Ukraine hits oil depot in Russian-held city, local leader says

(Reuters) -Ukrainian forces attacked an oil storage depot and sparked a large fire, injuring five people late on Tuesday on the outskirts of the Russian-held city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, the region’s Russia-installed leader said.

“Late at night, the enemy made a strike on the peaceful city of Luhansk, shelling an oil storage depot on the edge of the city,” Leonid Pasechnik, head of the Luhansk People’s Republic, wrote on Telegram.

He later reported that five employees of the depot were taken to hospital. All units from the local division of Russia’s Emergencies Ministry were deployed to put out the fire and keep nearby buildings safe.

Pasechnik suggested, without providing any evidence, that the strike had been carried out by a U.S.-supplied ATACM (Army Tactical Missile System).

“Efforts to provide medical assistance to the injured are compounded by the large fire,” he wrote.

There was no official Ukrainian statement on the incident.

Video posted on the sites of both Russian and Ukrainian war bloggers showed a large fire burning some distance from apartment buildings.

Ukrainian war bloggers reported the strike, one suggesting it was carried out by a missile.

Separatist fighters backed and financed by Russia seized control of large chunks of Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine in 2014 after Moscow annexed Crimea.

Pasechnik became head of the separatist region before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia annexed both regions – as well as Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions – in September 2022, though it does not have full control of any of them.

(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Franklin Paul and Stephen Coates)