Ukrainian drones spark fire at Sochi oil depot

RTÉ News​

2 days ago

An overnight Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire at an oil depot in Sochi, the Russian resort that hosted the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, around 400km from the Ukrainian border, authorities have said.
Ukraine has regularly hit Russian oil and gas infrastructure in response to attacks on its own territory since Russia began its offensive in February 2022.
"Sochi suffered a drone attack by the Kyiv regime last night," the governor of Russia's Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratiev, said on Telegram.
He said drone wreckage hit an "oil tank, which caused a fire".
Sochi's mayor, Andrei Proshunin, said there were no victims and that "the situation is totally under control", adding that firefighters were continuing to extinguish the blaze.
Images, broadcast by Russian media but whose authenticity AFP could not verify, showed flames and a thick plumes of black smoke rising from the site.
Air traffic was briefly suspended at Sochi airport but resumed shortly afterward, Russia's air transport regulator Rosaviatsia said.
Ukraine authorities had not commented on the fire.
Air strikes on Sochi are relatively rare compared to some other Russian cities.
However, Ukrainian drone attacks killed two people there late last month, according to local authorities.
Russian strikes
Ukraine has said it will intensify its air strikes against Russia in response to an increase in Russian attacks on its territory in recent weeks, which have killed dozens of civilians.
The Russian defence ministry said meanwhile that three Ukrainian drones had been intercepted in the Leningrad region, which includes the Baltic seaport of Saint Petersburg.
Overnight strikes by Russia inside Ukraine's south and north also left several people injured, authorities said.
One missile wounded seven people in a residential district of Mykolaiv, a city near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.
Three other people were injured in the northeastern Kharkiv region, she added, while local authorities also reported injuries in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south.
"The Russians continue to wage war not against Ukrainian forces, but against Ukrainian civilians," Svyrydenko said.
Last week, US President Donald Trump gave his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin a ten-day ultimatum, until next Friday, to end the conflict in Ukraine.
The air strikes and fighting have not abated, however, and the Kremlin has rejected the idea of a lasting ceasefire in Ukraine, which it sees as a gift to Kyiv's troops.
Ukraine uncovers major drone procurement corruption scheme
Separately, Ukraine's anti-corruption bodies said last night they had uncovered a major graft scheme that procured military drones and signal jamming systems at inflated prices, two days after the agencies' independence was restored following major protests.
The independence of Ukraine's anti-graft investigators and prosecutors, NABU and SAPO, was reinstated by parliament on Thursday after a move to take it away resulted in the country's biggest demonstrations since Russia's invasion in 2022.
In a statement published by both agencies on social media, NABU and SAPO said they had caught a sitting lawmaker, two local officials and an unspecified number of national guard personnel taking bribes. None of them were identified in the statement.
"The essence of the scheme was to conclude state contracts with supplier companies at deliberately inflated prices," it said, adding that the offenders had received kickbacks of up to 30% of a contract's cost. Four people had been arrested.
"There can only be zero tolerance for corruption, clear teamwork to expose corruption and, as a result, a just sentence," Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram.