Russia bolsters anti-drone defenses after Ukraine hits oil ports

MOSCOW

Russia on Friday announced it is bolstering air defences around critical infrastructure sites in the northwest after a spate of Ukrainian attacks on key oil exporting ports.

Ukraine has repeatedly attacked the ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk — the two most important export hubs for oil in western Russia.

Kiev says the strikes are fair retaliation for Moscow's nightly barrages of its cities.

Ukraine is also seeking to reduce Russia's earnings from the energy price surge amid the war in the Middle East.

Leningrad governor Alexander Drozdenko said he had "decided to deploy additional mobile fire groups at key enterprises in the region to protect them from UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) attacks."

"Reservists are expected to be involved in the mobile fire units," he said in a video.

Signing up would be voluntary and under an initial three-year contract, he added.

President Vladimir Putin last year signed a law to allow reservists to guard oil refineries, which have also been heavily targeted by Ukrainian drones.

These have weighed on Russian oil shipments, even as the International Energy Agency said this week that Russia's oil export revenues almost doubled to $19 billion in March.

Oil loadings at Ust-Luga and Primorsk halved in the week following a Ukrainian drone raid on March 23, compared to the same period last year, according to the calculations by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a nonprofit.