Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered pre-emptive strikes against Russian facilities used for the war effort, and Kyiv expanded a drone campaign targeting Russian energy infrastructure in an attempt to force Moscow to negotiate.“I directed our intelligence services and our military to take preemptive action against facilities that Russia uses to expand its war effort,” Zelensky said in a speech late Wednesday.The directive came as Ukrainian drones knocked out power on Wednesday in Sevastopol, the largest city in Russia-annexed Crimea, and the Russian-appointed governor said trolleybuses would stop running and parents should keep their children home as efforts to restore supplies continued. Robert Brovdy, commander of Ukraine’s drone force, said drones struck the main substation of the Sevastopol power plant.The Moscow refinery, the Russian capital’s largest fuel supplier, will be closed for at least six months after suffering severe damage in a Ukrainian drone strike, two industry sources told Reuters. The factory suffered two attacks this month, forcing it to cease operations. The attacks destroyed a large portion of Russia’s refining capacity, triggering fuel shortages, rising prices and long queues at gas stations across the country’s 11 time zones.The Russian Defense Ministry said Russian air defense systems shot down 323 drones across the country overnight. Falling debris killed two people and damaged an industrial facility in the central Nizhny Novgorod region. Authorities in the Orenburg region, more than 1,000 kilometers southeast of Moscow, said the drone was shot down over an industrial facility.Russia is considering a diesel export ban in the face of fuel shortages, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Tuesday. Vedomosti reports that fuel imports are being considered to address shortages, particularly in Crimea, where sales of gasoline to the public have been suspended. Russian lawmakers approved tax code amendments that would allow the use of lower-quality fuel in gasoline production and delay the modernization of certain equipment at refineries.Russia’s TASS news agency said the entrance to an apartment building in the Russian-controlled Ukrainian city of Horlivka collapsed after a nighttime drone attack, killing three people. A man was killed and a woman injured in a drone strike in Russia’s Belgorod region, while Russian shelling killed one person in the eastern Ukrainian city of Balaklia on Wednesday.
