Ukrainian gas firm reports damage from Russian strike amid energy ceasefire

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KYIV (Reuters) -A Russian drone attack has damaged warehouses owned by Ukraine’s state gas producer in the central region of Poltava during a truce on energy strikes, officials said on Friday, while the company said its gas production facilities had been damaged.

Washington said on Tuesday Kyiv and Moscow had agreed to stop striking each other’s energy facilities, but the two sides have accused each other of flouting the U.S.-brokered deal and appear to interpret its terms differently.

Poltava’s governor said storage sites owned by a division of energy company Naftogaz had been hit by drones in the region which, like the frontline Kharkiv region, is a major centre of Ukrainian gas production capacity.

“There were spare parts, equipment for the restoration and repair of wells or oil and gas processing facilities,” Governor Volodymyr Kohut said in televised comments.

Naftogaz, which often withholds details about attacks on its facilities for security reasons, did not spell out that its infrastructure was attacked in the Poltava region, but described it as “an attempt to undermine the country’s energy stability”.

“Fortunately, there were no casualties, but some gas production facilities were damaged,” it said.

The Kremlin said on Friday that Russia was respecting the energy strike ceasefire, but that it reserved the right to withdraw from the agreement.

Ukraine’s military said it is strictly adhering to the agreement and denied Russian accusations saying otherwise.

The Ukrainian air force said it shot down 89 of 163 Russian drones launched overnight. Fifty-one did not reach their targets, likely due to electronic warfare countermeasures, it said.

Ukraine’s general staff said the Russian military targeted civilian infrastructure and administrative buildings owned by oil and gas companies in Poltava.

“The Russian aggressor cynically continues to lie about its aspirations for peace, deliberately attacking civilian objects and endangering civilians,” it said.

The attack sparked fires over 2,500 square meters and also damaged the business’s transformer, according to local authorities. Damage to power lines also briefly cut power to a couple of Poltava’s districts, Kohut said.

In the southern region of Odesa, drones injured one person and caused fires in private residences, according to the state emergency services.

(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko, Yuliia Dysa, Editing by Aidan Lewis and Mark Potter)