Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes are punishing the industry fueling Russia’s war

• Ukraine is ramping up its long-range strike campaign against Russia’s energy sector.
• President Zelenskyy said Wednesday that Russia faces a fuel shortage and has tapped into reserves.
• A Ukrainian security source said that the attacks have left many Russian refineries “idle.”

Ukraine’s escalating attacks on Russia’s energy sector are biting into its economy and war chest, forcing Moscow to tap into emergency gas reserves, Kyiv said this week.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday night that “long-range sanctions against Russia,” a reference to its deep-strike campaign targeting Russian energy facilities, is “achieving truly significant results.” Moscow’s vast oil industry is a critical sector, with oil and natural gas exports fueling its war efforts in Ukraine.

Ukraine has been targeting infrastructure across Russia, including refineries, with long-range weapons to turn up the pressure on Moscow.

“The fuel shortage in Russia is already approaching 20% — this specifically concerns their gasoline,” Zelenskyy said, citing Ukrainian data. “They’ve now begun tapping into diesel reserves, which they’ve been saving for a rainy day.”

Ukrainian drones have struck targets far beyond the front lines, sometimes hundreds of miles into Russian territory. A strike on Friday, for instance, hit a facility more than 800 miles away, underscoring Kyiv’s long reach.

A source in the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, said that nearly 40% of the capacity of Russian refineries is “already idle” because of the long-range strike campaign.

“The SBU continues to cause serious damage to the Russian economy, working on the facilities of the oil and gas industry of the Russian Federation,” the source said after the strike last week, per a translation of their remarks shared with Business Insider.

“The decrease in petrodollar revenues to the budget directly affects the aggressor’s ability to continue the war against Ukraine,” they added.

Homegrown weapons

Ukraine has primarily used homemade missiles and drones to strike deep inside Russia, investing heavily in the production of weapons as a workaround to the restrictions and shortages it faced in using Western-provided cruise and tactical ballistic missiles to hit across the border.

Zelenskyy on Wednesday praised Ukraine’s weapons makers and said they were working to ensure that Russia bears the cost of the war. Their equipment has become more accurate, he added.

The attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure have leaned predominantly on drones; however, Ukraine has also used domestically produced cruise missiles and hybrid missile-drones to strike Russian targets.

Though Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars in security assistance from Western countries, Zelenskyy has also pushed Ukraine’s defense industry to contribute a greater share of domestically produced weaponry into the hands of soldiers.

On Monday, he said that more than 40% of the weaponry Ukraine uses at the front is Ukrainian-made, adding that it must be at least 50% by the end of the year.

A critical industry

Russia’s energy infrastructure has long been a target. The oil and gas sector is a significant source of income for Russia, which, in turn, helps fund the invasion. This one industrial sector is estimated to be worth approximately 20% of Russia’s GDP on average.

Kyle Glen, an investigator with the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience who tracks Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s energy sector, told Business Insider that there have been 24 attacks on oil refineries since the start of August.

The ability to strike these facilities has been crucial for Ukraine, even when it faces challenges such as battlefield setbacks or shortages of weapons and ammunition from its partners. Kyiv views these efforts as an opportunity to weaken Russia and project power.

The deep-strike campaign has been a bright spot for Ukraine as its forces continue to defend against the invading Russians, with relatively static front lines and mounting losses.

The escalating campaign comes amid Ukraine’s expanding ability to strike high-profile Russian targets — like warships, aircraft, bases, factories, and ammunition production sites — far beyond its borders, with its own weaponry, hampering Russia’s war machine and preventing the conflict from being fought solely on Ukrainian soil.

Russia is also hitting Ukraine with deep strikes. Nightly attacks, consisting of large numbers of drones and missiles, hammer civilian areas and critical infrastructure, including the country’s energy sector. Bombardments sometimes involve hundreds of munitions as Moscow ramps up its own weapons production.

Russian attacks have resulted in outages and blackouts, and have left Ukraine more reliant on imported energy, but they have not decimated a major national income source like the attacks in Russia have.

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