Emergency services were working at the site and specialists were assessing the scale and nature of the damage, Kukharuk said. He gave no information on casualties.
Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channels Exilenova+ and Supernova+ said the drones struck the Surgut Condensate Stabilization Plant named after Viktor Chernomyrdin. The facility is part of Gazprom's structure, with a design capacity of 12 million tonnes of raw material a year. The channels published video of the fire filmed by witnesses. There is no independent confirmation of the claim.
Surgut is located roughly 2,000 to 2,500 kilometers from the Russia-Ukraine border, in Western Siberia. The Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug is one of Russia's key oil and gas production centers.
According to Rosaviatsia, the federal air transport agency, restrictions on the arrival and departure of aircraft are in force at the airports of Surgut and Kogalym. Such restrictions are being introduced in Kogalym for the first time.
A drone attack threat regime was also declared in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug on September 9. At the time, Russia's Defense Ministry said it had intercepted drones over the okrug without specifying their number, and six airports in the region temporarily limited operations. The same day, Ukraine's Special Operations Forces claimed a strike on the Novy Urengoy and Purovsky gas processing plants in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, saying the drones had covered more than 3,000 kilometers.
Accounts differ: the Khanty-Mansiysk governor reports a fire at an unnamed "industrial facility" after a drone attack, while the Ukrainian monitoring channels Exilenova+ and Supernova+ name a specific enterprise, the Surgut Condensate Stabilization Plant named after Chernomyrdin. Russian authorities have not confirmed the plant's name.