A Ukrainian drone attack ignited a fire at an oil pipeline hub in central Russia’s Tambov region, authorities said early Tuesday.
Governor Yevgeny Pervyshov confirmed that a blaze had broken out at “one of the enterprises in the Michurinsky district” without identifying the facility. He said no one was hurt in the attack.
The district is home to the state pipeline operator Transneft’s Nikolskoye linear production and dispatch station, a key transit node along the Druzhba oil pipeline, which supplies countries in Eastern and Central Europe.
The exiled news outlet Astra used eyewitness footage of the fire to identify the targeted facility in the Tambov region as the Nikolskoye station.
Nikolskoye receives, stores and transports crude oil and refined products, including diesel, gasoline, jet fuel and fuel oil. Its pumping capacity is estimated at 300,000 metric tons per day.
The attack comes after U.S. President Donald Trump announced an agreement with the Kremlin to increase Russian diesel exports to global markets in order to offset energy prices driven by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, three people were killed after a Russian drone struck near a highway that connects Kyiv to the Black Sea port of Odesa in the south, according to the prosecutor’s office.
More than 32,700 families in the Odesa region were left without electricity after an overnight Russian attack on three facilities of Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it struck four commercial cargo vessels, one of them bound for Odesa, alongside logistics hubs in the Volyn and Khmelnytskyi regions.
Reuters contributed reporting.
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