Ukrainian drone strikes have killed at least three people and wounded two others overnight in western Russia, regional governors said, as a fire broke out at an oil refinery in central Russia after it was hit.
One woman was killed and two others wounded in an attack on an enterprise in Penza, the region’s governor, Oleg Melnichenko, wrote on Telegram on Saturday.
The second death of an elderly man happened inside a house that caught fire due to falling drone debris in the Samara region, Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev posted on Telegram.
In the Rostov region, a guard at an industrial facility was killed after a drone attack and a fire in one of the site’s buildings, acting Rostov Governor Yury Slyusar said. “The military repelled a massive air attack during the night,” destroying drones over seven districts, Slyusar posted on Telegram.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military said it struck Russia’s Ryazan oil refinery on Saturday, causing a fire on its territory.
In a statement on Telegram, the Unmanned Systems Forces also said they hit the Annanefteprodukt oil storage facility in the Voronezh region. The statement did not specify how the facilities were hit, but Ukraine’s military specialises in drone warfare, including long-range strikes.
Separately, Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said its drones had hit Russia’s Primorsko-Akhtarsk military airfield, which has been used to launch waves of long-range drones at targets in Ukraine.
The SBU said it also hit a factory in Penza that it said supplies Russia’s military-industrial complex with electronics.
At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine had no response to Moscow’s vast long-range strike capacity but it has since built up a fleet of long-range kamikaze drones able to carry explosive warheads for many hundreds of kilometres (miles).
Russia’s Defence Ministry said in its daily report that its defence units had downed a total of 338 Ukrainian drones overnight.
In Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, overnight Russian drone attacks also left three people wounded, Governor Serhiy Lysak wrote on Telegram. Several buildings, homes and cars were damaged, he added.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces captured the village of Oleksandro-Kalynove in the Donetsk region on Saturday. Russian forces now control almost 20 percent of Ukraine in its east and south after three and a half years of the grinding war.
Kyiv, however, denies any Russian presence in the Dnipropetrovsk area.
Reporting from Moscow, Al Jazeera’s Osama Bin Javaid said that while there have been indications of a ceasefire in the past, the situation on the ground remains the same.
“As tensions escalate, it appears that diplomacy will be a possible way out,” he said, adding that the United States’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkofff, who has close relations with Russian officials, is expected in Moscow soon to negotiate a truce.
US President Donald Trump on Friday said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “the appropriate regions” in response to remarks from former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev about the risk of war between the nuclear-armed adversaries.
The US has been trying to negotiate a truce but so far, Kyiv and Moscow have mainly engaged in prisoner exchanges.
On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said only Russia’s President Vladimir Putin could end the war and renewed his call for a meeting between the two leaders.
“Ukraine calls for moving beyond the exchange of statements and technical-level meetings to talks between leaders. The United States has proposed this. Ukraine has supported it,” he said on X.
“What is needed is Russia’s readiness,” he added.
Putin, who has consistently rejected calls for a ceasefire in the more than three-year conflict, said on Friday that he wanted peace but that his demands for ending Moscow’s military offensive were “unchanged”.
Those demands include that Ukraine abandon territory and end ambitions to join NATO.
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