastern territories into Russia, Vladimir Rogov, said the drone that was shot down near St.Petersburg carried a 3-kilogramme explosive charge.
Earlier in January, journalist and blogger Dmytro Karpenko of Ukraine claimed on his social network channel that in the second half of last year, Russian defectors passed to Ukraine thousands of pages of design and technical documentation on dozens of reconnaissance and attack drones that Russia manufactures.
Authorities in Kyiv have repeatedly urged Ukraine’s manufacturers to step up efforts to design and produce mid- to long-range attack drones. One goal of such drones is to disrupt Russian fuel supplies to its military forces hundreds of kilometres away from the frontline, as Ukraine has been unable to obtain sufficient deliveries of long-range cruise missiles from the West.