Ukrainian President Zelensky announced during a press conference that they were ordering pre-emptive strikes on Russian military facilities.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has ordered pre-emptive attacks on facilities used by Russia in its war, as Kiev expands its drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure in a bid to force Moscow into talks.“I have instructed our intelligence services and military to act preemptively against facilities that Russia is using to expand its war effort,” Zelensky said in his evening speech on Wednesday.
The directive comes as Ukrainian drones cut power in Sevastopol, the largest city in Russia-annexed Crimea, on Wednesday, with the Russia-appointed governor saying trolleybuses will not run and parents should keep their children at home as work continues to restore supplies.
Commander of the Ukrainian drone forces, Robert Provdi, said that drones struck the main substation of the Sevastopol power plant.
The Moscow oil refinery, the largest fuel supplier to the Russian capital, will be offline for at least six months after suffering severe damage in Ukrainian drone attacks, two oil industry sources told Reuters. The factory was bombed twice this month, forcing it to halt its operations. The attacks destroyed much of Russia’s oil refining capacity, leading to fuel shortages, rising prices and long queues at gas stations across the country’s 11 time zones.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that its air defenses shot down 323 drones overnight in areas across the country. In the central Nizhny Novgorod region, falling debris killed two people and damaged an industrial facility. Authorities in the Orenburg region, more than 1,000 kilometers southeast of Moscow, said drones were shot down over an industrial facility.Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Tuesday that Russia is considering imposing a ban on diesel exports, in the face of the fuel crisis.
Vedomosti newspaper reported that importing fuel is being considered to address the shortage, especially in Crimea, where gasoline sales to the public have been suspended. Russian lawmakers approved amendments to the tax code to allow the use of low-quality fuel in gasoline production and delay the modernization of some equipment at refineries.Three people were killed in the Russian-controlled Ukrainian city of Horlivka when the entrance to an apartment building collapsed after a drone attack overnight, Russia’s TASS agency said. In the Russian Belgorod region, a man was killed and a woman was injured in a drone attack, while Russian bombing killed a person in the city of Balakliya in eastern Ukraine, on Wednesday.