Saratov region Governor Roman Busargin said the scale of the attack was “massive.” Schools in the cities of Saratov and Engels will hold classes online on Tuesday because of the attacks, he added.
Firefighters had only the day before managed to put out a blaze at an oil depot in the city of Engels, which was hit by a Ukrainian drone strike last week.
In the republic of Tatarstan, a drone struck a gas storage tank, sending flames and thick smoke billowing toward the sky near the city of Kazan, according to media and the regional government.
Local media said a liquefied gas storage base was hit and published images showing flames and black smoke.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down six U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles and six British Storm Shadow cruise missiles that Ukraine fired at the Bryansk border region.
Ukraine’s army had earlier claimed a “successful” missile hit on a chemical plant in the region that makes rocket fuel and explosives for the Russian military.
“Drones successfully distracted Russian air defenses, paving the way for missiles that hit the main targets,” the Ukrainian military’s Unmanned Systems Forces said, confirming a hit on a plant near the town of Seltso, more than 100 kilometers from the border.
Ukraine regularly targets military and energy sites in Russia, part of what it calls “fair” retaliation for Russia’s repeated barrages of its energy grid since Moscow invaded in February 2022.
“Each damaged ammunition depot, oil refinery, oil depot or chemical plant is a painful blow to Russia’s ability to wage war in Ukraine,” the SBU source said.
One Ukrainian blogger, who goes by the name of Nikolayevski Vanyok, said on Telegram that the overnight barrage on Russia was “probably one of the most effective” of the war, reaching places “that usually don’t get many strikes.”
Ukraine’s air force said separately that its air defense systems had downed 58 Iranian-designed drones launched by Russia, while another 21 were destroyed with electronic interference systems or crashed.
A Ukrainian official in the Kharkiv region meanwhile said on Tuesday morning that a 52-year-old resident of the town of Kozachya Lopan had been killed by Russian artillery fire.
The overnight Ukrainian attacks come at a difficult moment for Kyiv’s forces along the front line, particularly in the eastern Donetsk region.
City authorities in Pokrovsk, Russia’s main target in the region, repeated a call on Tuesday for remaining residents to flee the town, where around 60,000 people lived before Russia invaded in February 2022.
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