Ukrainian drones strike oil infrastructure in Russia’s Volgograd and Samara; fires reported at both facilities

Ukrainian forces struck overnight with drones two major Russian oil infrastructure facilities — the oil refinery in Volgograd and the oil distribution station near the settlement of Prosvet in the Samara region — with fires reported at both facilities, as The Kyiv Independent reports.

The most important new fact is the strike on the oil distribution station in Samara: the plant near Prosvet is a key node of the Druzhba pipeline, where different types of oil are blended to produce the Urals blend — Russia’s main export crude. Activist Serhii Sternenko and the monitoring channel Exilenova Plus identified the station as the likely target of the attack, while fires were reported after the strike both there and in Volgograd.

The oil refinery in Volgograd, owned by the Russian giant Lukoil, has a processing capacity of around 15 million tons per year and ranks among the country’s largest refineries.

The Samara station has not been struck for the first time. According to The Kyiv Independent, citing a source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), in April a Ukrainian attack caused a major fire at the station and damaged five tanks of 20,000 cubic meters of oil each. The newspaper writes that it has not independently verified the damage caused by the latest attacks.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on October 1 that Ukrainian forces had successfully struck an oil facility in the Samara region, as part of the campaign of long-range attacks on Russian military and energy targets.

Kyiv has intensified in recent months its drone attacks on Russian refineries, depots and oil transport infrastructure, aiming to disrupt fuel supplies to the Russian army and reduce Moscow’s energy revenues — the main source of financing for the war.