Sept 15 (Reuters) – A drone hit a petrol station in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv early on Tuesday, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, just a day after U.S. President Donald Trump said Ukraine and Russia had agreed not to target each other’s energy assets.
The attack injured one person, and there was also a strike on warehouse facilities in another part of the city, Klitschko added on the Telegram messaging app. A Reuters witness heard an explosion in Kyiv.
Russia has recently started hitting petrol stations in Kyiv, expanding the range of target facilities. In recent months, Russia hit some 300 petrol stations, mainly in or near Ukraine’s frontline regions, according to Ukrainian authorities.
As Moscow was striking Ukraine, neighbouring Poland briefly began military aviation operations as a preventive step, Poland’s Armed Forces said in a statement on social media website X, adding later there was no violation of its airspace.
Military drones straying into the airspace of Ukraine and Russia’s neighbours have stoked concerns that Russia’s war in Ukraine is spilling over NATO’s borders.
In Lithuania, a NATO fighter jet shot down a drone early on Tuesday, the Lithuanian National Crisis Management Centre said, after a drone alert was issued earlier in the capital Vilnius and the surrounding region.
In Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, a Ukrainian missile attack damaged a warehouse of the e-commerce company Ozon in the southern port city of Taganrog, among other facilities, the regional governor said on Telegram.
Separately, a drone attack hit an industrial facility in Samara region on the Volga River, Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said on Telegram, without naming the facility. The region is home to a number of large oil refineries.
Reuters could not immediately independently verify the reports.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday that Kyiv was ready to support a U.S. proposal for a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire on energy sites only if Washington could ensure Moscow was genuinely ready to end its war on Ukraine.
(Reporting by Gleb Garanich in Kyiv and Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo; Editing by Tom Hogue and Lincoln Feast.)
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