Drone attack damages oil pipeline, Russia blames Ukraine

Russia has blamed Ukraine for a drone attack on an oil pipeline facility that damaged an office building in the city of Pskov in a border region near the Belarus border.

An attack by two drones caused an explosion in Russia's Pskov region near the border with Belarus, said local governor Mikhail Vedernikov in a Saturday post on his telegram social media account, blaming Kiev for the incident.

Vedernikov said the Ukrainian government was to blame for the incident, but Moscow had previously blamed Kiev for similar incidents, some of which have caused damage to people and property hundreds of kilometers from its border with Ukraine.

"Provisionally, the building was damaged as a result of an attack by two unmanned aerial vehicles," Vedernikov added.

He later noted that no casualties were inflicted in the incident and that the task force investigating the drone raid has arrived at the scene and will announce its final conclusion in due time.

The incident occurred near the village of Litvinovo, less than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from Russia's border with Belarus.

Ukrainian authorities have never publicly confirmed Kiev's attacks against targets inside Russia, but top Ukrainian officials have occasionally welcomed news of successful drone strikes on Russian soil.

Last September, three explosions targeted Russia's Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines rendering three of the four lines inoperable and releasing vast quantities of methane into the Baltic Sea.

There were speculations at the time about American involvement in the sabotage attack, but when the former Polish Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski, thanked the US for damaging the Russian pipeline, it became -- for all intents and purposes -- a certainty.

In February 2023, however, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh insisted that the blast was indeed carried out by the US in a top secret CIA operation ordered by President Joe Biden and with the collaboration of Norway. 

Hersh asserts that US Navy divers, operating from a Norwegian ship, using a NATO naval exercise in June 2022 as cover, had planted mines, which were later remotely detonated by sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian plane.

SS