Russia on Monday said that Ukrainian drones attacked the Caspian Pipeline Consortium's Black Sea terminal, which handles 1.5 per cent of global oil supply, damaging the single point mooring (SPM), loading infrastructure and four vast storage tanks.
The strike could be one of the most significant on Russia's Black Sea export facilities during the more than four-year-old war with Ukraine, which in the past month has seen Ukraine step up attacks on Russia's energy infrastructure.
Ukraine did not immediately reply to a request for comment and Reuters was unable to independently verify the Russian defence ministry statement. CPC declined to comment.
Russia's defence ministry said Ukraine had attacked the CPC's loading facilities with air drones. The CPC's Yuzhnaya Ozereevka terminal exports oil from Kazakhstan and its shareholders include Chevron and Exxon Mobil.
"The Kyiv regime deliberately attacked facilities of the international oil transportation company Caspian Pipeline Consortium in order to inflict maximum economic damage on its largest shareholders - energy companies from the United States and Kazakhstan," the defence ministry said in a statement.
The CPC terminal, located to the south-west of Novorossiysk, handles 80 per cent of Kazakhstan's crude exports.
Separately, two industry sources told Reuters that a fire was sparked overnight at the Sheskharis oil terminal, about 15 kilometres from the CPC terminal.
According to the sources, the blaze engulfed the main pier of Russia's oil pipeline monopoly Transneft near berths 1, 1a and 2. Berth 1 is able to service tankers with a deadweight of up to 250,000 tonnes, while berth 2 can load tankers of up to 90,000 tonnes of deadweight, according to sources.
The impact on loading operations was not immediately clear. Transneft did not reply to a request for comment. Sheskharis typically loads between 600,000 and 700,000 barrels per day of crude oil. Last year it also exported 19.8 million tonnes of oil products, according to the industry sources.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Kirsten Donovan)