MOSCOW—Ukraine pounded targets in Russia on Tuesday with dozens of drones and rockets in an attack that inflicted damage on a major oil refinery and sought to pierce the land borders of the world’s biggest nuclear power with armed proxies.
Russia and Ukraine have both used drones to strike critical infrastructure, military installations, and troop concentrations in their more than two-year war.
Russia said Ukrainian proxies had sought to cross the Russian border in at least seven attacks which Russian forces had repelled. The Russian-speaking Ukrainian proxies said they had breached the border, a claim denied by Russia.
In one of the biggest Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia to date, Russia said it had downed 25 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions including Moscow, Leningrad, Belgorod, Kursk, Bryansk, Tula, and Oryol. Many more drone attacks were reported.
Russian officials reported attacks on a slew of energy facilities, including a fire at Lukoil’s NORSI refinery and a drone destroyed on the outskirts of the town of Kirishi, home to Russia’s second largest oil refinery.
Gleb Nikitin, governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, posted a picture of a fire truck beside the NORSI refinery and said emergency services were working to put out a blaze there.
“A fuel and energy complex facility was attacked by unmanned aerial vehicles,” Mr. Nikitin said on Telegram.
Along with Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Iran, Russia has vast energy reserves but has, since oil was discovered in the wilds of Western Siberia in the 1960s, often relied on Western technology to exploit and refine its crude.
The Kremlin said the Russian military was doing everything necessary and that what it calls its military operation in Ukraine would continue.
Border Attack
Russia said its forces had repelled a series of attacks aimed at piercing the land border in the western Belgorod and Kursk regions after the shelling of civilian targets.
“Ukrainian terrorist formations, supported by tanks and armoured combat vehicles, attempted to invade the territory of the Russian Federation simultaneously,” the Russian defence ministry said.
At least two Ukraine-based armed groups said they had launched an incursion across Russia’s western border on Tuesday.
Russia denied that the groups, which Moscow casts as puppets of the Ukrainian military and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, had penetrated its territory, but said the border had come under attack in several places.
The TASS news agency cited the Federal Security Service (FSB) as saying Russian forces had killed 100 people and destroyed multiple armoured vehicles when fighting off attempted incursions.
Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine had fired eight RM-70 rockets and one Tochka-U missile at the Belgorod region.
