Aug 22 (Reuters) – Ukrainian drones killed at least eight civilians in a wave of strikes on Russia overnight that also hit a warehouse owned by online retailer Ozon and an industrial facility in the Samara region, Russian regional officials said on Saturday.
The strikes came after at least 16 people were killed and more than 130 wounded on Friday when several Russian drones struck a shopping centre in central Ukraine.
In a post on Telegram, Samara Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev said that an elderly woman had been killed in a strike on the city of Novokuibyshevsk, which he said caused damage to industrial facilities. Ukraine’s military said it had struck the city’s oil refinery, causing a fire.
Ozon, Russia’s second-largest online retailer, said in a statement on Telegram that work at its Samara region logistics centre in the town of Chapayevsk had been halted after the strike, which it said caused injuries.
The strike is the first on Ozon, after weeks of drone attacks on its larger rival Wildberries, which Ukraine has cast as part of a wider campaign against economic infrastructure underpinning the Russian war in Ukraine.
Elsewhere, in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said that three people, two of them children, had been killed and another adult in a strike on the Sea of Azov port town of Yeysk. He said a fire had broken out at an unnamed facility at the town’s port.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, said two people had been killed and 13 wounded in Ukrainian attacks. In Bryansk, another frontier region, four people were wounded, the local governor said.
In Luhansk, an eastern Ukrainian province almost all of which is controlled by Russia, Moscow-installed governor Leonid Pasechnik said that two civilians, including a 16-year-old boy, had been killed and nine more wounded.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said it downed a total of 457 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Russia is escalating its air war on Ukraine as fighting on the battlefield grinds toward the 4-1/2-year mark. Ukraine has also stepped up its own attacks on Russia, targeting oil facilities and logistics infrastructure to try to undermine Moscow’s ability to wage war.
(Reporting by Felix Light;Editing by Alexandra Hudson and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
