MOSCOW, May 15 (Reuters) - Ukrainian drones killed four people, including a child, in the central Russian city of Ryazan on Friday, damaging high-rise apartment buildings and hitting an unnamed industrial enterprise, the regional governor said.
Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, said separately that Ukrainian drones had struck a large oil refinery in Ryazan which has been hit multiple times, with the most recent confirmed strike occurring last December.
Kyiv has stepped up drone attacks on targets deep inside Russia, aiming to knock out oil refineries, depots and pipelines as both sides seek to degrade each other’s infrastructure in more than four years of war.
Pavel Malkov, the governor of the Ryazan region, said 99 Ukrainian drones had been involved in the overnight attack, that two high-rise apartment blocks had been damaged, and that debris from falling drones had landed on the territory of an industrial site, which he did not identify. Twelve people had been injured, seven of whom were being treated in hospital, he said.
Malkov said work was under way to deal with the consequences of the attack and promised financial help for those whose relatives had been killed or injured. Ukraine did not immediately comment on Malkov’s remarks.
The Ryazan region is southeast of Moscow. Its most southerly frontier is 220 miles (354 km) from the Ukrainian border.
The unofficial Telegram site Mash showed pictures of smoke rising from a high-rise building and said one entrance to the building had been blocked, preventing residents from leaving. Other unofficial sites showed several apartments ablaze.
Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, carried out heavy attacks on Ukraine this week in which Ukrainian officials said 24 people, including three children, were killed in a strike on an apartment building in Kyiv.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou and Ronald Popeski; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Timothy Heritage)
