Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, April 1: Amidst Russia’s claim that it has completely destroyed Ukraine’s air power, Ukrainian helicopters is believed to have for the first time since the war began in February, bombed a fuel storage depot in western Russia sparking a huge fire on Friday, the regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov admitted.
Bearing all the brunt of the attacks so far, it was the first reported counter-attack by Ukraine destroying a facility on the Russia soil, even as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues in its fifth week. The announcement came on the 37th day of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, with thousands killed and more than 10 million displaced in the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. The strike in the Russian town of Belgorod marked the first time Russia has reported a Ukrainian airstrike on its territory since the conflict began.
A fire broke out at the bombed fuel storage facility in Belgorod located close to the Ukrainian border and two people were hurt in fire and residents of three city streets were being evacuated, Gladkov said.
“There was a fire at the petrol depot because of an air strike carried out by two Ukrainian army helicopters, which entered Russian territory at a low altitude,” Gladkov wrote on messaging app Telegram. Some 170 firefighters were battling to put out the enormous blaze, which started around 6 am (0300 GMT), the emergencies ministry said. Fire was raging with black and white smoke billowing overhead, a video released by the ministry showed. Russian energy giant Rosneft, which owns the facility, said it had evacuated staff from the premises.
The incident was not received well by Russia amidst the peace talks and Moscow warned that the helicopter attack on a fuel depot in the town of Belgorod would hamper negotiations.
On Friday, Russia and Ukraine resumed peace talks by video conference, a negotiator said. “We are continuing talks by video conference,” Moscow’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said on Telegram. “Our positions on Crimea and Donbass have not changed.”
“Of course, this is not something that can be perceived as creating comfortable conditions for the continuation of negotiations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, referring to ongoing peace talks. The latest talks are being held days after Moscow said it would scale back attacks on the capital Kyiv and the city of Chernigiv.
But Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia was consolidating and preparing “powerful strikes” in the country’s east and south, joining a chorus of Western assessments that Moscow troops were regrouping.
“This is part of their tactics,” said Zelensky in a late-night address.
“We know that they are moving away from the areas where we are beating them to focus on others that are very important… where it can be difficult for us,” he said.
In particular, he warned, the situation in the country’s south and east was “very difficult.” “In Donbas and Mariupol, in the Kharkiv direction, the Russian army is accumulating the potential for attacks, powerful attacks,” he said.
Soon after the strike on the fuel tank in Belgorod, long lines of cars waited at filling stations but the governor urged residents not to panic buy, saying there was enough petrol. “There aren’t any problems with fuel in the region and there won’t be any,” Gladkov said. Earlier this week, explosions could be heard from an arms depot in Belgorod but the authorities did not provide any clear explanation for the blasts.
Belgorod lies around 40 kilometres from Russia’s border with Ukraine and some 80 kilometres from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, which has been pummelled by Russian forces since Moscow sent troops to Ukraine on February 24. Separately, the Russian defence ministry said that Moscow had destroyed six military facilities in Ukraine, including five depots containing ammunition, rockets and artillery weapons.
As the peace talks continued in Turkish city of Istanbul, Turkey said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba could meet within two weeks for talks even as NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg refuted Russian claims of “radically reducing” military actions” on the Ukrainian soil and said he did not see any pull-back of Russian forces in Ukraine and on the contrary expected “additional offensive actions.”
Rouble payments that Russia is insisting on for its gas exports will affect settlements due in late April and May, and Russia will not turn off gas supplies to Europe on Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. President Vladimir Putin signed an order on Thursday stipulating the change of currency, which European governments have called an unacceptable breach of contract.
“Does this mean that if there is no confirmation in roubles, then gas supplies will be cut off from April 1? No, it doesn’t, and it doesn’t follow from the decree,” Peskov told reporters. He said it would affect payments from the second half of April, and Gazprom would work with its customers to implement the new rules.
Peskov said Russia could at some point abandon the rouble order if conditions changed, but “in the current conditions, roubles are the most preferable and reliable option for us.” Asked about German media reports on the possibility of Germany nationalising some Gazprom subsidiaries, Peskov said it would be a serious violation of international law. He said Russia was witnessing “gangster actions” in relation to the seizure of its property.
One of Putin’s allies warned on Friday that Russia, a major global wheat exporter, could limit supplies of agriculture products to “friendly” countries only, amid Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis. The European Union will seek China’s assurances that it won’t assist Russia in circumventing economic sanctions levelled over the invasion of Ukraine at an annual summit Friday.
Russian troops left the heavily contaminated Chernobyl nuclear site early Friday after returning control to the Ukrainians, authorities said, as eastern parts of the country braced for renewed attacks and Russians blocked another aid mission to the besieged port city of Mariupol. Ukraine’s state power company, Energoatom, said the pull-out at Chernobyl came after soldiers received “significant doses” of radiation from digging trenches in the forest in the exclusion zone around the closed plant. But there was no independent confirmation of that.
Energoatom gave no details on the condition of the troops or how many were affected. But it said the Russians had dug in in the forest inside the exclusion zone around the now-closed plant, the site in 1986 of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. The exchange of control happened amid growing indications the Kremlin is using talk of de-escalation in Ukraine as cover to regroup, resupply its forces and redeploy them for a stepped-up offensive in the eastern part of the country.