Ukraine's latest wave of drone strikes spark fires in two Russian regions as oil refinery goes up in blaze

News.com.au

8 hours ago

Shocking images are emerging after Ukraine fired dozens of drones at Russia today, wounding three people and sparking fires in two separate regions, including at an oil refinery.
Videos posted on Russian social media purported to show a large fire at an oil refinery in the southern city of Volgograd, about 470 kilometres from the front line.
'The debris from the attack caused oil products to spill and catch fire at the Volgograd oil refinery,' Volgograd region governor Andrei Bocharov said in a statement on Telegram.
The governor of Russia's Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said a Ukrainian drone struck a car in the centre of the region's capital, setting it alight and wounding three people.
He posted a video showing the car in flames and debris scattered across the street.
'Emergency services are working at the scene,' he wrote on Telegram.
Ukraine did not immediately comment on the reported attacks. Since Russia launched its full-scale military assault on Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv has responded with drone strikes on Russian infrastructure hundreds of kilometres from its border.
Kyiv calls the strikes fair retaliation for Moscow's daily missile and drone barrages on its own civilians.
The Russian defence ministry said it had intercepted 44 Ukrainian drones between late Wednesday and early Thursday, including seven over Crimea, the peninsula that it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
The attacks came on the eve of a crunch summit in Alaska between US President Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin, the first between a sitting US and Russian president since 2021 as the White House pushes for an end to the three-and-a-half year conflict.
Pressure mounts as summit looms
Pressure is mounting ahead of a landmark summit in Alaska between the United States and Russia, as Donald Trump warned that Vladimir Putin had only one chance but Moscow pressed ahead with major battlefield gains in Ukraine.
Putin and Trump will meet Friday at an air base in the far-northern US state, the first time the Russian leader has been permitted on Western soil since his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine which has killed tens of thousands of people.
With such high stakes, all sides were pushing hard in the hours before the meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has refused to surrender territory to Russia, spoke by telephone Wednesday with Trump, as did European leaders who voiced confidence afterward that the US leader would seek a ceasefire rather than concessions by Kyiv.
Trump himself sent mixed messages, saying that he could quickly organise a three-way summit afterward with both Zelensky and Putin but also warning of his impatience with Putin.
'There may be no second meeting because, if I feel that it's not appropriate to have it because I didn't get the answers that we have to have, then we are not going to have a second meeting,' Trump told reporters.
Russia, Trump said, would face 'severe consequences' if it does not halt its offensive.
But Trump said: 'If the first one goes okay, we'll have a quick second one,' involving both Putin and Zelensky.
Putin pitched the meeting after Trump threatened sanctions on Russia. Trump has already ramped up tariffs on India, which has become a key buyer of Russian energy.
Zelensky, after being berated by Trump at a February meeting in the White House, has publicly supported US diplomacy but made clear his deep skepticism.
'I have told my colleagues -- the US president and our European friends -- that Putin definitely does not want peace,' Zelensky said.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who welcomed Zelensky in Berlin, said Ukraine is ready to negotiate 'on territorial issues' but stressed that legal recognition of Russian occupations 'would not be up for debate.'