Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region was under a “massive attack” early Saturday, the governor said, reporting strikes in Dnipro and Pavlograd. This comes after Lysak said Friday that Russian overnight strikes killed two people in Dnipropetrovsk.
“The region is under a massive attack. Explosions are being heard,” Sergiy Lysak wrote on Telegram. He also warned residents to take cover.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Dnipropetrovsk region had been largely spared from intense fighting. But on Tuesday, Kyiv admitted that Russian forces had entered the area, shortly after Moscow asserted its troops had secured a foothold there.
Lysak said the drone strike on the Synelnyky district also wounded a 50-year-old woman. Two people, including a 46-year-old man who was in a “serious condition,” were injured in a separate attack on the city of Dnipro.
Unlike Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea, Dnipropetrovsk is not among the five regions that Russia has formally declared as its own.
The strikes in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region followed a reported Ukrainian drone attack on an oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai overnight on August 30. As per the Kyiv Independent, residents reported hearing explosions around 2:30 a.m. local time, with drones spotted overhead. Footage circulating on social media appeared to show a massive fire breaking out at the refinery.
Located just east of Crimea across the Kerch Strait, Krasnodar Krai has increasingly come under Ukrainian drone attacks. The region hosts key military infrastructure vital to Russia’s air operations in southern Ukraine and over the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s military has not issued a statement on the reported strike, though Kyiv has consistently targeted Russian infrastructure in the region since the war began.
