Russia fires 433 drones at Ukraine as Ukrainian strike sets Kstovo refinery ablaze

Russia launched 433 long-range drones at Ukraine between Saturday evening and Sunday morning, Ukraine's air force said, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said strikes on power infrastructure in four regions left "hundreds of thousands of households" without electricity. Overnight, Ukrainian drones set fire to one of Russia's largest oil refineries, at Kstovo in the Nizhny Novgorod region, according to Ukrainian media, and Russia opened a terrorism case.

The exchange came hours after Ukraine's foreign minister offered to halt fighting along the whole front if Russia did the same, and a Russian official said the two sides had agreed to hold regular humanitarian missions after this week's evacuation of the occupied town of Oleshky.

The attack on Ukraine

Ukraine's air force said it shot down 371 of the 433 drones, ABC News reported, citing wire agencies. Zelensky said on Telegram that "the intensity of the strikes is very high" and that energy facilities in four regions had been hit. He did not name the regions in the reports seen by The Declaration, and no casualty figures had been published by Sunday afternoon India time. The figures could not be independently verified.

Blackouts across eight regions

Ukraine's energy ministry said on Sunday that consumers in eight regions, Zhytomyr, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy, Cherkasy and Kharkiv, had lost power, and that the worst damage was in the Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv regions, according to the Ukrainian news agency UNN. Emergency outages were brought in, including in the capital, and the ministry said repeated attacks were delaying repairs.

In the Dnipropetrovsk region, nearly 100,000 customers in the Dnipro, Pavlohrad and Samarivskyi districts were still without power on Sunday morning, the head of the regional military administration said, according to UA.News, with more than 70 emergency crews at work. Zelensky said Russia was trying "to maximally exploit the deficit of ballistic missile interceptors", Reuters reported, according to RTÉ.

The strike on Kstovo

The Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi, citing the independent Russian channel ASTRA, said the Lukoil-owned NORSI refinery in Kstovo was hit and a large fire broke out near two of its crude-processing units, after residents reported air defence fire and explosions between about 02:50 and 03:10 Moscow time (5:20-5:40 am IST).

Russian officials did not name the site. The regional governor said an unnamed facility had suffered "significant damage" in a "massive" drone attack, and that steps were being taken to keep fuel available at petrol stations, ABC reported. No casualties were reported. Russian investigators have opened a criminal case on terrorism charges, the state news agency TASS said.

Russia's defence ministry said its forces downed 235 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions overnight. Zelensky said Ukraine had also hit the Kamensky plant in the Rostov region, which he said makes components for Russian missiles. On Friday, senior Russian official Alexander Novak said Ukraine had resumed attacks on Russian energy sites, hitting three refineries and a gas-chemical complex.

Talk of a truce

Late on Saturday, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X that Ukraine was ready to stop hostilities on all front-line sectors immediately if Russia did the same. "Ukraine is ready. We expect the same from Russia," he wrote. He said the Oleshky evacuation could serve as a confidence-building measure, and thanked the US and Melania Trump for their mediation.

Russia's human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, said the two sides had agreed to carry out regular humanitarian missions, according to TASS. Ukraine had neither confirmed nor denied that by Saturday night, RBC-Ukraine reported. Ukraine's ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets had said a day earlier that the Oleshky mission could become the basis for a new mechanism.

No public Russian response to Sybiha's offer had been reported by Sunday evening India time.

Why it matters

The Oleshky evacuation, in which civilians left the Russian-held town on the Dnipro and reached Ukraine through Russia and Belarus, was a rare negotiated arrangement between the two sides. The overnight strikes, aimed by each side at the other's energy systems as winter approaches, came within a day of its completion.

For India, one of the largest buyers of Russian crude oil since 2022, attacks on Russian refineries and any movement towards a ceasefire both feed into oil prices and supply. New Delhi has consistently called for the war to be settled through dialogue and diplomacy.