Russia Pounds Kyiv as Ukraine Hits Refineries and Shadow Fleet Tankers Over Bloody Weekend
Russia killed at least three people, including a three-year-old boy, in a drone strike on the Kyiv-region village of Pukhivka overnight into August 9, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, as Russia combined the attack with a six-missile ballistic strike on Kyiv’s civilian infrastructure that killed at least one more person.
“Last night, Russia killed three people in Pukhivka, Kyiv region, with drone strikes – a grandfather, a grandmother, and their grandson. The boy was only three years old,” Zelenskiy wrote on social media, adding that four more people were hospitalised, including the child’s parents and a neighbour wounded in a follow-up “double-tap” strike. “It was an ordinary residential building. The Russians could not have been unaware of this.”
Firefighters battle a blaze at a residential building in Kyiv region after Russia‘s overnight strike.
Ukraine Strikes Back
Ukraine‘s own strikes over the same 48 hours matched the scale of Russia‘s. Long-range drones hit two Russian oil refineries on August 8 — Rosneft’s Syzran plant in Samara Oblast, more than 800km from the Ukrainian border, where locals reported at least three impacts on the plant’s primary distillation unit, and the Ilsky refinery in Krasnodar Krai, where falling drone debris sparked a fire and injured five people, according to Ukraine’s General Staff.
Ukraine‘s Unmanned Systems Forces separately said it struck 102 targets over August 6-7, commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi reported, including six shadow-fleet vessels — two tankers and four dry cargo ships — plus 10 energy facilities, ammunition and fuel depots, radar systems and a Buk air-defence battery. A further 12 shadow-fleet vessels were hit in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov in the following two days, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said on August 8, taking the total struck since the campaign began on July 6 to more than 218 — up from 205 vessels reported as of July 31.
Russia’s Missile War Continues
Russia’s brutal tit-for-tat missile war continues with Kyiv taking the brunt of the onslaught, but the whole country is being affected as the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) doubles the number of missiles fired at Ukraine and is increasingly targeting energy and crippling transport infrastructure. The Greater Odesa port also was subject to its biggest attack of the war that has brought Ukraine’s main connection to international grain and metal markets to halt. Experts estimate that Ukraine’s grain export revenue could be halved this year unless the ports are reopened soon.
Zelenskiy said the Donetsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv and Poltava regions also came under attack over the same period, and renewed his appeal for more Western air-defence hardware.
“Anti-ballistic capabilities, interceptor missiles for Patriot, SAMP/T, NASAMS, Hawk, and our F-16s – all of this works and helps protect lives when it is here, in Ukraine, rather than sitting in warehouses thousands of kilometres away,” he said, calling for new sanctions specifically targeting Russia‘s ballistic missile production.
The EU had already moved in that direction on August 7, adopting a fresh package of sanctions explicitly linked to Russia‘s air campaign against Kyiv, according to the Kyiv Independent.
Original Article: Russia pounds Kyiv as Ukraine hits refineries and shadow fleet tankers over bloody weekend — Intellinews