Russia says 41 injured fighting fire caused by Kyiv drone

MOSCOW — More than 40 Russian firefighters have been injured tackling a fire at an oil facility that has raged for two days after it was hit by a Ukrainian drone.

Authorities in the city of Proletarsk, in the southern Rostov region, which borders Ukraine, introduced a state of emergency Monday and called in extra medics to help treat the injured.

"At the moment, 41 firefighters have been seen to at the central district hospital," Rostov governor Vasily Golubev said in a post on Telegram.

"Eighteen of them were required to be hospitalised, including five who are now in intensive care," he added.

Russia said Kyiv struck a fuel storage warehouse in the city of 20,000 people on Sunday morning. 

"Firefighting units continue to extinguish the fire," Golubev said on Monday afternoon, almost 36 hours after the attack.

"Given the difficulty of the fire in the Proletarsk district, a high alert regime has been turned into a state of emergency," he said earlier Monday, adding that the "forces and means" to put out the fire had been increased.

Russian state media quoted a statement of the local city administration that said there was no threat of the fire spreading to residential areas and called on people "not to give in to panic". 

Videos on social media showed a huge cloud of smoke billowing into the air at night. 

Proletarsk lies some 200 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. 

Kyiv, which on August 6 launched a surprise incursion into Russia's Kursk region, has been hitting Russia's oil infrastructure for over a year. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the strikes "fair" retaliation for Moscow's attacks on his country.