MOSCOW (Reuters) – A fire at an oil depot in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region after a suspected Ukrainian drone attack has been extinguished nearly a week after it started, region governor Veniamin Kondratiev said on Tuesday.
The Kavkazskaya depot is located only a few kilometres from the Kropotkinskaya pumping station of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which was also hit by a drone last month, sparking fears of a drop in oil supplies in global markets.
The depot is key for Russia’s oil exports via the CPC, which mainly transports Kazakhstan’s oil exports.
Kondratiev said on the Telegram messaging app that two reservoirs at the facility were completely burnt out. More than 470 firefighters tackled the blaze, he added.
The oil complex includes a railway loading rack and a pipeline to the Kropotkinskaya pumping station.
Suppliers delivered at least 130,000 metric tons of oil per month via Kavkazskaya last year, CPC says, with volumes totalling around 1.51 million tons for the year as a whole.
(Reporting by Maxim Rodionov and Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by Andrew Osborn and David Goodman)
