Ukraine is bringing the war home to Russia at a scale, scope, and intensity not seen before, and in a way that could have consequences—maybe not on the battlefield, but in the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of ordinary Russians.
Since August, Ukraine has gone after Russian oil facilities with a vengeance. Kyiv has been sporadically targeting refineries and depots for the better part of two years, but thanks to the proliferation of small, cheap drones, and some bigger ones, and perhaps even a homegrown cruise missile, Ukraine is now absolutely hammering Russia’s far-flung oil installations.
It’s not necessary to do the whole litany of the targets that have been struck—there was another one just this week—to appreciate that Ukraine has, in a sense, stamped a “return to sender” on three years of relentless Russian airstrikes on homes, hospitals, kindergartens, and kids.
Bread lines in Russia have now given way to gas lines.
The Ukrainian air counteroffensive has taken a toll on Russia’s refinery complex, a big part of the way Moscow makes money to fund its war. But, breathless reports aside, experts say Ukraine has not yet disabled half of Russia’s oil facilities or kneecapped 38 percent of Russia’s refinery capacity. That number is way over the top.
“Well, that’s just bollocks,” said Sergey Vakulenko, who until 2022 was a senior executive at a Russian energy firm.
What is true is that Ukraine has, thanks to the availability of mass-produced drones, been able to strike targets as far as 2,000 kilometers inside Russia. Small drones pack a small punch but can evade scattered Russian air defenses, or at least enough of them to do some damage. And Ukraine may, if the Economist is right, have already unleashed the Flamingo, its homegrown, warhead-packing cruise missile. Either way, direct U.S. support, whether in the form of Tomahawk cruise missiles or other long-range firepower, may not be make-or-break for Kyiv.
The bigger question is what, exactly, Ukraine hopes to achieve by its offensive. Russia has itself recently upped the pace of its attacks on Ukraine’s natural gas sector, after previously targeting mostly power plants. Turnabout is fair play, so striking Russian energy infrastructure after years of relentless assaults is but a baseline. But what is the objective?
“The first is to make it painful for the population,” said Vakulenko, who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “The second is to make it painful for Russia’s economy.” The third potential objective, he said, was not going to happen: As much as Ukraine hits refineries and disrupts diesel distilling and the like, it will be unlikely to hobble the Russian army due to fuel shortages.
The Russian population has gone through a lot in the last few centuries and decades, but the last few years have also been noteworthy. The ruble collapsed for a spell, though it rallied substantially in 2025. But inflation is higher than the country’s defense-juiced employment numbers. Banks are holding and hiding debts, and large ones. A country that former U.S. Sen. John McCain once described as a gas station with nuclear weapons now has gas lines in Vladivostok.
A person of a certain age who grew up in the United States, with memories of lines of cars angrily nosing toward empty gas pumps in the 1970s, could think that such a domestic crisis might be pivotal. But it might not be in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“I would think that Putin has a better hold on elections than Jimmy Carter had,” Vakulenko said.
In terms of the Russian economy, the Ukrainian strikes do one thing very well, which is limit Russia’s ability to turn crude oil into higher-value refined products. What that means is that Russia just ships the raw material. That brings less revenue, and the country is running out of port capacity, but it still gets to global markets, especially since Russian shadow tanker fleets are running rampant.
That does not, though, dent Russia’s overall earnings from energy very much, if at all. Those have held steady, for years now, at around 550 million euros a day. Russia has so much spare refining capacity that even knocking out entire chunks of it, as Ukraine has done, will not knock that complex out cold.
What the offensive does appear to have done is add strain to Russia’s already-burdened energy sector. Outstanding loans held by Russian refineries have ballooned to almost $14 billion in the 12 months through July 2025, said Craig Kennedy, an expert on Russian energy at Harvard University. He suggested that the sudden surge of debt could be explained by the purchase of urgently needed equipment from China to repair damaged installations.
The refinery strikes, part of a wider campaign to limit Russia’s oil and gas earnings, do weigh in the balance of Kremlin calculations, even if spare parts and spare capacity are able to tide the country through the worst of the onslaught.
“On their own, the [refinery strikes] are unlikely to change that calculus, but as part of a broader, multifront assault on the oil sector, they might,” Kennedy said.
Ukraine’s offensive against Russian refineries may not have hit entirely home, in the sense of bringing the regime to its knees. But when it comes to refined petroleum products, such as gasoline, or aviation fuel, the message is at the margins. In 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Spitfire pilots had a secret weapon: U.S.-made, high-octane aviation fuel that allowed them to defeat the Luftwaffe. It wasn’t a refinery breakthrough as much as a chemistry breakthrough, but little things can make a big difference when countries are at war.
Ukraine is nibbling away at those margins.
“They are not there yet. It is not the death blow. It has gone from a small inconvenience to a major nuisance,” Vakulenko said. “What is next is whether Ukraine can sustain that, or if Russia can field effective air defenses everywhere.”
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