The air defenses thwarted “an attempt by the Kiev regime to carry out a terrorist attack” and intercepted more than ten drones over the Slavyansk, Kushevsk and Seversky districts, Veniamin Kondratyev wrote in a Telegram post on Saturday morning. There were no reports of casualties, he added.
The Russian military intercepted a total of 68 unmanned aerial vehicles overnight, including two over the Crimean peninsula, the Defense Ministry reported Saturday morning.
An airstrike damaged a distillation column at the Slavyansk-on-Kuban oil refinery, Slavyansk district head Roman Sinyagovsky said. The attack sparked a fire that has since been extinguished, the official wrote in a Telegram post.
“There have been nine attacks in total on the tank farm and the distillation column. Thanks to the built-in protection system, the tank farm has not suffered damage.”
The region’s operations headquarters later reported that a fire had also been extinguished in a separation unit at the crude oil processing plant.
Eyewitnesses told the SHOT Telegram channel that Ukrainian kamikaze drones had attacked around 4 am. The explosions reportedly lasted more than 30 minutes while air defense and electronic warfare systems were activated.
The Slavyansk oil refinery in the Krasnodar region has already been attacked by kyiv forces. In March, it caught fire after a Ukrainian drone strike in which one person died of a suspected heart attack, local officials said.
Since January, Ukraine has launched a series of long-range drone attacks against Russian energy facilities, including oil depots and refineries.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has suggested that the attacks are aimed at impressing kyiv’s Western supporters and compensating for a lack of progress on the front line.
US Vice President Kamala Harris privately told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to refrain from attacking Russian oil refineries when they met on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in February, the Washington Post wrote early in this week.
The White House reportedly fears that attacks on refineries inside Russia could drive up global prices and provoke massive retaliation from Moscow.