A Ukrainian drone strike killed two people in Russia’s central Samara region yesterday, the local governor said, as Kyiv claimed a strike on a major oil refinery in the area.

Ukraine has stepped up its retaliatory attacks in recent weeks, hitting Russian cities as far as the Urals.

The governor of the Samara region, Vyacheslav Fedorishchev, said in the early hours of yesterday that the city of Syzran on the Volga river had come under attack by Ukrainian drones.

“Two people were killed as a result of the enemy’s inhumane actions,” Fedorishchev said, adding that others had been wounded in the attack.

Syzran is home to a major oil refinery.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later claimed the strike as “another Ukrainian long-range sanction against Russian oil refining”.

“This time around, it was the Syzran oil refinery -- more than 800 kilometres (500 miles) away from our border,” he said on social media.

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said “a large-scale fire” broke out on the refinery’s premises after the strike.

Claiming fair retaliation for the Russian army’s near-daily bombardments of Ukrainian cities across the four-year conflict, Ukraine has regularly launched attacks inside Russia, including on areas thousands of miles away from its territory.

Kyiv insists it targets Russian military sites, as well as energy installations in a bid to disrupt the fossil fuel revenues Moscow uses to fund the offensive.

Diplomatic efforts led by Washington to end the conflict have been deadlocked.