A man inspects an apartment building damaged in a deadly Ukrainian drone stike on Ramenskoye near Moscow’s Zhukovsky International Airport on Tuesday in what Russian officials said was the largest airborne attack of the war. Ukraine struck the capital again Friday but with a much smaller attack that caused no casualties. Photo by Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EPE.
March 14 (UPI) — Ukraine and Russia traded attacks overnight with at least a dozen people injured, four of them children, in Russian drone and artillery strikes on Ukraine’s northeast and Ukraine targeting Moscow for the second time in three days and a major Black Sea oil refinery in southern Russia.
Several explosions were heard in three districts of Kharkiv on Thursday night, after Russian attack drones targeted the city injuring two women, a man, and four children, and setting a house and a large industrial building ablaze.
A so-called “double-tap” drone strike on Zolochiv 24 miles, northwest of Kharkiv, sparked a fire in the town’s hospital, Kharkiv Province Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said on social media where he posted photos showing the roof of the facility consumed by flames.
“The enemy struck the hospital in Zolochiv at around midnight. The roof caught fire as a result of the drone strike. The enemy launched a second attack with two more drones 40 minutes later,” Syniehubov wrote.
“A 33-year-old woman, an employee of the emergency medical team, suffered an acute stress reaction.”
A 65-year-old man sustained blast injuries after Russian artillery opened fire on a village in the province’s Kupiansk district, 60 miles southeast of Kharkiv, damaging several houses, according to the prosecutor’s office for the region, which said in a social media post that it was investigating the attack as a war crime.
Further to the north in Sumy Province, three civilians were injured in Russian shelling of Khotin, just north of Sumy, the regional capital, one of almost 100 attacks on settlements in areas bordering Russia, the province’s military administration said in an update on its Telegram channel.
Meanwhile, explosions were reported in Moscow on Friday for the second time this week in a pre-dawn Ukrainian drone attack on the capital targeting the eastern and southern suburbs.
Regional Gov. Andrey Vorobyev said the city’s air defenses had successfully repelled the attack but damage was sustained from debris falling from destroyed UAVs, including to a high-rise building under construction in the Yuzhnaya Bitza neighborhood of south Moscow’s Leninsky district.
Ukrainian forces once again targeted Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, setting ablaze an oil refinery in Tuapse on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea in Krasnodar Territory, 70 miles up the coast from Sochi, in a surprise UAV raid.
Footage circulating on social media shows storage tanks on fire at the strategically key Rosnoft-owned facility, which refines products from the Tuapse Trough deepwater oil field, with local residents reported hearing at least 10 blasts in the early hours of Friday, prior to air raid warnings sounding.
Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratyev confirmed the attack on one of the largest refineries in Russia on social media, saying more than 120 firefighters with 39 engines were battling a 1,000 square-meter blaze from a storage tank but that there were no casualties.
Ukraine National Security and Defense Council Center for Countering Disinformation head Andriy Kovalenko said the refinery’s location made it a key export earner for the Russian economy and vital to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea operations.
“It is one of the largest in the Russian Federation and has a processing capacity of about 12 million tons of oil per year. The refinery specializes in primary oil processing, producing straight-run gasoline, diesel fuel and fuel oil, a significant part of which is exported,” he wrote on Telegram.
“For the Russian army, this plant is of strategic importance, as it provides fuel to the Black Sea Fleet and military infrastructure in the south of the country. It is part of the logistical supply chain of fuel for military equipment and aviation,” said Kovalenko.
Ukrainian forces targeted the same plant in late February and January 2024.
