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Fires have erupted at one of Russia’s largest oil refineries after Ukrainian drones struck the oil production facility overnight.
Apocalyptic red flames lit up the sky as the Ukrainian attack set the Ryazan oil refinery ablaze for the second time in two days.
In an embarrassment for Vladimir Putin, Ukraine struck the refinery for a second time in 48 hours after Russia’s air defences failed, triggering new problems for supplies of fuel to Moscow and the Russian army.
Residents heard as many as 15 explosions in as many minutes in the area of the refinery, which is 112 miles southeast of Moscow and crucial to Russian oil exports.
Eight drones were downed over the Ryazan region, six drones were destroyed in the Kursk region and one drone was hit over the Belgorod region overnight, Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov has claimed.
Malkov said there were no casualties in the latest drone attack but that ‘material damage is being assessed’ from the latest strike.
The latest strikes come as Donald Trump is putting pressure on Putin to agree to talks aimed at halting the fighting and ending the debilitating war, which the US president has branded ‘ridiculous’.
Trump said he would end the war in his first 24 hours in office, but has missed his own deadline and set a new goal of 100 days to stop Putin’s aggression, which experts have warned is also seemingly out of reach.

Apocalyptic red flames lit up the sky overnight as the Ukrainian attack set the Ryazan oil refinery ablaze for the second time in two days

Ukraine said on Friday it had struck a Russia’s Ryazan oil refinery and a microchip factory in a huge drone attack that caused fires at the refinery’s production facilities and an oil pumping station
Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces have attacked the Ryazan oil refinery for the second time in 48 hours. Air defence systems destroyed 15 Ukrainian drones over Russia and two sea drones in the Black Sea, Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Sunday.
The overnight attack comes after Ukrainian drones struck the facility on Friday, causing a fire and damaging equipment at one of Russia’s biggest refineries
In the earlier strike, Russians were seen fleeing from the exploding oil refinery, apparently running for safety in panic, as smoke and flames engulfed the building.
The attack set ablaze oil storage at the refinery and damaged equipment including a railway loading rack and a hydrotreater unit used to remove impurities from refined products, sources have said.
The Ryazan oil refinery is one of the largest in Russia and critical for fuel supplies to Moscow, with a capacity of 18million tons a year. It is owned by state company Rosneft, headed by close Putin crony Igor Sechin.
Andrii Kovalenko, counter-disinformation chief at Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, said: ‘The refinery plays an important role in providing fuel for both the civilian and military-industrial complex of Russia.
‘It produces fuel for military equipment, aviation kerosene, diesel fuel and other types of petroleum products used in tanks, aircraft, ships and other equipment of the Russian Armed Forces.’
Russia is facing rising inflation with prices rises of essential food items, which is blamed on the war. Reports say Putin is under pressure from his oligarchs to halt the war before further economic damage is suffered.

In an embarrassment for Vladimir Putin, Ukraine struck the Ryazan oil refinery for a second time in 48 hours overnight after Russia’s air defences failed

Residents heard as many as 15 explosions in as many minutes in the area of the refinery – which is 112 miles southeast of Moscow and crucial to Russian oil exports. Pictured are flames in the sky as the Ryazan oil refinery fell under attack overnight

Russians were seen fleeing from the exploding oil refinery on Friday, apparently running for safety in panic, as smoke and flames engulfed the building
Trump has vowed to bring a swift end to nearly three years of war in Ukraine, but the overnight strikes have underlined Ukraine’s ability to hit targets deep inside Russia as the two sides try to strengthen their positions before any peace talks get under way.
Putin said on Friday he was open to discussions with Trump on the Ukraine war, but that the question of negotiating with Ukraine was complicated by the fact that Zelensky has signed a decree preventing him from conducting talks with Putin.
Sergei Lavrov, the Kremlin’s Foreign Minister, said he saw no objective signs that Ukraine or the West were ready for peace talks.
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US has not stopped giving military aid to Ukraine, insists President Zelensky

‘On the contrary, Western military supplies to the Ukrainian armed forces are continuing, ultimatums to Russia are being worked out, there is a (Ukrainian) legal ban on negotiations, and the issue of the legitimacy of the Ukrainian authorities is not being resolved,’ Lavrov said in remarks published on Friday.
The newly inaugurated US president failed to get Kyiv and Moscow to the negotiating table within 24 hours of his return to the White House, meaning he has backtracked on a promise – albeit an implausible one – that he repeatedly made while on the campaign trail.
‘No one with a decent grasp of this matter could believe that a conflict with such complex and deep roots could be resolved that easily,’ Vuk Vuksanovic, a political scientist at the London School of Economics (LSE), told Newsweek.
‘It remains more likely that this is a clash of interests and wills that will be resolved on the battlefield and not at the negotiating table,’ the foreign policy expert added.
Despite his repeated mentions of the war in the run-up to his inauguration, the president made no mention of it in his first speech, other than to declare himself a ‘peacemaker’.
In his first few days in office he has laid the blame for the grinding three-year war both with Putin and Zelensky, and continued to boldly claim that he will secure a deal quickly, while giving fairly scant details as to how.

Trump has vowed to bring a swift end to nearly three years of war in Ukraine. Trump (pictured in Las Vegas, Nevada on Saturday) has said that while he believes Zelensky wants to make a deal, ‘I don’t know if Putin does’
With the 24-hour deadline now expired and the war showing no sign of letting up anytime soon, Trump is said to have set his Ukraine envoy, Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, the task of ending it within 100 days.
‘He can’t. The Russians are in the driver’s seat. The Russians, for good strategic reasons from their perspective, are driving a hard bargain,’ University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer said, adding: ‘It’s almost impossible for me to see President Trump accepting the terms that the Russians demand.’
Trump is now focusing on his first phone call with Moscow, reports suggest, and when asked how long the war would last he said: ‘I have to speak to President Putin. We’re going to have to find out.’
Despite warnings that Trump may be ‘over-eager’ to end the war and could wish to do so at any price to meet his targets, there has been some optimism from voices in Kyiv and among its allies.
Referring to his country’s fate in light of a Trump presidency, former Ukrainian minister Tymofiy Mylovanov said: ‘It might not be good — but it will be much better than under Biden.
‘Biden managed the war as a crisis — he thought if he holds out long enough, the storm will pass. But it’s not passing.
‘Trump takes the perspective that we have to stop the storm. He’s not concerned about how it will be stopped.’
The Republican has continued making firm statements as he tries to project strength ahead of potential talks with Putin, who he shared relatively good relations with during his first term in office.
He has threatened heavy sanctions and tariffs on Russia unless Putin settles ‘almost immediately’, a move which would likely have little impact due to the limited US imports from Russia and the fact large-scale sanctions are already in place.

A 76-year-old Ukrainian man attaches firewood to his bicycle in front of a building damaged by Russian military strikes in Pokrovsk, Donetsk region on Saturday

Ukrainian rescuers working at the site of a ten-flour residential building in one of the settlements near of Kyiv, Ukraine on Friday. A total of at least three persons were killed and a dozen others were injured as a result of drone attacks in the Kyiv area
Speaking in the first interview of his presidency, Trump said of Moscow: ‘If they don’t settle this war soon, I mean almost immediately, I am going to put massive tariffs on Russia… I don’t want to do that, I love the Russian people, but we’ve got to get this war ended.’
He added that there was also a strong appetite in Kyiv to end the bloodshed – but indicated that this could be at a steep cost and that he perhaps had limited patience with Zelensky’s position.
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‘I will say he wants to settle now,’ Trump said. ‘He’s had enough.’
In a somewhat inflammatory statement about the Ukrainian leader, he said Zelensky is ‘no angel,’ and even claimed that he ‘shouldn’t have allowed this war to happen.’
‘First of all, he’s fighting a much bigger entity, okay, much bigger. When he was, you know, talking so brave… Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful,’ Trump said.
‘He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been… it would have been a nothing deal. I could have made that deal so easily,’ Trump said. ‘But Zelensky decided that ‘”I want to fight”.’
Elsewhere in the interview, Trump also said of the February 2022 invasion that Putin ‘shouldn’t have done it.’
‘He shouldn’t have done it and it has to stop. You know, they’ve lost about 850,000 Russian soldiers and 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers,’ he said – figures that are almost certainly overblown, with war monitors putting the death toll closer to 150,000 on the Russian side and 62,000 for the Ukrainians.

A Ukrainian brigade fires a self-propelled howitzer toward Russian front-line positions in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine on Thursday
With both sides counting their dead and struggling to replenish their frontline forces, an end to the war is an appealing prospect. But both Kyiv and Moscow insist on it being favourable to them, and have demanded concessions from the other side.
Meanwhile, desperate Russians have turned to fortune-telling cards and kits amid Putin’s relentless war against Ukraine.
They spent £15.6million buying Tarot cards in online marketplaces last year, more than double 2023. They purchased 2.8million fortune-telling decks, reported Forbes and Moneyplace.
The search for a better future comes amid a war that has lasted less than one month short of three years.
Since the war began in February 2022, the volume of sales of Tarot cards has jumped more than six times, say reports.