Oil: faced with bursts of Ukrainian drones, Russia tries (in vain) to protect its refineries

What Moscow takes from Ukrainian territory, kyiv returns, blow for blow, eye for eye, on Russian borders. In the war of attrition which is ravaging the confines of Europe, there are few victories and many disappointments. The destruction is innumerable.

Taken up by Newsweek, the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces publishes daily the figures for the losses of Russian troops and equipment: if the figures are always to be put into perspective in a war, they indicated on May 30 that the invader lost no less than 14,913 transport vehicles. A few days ago, authorities estimated the number of Russian soldiers dead at half a million.

Distance records for drones

No matter, Moscow is rolling over corpses in its thirst for land, and throwing all its forces into weak advances near Kharkiv (north-east), and lightning attacks around Donetsk and Avdiivka (east) on the eastern flank of Ukraine. “Russian forces recently carried out four small-scale mechanized assaults on several operational axes in Donetsk Oblast without making significant advances”we noted recently, citing a report from the Institute for the study of War dated Tuesday, May 28.

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A global strategy which, if it allows Moscow to boast of the capture of certain villages, leaves the western regions of Russia at the mercy of kyiv’s increasingly curious drones. Earlier this week, The Kyiv Independent reported a long-range drone attack on a Voronezh M early warning radar in the Russian city of Orsk. The device was launched from a Ukrainian base 1,800 kilometers away, a record since the start of the war. On Tuesday, social networks were teeming with images showing a new attack on an airfield in the Luhansk region, appearing to confirm the loss of an advanced long-range radar system, the Nebo-M.

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But if kyiv’s drones excel in radar strikes, their favorite target remains Russian oil establishments. For several months now, Ukrainian breakthroughs have focused on oil depots and refineries. To the point that Artyom Verkhov, an official from the Russian Ministry of Energy, declared before Parliament in March that there were plans to protect certain oil and gas infrastructure with missile systems, recalls Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty. On the private side, companies have begun setting up mobile air defense groups armed with machine guns, anti-aircraft guns and electronic warfare weapons, and covering potential targets with metal nets.

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The attacks are repeated

The strategy seems to have failed for the moment: on May 19, the Prague-based media further notes, a Ukrainian drone crashed in a deluge of fire on the Slavyansk oil refinery, with a capacity of 70,000 barrels per barrel. day, located in the Krasnodar region in southern Russia. It was, counting Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “the third time in two months that Ukrainian forces have struck the relatively small factory located several hundred kilometers from the front, avoiding Russian air defense systems.”

Another followed on May 30, at a Taman refinery, dangerously close to the Crimean bridge. Squads of drones in simultaneous flights (sometimes more than fifty) streak the Russian sky.

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In total since the start of 2024, Ukraine has carried out more than 20 attacks on Russian refineries and energy infrastructure, temporarily knocking out 14% of capacity at the peak of the year in late March, summarizes Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which illustrates this assessment in a map.

This cavalcade is all the more disabling for Russia, as some of the Russian oil refineries attacked by Ukrainian drones this year supplied fuel to the Russian army, according to a Global Witness report.

In a Foreign Affairs article aptly titled “Why Ukraine Should Continue Hitting Russian Oil Refineries”, three specialists in Energy and War draw up this observation: “These strikes achieve the very goals that Ukraine’s Western partners had set for themselves, but which they failed to achieve by imposing sanctions and a price cap on Russian oil: degrading the financial and logistical capacity of Russia to fight a war while limiting the broader damage to the global economy.“

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With all due respect to Washington, which fears for world oil prices, kyiv has embarked on a major energy “upheaval” in Russia, and the results are there.