Gas Infrastructure Damaged as Russia Launches Missile Barrage on Western Ukraine

[UPDATES] 6:40 p.m. Russia was allegedly aiming for two gas fields. One of which is Oparske underground gas storage, the second largest in Prykarpattia and located in Drohobych district Lviv region. “The storage is quite large - almost 2 billion cubic meters,” a source in Ukraine’s energy sector told Kyiv Post. 

Another gas facility is gas storage in Striy. Both form oil and gas fields of the Drohobych-Boryslav industrial district. 

Ukraine’s state-owned company Naftogaz wrote in a Facebook post that the gas facilities are operating as usual. A second source among Ukrainian gas experts confirmed it.

“They aimed underground gas fields. Three missiles were trying to reach the target but nothing critical,” he told Kyiv Post. 

Kyiv Post also confirmed this information with two other sources from Ukraine’s energy market. 

[UPDATES] As of 11 a.m., Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian troops launched over 40 rockets into Ukraine in the morning of Wednesday, Jan. 15, targeting gas infrastructure and energy facilities. 

Zelensky reported that at least 30 of these missiles were intercepted and destroyed. Additionally, the Russian military deployed more than 70 drones in attacks across Ukraine overnight.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine echoed Zelensky’s statement, saying that Russian forces attacked Ukrainian energy facilities, in particular gas infrastructure in Kharkiv, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions.

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‘Unfortunately, the Russian attack caused significant damage to these facilities,” the General Staff reported. 

According to Maxym Kozytsky, the Head of the Lviv Regional Administration, two critical infrastructure facilities in the Drohobych and Stryi districts were struck.

“Thankfully, there were no casualties, but there was damage,” he said.

Svitlana Onishchuk, the head of the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Administration, said the Russian attack also targeted critical infrastructure.

“Thankfully, there were no casualties. Relevant services are working at the scene, and the situation is under control,” she said, without giving more details.

Due to the Russian missile strikes, emergency blackouts were introduced in the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Poltava, Zaporizhia, and Kirovohrad regions.

Russian forces launched yet another mass missile attack against Ukraine on Wednesday morning, Jan. 15, firing missiles, including hypersonic Kinzhals, from more than 13 strategic bombers, mostly targeting western regions of Ukraine.

Moscow and Kyiv have increased strikes on each other ahead of US President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, as both sides seek to gain the upper hand in potential negotiations aimed at settling the full-scale war that has been raging for nearly three years.

At around 5:45 a.m., monitoring channels reported that Tu-95ms bombers had likely launched air-launched cruise missiles from Russia’s Volgograd region. However, it wasn’t clear if this was a real attack or just a drill.

Half an hour later, at around 6:15 a.m., it was reported that 13 bombers – seven Tu-22s and six Tu-95s – were in the sky after taking off from Olenya airfield in the Saratov region.

By 6:15 a.m., a supersonic MiG-31K fighter jet, capable of carrying Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, was spotted in the air. Around the same time, the first explosion was reported in Kharkiv.

Shortly after, reports surfaced of Kalibr cruise missiles being fired from the Black Sea. Throughout the morning, a mix of missile types, including Kh-101, Kinzhal missiles, and Kalibr missiles, were launched across Ukraine.

Reports indicated that the majority of the missiles were heading toward western Ukraine.

At 7:19 a.m., the head of the Lviv Regional Military Administration, Maksym Kozytsky, announced on Telegram that the nearest cruise missiles to the region had been detected in the airspace over Khmelnytsky region.

As of now, there’s no information about damage or casualties from the attacks. Authorities are monitoring the situation closely.

The missile assault comes a day after Ukraine carried out its largest aerial attack on Russian territory of the nearly three-year war, hitting factories and energy hubs hundreds of kilometers from the frontline.

“The Ukrainian Defense Forces carried out the most massive strike against the occupiers’ military facilities, at a distance of 200 to 1,100 kilometers (125 to 700 miles) deep into the territory of the Russian Federation,” Ukraine’s General Staff said in a post on social media.

Facilities “in the Bryansk, Saratov, Tula regions and the Republic of Tatarstan were hit,” it added.

Among the targets were a chemical factory that makes rocket fuel and ammunition for Russia’s army, an oil depot near a Russian air base and an oil refinery.

The Russian military accused Kyiv of using US- and British-supplied missiles for one of the strikes and promised it would “not go unanswered.”