Ukrainian drones spark fires at Ryazan industrial sites, including a reported refinery blaze

Overnight attack on Ryazan

Drones attacked the Ryazan region of western Russia overnight into Thursday, 5 November, and the regional governor, Pavel Malkov, put their number at more than 200. Falling debris, he said in a Telegram post, started fires at several industrial sites and damaged power lines, leaving parts of the city of Ryazan without electricity. One person was injured. Malkov later said power had been restored and the fires were extinguished or contained, but he did not name the sites that were hit. The Ukrainian military portal Militarnyi reported that an air raid alert had sounded in the region around 2 a.m.

Refinery and warehouse

Ukrainian Telegram channels Exilenova+ and Supernova+ said drones had reached the industrial zone of the Ryazan refinery, and Astra, an independent Russian outlet, verified footage of a blaze at the plant, which belongs to Rosneft. Malkov did not confirm any damage to the refinery. According to oko.press, the plant supplies aviation fuel and diesel to the Russian army, and several reports put its capacity at 17 to 18 million tonnes of crude a year. Astra also reported a fire at a Wildberries logistics centre, citing local residents; the facility covers about 173,000 square metres in the Ryazanskiy industrial park near the village of Tyushevo. Militarnyi said the warehouse had been targeted, but the available information does not show whether it was damaged. An earlier drone attack on the same warehouse, on 29 August, briefly halted its operations.

Pause and earlier refinery strikes

Ukraine halted strikes on Russian refineries for two weeks at the end of October, a pause that De Morgen says it imposed under pressure from US President Donald Trump. Trump had announced an energy truce between Ukraine and Russia, and according to De Morgen he said the attacks had pushed up global fuel prices. Kyiv has since resumed the strikes, and Militarnyi said the Ryazan refinery was the sixth Russian refinery attacked that week, while De Morgen counted it as the fifth attack on a Russian refinery in less than a week, so the two tallies differ. The Ryazan refinery had already been hit on 15 October, when a fire broke out and one of its primary processing units was temporarily halted.

Wider strikes across Ukraine and Russia

Russia's Defence Ministry said its forces had hit a Nova Poshta terminal near Kharkiv, a 330-kilovolt substation in the Dnipropetrovsk region and a dry cargo ship in the Black Sea, but Ukrainian officials had not immediately confirmed the postal strike or the vessel. Kharkiv governor Oleh Syniehubov said Russia had attacked the city and 17 settlements over the previous day with more than 80 drones, and six people were hurt, one of them a child. In Donetsk, governor Vadym Filashkin reported four civilians killed and five injured in Russian attacks on Wednesday. Overnight, fires also broke out in the Bucha district outside Kyiv, where a logistics centre was targeted and one person was hurt. In Russia's Rostov and Voronezh regions, governors reported about 50 and 48 drones intercepted or destroyed, with casualty details still pending or absent.

Open questions

Malkov has not named the affected industrial sites, and no Russian official has confirmed damage to the refinery. Early footage of the refinery fire came from videos and Telegram channels that could not be independently verified at first, according to Focus. The casualty figures for Ryazan and the other regions remain preliminary.