Ukraine hits Crimea oil facility

AFP
Ukraine said Monday its forces had struck an oil terminal overnight on the Crimean peninsula — seized by Moscow in 2014 — in Kyiv’s latest attack on Russian-controlled energy facilities.
Kyiv has ramped up strikes targeting Russia’s energy sector in recent months aiming to dent revenues used by Moscow to fund its invasion, now grinding through its third year.
“At night, a successful strike was carried out on the enemy’s offshore oil terminal in temporarily occupied Feodosia, Crimea,” the Ukrainian military said in a post on social media.
Russian-installed authorities in Crimea said a fire had broken out at an oil depot in the Black Sea port town of some 70,000 people and that there were no casualties.
The Russian defense ministry meanwhile said that 12 Ukrainian attack drones had been downed over the peninsula overnight, of a total of 21 deployed by Kyiv.
“The Feodosia terminal is the largest in Crimea in terms of transshipment of oil products, which were used, among other things, to meet the needs of the Russian occupation army,” the Ukrainian military said, vowing to continue such attacks.
Ukraine insists the strikes are fair retaliation for Russian attacks on its own energy infrastructure that have plunged millions into darkness.
Separately, Ukrainian authorities said three civilians had been killed in overnight Russian attacks — two brothers aged 35 and 38 in the eastern region of Sumy and a 61-year-old woman in the southern Kherson region.
Russian forces launched several missiles and dozens of drones overnight at Ukraine, the air force in Kyiv said, with two missiles shot down over the capital and the third exploding near an airfield in the central Khmelnytskyi region.
Authorities in Kyiv said debris from the downed missiles had landed near a kindergarten.
Meantime, Anti-Kremlin activist Ildar Dadin, who was imprisoned in Russia for protesting against Vladimir Putin, was killed on the front line in Ukraine where he was fighting alongside Kyiv forces, his relatives and Russian media said Sunday.
“It is with deep regret that I must inform you that Ildar Dadin — call sign Gandhi — died yesterday in combat in the Kharkiv region” in northeast Ukraine, his friend and former Russian MP Ilia Ponomarev, who is living in exile, announced on Facebook.
He hailed Dadin as a “fearless and determined fighter” who had gone “to the front to fight Putinism.”
Dadin, 42, had fought alongside Ukrainian armed forces in a “Siberian battalion,” according to Ponomarev, and then in the “Freedom Legion of Russia,” a group claiming to be made up of Russians and responsible for several incursions into the country.
