A fire broke out near an oil refinery in Volgograd following a drone attack

On the night of September 31, Ukrainian drones launched a massive attack on industrial infrastructure in Russia’s Volgograd Oblast. 

A fire broke out in an apartment building in the Krasnoarmeysky District of Volgograd.

“One victim has been hospitalized, and the fire has been contained,” Bocharov said.

At the same time, local residents reported numerous explosions across all districts of Volgograd.

Footage from eyewitnesses shows a major fire near two adjacent facilities—the Volgograd Oil Refinery (OR) and the “Kaustik” chemical plant.

The Volgograd Oil Refinery is owned by Lukoil through Lukoil-Volgograd Oil Refining LLC and ranks among the top ten largest oil refineries in Russia. The facility has a processing capacity of approximately 14.8 million metric tons of crude oil per year.

The refinery produces automotive gasoline, including high-octane grades, diesel fuel, jet fuel, fuel oil, and bitumen.

Prior to this, the Volgograd Oil Refinery had already come under a drone attack on July 31. According to reports, key production facilities were damaged at that time, and the AVT-1 and AVT-6 primary oil refining units were shut down.

Located near the refinery is OJSC “Kaustik,” a chemical industry enterprise that supplies products to the Russian military-industrial complex.

Another facility targeted last night was the “Samara” Linear Production and Dispatch Station (LPDS) and Transneft’s largest tank farm. This was reported by Astra.

The facility covers an area of more than 216 hectares. Its grounds house 71 storage tanks with a total capacity of over 1.6 million cubic meters of oil, as well as two oil pumping stations and one oil blending station.

Four main oil pipelines converge at the “Samara” oil terminal:

• “Almetyevsk–Kuibyshev”;
• “Kaltasinsky–Kuibyshev”;
• “Nizhnevartovsk–Kurgan–Kuibyshev”;
• “Guryev–Kuibyshev.”

Thus, the terminal receives crude oil from Western Siberia, Tatarstan, Orenburg, and Kazakhstan.

At the same time, the official authorities of the Samara Region have not commented on the fire at the facility. It is known that a missile alert was issued in the region.

This was reported by the region’s governor, Andrei Bocharov.

Explosions were heard in Russia’s Samara Oblast, followed by a fire. 

Prior to this, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin stated that Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries had impacted the industry and Russia’s economic indicators. According to him, the losses amounted to about 1% of the country’s GDP.

Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia—the aggressor state—rejected the possibility of halting long-range strikes in the war against Ukraine at the Valdai Political Forum in Moscow. He called absurd the proposal that Ukraine should stop attacking Russian oil refineries while Russia would stop striking Ukrainian ships.