A satellite near-infrared image shows smoke rising from oil storage tanks at Russia’s Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga, which was struck multiple times in Ukrainian attacks, in Ust-Luga, Russia March 29, 2026. Vantor/Handout via REUTERS
Ukraine Strikes Two Russian Refineries, Baltic Sea Port
April 18 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones struck a handful of Russia’s oil facilities overnight, including two oil refineries in the Samara region and a Baltic Sea port that exports petroleum products, Russian local governors and a Ukrainian army official said on Saturday.
Kyiv’s troops have in recent weeks stepped up
attacks on Russian oil depots and refineries
– key sources of revenue for Moscow’s war budget – sometimes targeting sites thousands of kilometers from Ukraine’s borders.
In the Leningrad region, which surrounds St Petersburg and borders Finland, Governor Alexander Drozdenko said a fire had been extinguished at the Vysotsk port, which houses a terminal operated by Lukoil LKOH.MM handling exports of fuel oil, naphtha, diesel and vacuum gas oil.
In a statement on the Telegram messaging app acknowledging the port attack, Ukraine’s drone forces commander, Robert Brovdi, said Ukrainian forces also attacked oil refineries in the cities of Novokuibyshevsk and Syzran in the Samara region. Both sites have been repeatedly struck in the course of
Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Make Russian Oil Great Again,” he wrote sarcastically.
Brovdi also criticized the U.S. decision to renew a waiver allowing countries to
buy sanctioned Russian oil
Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, the Samara region governor, said industrial targets came under strike. He did not name the facilities.
According to Brovdi, a series of recent strikes on Russia’s oil logistics at Primorsk, Ust-Luga, Sheskharis, Tuapse reduced total daily oil shipments by about 880,000 barrels. Reuters could not immediately verify the figure.
An oil depot in Russian-occupied Sevastopol in Crimea also came under attack on Saturday, Brovdi said.
Separately, authorities in the southern Krasnodar region said on Saturday that a fire at an oil depot in Tikhoretsk, and another at an oil terminal at the Black Sea port of Tuapse, which had burned since Thursday, have been extinguished.
Both fires, authorities have said, were caused by Ukrainian drone strikes.