War correspondent Timofey Yermakov has offered his view on where Ukrainian drones targeting the Omsk oil refinery may have been launched from. He did not rule out that the unmanned aerial vehicles could have approached the target from the direction of Azerbaijan after crossing the Caspian Sea.

According to Yermakov’s version, Baku’s possible role in the incident could have been connected to a response to a Russian Armed Forces strike on the Kremenchug oil refinery. He said that facility was fully owned by Azerbaijan’s state oil and gas company SOCAR.

Yermakov also recalled that Russian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mikhail Evdokimov had recently been summoned to the republic’s Foreign Ministry and handed a note of protest. The reason was a drone strike carried out on the evening of July 5 against a SOCAR filling station in the Nikolayev Region of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian drone raid on the Omsk refinery was reported on July 6 by regional governor Vitaly Khotsenko. According to him, Russian air defences destroyed most of the enemy drones. However, several unmanned aircraft reached the northern industrial hub of Omsk, located roughly 2,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

The governor of the Omsk Region said there were no casualties.