Ukraine Says It Hit Russia’s Yanos Oil Refinery Thursday

Ukrainian forces struck the oil refinery in Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow, on Thursday, as drone attacks deepen fuel shortages across Russia.

(Bloomberg) — Ukrainian forces struck the oil refinery in Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow, on Thursday, as drone attacks deepen fuel shortages across Russia. The strike caused a fire at the Yanos refinery site, Ukraine’s General Staff said in a statement on Friday. Russia’s oil producer, Gazprom Neft PJSC, which co-owns the facility, did not immediately respond to a Bloomberg request for a comment.

Images of the Yanos refinery captured on July 16 by NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System show heat anomalies on the edge of the site that may indicate fires. The refinery, which has a design capacity of about 300,000 barrels a day, has been a target of multiple Ukrainian drone strikes, most recently in early July. It is located about 280 kilometers (175 miles) northeast of Moscow and was built to supply fuels to the Russian capital city and the surrounding areas.

Kyiv has been carrying out almost daily strikes on Russian energy assets in an effort to bring the Kremlin to the negotiating table. As a result of its bombardment of refineries, Russian oil-processing rates in the first half of July dropped to the lowest in more than two decades, according to EA Analytics, deepening a domestic fuel crunch. Earlier on Friday, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium confirmed that overnight drone strikes had set on fire the Nordic Zenith tanker, which was scheduled to load crude at the CPC terminal off Russia’s Black Sea coast.

The terminal is the single most important export outlet for crude from Kazakhstan. It also loads some Russian barrels. Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday that its forces continued air strikes on Ukraine’s ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk.