Ukraine says struck more oil facilities in western Russia
Ukraine on Monday stepped up its bombing campaign of Russian energy sites with aerial attacks on two oil facilities in the west of the country, Kyiv's military said.
Ukraine and Russia have both targeted each others' energy facilities and military infrastructure in almost nightly drone or missile attacks.
The strikes launched by Ukraine have escalated over recent months, with Kyiv saying they are aimed at interrupting Russian military logistics or denting oil revenues that Moscow uses to fund its war effort.
The General Staff said in a statement that special forces and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) had hit an oil refinery in the Volgograd region and another processing plant in the nearby Astrakhan region.
A source in the SBU told AFP the attack had been carried out with drones, adding this was the fifth such strike since the beginning of the year.
"Both these strategic facilities produce large quantities of fuel for the Russian occupation army," the General Staff said in its statement, vowing further such attacks.
Regional governors in both Volgograd and Astrakhan earlier confirmed that Ukrainian drone attacks had sparked fires on oil and energy sites.
The Russian defense ministry said its air defense systems had shot down or disabled 70 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles, including 25 over Volgograd region and seven over Astrakhan.
Russia has also been attacking Ukraine with drones and Kyiv's air force said Monday it had downed 38 Russian drones over several regions.
The national grid operator meanwhile said there were electricity outages in nine regions following Russian overnight attacks on power facilities and transmission networks.
The overnight attacks come at a critical time for Ukraine on the battlefield, where Russian forces have been steadily gaining ground across the sprawling front line.
Russian forces advanced 430 square kilometers (166 square miles) in January alone, according to an AFP analysis of data from the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
The governor of the industrial Donetsk region, where the Kremlin has focused its military efforts, meanwhile said that the bodies of six killed civilians had been discovered on Monday, without specifying when the deaths had occurred.
Source: Agence France Presse
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