Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of things that Russia does. It doesn’t have a huge oil industry, powering its economy with foreign exchange despite Western sanctions. Ukraine doesn’t have heavy bombers armed with long-range cruise missiles, as Russia does. Nor does it have Russia’s large surface warships and submarines armed with their own far-cruising missiles. Ukraine doesn’t have the same hypersonic ground-launched ballistic missiles that Russia has in abundance.
But that doesn’t mean Ukraine isn’t conducting deep strikes targeting Russian cities, military facilities and – lately – Russian oil, just as Russia frequently conducts these strikes in Ukraine.
No, it just means Ukraine has to find creative new ways of striking targets hundreds of miles inside Russia’s borders. Mostly, that means drones.
In the 25 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, Ukrainian engineers have developed a surprising array of explosive long-range drones. And starting in January, planners in Kyiv began aiming these drones at Russia’s sprawling oil industry.
In three months there have been around a dozen confirmed drone attacks on Russian oil depots and refineries as far as 750 miles from the border with Ukraine. These attacks often target the tall, easy-to-spot distillation towers where crude oil separates into different fuels of different weights.
The strikes have, according to some sources, reduced Russia’s refining capacity by more than 10 percent. While this might seem like a major blow to an industry that accounts for nearly a fifth of Russia’s national wealth, it’s not. And it’s important to understand why Ukraine’s oil raids really do matter.
There’s a good chance they’re not actually about the oil.
A dozen strikes on Russian oil facilities in the span of three months isn’t decisive: not when the Russian oil industry operates around three dozen major refineries across the vast country and can shift resources and activities across refineries as it repairs any major damage.
Yes, Russian refining took a hit during the shock of the initial attacks. But it probably won’t last. “These are spot strikes,” energy expert Hennadii Rіabtsev told Ukrainian Pravda. “They are painful and affect logistics, but they do not significantly impact annual total refining volumes.”
It’s the secondary effect that might be the most interesting. In a bid to protect oil facilities, the Russian air force is redeploying some of its air defences, including Pantsir-S1 truck-mounted launchers firing short-range, radar-guided missiles.
The problem is that the Russian air force, alongside the army, is also responsible for defending military installations – ports, airfields and headquarters – as well as front-line troop formations in Ukraine. It was stretched thin before the oil raids began in January. It’s even more stretched now.
Russian forces went to war in Ukraine more than two years ago with around a thousand air-defence vehicles including a hundred or so Pantsir-S1s. In 25 months of hard fighting, the Ukrainians have destroyed or captured around 200 of the original systems.
Unlike tanks and fighting vehicles, which Russian industry can build new or pull out of storage by the hundred, complex and pricey air-defence vehicles take a while to build. In 12 years, the Russian KBP Instrument Design Bureau has completed a little more than 200 Pantsir-S1s for Russian forces and also for export.
All that is to say, the Russians have many fewer close air defence systems than they had two years ago. And now that the Ukrainians are striking refineries as far away as 750 miles, those systems must defend more targets across a wider area.
“Russia may be unable to deploy conventional air-defence systems, such as Pantsir-S1 or S-300/400 systems, to all critical facilities within western Russia,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington DC concluded.
This is a problem the Ukrainians appreciate. They too have struggled to distribute air-defence systems in a way that allows them to protect Ukrainian cities, bases and industry while also protecting front-line forces. Which is why we can, in the same day, read about Ukrainian batteries shooting down dozens of Russian rockets and drones and also read about Russian strikes on dams and power plants – to say nothing of the hourly Russian air raids targeting Ukrainian troop positions.
What Ukraine is doing with its own long-range raids is forcing Russia to address the same air-defence dilemma – and make the same compromises.
“You can’t defend everywhere,” retired US Army general Mark Hertling noted. And if the Russians are anything like the Ukrainians, they will prioritize a strategic industrial site over some unfortunate infantry platoon.
If so, gaps might begin to open in Russian air-defences over the front line. That represents an opportunity for the scrappy Ukrainian air force, newly rearmed with French glide-bombs and awaiting its first ex-European F-16 fighters, to escalate its attacks along the front.
Anticipating this, the Russians are trying to solve their air-defence problem without redeploying their best systems hundreds of miles from the front line. When Ukrainian officials finally appreciated the scale of their own air-defence problem a year after the wider war kicked off, they began forming mobile short-range air-defence units. Lots of them.
These units, often staffed by men who are perhaps a bit too old for the front line, ride in nimble pickup trucks fitted with spotlights and infrared sensors and armed with auto-cannons and machine guns. They’re not sophisticated, but they work. When the Russians launched a record 90 Shahed drones at Ukrainian cities on Jan. 1, the mobile groups helped shoot down 87 of them.
According to Russian state media, the Kremlin is forming its own mobile air-defence groups. The problem, for the Russians, is scale. Russian air-defenders must protect many more targets than Ukrainian air-defenders protect. And since Russia is much bigger than Ukraine is, it’s harder for the mobile groups to anticipate which direction a Ukrainian drone might come from.
“Russian forces appear to struggle with properly deploying short-range air-defence systems along expected flight vectors for Ukrainian drones, and the Russian military appears to have even failed to cover important potential targets in reportedly well-defended areas within Russia,” ISW explained. “The mass deployment of mobile fire groups throughout western Russia could pose similar challenges for Russian forces.”
The best-case scenario, for Ukraine, is that its drone raids continue to hit Russian oil refineries while also forcing Russia to thin out its air-defences. But even if the Russians manage to protect their refineries, there’s a good chance they’ll do it at the expense of protecting their front-line troops.
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