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Ukrainian forces carried out a drone strike on an oil refinery in the Russian city of Omsk on Monday, hitting the country’s most important fuel production site more than 2,500km from the Russia-Ukraine border.
The Omsk Oil Refinery is Russia’s largest, with a design capacity of around 22 million tonnes of crude oil per year. It produces gasoline, diesel, aviation kerosene and other petroleum products, including fuel used by the Russian military.
The facility had previously been considered beyond the reach of Kyiv’s deep‑strike campaign, but according to Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces, Monday’s attack damaged critical plant equipment, in particular the primary oil refining unit, described as the refinery’s most vital component.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said a fire broke out at the site after the drone strike, and footage posted online appeared to show a powerful column of fire and smoke rising from the refinery.
Ukrainian officials said Omsk was “the last of the 11 largest petrol producers in the Russian Federation” to be hit by Ukrainian forces, underscoring the scale of Kyiv’s campaign against Russia’s refining sector.
Before 6 July, Omsk was one of only two facilities among Russia’s ten largest refineries that had not been targeted by Ukrainian drones. The other is the Angarsk Petrochemical Company in the Irkutsk region.
Representatives of Gazprom Neft, which owns the Omsk refinery, have not yet commented on the incident, and there has been no official statement from the plant itself.