July 1 (Reuters) – Russia attacked five retail fuel stations in Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region overnight, killing a woman, regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday.
Three other women, one of them pregnant, were injured in the strikes, Hanzha said, adding that equipment had been damaged at all of them and the attacks had caused fires.
In the past 24 hours, Russia also hit four stations in the northern Chernihiv region, regional governor Viacheslav Chaus said.
Russia has been striking fuel stations, but the drone attacks have intensified recently, with Ukrainian authorities in frontline Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions reporting nearly daily attacks.
Serhiy Beskrestnov, an adviser to the defence minister, said on Sunday that Russia aimed to “destroy all our frontline filling stations” in response to Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s logistics.
“Civilian filling stations have absolutely no impact on military fuel supplies, therefore, the aim of the attacks is to terrorise the civilian population,” he said on Telegram.
Although Moscow’s forces are slowly moving westward through Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials say the advance has slowed considerably while Ukraine steps up its campaign of medium- and long-range drone strikes.
In Russia, intensifying Ukrainian strikes on energy infrastructure have triggered fuel restrictions across much of the country, with particularly severe curbs imposed in much of southern Russia and Siberia, as well as all of Russian-occupied Ukraine.
In the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, a separate drone attack early on Wednesday on a passenger bus killed two people and left another nine wounded, officials said.
“The operator of the enemy drone could clearly see that there was a civilian transport in front of him, with people going about their business,” regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on Telegram.
(Reporting by Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo and Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk; Editing by Tom Hogue, Michael Perry and Sharon Singleton)
Comments