Yet another fire has broken out at the oil refinery in Tuapse after a Ukrainian drone attack overnight April 28, according to a report by the regional emergency headquarters. The strike marked the third such attack in the past two weeks.
No casualties have been reported in the latest fire, and the scale of the damage is currently unknown. NASA satellites detected a fire in the area of the Tuapse refinery, as indicated by data from the agency’s FIRMS service.
Telegram channels published footage of the fire at the facility (1, 2). Ostorozhno Novosti, citing local residents, reported that the drone attack lasted several hours. Surveillance camera footage published by the independent outlet Astra showed a thick plume of smoke rising from the site of the fire.
Residents of homes near the facility were urged to evacuate “because of the threat of the fire spreading,” wrote Tuapse mayor Sergei Boyko.
The broadcaster RTVI published video of the fire in the city several hours after the first reports of the attack broke. According to the outlet’s correspondent, “two or three” new tanks at the Tuapse refinery that had not previously been hit were burning. Ostorozhno Novosti reported that the smoke plume was visible from the resort of Krasnaya Polyana, located near the resort city of Sochi.
This is the third attack on the Tuapse refinery in the past 12 days. The facility was first hit on April 16. Several days later, an oil slick was spotted near the city’s port, with the regional emergency headquarters saying at the time that the spill was caused by the drone attack. The previous fire at the marine terminal in Tuapse began overnight April 20 after another Ukrainian drone attack. After that, “black rain” — precipitation mixed with the byproducts of burning oil — began falling across the city. That fire took four days to extinguish.
After the April 28 attack, a correspondent for the independent environment-focused Russian outlet Kedr recorded black streams in the Tuapse River that “differ sharply from the color of the water and look like petroleum products.”
