Ukraine Hits Ryazan Refinery as Energy Strikes Resume After Brief Pause

Update: Trump calls the resumed strikes a disgrace

Updated 06:40 UTC, Oct 16: President Donald Trump attacked the resumed refinery strikes in a Newsmax interview aired on Thursday, October 15. He said the attacks push world oil prices higher and called them a disgrace. He said Ukraine has plenty of other targets, and that hitting diesel refineries does the world no service. Trump said he is not a big fan of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and finds him harder to deal with than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Zelenskiy spent Thursday in Brussels seeking European backing, where he met NATO chief Mark Rutte. Reuters also reported that Ukraine has faced reduced use of a satellite system it relies on for battlefield communications and drone work. Two US officials and a Western official told the wire the order to restrict it came from inside the White House.

Ukrainian drones struck the Rosneft oil refinery at Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, early on Thursday, October 15, and started a fire at the plant, Russian and Ukrainian officials said. The strike was the first Ukrainian attack on a Russian energy site since President Donald Trump announced on Sunday that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to an energy ceasefire, a truce neither side confirmed at the time.

Russia's Defense Ministry said air defenses brought down four Ukrainian Flamingo missiles and 69 drones aimed at the refinery, and that falling drone fragments sparked the fire. A senior Ukrainian official, speaking without his name because he was not cleared to talk in public, confirmed to the Associated Press that Ukraine had hit the refinery. Russia's Astra news outlet posted a photograph that it said showed the blaze.

Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov said the damage at the refinery was still being assessed and emergency crews were working at the scene. A warehouse elsewhere in the region was also damaged, he said. Classes at schools and kindergartens in two districts were called off for the day because of the scale of the drone attack, Malkov said earlier on Thursday.

A plant that feeds the capital

The Ryazan refinery is owned by Rosneft, the biggest oil company in Russia. The plant supplies fuel to Moscow and handles close to 5 percent of all the oil refined in Russia. Ukrainian drones have hit it several times in recent months, and each strike has forced repair work at a site the capital depends on for petrol and diesel.

Ukraine has struck Russian refineries through the year to cut the fuel supply and the export income that help fund Moscow's war. Russia has struck Ukraine's power grid in return, and blackouts have followed in cities far from the front line. The energy ceasefire that Trump announced on Sunday was the latest attempt to pause that exchange.

The pause lasted three days

The Ryazan strike came hours after President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the short energy pause was over. In a Financial Times interview published on Thursday, Zelenskiy said Ukraine had held off energy strikes for three days to meet Washington's wishes, and would resume them because Russia kept hitting Ukrainian energy sites.

Kyiv's confirmation that the Ryazan strike landed turns that warning into action. It also lands as ties between Kyiv and Washington strain over Trump's Russian diesel deal, which Zelenskiy has called a betrayal of Ukraine. Zelenskiy said he could agree to halt energy strikes only in return for more US made Patriot interceptors.

Neither the Associated Press nor Reuters reported casualties in Ryazan. Neither report said how long the refinery fire burned or whether output at the plant had stopped, and Rosneft gave no comment in the Reuters report. The damage count, for now, rests on the word of the two governments and one photograph from the scene.