Ukraine hits Russian oil facilities, military airfield

Ukraine’s military said on Saturday that it had struck oil facilities inside Russia, including a major refinery as well as a military airfield for drones and an electronics factory.

In a statement on Telegram, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said they had hit the oil refinery in Ryazan, about 180 km southeast of Moscow, causing a fire on its premises.

Also hit, the USF said, was the Annanefteprodukt oil storage facility in the Voronezh region that borders on northeastern Ukraine.

The statement did not specify how the facilities were hit, but the USF specialises in drone warfare, including long-range strikes.

There was no immediate comment from Russia on the reported attacks on its infrastructure sites.

Separately, Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said its drones had hit Russia’s Primorsko-Akhtarsk military airfield, which has been used to launch waves of long-range drones at targets in Ukraine.

The SBU said it also hit a factory in Penza that it said supplies Russia’s military-industrial complex with electronics.

At the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine had no response to Moscow’s vast long-range strike capacity but it has since built up a fleet of long-range kamikaze drones able to carry explosive warheads for many hundreds of kilometres.

Russia’s defence ministry said in its daily report that its defence units had downed a total of 338 Ukrainian drones overnight. Its reports do not say how many Ukrainian drones were launched at any given time.

For its part, Ukraine’s air force said it had downed 45 of 53 Russian drones launched towards its territory overnight.

On Ukraine’s eastern battlefront, Russia’s defence ministry said, Russian forces had captured the village of Oleksandro-Kalynove in the Donetsk region on Saturday.

Reuters could not immediately verify the battlefield report.

Russian forces now control almost 20% of Ukraine in its east and south after three-and-a-half years of grinding war.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities said that they had arrested several politicians in connection with a “large-scale corruption scheme” in the defence sector, shortly after an uproar over the independence of anti-graft bodies.

A law passed at the end of July stripped the National Anti-Corruption Agency (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP) of their independence and placed them under the supervision of the Prosecutor General, himself appointed by the head of state.

President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday backtracked and restored the bodies’ independence following an outcry from the country’s allies and the first anti-government street demonstrations since the Russian invasion in 2022.

The NABU said on Saturday that it and the SAP had exposed “a scheme for the systematic misappropriation of budget funds allocated by local authorities for the needs of the defence forces, as well as the receipt and provision of unlawful benefits on an especially large scale.”

It said the scheme involved inflating prices for electronic warfare and drone equipment, and then funnelling off 30 per cent of the contract amounts.

The suspects include a member of parliament, heads of district and city administrations, members of the National Guard, and executives at defence companies.

The NABU said it has made four arrests so far but did not identify those detained.

The interior ministry said it had suspended the suspected members of the National Guard.

Zelensky said in a statement: “I am grateful to the anti-corruption agencies for their work.

“It is important that anti-corruption institutions operate independently, and the law passed on Thursday guarantees them all the tools necessary for a real fight against corruption.”

The president initially said he needed to bring the NABU and the SAP under his control because they were inefficient and under “Russian influence.”

But he did an about-face when confronted with the outcry - first serious political crisis since he took office six years ago.

Several cases of corruption - an endemic problem in the country - have been exposed within the armed forces and the defence ministry during the war with Russia.

Agencies