Caption: This handout video grab taken from a footage released on August 14, 2025, on the official Telegram account of the Belgorod region governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, shows a scene of a alleged Ukrainian strike in Belgorod

MOSCOW – Ukraine fired dozens of drones at Russia between late Wednesday and early Thursday, wounding three people and sparking fires in two southern regions, including at an oil refinery, officials said.

Videos posted on Russian social media purported to show a large fire at an oil refinery in the southern city of Volgograd, about 470 kilometres (around 300 miles) from the front line.

“The debris from the attack caused oil products to spill and catch fire at the Volgograd oil refinery,” Volgograd region governor Andrei Bocharov said in a statement on Telegram.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said a Ukrainian drone struck a car in the centre of the region’s capital, setting it alight and wounding three people.

He posted a video showing the car in flames and debris scattered across the street.

“Emergency services are working at the scene,” he wrote on Telegram.

Ukraine did not immediately comment on the reported attacks.

Since Russia launched its full-scale military assault on Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv has responded with drone strikes on Russian infrastructure hundreds of kilometres from its border.

Kyiv calls the strikes fair retaliation for Moscow’s daily missile and drone barrages on its own civilians.

The Russian defence ministry said it had intercepted 44 Ukrainian drones between late Wednesday and early Thursday, including seven over Crimea, the peninsula that it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The attacks came on the eve of a crunch summit in Alaska between US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the first between a sitting US and Russian president since 2021 as the White House pushes for an end to the three-and-a-half year conflict. (AFP)