Abandoning the Sea of ​​Azov is not necessarily a guarantee of security from Ukrainian drone attacks.

Ukraine’s general staff released footage Wednesday of a naval drone attack on a sanctioned tanker called Blue.

Footage on board shows the unmanned vessel evading fire as it approaches the tanker, before the video cuts out as it approaches the ship’s hull.

Although the location cannot be confirmed, Ukraine said the incident occurred near Yalta, a Black Sea resort city in occupied Crimea.

The attacks on the tankers coincide with continued attacks on Russian oil refineries, which have caused widespread fuel shortages across the country, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has argued that by attacking oil refineries, kyiv is responding correctly to Russia’s attacks and that Russians should “feel that it is their state that is waging war.”

It highlighted two other attacks on oil depots, in the Tver and Stavropol regions, hundreds of kilometers from the front line, as well as an unidentified oil terminal in the Rostov region, believed to be Yug Rusi, inland from Taganrog Bay.

US President Donald Trump described the drone strategy as an escalation when he met Zelensky at the NATO summit in Ankara on Tuesday, “but it is also an escalation that can help bring it to an end.”

But it is the scale of drone attacks on Russian maritime logistics that appears to have intensified in recent days.

Brovdi claimed to have attacked 12 oil tankers in just one night from Wednesday to Thursday, and pro-war Russian sources have not disputed either the details or the authenticity of the images.