A fire broke out at an oil depot in the southern Russian port of Novorossiysk following a Ukrainian drone attack, the city’s mayor said on Saturday (May 23, 2026).

“As a result of falling UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) debris, a fire broke out at the oil depot. Several technical and administrative buildings caught fire. Fragments of the drones also fell onto the fuel terminal site,” Mayor Andrey Kravchenko wrote on Telegram.

Two people were wounded, he added.

Novorossiysk handles around a fifth of Russia’s crude oil shipments and is the country’s largest export hub on the Black Sea.

Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences had intercepted 348 drones in total from Ukraine overnight.

In response to daily bombardments since Russia invaded in 2022, Ukraine has regularly struck within Russian territory.

Kyiv frequently carries out long-range strikes that it says target energy facilities in a bid to dent Russia’s oil revenues.

The Kremlin said on Tuesday (December 30, 2025) that a Ukrainian ‍drone attack on a presidential residence ​in the Novgorod region would toughen Russia’s ‌position on a possible peace ​deal to end the fighting.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has dismissed the Russian accusations as “another round of lies” aimed to justify additional attacks against Ukraine and to prolong the war.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry ​Peskov noted Ukraine’s denial of the ⁠drone attack — and said that many Western media were playing along with Kyiv’s denial.

“This terrorist ​action is aimed ⁠at collapsing the negotiation process,” Mr. Peskov told reporters. “The diplomatic consequence will be to toughen the negotiating position of the Russian ‌Federation.”

The Russian military, he said, ‌knew how and when to respond.

“We see that Zelenskyy himself is ‍trying to deny this, and many Western media outlets, playing along with the ‍Kyiv regime, are starting to spread the theme that this did not happen,” Mr. Peskov said. “This is a completely insane assertion.”

Mr. Peskov declined to say where Mr. Putin was at the time of the attack, saying that in light of recent ⁠events, such details should not be in the public domain.

When asked ​if Russia had physical evidence of ⁠the drone attack, he said air defences shot the drones down, but that the question of wreckage was for the Defence Ministry.