Russian officials said the fire broke out at a terminal in Russia’s Black Sea port of Tuapse after a Ukrainian drone attack on Friday, the fourth such attack in just over two weeks.
A total of 143 workers and 25 pieces of firefighting equipment were deployed to suppress the fire, according to Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the Krasnodar region, where the city is located.
“The situation is under control,” he said in a telegram post. “We are making every effort to prevent oil from spilling into the sea.”
Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces attacked the Tuapse refinery near the terminal, causing an explosion and fire. The extent of the damage is being assessed, Telegram said in a statement.
Earlier this week, Russia declared a regional state of emergency in Tuapse, a city of more than 60,000 people that is home to one of the country’s largest Black Sea ports and a refinery owned by energy giant Rosneft PJSC. This followed repeated drone strikes that began on April 16.
The Ukrainian attacks brought operations to a halt at the port and refinery, with each fire taking several days to extinguish. The fire, which broke out on April 28 due to a strike at the refinery, was extinguished only on Thursday.
Earlier attacks caused a spill of oil products in the Tuapse River and the coastal area. Officials said Friday that more than 13,000 cubic meters of oil-contaminated soil and an oil-water mixture, roughly the equivalent of more than five Olympic swimming pools, had been collected from three cleanup sites.
Local authorities are also dealing with polluted rain and high levels of toxic substances in the air after the fires. They advised residents not to use unfiltered water and not to go outside.
Russia attacked Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and residential areas with 210 drones overnight, injuring five people in Odesa, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a post on Friday X. Thousands of families were left without power in the Kharkiv region due to the shelling, which also damaged railway infrastructure, he said.
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