Ukrainian drones hit multiple Russian regions in overnight strikes

Ukrainian drones struck targets across several Russian regions overnight, including an oil pipeline pumping station, a refinery and a fuel depot, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday, in an escalating campaign of strikes against energy infrastructure often hundreds of miles inside Russia.

Ukraine’s General Staff said it had struck the Saratov oil refinery on the Volga river, causing a large fire. Saratov regional governor Roman Busargin said on Telegram that “civil infrastructure” had been damaged in the strike, but gave no more details.

“During the night, our soldiers applied Ukraine’s long-range sanctions against an oil refinery in Saratov, Russia. This is about 700 km from the front line,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Not all the drones struck their targets. Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had downed 216 drones overnight.

Major fire burning after drone hits fuel depot

Kyiv said it had also struck the Lazarevo pumping station in the Kirov region, northeast of Moscow and about 800 miles from Ukrainian-held territory, which serves the Surgut-Gorky-Polotsk pipeline, shipping Russian oil from Siberia to Belarus.

Kirov regional governor Alexander Sokolov said drones had hit a facility in the region, but gave no further information.

In the Rostov region, which borders Ukraine’s Donbas, the focus of fighting in the more than four-year-old war, authorities in the town of Matveyev Kurgan said a major fire was burning after drones hit a fuel depot in the town, which adjoins the Russian-held part of the Donetsk region. Ukraine confirmed the strike.

Governors in the Voronezh and Belgorod regions, both of which border Ukraine, also reported damage, with three civilians injured in Belgorod. 

On the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula, Moscow-backed governor Sergei Aksyonov said authorities were introducing restrictions on sales of petrol.

He did not say why, but Ukraine has for months been attacking fuel infrastructure in southwestern Russia, close to Crimea.

A Russian-appointed official said a Ukrainian drone struck an apartment building in a Russian-held part of the southern Kherson region, killing a child and injuring 11 people.

Vladimir Saldo, Russian-appointed governor of Russian-held parts of the Kherson region, wrote on Telegram that the strike occurred in the city of Henichesk, on the shore of the Sea of Azov.

Alleged strike on nuclear plant

Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 229 drones overnight, 212 of which were downed over northern and eastern Ukraine.

In Ukraine, 40,000 people were left without power after a Russian attack on the Chernihiv region on the Russian border, a local energy company said on Telegram.

Russia accused Ukraine of hitting a garage at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in occupied Ukrainian territory on Sunday. Ukraine’s foreign ministry denied the allegation, which followed a separate accusation of a strike on the plant yesterday, which Ukraine also denied.

The U.N.’s nuclear energy watchdog, which has inspectors at the Russian-occupied and administered plant, said on Sunday its team observed damage to a turbine building caused by drones on Saturday, but did not specify whose drones.

It said that radiation levels at the site remained normal.

Zelenskyy: Time to press on peace talks

Zelenskyy, in an interview broadcast on Sunday, said he wanted to press on with talks on securing peace with Russia before the onset of winter to take account of Kyiv’s improved strategic position.

Talks brokered by the United States on moving toward a peace accord have stalled as Washington has focused on the conflict in Iran.

Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials have said the advance of Russian forces has slowed on the ground while Ukraine has intensified a campaign of medium- and long-range strikes inside Russia, targeting mainly Russia’s oil industry.

“It began in December 2025, Russia began to lose the initiative on the battlefield,” Zelenskyy told CBS Television’s ‘Face the Nation’.

“So now we have this period of time before the winter... before the winter we need to find a way, diplomatic way, to sit and to speak,” Zelenskyy said, adding that it depends on the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin, “the pressure in his society, and I think that is increasing, the pressure by sanctions -- not to lift them, to put more.”

He said there was also the possibility of negotiations organized with European help or bilateral talks with Russia, but he repeated his call to impose tougher sanctions on Russia.

A senior Ukrainian commander told Reuters in an interview last week that Ukraine had a six-month window in which to seize the battlefield initiative and strengthen its hand for peace talks.

Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, who commands Ukraine’s respected Third Army Corps, said he believed Russia’s army was exhausted and incapable of making major breakthroughs.

In his comments to “Face the Nation,” Zelenskyy also said that in the absence of a European anti-missile defense program, Ukraine needed help from the United States in supplying air defense missiles.

“Until the moment we will produce our European anti-ballistic system, until this moment, we need support from the United States,” he said. 

Ukraine hoped to clinch a deal with the United States on joint drone technology, he said, with Kyiv able to provide expertise from five years of downing Russian drones and missiles.

“We have already drone deals with some Middle East countries and we have already drone deals with some European countries,” he said. “Now we’re preparing the big drone deal with the European Union, and I hope that we will have such decisions with American partners. I count on it.” 

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect.