Fuel depot ablaze near key Crimea bridge in Russia

A fuel depot was on fire early on Wednesday near a crucial bridge linking Russia’s mainland with Crimea, a Russian official said, days after Moscow blamed Ukraine for an attack that set fire to an oil depot in Sevastopol.
Flames and black smoke billowed over what appeared to be large tanks emblazoned with red warnings of “Flammable” in videos posted on Russian social media, though Reuters could not independently verify either the fire reports or the videos.
Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the Krasnodar region lying across the Sea of Azov from Ukraine, said, “The fire has been classified as the highest rank of difficulty,” adding that there were no casualties.
Kondratyev said the blaze broke out in the village of Volna. The hamlet is close to the Crimean bridge over the Kerch Strait, a major artery for Russian forces, as it links the mainland to the Crimean peninsula that was annexed in 2014 from Ukraine.
The incident came days after a drone strike set ablaze a Russian fuel storage facility in the Crimean port of Sevastopol on Saturday, in what Moscow called a Ukrainian attack.