More than 40 firefighters were injured while battling a major blaze at an oil storage facility in southern Russia’s Rostov region, officials said Monday, a day after a Ukrainian drone attack in the area.
Rostov region Governor Vasily Golubev said the diesel fire ignited early Sunday morning after Russian air defense systems shot down Ukrainian drones in the town of Proletarsk. Ukraine’s military claimed responsibility for the strike, saying that it had targeted the Kavkaz oil and petroleum storage facility.
“As of now, 41 firefighters have been hospitalized. Eighteen of them required extended care, with five in intensive care,” Golubev wrote on Telegram Monday afternoon, noting that efforts to extinguish the fire were still ongoing more than a day after the drone downing.
A video shared by the Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti later showed what it described as a new explosion at the site. In the video, personnel from Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry can be seen reacting to a massive fire in the distance.
“We’ve burned a little here,” a voice is heard saying over the radio in the footage.
Proletarsk is located approximately 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the Ukrainian border and about 350 kilometers (217 miles) from areas in eastern Ukraine currently held by Kyiv’s forces.
Since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has repeatedly targeted oil and gas facilities within Russia, describing these strikes as “fair” retaliation for Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.