Russia Ukraine war latest: Kyiv launches ‘deepest’ drone strike yet on Russian refinery 1,200km from frontline

Ukrainian drones attacked industrial facilities in the province of Tatarstan, Russian authorities said Tuesday, in what would be Kyiv’s deepest strike inside Russian territory since the war began more than two years ago.

Seven people were injured in the attack on facilities near the cities of Yelabuga and Nizhnekamsk, located some 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) east of Ukraine, Russian regional authorities said.

The strike damaged a hostel for students and workers in a free economic zone where a factory manufacturing Iranian-designed drones is reportedly located, other media reports said. Tatarstan is known for its high level of industrialization.

Tatarstan officials said the attack didn’t disrupt industrial production, while Nizhnekamsk’s mayor said the attempt to strike a refinery was thwarted by air defenses.

Ukraine previously has launched drone attacks in and around St. Petersburg, which lies about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of the border. But the facilities in Tatarstan, a province on the Volga River, appears to be the most distant target Ukraine has tried to hit.

Ministers and officials from dozens of countries are gathering in the Netherlands on Tuesday for a conference on restoring justice in Ukraine, as the war sparked by Russia‘s invasion drags on in its third devastating year.

Among speakers will be the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and military officers linked to the war.

“The people of Ukraine, they want to see justice delivered,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said as he arrived for the conference.

His Dutch counterpart, Hanke Bruins Slot, agreed.

“These horrendous crimes of Russia cannot go unpunished. There is no place for impunity,” she said.

During the conference, a register of damage caused by Russia‘s invasion will formally open a process that will allow people to submit claims for compensation for damages, loss or injury suffered as a result of the invasion.

The Council of Europe, whose members established the register in May last year, said in a statement that the Tuesday launch will focus on claims for damage or destruction of residential property. It said that between 300,000 and 600,000 claims are expected.

A powerful ally of President Vladimir Putin claimed on Tuesday that NATO was basically fighting Russia in Ukraine and that the US-led military alliance had helped organise strikes on sovereign Russian territory.

Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered the worst crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Russian and US diplomats.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin’s most powerful allies, said that the 75 years of NATO history since its founding on April 4, 1949 had shown it to be a long term source of “danger, crisis and conflict”.

“The North Atlantic Alliance is de-facto a party to the Ukrainian conflict and is actively involved in organising the shelling of Russian territories,” Patrushev told the Argumenty I Fakty newspaper.

“Within its framework, collective decisions are being made on new arms supplies with an increase in their technical and long-range capabilities, and NATO instructors in several countries are training mercenaries and saboteurs for their participation in anti-Russian operations.”

Ukraine has struck deep into Russian territory over the past year, bombing oil refineries and weapons factories with drones and repeatedly shelling Russian border regions.

Ukraine’s military spy agency caused “significant damage” to a military target in Russia’s Tatarstan region on Tuesday in an attack using Ukrainian-made drones, a Ukrainian intelligence source told Reuters.

Local authorities in Russia’s Tatarstan, east of Moscow, said earlier that drones had attacked industrial sites and that several people had been wounded.

Several people were injured in a drone attack on industrial sites in Russia’s Tatarstan, local authorities said on Tuesday.

“This morning, the republic’s industrial enterprises in Yelabuga and Nizhnekamsk were attacked by drones. There is no serious damage, the technological process of the enterprises was not disrupted,” Tatarstan’s head Rustam Minnikhanov said in a post on his Telegram channel.

Two drones attacked a dormitory on the territory of the local Special Economic Zone, it said on Telegram, adding that two people were injured.

The TASS news agency said, citing emergency services, that six people had been injured.

Russian drones targeted energy infrastructure in overnight attacks on Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk and Kirovohrad regions, hitting an energy facility in the latter, Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday.

Nine drones were shot down over Dnipropetrovsk region where debris caused two fires in the regional capital of Dnipro, the governor said in a statement on the Telegram messaging app, adding they had both been put out.

But a drone hit a high voltage substation in Kirovohrad region, causing a fire there, the Ukrenergo grid operator wrote on Telegram. The governor said no casualties had been reported.

Air defences were able to down nine out of 10 of the incoming Russian drones, the General Staff said.

Russia has pounded Ukraine’s energy facilities in recent weeks, dealing significant damage to the Ukrainian power system and causing blackouts in many regions.

Belarusian forces kickstarted their military exercises today in regions bordering Ukraine and European Union members Lithuania and Poland, Belarus’s defence ministry said.

The three-day drills in the southeastern city of Gomel and the western Grodno region aim to train officers and territorial defence troops how to defend their respective regions and how to act in case martial law is enacted, the ministry said on Telegram.

Russia’s closest ally, Belarus is facing flak from its western neighbours after it provided its territory as a launchpad to Russia for invading Ukraine in February 2022.

It is the only nation to hold drills with help from Russia and allow Moscow to station tactical nuclear weapons in the region.

Days after Russian forces withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv in the dramatic first weeks of their full-scale invasion two years ago, a photo revealed what had become of Nataliia Verbova’s missing husband.

Poring over the image of eight men executed and lying on cold concrete in the suburb of Bucha, taken by AP photographer Vadim Ghirda, she focused on a man face down with his hands tied. She didn’t want to believe it was Andrii, who had joined the territorial defence days after the invasion but was detained by the Russians.

A month later, she visited the morgue and recognized the socks she had gifted him. It was Andrii.

“I will never forget the pool of blood under him. When I saw these photos all around the world I felt pain,” she said, standing over her husband’s grave. “Two years have passed, but for me it’s as though it happened yesterday. Nothing has changed.”

Ukrainian officials accused Russia of firing its new hypersonic Zircon missiles at Kyiv five times since the start of this year, the capital city’s military administration said.

The Zircon was hailed by Vladimir Putin as part of a new generation of weapons systems during his annual state-of-the-nation address in February. Fired from the sea, Zircon missiles have a range of 1,000km (625 miles) and travel at nine times the speed of sound, according to officials in Russia.

The five Zircon missiles were among more than 180 Russian missile and drone attacks launched against the Ukrainian capital in the first three months of the year, the administration said in a post on Telegram.

Six other types of missiles were also used including the Kh-101, an air-launched cruise missile, of which 113 have been fired on Kyiv since the start of this year, the administration said.