Zelenskyy orders preemptive strikes on Russian war facilities as drone campaign intensifies

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has ordered preemptive attacks on facilities Russia is using for its war, as Kyiv expands its drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure in an attempt to force Moscow into talks.“I instructed our intelligence services and military to act preemptively against facilities Russia uses to expand its war effort,” Zelenskiy said in his evening address on Wednesday.The directive comes as Ukrainian drones knocked out power in Sevastopol, the largest city in Russian-annexed Crimea, on Wednesday, with the Russian-installed governor saying trolleybuses would not operate and parents should keep children at home as work continued to restore supplies. Ukraine’s drone forces commander Robert Brovdi said drones had hit the main substation at the Sevastopol power plant.The Moscow oil refinery, the largest fuel supplier to the Russian capital, will be offline for at least six months after suffering extensive damage in Ukrainian drone attacks, two industry sources told Reuters. The plant was hit twice this month, forcing it to halt operations. The attacks have knocked out a significant part of Russia’s oil refining capacity, triggering fuel shortages, price increases and long queues at filling stations across the country’s 11 time zones.Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences shot down 323 drones overnight in regions across the country. In the central Nizhny Novgorod region, falling debris killed two people and damaged an industrial facility. Authorities in the Orenburg region, more than 1,000 km southeast of Moscow, said drones had been downed over an industrial facility.Faced with a fuel crunch, Russia is considering a diesel export ban, deputy prime minister Alexander Novak said on Tuesday. The Vedomosti newspaper reported that fuel imports were being considered to tackle shortages, especially in Crimea, where gasoline sales to the public have been suspended. Russian lawmakers approved amendments to the Tax Code to allow lower-quality fuel to be used in gasoline production and delay certain equipment modernisation at refineries.Three people were killed in the Russian-held Ukrainian city of Horlivka when the entrance of an apartment building collapsed after an overnight drone attack, Russia’s TASS agency said. In Russia’s Belgorod region, a man was killed and a woman injured in a drone attack, while Russian shelling killed one person in the eastern Ukrainian city of Balakliia on Wednesday.