Authorities in Western Siberia’s Tyumen region said they downed three drones near an industrial site on Monday evening in what may be the furthest Ukrainian drone incursion reported inside Russian territory since the start of the war.
Tyumen residents posted videos online showing fire trucks and ambulances rushing toward the Antipinsky oil refinery, one of the region’s largest, with a processing capacity of 9 million tons of crude per year. Local Telegram news channels reported there being at least two explosions and mobile network disruptions in the area, located roughly 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
Regional authorities said that emergency crews were initially dispatched to an industrial site in Antipino after reports of explosions and fire, but added that no blaze was found. Less than 30 minutes later, they said three drones were “detected and neutralized on the premises of an enterprise.”
“A prompt response from emergency services prevented a detonation. There were no casualties, explosions or fires. All enterprises in the area continue to operate normally,” the Tyumen government press service said without specifying who was behind the drone incursion.
Andriy Kovalenko, who heads the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council’s anti-disinformation center, appeared to confirm the attack when he wrote “it’s a bad night for the Antipinsky refinery in Tyumen” in a Monday Telegram post on Monday night.
Russia’s Defense Ministry has not commented on the incident.
If confirmed, the attack would mark one of the deepest Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory to date. The key Russian oil refining and petrochemical hub of Tyumen had not reported any drone attacks before Monday.
Previously, Ukrainian drones reached targets in the Orenburg region, located 1,800 kilometers (1,110 miles) from the border, and multiple times the Murmansk region in Russia’s Far North, around 1,700 kilometers (1,056 miles) from the border.
In June, Ukraine likewise launched a large-scale covert drone attack, dubbed Operation Spiderweb, across several Russian regions, targeting five military airbases. In those strikes, drones were concealed and launched from inside Russia.