2024-09-09 16:55:16
The Kremlin is trying to play down the effects of Ukrainian drone attacks on refineries and oil warehouses. According to the American website Newsweek, however, it shows how vulnerable the energy infrastructure is, which is key to President Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
In early September, a Ukrainian drone hit an oil refinery near Moscow. | Video: Reuters
The last time a drone attacked an oil refinery was on September 2. It was Gazprom Neft on the outskirts of Moscow. It was on that day that the Russians managed to put out the fire after another attack after sixteen days. At the time, the target was an oil storage facility in Proletarsk near the Caucasus.
“We have to aim where Russia really hurts,” Hanna Šelestová from the Ukrainian Prism non-governmental analytical center told the Newsweek server. According to her, Russian air defense is really good. “The question is whether they can have enough of them in the right places. They placed a lot of them around Moscow, around the airport. The Russians need to move mobile air defense to the front, but they have to take it from somewhere,” muses Šelestová.
The analyst pointed out that most refineries are private rather than state property, and therefore were not protected as a matter of priority. And this offers Kyiv an opportunity. “Refineries are not protected by the same type of air defense as military facilities. At the same time, refineries and the energy sector are the largest contributors to the Russian state budget,” says Šelestová, who works at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Successful Ukrainian attacks on oil facilities make it difficult for Russia, among other things, to supply frontline troops. Already in June, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said that “more than 30 oil refineries, terminals and oil warehouses of the terrorist state have been hit”. And the attacks continued through the summer. Just last week, drones found a target in Kirov and the Atlas oil depot in southern Rostov Oblast.
The aggressor, who has been waging a war of conquest in Ukraine for the third year, is also trying to defend himself against the attacks by gradually erasing publicly available data about his oil industry. This makes it difficult to assess the impact of these strikes. May data from the state statistics agency Rosstat, according to Newsweek, show relatively stable fuel prices at Russian pumps.
But Sergey Vakulenko of the Carnegie Russia Center wrote in June that one of the biggest impacts of drone attacks is the cost of repairs, which are likely to be in the tens of millions of dollars per device. “It is very far from the original estimates in the order of billions that the counterparty hoped for,” added Vakulenko.
Nevertheless, the fact that it can hit places thousands of kilometers away and cause difficulties for Russian air defense, which must cover a large area, gives Ukraine a morale boost. “The short-range defenses that Russia has, such as the S-300 (anti-aircraft system), are designed for fast fighters and cruise missiles, not for small, slow-flying drones,” said Ryan Gury of PDW, a technology company for drones.
“We are used to cruise missiles or missiles having a linear trajectory. (The Ukrainians) have targeted such a large area that they can change their flight paths and fly around Moscow,” he added to Newsweek.
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“I mean the Western sanctions fever. The sanctions were sharply criticized by Vladimir Putin, for example, in October 2022 | Video: Reuters