Russian firefighters are battling a three-day inferno in the southwest of the country, after a Ukrainian drone attack on an oil storage depot ignited the facility’s diesel reserves.
On Saturday Rostov Oblast Governor Vasily Golubev said that Russian air defense forces had repelled an attack by a Ukrainian UAV in the town of Proletarsk, located around 150 miles from the Ukrainian border.
A day later, however, Golubev said that fallen debris from the UAV had landed on the industrial warehouses at the Proletarsk state reserve fuel facility, igniting a fire which Russian authorities have since struggled to contain.
Golubev also claimed that, due to a “repeated UAV attack” on Sunday morning, firefighting at Proletarsk was temporarily suspended.
Ukraine has already claimed responsibility for the attack, with Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereschuck taking to Telegram to celebrate the damage wrought by the attack.
“This is how, step by step, the war enters the enemy’s territory. This is the Rostov region of the Russian Federation,” Vereschuck said on Monday.
Newsweek has contacted the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry for further information on the attack.
According to Russian state-run news agency Tass via Telegram on Monday, the fire is raging across an area of 10,000 square meters, and head of the Proletarsk district administration said that over 500 firefighters have been sent to deal with the blaze.
On Monday, Governor Golubev said that a state of emergency had been declared in the district, and that 41 firefighters had been taken to the Proletarsk central district hospital to seek treatment, 18 of whom were subsequently hospitalized, with five currently in intensive care.
According to Yaroslov Trofimov, a Ukrainian-born journalist and chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, the Proletarsk facility holds up to $200 million worth of fuel, based on a domestic wholesale price of around $500 per ton of diesel.
Since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has continued to strike industrial facilities and energy assets within Russia in the hopes of crippling its economy and military financing capabilities.
Areas near the Ukrainian border, such as Rostov, have been especially vulnerable to these sorts of strikes.
In mid-June, another Ukrainian drone attack on the Rostov Oblast ignited a fire, disrupting local power supplies and causing blackouts across parts of Morozovsk.
On August 3, Anton Gerashchenko, former adviser to the Ukrainian internal affairs minister, posted video on X showing what he claimed was the fallout from a Ukrainian drone attack on Rostov’s “Atlas Plant,” which he said “supplies the Russian army with petroleum products.”
However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has continued to ask for permission to use foreign-supplied weaponry on targets deeper within Russian territory, currently prohibited by U.S. and U.K. provisions attached to their shipments.
On Monday, Zelensky’s office said that this was “the one decision” that would halt the advance of the Russian army in Ukraine, and that, if these restrictions were lifted, “Ukraine would not need to physically enter the Kursk region to protect Ukrainian citizens in the border area and destroy Russia’s potential for aggression.”
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