Ukrainian Drones Strike Russian Refineries, Ship; Russia Barrages Kyiv and Kherson

Ukrainian drones struck three oil refineries in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday. The refineries “process millions of tonnes of oil each year” and are located nearly 1,600km (994 miles) from Ukraine, Ukraine’s president said. The Russian online news outlet Astra reported Saturday that a Ukrainian drone set on fire an oil refinery in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan.

A sanctioned Russian container ship, the Yanina, sank in the Black Sea after being hit by Ukrainian drones, Zelenskyy said, listing the ship as among “facilities that sustain the war effort”. Russia’s state nuclear energy company, Rosatom, whose shipping subsidiary FESCO operates the vessel, claimed the ship was carrying “civilian goods” such as frozen food and construction materials.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Saturday that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant lost off-site power for nearly two hours – the 23rd time it has happened since the full-scale Russian invasion. The plant is illegally occupied by Russia and not operating, but needs power supplied from outside to power cooling systems that maintain the safety of its nuclear materials.

Ukraine’s campaign to cut off illegally occupied Crimea from Russia has led to people having to queue in the streets for hot meals due to power cuts, Reuters reports. It caught up with residents waiting in the town of Massandra for food being cooked in huge pots. Standing beside boiling vats of buckwheat, later to be added to plates of reheated tinned beef, Massandra town administration head Oksana Madyud said her workers were serving roughly 200 people per day, “as under the current circumstances not everyone has the means to cook hot food on electric hobs”. Ukraine says it is “bringing the war back home to Russia” by striking deep inside the country, as well as hitting territory the invader controls and has sought to populate with Russian immigrants.

One local woman, Marina, said a bad leg made the climb down from her 10th-floor apartment difficult, but the lack of electricity had sent her hunting for a gas cooker and some cylinders. Another older resident, Alexandra, said she had been lured down by the smell of the lunch after going without electricity for 10 days. “They turned it back on today, at 4 o’clock” in the afternoon, but she wasn’t sure the lights would still be on when she returned home, she added.

Lithuania’s foreign minister said on Saturday that its embassy in Kyiv was damaged when Russian missiles struck nearby. The Lithuanian foreign ministry said there were no injuries but embassy windows broke, solar collectors were damaged and the yard was scattered with debris. The minister, Kestutis Budrys, said: “Today we will summon the Russian embassy representative to protest. We understand this won’t stop this madness and aggression against Ukraine. What might stop it is continued support to Ukraine, raising its resilience and piling pressure on Russia through sanctions so it finally sits at the negotiation table.”

Recovery efforts continued in Kyiv after a Russian missile and drone barrage killed at least nine people and wounded 33 civilians over Friday night and into Saturday. A five-story residential building in the city’s Solomianskyi district was damaged and a fire broke out. Rescue workers evacuated 35 people from the upper floors of the building and two people died, with eight reported injured, including two children, according to Ukraine’s state emergency service.

In the Darnytskyi district of Kyiv, seven people were killed and another 14 injured after the attack caused fires and damage to houses, vehicles, an administrative and non-residential building, the emergency services said. Elsewhere, emergency workers extinguished a fire in a non-residential building in the capital’s Shevchenkivskyi district. There was no additional information about earlier reports by the district mayor that people were trapped in another residential building.

A Russian airstrike killed one person and wounded five more in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, local officials said on Saturday. Zelenskyy posted a further plea for Patriot missiles. “Every package of ballistic missile interceptors saves the lives of our people. And every night without them results in more casualties.” Due to the air defence shortages, Ukraine was only able to shoot down one out of the 27 ballistic missiles in Friday night’s barrage, Zelenskyy said.