At least four people have been killed and a Russian oil refinery set on fire after Russia and Ukraine traded strikes overnight, in a fresh wave of attacks that has thrown Ukraine’s energy grid into deeper crisis and struck inside Russia’s Leningrad region, according to Al Jazeera.
The head of the military administration in Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa said a Russian attack killed three people there, with one more person wounded and in serious condition. In Russia, the Kirishi refinery in the Leningrad region, the country’s second largest and a major hub for oil and grain exports via the Baltic Sea, was set on fire in a Ukrainian drone attack, and Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko said one woman was killed by falling drone debris.
Strikes on refineries, power stations and a cargo ship
Drozdenko said air defence forces downed 113 Ukrainian drones overnight over the Leningrad region and that an apartment in the town of Kirishi was damaged in the same attack. Ukraine’s military chief of staff said the country also hit the Morozov plant near St Petersburg, which produces explosives and fuel for Russian missiles used against Ukraine. On the Russian side, state news agencies said forces struck three power substations and a cargo ship in the Black Sea that Moscow claimed was supplying arms to Ukrainian forces, though Al Jazeera could not independently verify those claims.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy said Russia had attacked its energy sector 128 times over the past week as part of a long-term campaign to degrade power and heating infrastructure before winter. Kyiv, Dnipro, Sumy and Donetsk regions, as well as Kherson, are facing the most acute energy crises, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. “Right now, many of our cities and communities are facing a very difficult situation with power, water, and heating supplies due to Russian strikes,” he wrote on X.
Zelenskyy added that he had agreed with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to “activate a special emergency mechanism” that would allow European funding “for what is needed most” to be deployed more quickly in response to attacks on energy infrastructure. The announcement came as the two men prepared for trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi this week, with Zelenskyy saying he had coordinated his negotiating position in talks with von der Leyen.
Why it matters
For Ukraine, the strikes are about survival through winter: with heating supplies under sustained attack, blackouts threaten civilian life as temperatures fall. For Russia, Ukrainian drones hitting its second-largest refinery and a missile-fuel plant near St Petersburg are a reminder that distance from the front line no longer guarantees safety, and that pressure on the Russian economy is part of Kyiv’s strategy alongside the battlefield. For the UK and its European allies, the crisis lands while Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government is weighing how tightly to bind Britain to EU defence and energy responses to Russian attacks, even as London itself keeps up its own sanctions and military support for Kyiv.
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What happens next
Ukraine says it is working to restore power supplies, with the new EU emergency funding mechanism being readied for deployment. The Kremlin insisted that this week’s Abu Dhabi negotiations would remain in “trilateral” format between Russia, Ukraine and the United States, after French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said Europe would be represented. Kiev’s priority will be persuading its partners that emergency energy support must flow faster than the missiles arrive, while Ukrainian drones continue to test how much pressure Russia’s refining capacity can take.
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