Kyiv: Ukraine has maintained its offensive against Russian oil export and production infrastructure, targeting facilities in two regions. Simultaneously, widespread Russian drone attacks on Ukraine resulted in the death of at least one civilian overnight, with ongoing fighting at the front, officials reported.
According to Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled to Syria on April 5 for discussions with his Syrian counterpart, Ahmed al-Sharaa. This visit aims to underscore the military expertise Ukraine has gained after more than four years of conflict. The attacks on August 5 occurred amidst stalled US-led negotiations to end Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has now surpassed the 1,500-day mark, compounded by the US-Israeli conflict with Iran.
Ukrainian drones targeted Primorsk, a significant Russian oil export hub on the Baltic Sea, and the NORSI oil refinery in the Nizhny Novgorod region, near the Volga River east of Moscow, as confirmed by Ukrainian drone forces commander Robert Brovdi. Initially, Leningrad region Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko reported damage to a pipeline at Primorsk but later revised his statement on Telegram to clarify that a fuel reservoir in the port area was damaged by shrapnel.
A fire erupted at NORSI, Russia's fourth-largest oil refinery, after two facilities were struck during a drone attack, according to Nizhny Novgorod region's governor, Gleg Nikitin, on Telegram. Ukraine has intensified drone assaults on Russian oil facilities recently, disrupting exports and affecting Moscow's ability to capitalize on a spike in global energy prices caused by the Iran war and Tehran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Primorsk faced similar attacks on March 23.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported on April 5 that air defense systems had intercepted five guided bombs and 293 Ukrainian drones in the preceding 24 hours. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Air Force stated that Ukrainian defenses had neutralized 76 Russian attack drones since the previous evening, with 17 others hitting 10 different locations. Fragments from downed drones struck three locations.
A drone attack in Nikopol, a city in the Dnipropetrovsk region, resulted in one death and severely injured a 60-year-old woman, as reported by regional head Oleksandr Hanzha on Telegram. Authorities also reported five fatalities in a drone strike on a market in Nikopol on April 4. An apartment building and other civilian infrastructure were damaged in the southern Odesa region, a frequent target of Russian attacks, along with the Poltava region.
Fighting persisted on several sections of the front in eastern and southern Ukraine, with Russian forces launching numerous attacks, according to the Ukrainian military. Russia initiated a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, eight years after seizing control of the Crimean Peninsula and instigating conflict in the Donbas, comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine.
Currently, Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine's territory and demands that Kyiv cede the portion of the Donetsk region that Moscow's forces have struggled to capture despite years of intense fighting. Control over Donbas remains a central issue in US-brokered efforts to conclude the war.
Several rounds of US-Ukraine-Russia talks have occurred in recent months, but no trilateral or bilateral Ukraine-Russia meetings have been held since the onset of the Iran war on February 28. Zelenskyy has visited multiple Middle Eastern countries confronting drone and missile attacks from Iran in retaliation for US-Israeli airstrikes in the ongoing conflict. "Today in Damascus. We continue our active Ukrainian diplomacy aimed at real security and economic cooperation," Zelenskyy stated on Telegram.