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Ukraine struck two Russian oil refineries hundreds of kilometres from the border in an overnight attack, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday, as Russia hit a train station and commercial ship in Ukraine.
Both sides have been intensifying their long-range attacks in recent months, leading to a jump in civilian deaths.
Kyiv has been firing record numbers of drones at Russia, while Moscow has been launching all-time high missile attacks.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had hit oil refineries in the Bashkortostan and Yaroslavl regions, about 700 kilometres from the front.
The attacks were “strengthening the prospects for diplomacy,” Zelenskyy said.
“Russia must choose peace,” he added, posting a video from Russian social media of black smoke rising above an oil facility.
Russia’s defence ministry said earlier it had downed 605 Ukrainian drones in the night.
The governor of the Yaroslavl region, north of Moscow where Zelenskyy said a refinery had been hit, said 92 drones had been downed there in what he called the “most massive” attack on the region of the war.
In the Tver region, also north of Moscow, a drone hit a logistics centre belonging to Wildberries, the Russian e-commerce giant that has been heavily targeted over the past month.
Russian missile attacks on Kyiv a day earlier had killed at least 17 people and destroyed warehouses belonging to a number of retailers in what was widely seen as a direct response to Ukraine’s campaign targeting Wildberries, widely dubbed “Russia’s Amazon.”
Kyiv was unable to down any of the missiles Russia fired, prompting urgent calls from Zelenskyy for air defence supplies.
Fresh Russian attacks overnight killed two people at the Lozova train station in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
A commercial vessel carrying Ukrainian wheat was also hit in the Black Sea by Russia, killing one person, the Odesa region governor said.
More than four years after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, diplomacy is at a standstill and the two countries are ramping up long-range strikes, causing a growing number of civilian casualties.
Additional sources • AFP