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Ukraine Says It Struck Russian Oil Depot, Radar Station.
Ukraine said it struck an oil depot and an air-defense radar inside Russia early on November 29 amid an escalation of attacks by both Moscow and Kyiv ahead U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Ukraine’s military General Staff said a strike on the Atlas oil depot in Russia’s Rostov region sparked a fire at the facility, which was previously hit by a similar attack earlier this year.
“Atlas is part of the Russian military-industrial complex, which provides the supply of petroleum products for the army of the Russian Federation,” it said in a statement on social media.
It added that a radar station housing a Russian Buk-M3 antiaircraft missile system was destroyed in a separate attack in a Russian-controlled area of Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhya region.
Yury Slyusar, the acting governor of the Rostov region, acknowledged the blaze at an “industrial complex” in the area where the refinery is located, saying more than 100 responders were battling to extinguish the fire.
For the past several months, Russia has been battering Ukrainian cities with increasingly heavy drone, missile, and glide-bomb strikes, causing casualties and damaging energy infrastructure as the cold season settles in.
Ukraine has launched several counterattacks since the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, the top foreign supporter of Ukraine in its battle against Russia’s full-scale invasion, and Kyiv’s European allies authorized the use of long-range missiles against targets inside Russia.
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During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump was critical of Biden for pouring billions of dollars into Ukraine to help it fight.
Trump also said he could end the war within 24 hours of retaking the White House, a statement that has been interpreted as meaning that Ukraine would have to surrender territory that Russia now occupies.
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That possibility appears to have prompted both Moscow and Kyiv to try and solidify geographical positions before Trump takes office in January.
Later on November 29, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy appointed Mykhaylo Drapatiy as the new commander of Ukraine’s ground forces and named Oleh Apostol as a deputy commander in chief of the country’s armed forces.
Writing on Telegram, Zelenskiy said the Ukrainian Army needed “internal changes to achieve our state’s goals in full.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s stepped-up attacks have targeted energy infrastructure, leading to the introduction of emergency power outages in the regions including Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk.
Kyiv had also reportedly been forced to disconnect several nuclear power units from the network during attacks. Ukraine gets more than half of its electricity from nuclear plants.
Russia’s offensive comes as temperatures across Ukraine dropped to around zero degrees Celsius.
Earlier this month, a senior UN official, Rosemary DiCarlo, warned that Moscow’s targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure could make this winter the “harshest since the start of the war” nearly three years ago.
(rferl)