On Sunday, Ukraine escalated its long-range targeting campaign against Russian energy assets, launching a coordinated wave of drone strikes that hit a major Baltic Sea oil export terminal and multiple vessels Kyiv links to Russia’s sanctions-evading shadow crude fleet. The cross-border attacks came amid a wave of reciprocal strikes that left civilian casualties on both sides, deepening the ongoing military escalation in the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The first and highest-profile strike targeted Primorsk, Russia’s largest Baltic Sea oil export terminal operated by state-owned energy giant Transneft. Located more than 1,000 kilometers from Ukrainian territory, between the Russian-Finnish border and St. Petersburg, the facility is capable of processing hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude daily and has been targeted by Ukrainian drones multiple times since March. Russian regional governor Alexander Drozdenko confirmed that a nighttime drone attack sparked a fire at the port, but noted no oil spill occurred. He offered no immediate details on potential casualties or the extent of infrastructure damage.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed the operation delivered significant damage to Russian assets in a post on the Telegram messaging platform Sunday. He confirmed the strike, adding that one more Russian Kalibr missile-carrying vessel had been put out of action, alongside destruction of key port infrastructure. Zelenskyy also said Ukrainian drones hit a Karakurt-class missile ship, a Russian patrol boat, and one tanker belonging to Russia’s notorious shadow oil fleet — a network of unregistered or loosely registered vessels used to bypass Western price caps and sanctions on Russian crude exports.
In an earlier separate statement Sunday, Zelenskyy announced a second strike targeting two additional shadow fleet tankers near the entrance to Novorossiysk, Russia’s major Black Sea port. “These tankers were actively used to transport oil. Now they won’t,” he said, confirming the operation was directed by the chief of Ukraine’s general staff, Andrii Hnatov. The Kremlin has not issued any official confirmation of Zelenskyy’s claims regarding the two tanker strikes as of Sunday evening.
Sunday’s attacks mark the latest acceleration of Ukraine’s recent campaign against Russian energy export infrastructure. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly justified the targeting, noting that oil and gas revenue forms a core pillar of funding for Russia’s full-scale invasion, which entered its third year in February 2024.
The coordinated Ukrainian strikes were matched by a large-scale Russian air assault across Ukraine overnight into Sunday, which left multiple civilians dead and injured. Ukraine’s Emergency Service confirmed that a Russian drone strike on the southern Odesa region killed two people and wounded three more, damaging three residential buildings and port infrastructure before emergency crews extinguished a resulting fire. In central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, six people were wounded in overnight strikes. A passenger bus carrying 40 children was damaged in the attack, though no children onboard were injured.
Reciprocal strikes also caused civilian casualties inside Russian territory. A 77-year-old man was killed in a Ukrainian drone strike west of Moscow near the town of Volokolamsk, 120 kilometers from central Moscow, regional governor Andrei Vorobyov confirmed via Telegram. Russian officials said six drones were intercepted and downed in the Moscow region, which surrounds the capital, and Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin confirmed an additional five drones were shot down while approaching the city itself. In western Russia’s Smolensk region, three people — a man, woman and child — were injured after debris from a shot-down Ukrainian drone crashed into an apartment block, local governor Vasiliy Anokhin reported.
Russian Defense Ministry figures released Sunday show that Russian air defenses intercepted and downed a total of 334 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles overnight across Russia and occupied Crimea. For its part, Ukraine’s Air Force reported that Russia launched a total of 269 drones and ballistic missiles against Ukrainian targets overnight. Ukrainian forces shot down 249 of the incoming drones, the service said in a Facebook update, while 19 drones and multiple ballistic missiles successfully hit targets in 15 separate locations across the country.