Two drones hit a fuel depot in the port city of Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea and set off an enormous fire early on Saturday, a Russian official said, in the latest attack on a peninsula key to Moscow’s war effort.

A thick cloud of black smoke darkened the skies above the port city, which is home to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet.

The Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 and has been heavily fortified in the years since is critically important to Moscow’s control over occupied territories in southern and eastern Ukraine. It has increasingly become a target of attacks, though Ukraine typically maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity about strikes there.

The Kremlin-appointed local governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, urged local residents to remain calm as teams of firefighters battled a blaze that he said was caused by “enemy drones”. Ukrainian officials did not claim responsibility for Saturday’s blaze.

“The main thing is that no one was hurt,” Razvozhaev told reporters at a news conference. “With the rest — we’ll figure it out.”

Crimea was a key staging ground when President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago.

As Ukrainian officials say the country is in the final stages of preparation for a counter-offensive to take back territory seized by Russian forces, President Volodymyr Zelensky has maintained that Kyiv needs to reclaim control of Crimea in order to prevent future aggression by Moscow.

He reiterated that position in an interview published on Saturday by the Finnish channel Yle, saying that the more weapons the West can provide to Ukraine, the faster the war will end. “We want to save as many lives as possible, so the number of weapons matters,” he said.

New York Times News Service