Russia hit the Black Sea port of Odesa on Friday in a deadly missile attack, hours after Ukrainian drones targeted a small petrochemical plant near the Moscow region without causing serious damage, the latest in a series of attacks on Russia’s oil industry.
The strikes on the city in southern Ukraine killed 14 people and injured at least 46 on Friday morning, regional Governor Oleg Kiper said. Among those who died when a second missile hit were a rescue worker and a doctor who’d arrived to help people injured in an earlier explosion, he said.
In the past weeks, Russia has stepped up attacks on Odesa, a key port for grain and commodity exports, hitting it almost daily with drones or missiles.
Ukraine has unleashed a flurry of attacks on Russia’s oil processing facilities this week, ahead of elections that will hand Vladimir Putin a fifth presidential term. Officials in Kyiv have said the intent is to damage a key industry that provides revenue for Russia’s war and to disrupt domestic fuel supplies.
Four Ukrainian drones were downed in the Dzerzhinsk district of Russia’s Kaluga region overnight, according to local governor Vladislav Shapsha. Russia’s air defense forces shot one of them, while the other three were downed by the electronic warfare system, he said. Kaluga borders the Moscow region to the southwest.
“Two of them fell on the territory of a plant, and one exploded above it, without causing serious damage to it,” the governor said in a Telegram post. “The facility continues to operate.”
In an earlier post, he said there were no casualties.
The Perviy Zavod facility, located in the Dzerzhinsk district of the Kaluga region, has an annual processing capacity of 1.2 million tons, or about 24,000 barrels a day, according to its website. There were no official statements on any damage at the facility, and the plant didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The drones were targeting a refinery in that region, according to a Ukrainian military intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Two years after the invasion of Ukraine, many in Russia have reason to feel the wartime economy is working well — just as Putin is about to win a fifth term
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