A Ukrainian drone strike began a hearth at a Russian oil depot related to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium pumping station broken in an assault final month.
The depot, positioned within the village of Kavkazskaya, halted all operations early Wednesday, in accordance with a assertion from the regional emergency service. The ability was used to ship Russian crude to the Kropotkinskaya pumping station, a part of the CPC export conduit, till the station halted operations in mid-February.
The assault got here simply hours after Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump mentioned the struggle in Ukraine. Whereas Putin refused to commit to a 30-day ceasefire, he agreed to a potential plan underneath which either side pause strikes on power infrastructure for a similar period.
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Nonetheless, Kyiv and different components of Ukraine got here underneath huge Russian drone assault in a single day, that additionally focused power tasks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy stated.
The CPC infrastructure, stretched between Kazakhstan’s big oil fields and Russia’s Black Coastline, is the single-largest route for exports of Kazakh barrels. It additionally ships some crude from Russian tasks. The most recent assault highlights the vulnerability of a route that’s key for the nation and its European consumers.
“The CPC pipeline continues its operations,” the venture’s press service stated. “The Kropotkinskaya pumping station continues to be not operational and restore works there are underway,” so the broken depot has not impacted flows, it stated.
Nevertheless, the hearth harm to the oil depot signifies that restoration of Russian flows to Kropotkinskaya could take longer than the two-month timeframe CPC initially gave. Consequently, some minimal volumes of Russian crude won’t be fed into the CPC system till each the depot and the station are again on-line.
Final 12 months, European purchasers obtained about 1 million barrels a day of CPC crude, in accordance with ship-tracking knowledge compiled by Bloomberg. The volumes had been of Kazakh origin because the European Union has banned imports of Russian barrels.
If applied, any halt on assaults on power infrastructure would scale back dangers for Russian and Kazakh oil exports through onshore pipelines, like Druzhba and the CPC. It will additionally help Russian refinery runs, hindered by near-daily Ukrainian drone assaults this 12 months.
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