Ukraine-Russia battle dwell: Zelensky stands by Easter truce supply whereas Kyiv steps up assaults on Putin’s oil refinery | EUROtoday

Rescue workers completed ​search operations five days after a large fire at a Russian petrochemical plant and ⁠the final death toll stood at 12, the company owning the plant said in the early hours today.

Sibur, which ​owns the ⁠sprawling Nizhnekamskneftekhim plant in central Russia’s Tatarstan region, ⁠offered condolences and posted the names ​of ⁠the 12 ‌dead, including a firefighter, on Telegram. Dozens of people were injured.

In ‌the aftermath of ‌the accident in the town of Nizhnekamsk, Sibur said a gas ⁠mixture had exploded following a loss of pressure at a facility producing synthetic rubber and plastics. It said it was not clear what had caused the ‌gas to ignite.

Russia’s ​emergencies ministry said an ‌aircraft had been dispatched ⁠from Moscow to Nizhnekamsk, ⁠about 1,000km (620 miles) to the ‌east to ​bring the ‌injured to the ​capital for treatment.

Earlier this year, Ukraine’s defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, admitted that Ukraine has 2 million draft-dodgers and hundreds of thousands more who are absent without leave (awol).

All 41 miners who were trapped ⁠underground after Ukraine struck the Bilorechenska coal mine in the Russian-controlled Luhansk ⁠region have ​been evacuated ⁠and are safe, a Russian-installed ⁠official said.

Leonid Pasechnik, ​the ⁠Moscow-appointed head ‌of the region, said power had been restored to ‌the mine and ‌the workers brought to the surface.

He added none ⁠of the miners was injured and that no one required medical assistance.

Earlier, Pasechnik said a Ukrainian strike had damaged ‌a power substation supplying ​the mine, leaving ‌workers trapped underground ⁠while rescue operations ⁠were under way.

Kyiv has ‌not ​commented on ‌the incident.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has said he stood by a proposal made to Russia for a ceasefire contingent on Moscow halting all attacks on energy infrastructure.

Zelensky ⁠said in his nightly video address that the proposal had been conveyed to Moscow through the US. He also said work was continuing with US negotiators ⁠on security guarantees, which he ​called ⁠the key to lasting peace.

“If Russia is ready to stop strikes on our ⁠energy infrastructure, we will be ready to respond ​in ⁠kind,” he said. “This proposal ‌has been conveyed to the Russian side through the Americans.”

Zelensky offered last week to observe a ‌ceasefire under similar conditions for Easter – ‌in the Orthodox faith dominant in both Russia and Ukraine Easter falls on this coming Sunday.

But following new ⁠Russian attacks, he then said Russia had responded to the proposal by deploying Iranian-designed Shahed drones.

Moscow reacted coolly to Zelensky’s proposal last week, saying it favoured an overall peace deal instead.

In his remarks last night, after an overnight attack on ‌the Black Sea port of Odesa killed three ​people, Zelensky said Russia appeared unwilling to ‌agree to an Easter ⁠ceasefire.

“We have repeatedly proposed to Russia ⁠a ceasefire at least for Easter, a special time of ‌the year,” he ​said. “But for them, all times ‌are the same. Nothing ​is sacred.”

Russia said Ukrainian drones attacked the Caspian Pipeline Consortium’s Black Sea terminal, which handles 1.5 per cent of global oil supply, damaging ⁠the single point mooring (SPM), loading infrastructure and four vast storage tanks.

Separately, the Ukrainian military said it had struck oil loading facilities at the nearby Sheskharis oil terminal in Novorossiysk.

The strikes could be among the most significant on Russia’s Black Sea export facilities during the more than four-year-old war with Ukraine, which in ⁠the past month has seen Ukraine step up ​attacks ⁠on Russia’s energy infrastructure.

Russia’s defence ministry said Ukraine had attacked the CPC’s loading ​facilities ⁠with air drones. The CPC’s Yuzhnaya Ozereevka ‌terminal exports oil from Kazakhstan and its shareholders include Chevron and Exxon Mobil.

Fire Point, maker of Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missile, is in talks with European companies to launch a new air defence system by next year, a senior executive told Reuters, creating a low-cost alternative to the increasingly hard-to-get ​Patriot system.

With governments seeking to defend their skies as the wars in Ukraine and Iran sow global instability, Fire Point’s co-founder and chief designer Denys Shtilierman said it aimed to slash the cost of intercepting ‌a ballistic missile to below $1m.

Shtilierman also said Fire Point was awaiting government approval for an investment by a Middle Eastern conglomerate that valued the company at $2.5bn and would open the door to new business opportunities, including low-orbit satellite launches.

Years of know-how gained on the battlefield fighting Russian forces have made Ukraine a leading innovator in low-cost defence tech. With the outbreak of war in the Gulf, Kyiv has leveraged that expertise to sign security agreements with governments across the region.

Many Ukrainian defence firms are now seeking to export their excess capacity and cash ​in on a global boom in military spending. While the government recently loosened wartime export restrictions, each proposed deal is still subject to stringent checks and state approval.

Russia suffered more cross-border drone attacks from Ukraine in a one-month period than it has unleashed on the smaller nation since Russian president Vladimir Putin launched the war in February 2022, a new report has revealed.

According to the data by the Russian defence ministry, its forces downed 7,347 Ukrainian drones during March. This marks the highest monthly total ever reported by Moscow and an average of 237 craft each day, reported ABC news after analysing data from both the countries.

Russia typically only publishes the number of Ukrainian drones it claims were shot down and not how many were fired in total.

In sharp contrast, Ukraine’s air force confirmed that they faced an onslaught of 6,462 Russian drones and 138 missiles of various types across the course of the month.

Of these, at least 5,833 drones and 102 missiles – around 90 per cent of drones and just under 74 per cent of missiles – were intercepted or suppressed.

The daily average for Ukraine is a little over 208 drones and four missiles during March.

It is not immediately clear if Russia’s drone attacks have been impacted by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East where Iran has been targeting US and Israeli bases in the region by using its Shahed drones.

Russia no longer has the “upper hand” within the battle towards Ukraine, former CIA director David Petraeus mentioned.

“I think what’s remarkable is that Russia no longer has the upper hand,” Petraeus said in an interview with CBS News.

“Russia heavily outnumbers Ukraine. It outguns Ukraine. It has an economy 10 or 12 times the size of Ukraine’s. And yet the Ukrainian forces right now are stopping the Russians cold on the front lines,” he said.

Petraeus also highlighted that on the morning of his interview, more than 400 drones and dozens of missiles were fired, and glide bombs are incoming every night.

Serbia’s top military official has ruled out any Ukrainian role in explosives found near a gas pipeline with Hungary, after Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban claimed Kyiv was involved.

Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, a close ally of Orbán, on Sunday said authorities found “an explosive of devastating power” near a gas pipeline transporting Russian gas from the country to its neighbour Hungary.

However, Đuro Jovanić, director of Belgrade’s counterintelligence Military Security Agency (VBA), said it was “not true that the Ukrainians tried to organise” the plot, which involved “explosives specially packaged, hermetically sealed, detonator caps”.

“The manufacturer of the explosives does not mean that he is also the one who ordered or executed it,” he said, adding, “The markings on the explosives show that it was manufactured in the US,” Jovanić said.

His remarks came as Orban on Sunday called an emergency meeting of the National Defence Council that the Serbian authorities had uncovered a “sabotage operation” in Vojvodina, Serbia and seemingly linked it to Ukraine.

Orban went as far as to claim that Ukraine, without naming the country, had been “working for years to cut Europe off from Russian energy” and posed “a direct threat to Hungary”.