Ukraine is using homemade drones to strike Russian oil facilities, leading Russian President Vladimir Putin to ban the export of refined fuels for the time being. Russia — the world’s second largest petroleum-producing nation — is now importing some refined products from Belarus.
Ukraine has been outmanned and outgunned for the majority of the war and is relying partially on unconventional weapons and tactics to fight against Russia.
About 50% of Moscow’s revenues come from oil and gas production. Ukraine has attacked over a dozen sites since the start of 2024, including storage depots, terminals and refineries. The cumulative impact of the strikes brought Russia’s refining capacity down an estimated 14%.
“The short answer is, it’s a smart move by the Ukrainians,” Matt Shoemaker, a former intelligence officer with expertise on Russia said. “And Ukrainians recognize that Russian oil and gas production in many ways is really their center of gravity. It’s the mechanism by which the Russians are able to continue warfare and to continue attacking Ukraine.”
Refining capacity does not impact crude oil sales, so Russia is still able to sell that to China and India. However, according to Shoemaker, the longer the targeted attacks on oil facilities continue, the harder it is going to get for Russia.
The money Moscow gets from oil and gas sales is used to hire and train more soldiers, build new weapons and armaments domestically or buy them from trade partners, including North Korea and Iran.
Cutting into this major source of revenue for Russia will impact the country’s ability to rearm and resupply its troops. The refineries Ukraine is targeting produce gasoline as well as diesel and high-octane fuel, which power most military vehicles and aircraft.
Some of the refineries and storage depots Ukraine is targeting are hundreds of miles away from the front lines, meaning the drones need to fly through Russian airspace. In theory, the airspace should be protected by air defense systems, but according to Shoemaker, Russia can’t defend both the facilities and the troops at the front line.
“With regards to their oil and gas industry, all of that is now state secret sort of stuff,” Shoemaker said. “So anything that comes out of the Kremlin, in terms of what they claim it is, you know, that you’re going to have to take a very heavy pinch of salt along with it. Now, the reason I bring that up is because, yes, on the one hand, what they could do is they could start moving air defense systems away from the front lines. That’s an assumption that we’re making that they would, they would move that. There might be some very old legacy air defense systems that are in storage, for example, that they could possibly draw from if those are still there.”
Russia may have older “legacy” air defense systems to deploy, but Shoemaker said he isn’t confident they would be able to stop Ukrainian drones, which are getting more powerful and have longer ranges than they did at the start of the war.
Shoemaker said that while the attacks on Russian refineries are proving fruitful, the technology to make the attacks possible might have come too late.
“This would have been certainly much more useful earlier on in the campaign,” Shoemaker said. “At this point, I don’t know if you saw the report that President Zelenskyy is lowering the age of draftees for the Ukrainian army. That’s certainly never a good situation. When you have to do that. That’s certainly sending a signal that they’re running out of men.”
Zelenskyy proposed lowering the draft age from 27 to 25. Russia is expected to conscript another 300,000 people into its military by June in anticipation of a large summer offensive.