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Volgograd governor Andrei Bocharov says a fire temporarily broke out after a Ukrainian drone attack
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Ukraine has launched its second drone attack this week against oil refineries in Russia.
An oil refinery in Russia’s southern Volgograd region temporarily caught fire after an overnight Ukrainian drone attack, the regional governor said on Friday.
Andrei Bocharov, the governor, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that Russian air defences had repelled an attack on his region by eight drones.
“As a result of falling debris from one of the drones, a fire broke out on the territory of an oil refinery, which was promptly extinguished. One injured refinery worker was hospitalised,” he said.
Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, said on Telegram that the Volgograd oil refinery, which he described as one of Russia’s largest, had been struck.
Ukraine has carried out frequent air attacks on Russian refineries, oil depots and industrial sites in an attempt to cripple key infrastructure underpinning Russia’s war effort.
This week it claimed to have struck and set on fire a Lukoil refinery, Russia’s fourth largest, in the Nizhny Novgorod region, east of Moscow.
The fall of Pokrovsk opens up Russia’s army s in the east, potentially opening avenues for attacks in several directions
Ukrainian forces fighting around Velyka Novosilka claim its Russian takeover will amount to nothing more than a flag-raising exercise
Below, we have some of the latest pictures of civilian life in the besieged Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.
As it sits on logistical lines supplying the wider area, it has been the main objective of Russia’s offensive in the eastern Donetsk region for months.
Since the fall of the city of Avdiivka last February, Vladimir Putin’s troops have advanced around 30 miles to the southwestern outskirts of Pokrovsk. The area is heavily fortified.
Only 7,000 of the 60,000 civilians who lived there before the war remain.
A Russian drone attack in the central Ukrainian city of Cherkasy has blown a hole in a high-rise apartment block.
Ukraine’s state emergency service posted a picture of the damaged building on social media.
“Rescuers extinguished a fire in a high-rise building caused by falling debris from a Russian UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle),” they wrote.
“A balcony in one of the apartments was damaged. Fortunately, there were no injuries.”
Russian drones launched overnight caused damage in the northeastern Sumy region, the Odesa region in the south and the central Cherkasy region, local officials have said.
Oleh Kiper, the Odesa regional governor, said that four civilians, including a doctor, were injured in drone attacks targeting the city of Chornomorsk.
The strikes also partially disrupted electricity supplies in the city and damaged the city’s hospital, an administrative building, a grain warehouse, a residential house, and several trucks, he said on the Telegram app.
Regional officials in the central Cherkasy region said that drone debris damaged an apartment building.
The Kursk regional court accused Jerome Starkey of illegally crossing the border into Russia.
Ukraine’s air defences shot down 59 of 102 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack on Friday, the air force said.
It said that 37 drones were “lost”, referring to the use of electronic warfare to redirect them. Russian drones caused damage in the northeastern Sumy region, the Odesa region in the south and the central Cherkasy region, the air force said, without providing further details.
The father of a former British soldier allegedly captured by Russian troops fighting for Ukraine expressed fear that his son might be tortured in prison.
James Scott Rhys Anderson, 22, was taken prisoner in the Kursk area of Russia, state news agency RIA reported, citing a security source.
In a video posted on unofficial pro-war Russian Telegram channels, a young bearded man wearing military clothing with what appears to be his hands tied behind his back, says in English that he formerly served in the British army.
Father says he tried to stop his son James Scott Rhys Anderson from joining the Ukrainian forces
Russian forces are starting to encircle the strategically important eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after capturing a string of villages to its south, and Ukraine has halted production at its only coking coal mine nearby.
Pokrovsk is a road and rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and had a pre-war population of some 60,000 people. Most people have fled and only around 7,000 residents remain, according to a Ukrainian police statement in late January.
It lies on a key road used by the Ukrainian military to supply other embattled eastern outposts, including the towns of Chasiv Yar, which is consumed by heavy fighting, and Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region.
Moscow says it has annexed Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and sees taking control of Pokrovsk as an important stepping stone to incorporating the entire region into Russia.
Kyiv and the West reject Russia’s territorial claims as illegal and accuse Moscow of prosecuting a war of colonial conquest.
Control of the city, which the Russian media call “the gateway to Donetsk”, would allow Moscow to severely disrupt Ukrainian supply lines along the eastern front and boost its campaign to capture Chasiv Yar, which sits on higher ground offering potential control of a wider area.
An oil refinery in Russia’s southern Volgograd region caught fire after an overnight Ukrainian drone attack, but the blaze has now been put out, the regional governor said today.
Andrei Bocharov, the governor, said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that Russian air defences had repelled an attack on his region by eight drones.
“As a result of falling debris from one of the drones, a fire broke out on the territory of an oil refinery, which was promptly extinguished. One injured refinery worker was hospitalised,” he said.
Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement that 49 Ukrainian drones had been downed over the country overnight, including 25 drones in the southern Rostov region and eight in the Volgograd region.
Drones had also been detected and destroyed in the Kursk, Yaroslavl, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Krasnodar regions, it said.
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