Ukraine said it hit the Syzran refinery in Russia’s Volga region overnight, underlining that the two nations have not signed up to the energy truce claimed by US President Donald Trump.
Both Moscow and Kyiv welcomed a potential energy truce, but made it clear that there’s no agreement to stop attacks. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said a halt to strikes on energy infrastructure was a “good idea” without saying whether Russia would accept such a proposal. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country would “support de-escalation.”
“Russia hasn’t stopped striking our energy sector, conventional logistics and critical infrastructure. And our responses to them for this are tangible,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s president confirmed that the nation’s forces hit the oil refinery in Syzran, a drone production facility in Taganrog, a drone preparation and launch site in the Oryol region and targets in the Black Sea. As a result of the strike, a fire broke out at the site of the Syzran refinery, Ukraine’s General Staff said in a separate statement on Telegram, adding that a primary crude processing unit and the tank farm were hit.
Satellite images taken by NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System on Tuesday show a fresh heat anomaly at the refinery site, likely indicating a blaze. Russia’s largest oil producer Rosneft PJSC did not respond to a Bloomberg request for a comment.
Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, governor of the Samara region where the facility is located, said earlier on Tuesday that an unnamed industrial facility had been damaged in the drone attack overnight.
Trump on Monday blamed Ukraine’s strikes on Russian energy infrastructure for the surge in diesel prices and posted on social media that Moscow and Kyiv agreed to stop the mutual attacks. Zelenskyy later said no deal had been finalized, though he acknowledged a “strong US proposal for a mutual halt to strikes on critical infrastructure.”
Commenting on Trump’s energy-truce plan, Peskov said the security of Russian oil refineries and higher output of petroleum products alone “will not resolve global issues,” Interfax reported later Tuesday. The main issue is logistical, so the security of oil shipments across the world should be ensured and all sanctions on global producers lifted, he said.
Ukraine has been attacking Russia’s energy assets – from refineries and pipelines to oil-export terminals – to reduce the nation’s ability to process and export crude and curb the revenues that finance the Kremlin’s war.
Ukraine’s attacks reduced Russia’s oil-refining volumes to the lowest level in more than two decades, forcing the government in Moscow to impose temporary bans on most exports of gasoline and diesel. Before Kyiv’s flurry of attacks, the country was a major exporter of diesel, accounting for about 10% of global supplies.
Russia’s export restrictions due to the Ukrainian strikes have added pressure to a global diesel market that’s already squeezed by the war in the Middle East. Average prices of the fuel rose above $6 per gallon in the US for the first time last week.
Since late August, Russia has ramped up the frequency of its own air assaults on Ukraine, particularly its capital, using jet-powered drones that are harder to intercept, increasing the risk of civilian casualties and disrupting public services.
Ukraine previously said it struck the Syzran refinery, which is some 760 kilometers (470 miles) from Moscow, in August. The facility, which has a design capacity of around 170,000 barrels a day, is part of the so-called Samara group of refineries, built to provide oil products to the European part of Russia.
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