Ukraine fends off more than 40 attacks from Russian forces as drone strike sparks massive fire at Crimea oil reservoir
Ukraine repelled more than 40 attacks by Russian forces on Saturday, with the most intense fighting around the Bakhmut and Marinka fronts, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Russia barraged Ukrainian troops and settlements with “1x missile and 29x air strikes,” in addition to a dozen attacks from rocket salvo systems, the General Staff wrote on Facebook.
Ukrainian civilians were killed and injured in the onslaught, though the report did not specify how many.
Russia’s main effort is continuing to focus on offensives in the Limansky, Bakhmutsky, Avdiiv, Maryinsky and Shakhtar regions, while the heaviest fighting continues to center around Marinka and Bakhmut, which are in the eastern part of the besieged nation, the report noted.
Also Saturday, Russian shelling killed one man and injured a woman in the area of the Bilozerka village, in Kherson province, according to the Kherson prosecutor’s office.
Since the invasion began in February 2022, more than 190,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said.
The attacks came the same day that a Ukrainian drone hit a fuel storage facility in Crimea, sparking a massive fire, according to a local Russian-appointed official.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of the port city of Sevastopol, posted videos and photos to his Telegram channel of the intense waterfront blaze, with a thick column of black smoke billowing into the sky.
Razvozhayev said the fire had been deemed the highest ranking in terms of difficulty to control the blaze.
He later wrote on Telegram though that the fire had been completely put out. A single drone managed to cause the enormous fire, according to Razvozhayev, although he had initially claimed Saturday’s destruction was the result of “two enemy drones.”
Experts on the scene determined that only one drone had reached the facility, while the wreckage of a second was found on the shore near the terminal.
A third drone was shot down from the sky, while a fourth was taken out through radio-electronic measures, according to Crimea’s Moscow-backed governor, Sergei Aksyonov.
Andriy Yusov, a Ukrainian military intelligence official, said that more than 10 oil tanks intended for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet had been destroyed in Sevastopol, RBC Ukraine reported.
Yusov, however, did not claim that Ukraine was responsible for Saturday’s explosion, instead calling the eruption “God’s punishment” for Russia’s missile and drone strikes Friday across multiple Ukrainian cities.
Those attacks killed at least 25 people, six of whom were children.
Razvozhayev said no one had been injured by the fire and the attack would not affect fuel supplies in Sevastopol.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world considered illegal. Sevastopol repeatedly has been the target of air attacks since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia-backed authorities who control Novaya Kakhovka in southern Ukraine meanwhile claimed that Ukrainian forces have been bombarding the city with “intense artillery fire,” cutting off their electricity.
“Novaya Kakhovka and settlements around the district are under very intense artillery fire from the armed forces of Ukraine,” the city’s Russian-appointed leaders said on Telegram, noting that the onslaught had left the city “without power.”
Novaya Kakhovka, which is located in the Kherson region, was captured by Russian forces on the first day of the invasion, in February 2022.
Authorities urged residents “to keep calm” and said that they would begin working to restore power “after the shelling ends.”
Ukrainian forces also had managed to cut off power to five Russian villages in the southwestern Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, according to its governor.
With Post wires
