May 3 (Reuters) – A gasoline depot was on fireplace early on Wednesday near a vital bridge linking Russia’s mainland with Crimea, a Russian official stated, days after Moscow blamed Ukraine for an assault that set fireplace to an oil depot in Sevastopol.
Flames and black smoke billowed over what seemed to be massive tanks emblazoned with crimson warnings of “Flammable” in movies posted on Russian social media, although Reuters couldn’t independently confirm both the fireplace studies or the movies.
“The fire has been classified as the highest rank of difficulty,” Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the Krasnodar area mendacity throughout the Sea of Azov from Ukraine, stated on the Telegram messaging app, including that there have been no casualties.
Kondratyev stated the blaze broke out in the village of Volna. The hamlet is near the Crimean bridge over the Kerch Strait, a serious artery for Russian forces, because it hyperlinks the mainland to the Crimean peninsula that was annexed in 2014 from Ukraine.
The incident got here days after a drone strike set ablaze a Russian gasoline storage facility in the Crimean port of Sevastopol on Saturday, in what Moscow referred to as a Ukrainian assault.
Ukraine didn’t declare duty for the Sevastopol assault, in line with its normal follow in the course of the battle, which started in February 2022.
Over the weekend, nevertheless, Kyiv’s army stated undermining Russia’s logistics fashioned a part of preparations for a long-expected counteroffensive, aided by recent deliveries of extra highly effective Western weapons.
Blasts derailed a train on Monday in Russia’s area of Bryansk bordering Ukraine, the second such incident in two days. Russian officers say pro-Ukrainian sabotage teams have made assaults there for the reason that start of hostilities.
Russia has additionally stepped up assaults on Ukraine forward of a counteroffensive anticipated by the latter, with almost nightly waves of drones and missiles focusing on Kyiv and different areas over the previous week.
Early on Wednesday, authorities in the Ukrainian capital stated they parried Moscow’s in a single day assault as air defence techniques destroyed all of the drones launched.
Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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