AFP, Kyiv

Ukrainian drones yesterday struck an oil depot in southern Russia and a pumping station hundreds of kilometres from the front, Kyiv said, with Russian officials confirming strikes in the areas.

Kyiv has stepped up strikes on Moscow’s infrastructure in the fifth year of war, hitting targets as far as the Urals in recent weeks.

Its army said drones hit a “dispatch station of a major oil pipeline” in Russia’s Kirov region and an oil depot in the Rostov region, near occupied Ukraine.

It said the pipeline transported oil from Siberia to western Russia and Belarus.

The governor of the Kirov region, Alexander Sokolov, only said that Ukrainian drones had hit a “facility” and caused a fire, claiming no casualties and calling for calm.

In the town of Matveyev-Kurgan in the southern Rostov region, regularly hit by Kyiv, local officials introduced a state of emergency over a huge blaze at an oil depot hit by a drone.

The town’s head Dina Alborova said the fire spread over 3,600 square meters (39,000 square feet), publishing images of plumes of black smoke. She said residential houses and several shops were affected.

In Ukraine, authorities were clearing the aftermath of a Russian strike on a warehouse in Dnipro, belonging to popular postal company Nova Poshta.

Nova Poshta, a private courier company widely used in and outside Ukraine, said its Dnipro branch was hit by a drone and that “the building burned down completely”.

It added that no employees were injured.

“All these attacks must be stopped,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said online, posting images of the blaze.