Aug 14 (Reuters) – Firefighters were battling flames on Friday at Russia’s Baltic Sea port Ust-Luga, a major energy exports hub, after a fire sparked by a drone attack, regional governor Aleksander Drozdenko said on messaging app Telegram.
More than fifty drones were downed in the Leningrad region, he added, as the region around Ust-Luga, a centre for exports of oil and oil products, kept up efforts to repel the attack.
The scale of damage was not immediately clear in the attack, which continues Ukraine’s tactics of hitting Russian oil processing and export facilities and grain shipping routes, in an effort to deny revenue to Moscow and force it to end the war.
On Friday, fighter jets shot down a drone that entered the airspace of Latvia, the armed forces of the NATO and European Union member said, while Finland temporarily restricted parts of the Baltic Sea, as a precaution against drone attacks.
Ukraine has struck, sometimes repeatedly, more than a dozen major refineries in Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers, causing a widespread domestic fuel crisis.
The Russian capital of Moscow, home to another big oil processing plant, downed overnight more than a dozen drones heading towards it, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram on Friday.
(Reporting by Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo; Editing by Tom Hogue and Clarence Fernandez)
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