From Burning Refineries to a Naval Blockade: A New Strategy to Pressure Russia

Not merely spectacular but, above all, effective strikes by Ukraine’s Defense Forces on Russian oil refining over the past 12 months have produced a cumulative effect, knocking out dozens of crude-processing units. The second quarter of this year was especially telling in its intensity and results. The final days of June, when refineries burned at Slavyansk-on-Kuban and Yaroslavl, are further proof of this. It sets off a cascade of consequences, beginning with a shortfall in the output of high-volume petroleum products, restrictions on exports of motor petrol and aviation kerosene, and a fuel crisis on the domestic market, and ending in hysteria and snivelling on social media from numerous specimens of the silent majority, the “deep people.” There is also soothing babble from the high corridors of Russian power to the effect that there is no need to stir things up, that reserves are sufficient and these are merely isolated, temporary difficulties. The final touch was the statement by the tsar of the “Petrostate” on 28 June that the fuel shortage in Russia is not critical. Yet at the same time they have begun drawing on strategic reserves. So it is worth looking more closely at what is what.

Deep strikes: more

The day of June 22 was spent, by inertia, discussing the aftermath of the Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow refinery—which broke through the layered air defences of the Russian capital on June 19—and of the strike at a record range of 2,000 km on the Tyumen refinery on June 21. And yet the date of 22 June is significant not only in the history of the second world war but also for this period of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Four years ago on that day, the first successful Ukrainian UAV attack on Russian oil refining facilities took place. One of Russia’s newest refineries—the Novoshakhtinsk petroleum-products plant (NZNP) in Russia’s Rostov region, with a refining capacity of 7.5 million tonnes a year—was hit by a drone strike. Although work there halted for only a few days at the time, the strike was symbolic. Ukraine had demonstrated an innovative approach: how a cheap drone can inflict damage on Russia’s oil processing infrastructure, which generates multibillion cash flows for the war budget. It became only the second instance in the world’s oil history of a successful UAV attack on refining infrastructure (the first was in 2019, when Houthi drones attacked processing facilities in Saudi Arabia, knocking out 50 percent of the Kingdom’s oil exports).

Today we are seeing not isolated cases of Ukrainian drone attacks on the enemy’s refineries, as in 2023 or 2024, but massive and systematic raids by Ukrainian Defense Forces units on the enemy’s refining facilities almost weekly, if not more often.

The latest counts show that, as of the end of June, 50 percent of primary refining capacity—out of the total of 6.6 million barrels a day of Russian refining as of the start of 2026—is not functioning. Most of it has been put out of action by Ukrainian UAV strikes, but the figure also includes idle capacity caused by ongoing scheduled maintenance at individual facilities. This is not yet the catastrophe of the “Petrostate,” but the trajectory of movement towards it is becoming obvious.

Deep strikes: harder

The second quarter of this year was notable for records of the range, scale and effectiveness of the attacks. But not only for that. Nor were the Defense Forces’ strikes on Russian refineries marked by drones alone. In particular, on May 31, 2026 the aforementioned NZNP became the target of an attack by R-360 Neptune cruise missiles modified to hit ground targets, fired from the RK-360MTs anti-ship missile system. With two rockets, both primary refining units, with a capacity of 5 million tonnes a year, were hit—that is, two-thirds of the refinery’s capacity. It should also be noted that the NZNP was attacked by Storm Shadow cruise missiles on December 25, 2025, after which it was shut down for several months of repairs. As soon as the repair work neared completion, the refinery was attacked again with heavy munitions. Clearly, the damage inflicted by the warhead of a cruise missile weighing several hundred kilograms is far more serious than that from the warhead of a drone weighing several tens of kilograms. The repair period after a missile strike will be longer and more costly.

However, one should harbor no illusions that Russian oil refining is about to grind to a halt. It is worth recalling that the enemy attacked the Kremenchuk refinery in Ukraine for three years before it finally shut down in June 2025. Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal, speaking in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada in March, cited statistics on the strikes on that refinery: 260 drones and 60 missiles, both ballistic and cruise. So, to finish off such leading Russian refineries as Ryazan, Nizhniy Novgorod or Nizhnekamsk, which are close in capacity to Kremenchuk, much more effort will be required.

To send Russia’s oil refining into a tailspin, the intensity of the strikes and the severity of the damage to refining capacity—especially secondary refining—must outpace the rate of repair and of bringing restored units back into operation. At the end of June and the start of July, a number of primary refining units at various facilities will be brought back into service after repairs. By calculations, between late March and mid-June 21 primary refining units at 11 refineries were damaged. Nineteen of them are now due to be restarted. The average repair time is six weeks, or 1.5 months. But it needs to be extended to 12–16 weeks. If primary units at Russian refineries do not operate for three to four months a year, then the average plant will not only fail to meet its plan for supplying petroleum products to the market but will enter the zone of unprofitability, thus requiring financial assistance. From an asset it will turn into a burden. Then not only will exports of diesel—the highest-volume petroleum product that Russian refineries produce and still sell abroad—cease, but its import will begin, as is already the case with petrol.

Tellingly, in the coming days the Russian government is due to make a decision banning the export of diesel as well, on top of earlier orders halting exports of motor petrol and aviation kerosene. Incidentally, the draft decision on diesel was ready back in May, but at the time it seemed ill-timed to Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak. As we can see, the time has come unexpectedly quickly—and not only because the tsar of the “Petrostate” has started talking about the fuel crisis.

To achieve several months of downtime for both primary and secondary refining, heavier strike means are needed—cruise and ballistic missiles with a warhead of several hundred kilograms, and better still a tonne. The NZNP example is telling. All the more so since there are already proven “long-range Neptunes,” the production of which should be scaled up first and foremost as a highly effective type of missile created by professionals. Of course, something else is needed too—to “thin out” Russian air defenses, to improve the navigation and guidance systems of drones and missiles and to increase their resistance to jamming. But that goes beyond the oil theme and deserves separate treatment.

Deep strikes: more varied…

It is not refineries alone that Ukraine’s Defense Forces are dealing with in the aggressor’s oil sector. No less important a priority is striking the oil transport infrastructure—pumping stations, tank farms, export terminals, tankers. With storage tanks, it is fairly simple: a large stationary target with flammable contents. Destroying a tank does not require a heavy strike. But oil is moved through pipelines by powerful mainline pumping units at pumping stations. Without destroying the pumps, the transport of oil to refineries and its loading onto tankers at terminals will continue. Indeed, strikes on a number of linear production-and-dispatch stations (LVDS) in the Transneft system, which some considered key, did not halt oil transport and caused only certain restrictions. Why? Because the pumping units remained unscathed or suffered only minor damage. It should be noted that a mainline pumping unit is a massive structure weighing 100–150 tonnes (depending on the modification and power), and three or four such units are mounted within the solid building of the mainline pumping station. The pump’s many-tonne cast casing reliably protects it from shrapnel.

Damaging such structures effectively requires more powerful strike means than UAVs—cruise and ballistic missiles. The same goes for maximizing damage to the massive structures of the oil processing units and complexes at refineries, weighing hundreds and thousands of tonnes. Without heavy strikes, the “Tuapse tactic” is unlikely to succeed in Novorossiysk, Primorsk, Ust-Luga and the key LVDS.

If Putin has begun talking about using strategic fuel reserves, that means the tank farms of Russia’s Federal Agency for State Reserves must be burned out by Ukrainian drones. The basis of consistent work in this direction was laid in past years and is now gaining additional relevance.

War at sea

If the drones available cannot inflict fatal damage on the export terminals, and missiles are in short supply, then it is clearly time to tackle another important link in Russia's oil-logistics chain. This is the maritime link, which in fact plays the key role in getting the Kremlin paid for the raw materials it sells.

Here Ukraine’s Defense Forces have had a measure of success. A number of tankers heading to load oil at Russian ports are periodically hit by naval uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) or UAVs. But this has not yet become a large-scale operation. The successful delivery of systematic fire against the enemy’s land communications along the coast of the Sea of Azov (the Rostov–Mariupol–Melitopol–Dzhankoi road and rail arteries) must be extended to the maritime expanses of the Azov (from the air, by combat UAVs) and the Black (UAVs and USVs) seas.

The strategic goal is not simply to hit every empty tanker, but a naval blockade of Russia’s Black Sea ports. What the aggressor did against us in 2022 must come back to them like a boomerang. The time has come.

Possible stages of parallel-and-sequential actions by Ukraine’s Defense Forces:

• burning the storage tanks in port areas to the ground with UAV attacks from the air;
• strikes on oil tankers, as well as on vessels carrying goods and chemicals that head to load at the ports of the Black and Azov seas;
• hitting product tankers carrying petrol that are bound for Russian ports;
• strikes on dry-bulk vessels and container ships carrying export cargoes out of Russian ports.

Such a blockade must be synchronized with the burning out of the enemy’s forces and assets in occupied Crimea.

Russia made the Black Sea a theater of war in 2022, hoping to cut Ukraine off from the sea. Ukraine’s Defense Forces not only thwarted those plans but also turned the Mediterranean, through which a significant flow of Russian oil and LNG passes, into a theater of war. Strikes on a handful of sanctioned tankers that have been carrying Russian raw materials through these waters since last year need to be scaled up. Particular attention should be paid to the methane (LNG) carriers bringing cargoes of Yamal liquefied gas to Asia. A start has been made: on 3 March, a naval strike drone struck the Arctic Metagaz in the central Mediterranean. The Defense Forces should not confine themselves solely to the maritime zones of the Azov, Black and Mediterranean seas. The aggressor must feel uneasy anywhere on the world’s oceans.

Fuel doping for the aggressor

Having run into a petrol shortage on the fuel market, the Kremlin peremptorily demanded additional supplies from its ally, Belarus, and also from Kazakhstan. As for Belarus, the volumes of supplies began to grow as early as the start of this year, with a sharp jump in late spring. Over January to May, supplies of petrol from Belarusian refineries to Russia rose almost 13-fold, and of diesel roughly threefold. In May, almost four times as much jet fuel was supplied as in May 2025. Yet it is obvious that this “doping” does not solve the market’s shortage problem.

That is why a similar request went to Astana too, though this is more than a little odd, since Kazakhstan is not a significant exporter of petroleum products and seasonally buys small volumes of petrol, Arctic diesel and jet fuel from Russia itself. So Astana will evidently limit itself to small volumes, with an eye to preserving in 2027 the import volumes of those petroleum products it needs.

The appearance of tankers carrying fuel from (as yet) unknown Asian countries is entirely likely. But this means that such vessels will automatically become legitimate military targets for Ukraine’s Defense Forces as soon as they appear in Ukraine’s territorial sea, beginning with the Sea of Azov. Incidentally, it is important to finally adopt the law “On the Territorial Sea of Ukraine in the Sea of Azov, the Kerch Strait and the North-Eastern Part of the Black Sea” after an 18-month delay.

Ukraine’s binary strategy

What we are witnessing now is the beginning of the end of the land empire of northern Eurasia, which pompously styled itself an “energy superpower” during the oil price boom of the 2000s. It would have remained simply the “Petrostate,” as the westerners dubbed Russia—a trader in oil and gas—had it not decided to use energy resources as a weapon, accompanying this with large-scale campaigns of corrupting the political class in Ukraine and Europe, propaganda frenzy and cognitive influence on citizens’ minds. This was quite effective in conditions of hybrid warfare, but during a protracted and exhausting conventional war the toolkit of “energy resources + propaganda + cognitive influence” has ceased to work.

Now Ukraine is applying a binary strategy—kinetic strikes + a cognitive blow against the enemy. A vivid example is the strike on the Moscow refinery with a simultaneous verbal message to the Kremlin’s Führer—and at the same time to the Washington narcissist and the “Euro-frightened”: peace in Europe is possible only in the event of the aggressor’s total defeat. It is entirely realistic, and its “recipe”—the concentration of an asymmetric arsenal, “when non-force capabilities are combined into a single bundle with military levers”—was described by Volodymyr Horbulin in his 2020 book How to Defeat Russia in the War of the Future?. The occupied Crimean peninsula is now a proving ground for Ukraine’s Defense Forces to practize the de-fuelling, de-gasification and de-electrification of a specific zone of the theater of war, with the simultaneous desacralization of Crimea—a “suitcase without a handle.” Moscow will not escape the scenario of energy isolation. Forty days, of course, will not be enough.

Destroying the aggressor’s energy infrastructure (not only refining), the queues of the “deep people” at petrol stations for fuel with their emotional grumbling—all this is not only a sectoral dysfunction of the “Petrostate” but also the collapse of the image of an “energy superpower” in the minds of its citizens. They can see that chanting “Putin, help!” does not work—the emperor has no clothes. Yet it is still a long way to victory. Ukraine’s Defense Forces still have work to do in the enemy’s gas and electricity sectors too—more, further still and more painfully. So that, in the end, every region of northern Eurasia realizes: enough of feeding Moscow and fuelling the war!