Inside Ukraine’s drone campaign to blitz Russia’s energy industry

“You don’t have the cards,” Donald Trump famously told Volodymyr Zelenskiy during their Oval Office showdown in February as he dismissed Ukraine’s capabilities in the war against Russia.

As the two leaders prepare to meet in the White House again, Ukraine’s military remains on the back foot — but it has shown it has at least one potent play to hit the enemy where it hurts: long-range drone strikes on Russia’s crucial energy industry.

Last month, Zelenskiy described the attacks on the oil sector, which funds and fuels Moscow’s war effort, as “the sanctions that work the fastest”. Reuters can reveal the scale of the campaign and the strategy behind it, drawing on data from independent researchers, footage of some attacks, plus interviews with seven Ukrainian sources with knowledge of the strikes.

Ukraine has launched at least 58 attacks on key Russian energy sites since the start of August, sending drones as far as about 2,000 km (1,200 miles) into Russian territory to bomb refineries, pumping stations, storage depots and export terminals, according to data compiled by UK-based non-profit group Open Source Centre (OSC).

That compares with just one such strike in June and two in July.

A senior Ukrainian government source, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters, told Reuters the primary goal of the campaign was to create shortages of key products like gasoline and diesel within Russia, making it harder for Moscow to push forward on the front lines.

The impact is being felt.

Drone strikes at various refineries knocked out around 17% of Russia’s refining capacity in mid-August, or 1.2 million barrels per day, which rose to 21%, or 1.4 million barrels per day, by the end of that month, according to Reuters calculations.

Domestic gasoline prices in Russia have risen by about a tenth and sporadic queues have appeared at filling stations. The strikes on refining have also served to push more crude towards export, reshaping Russia’s energy trade, according to LSEG data.

The recent attacks are not the first time Ukraine has launched long-range drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), at Russian energy installations. But the frequency of attacks is the highest since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of February 2022, as the range and payloads of drones grow.

Russia, for its part, has been pummelling Ukraine’s power and natural gas facilities in the last two months, causing widespread blackouts and water shortages across the country.

The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article. Russian officials have said no external power will force them to change course in the conflict and that attacks on the oil industry are dangerously escalatory.

Russia’s energy industry isn’t under critical threat, as Kyiv itself acknowledges.

Sergey Vakulenko, an oil and gas specialist at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said only repeated successful strikes on refineries could knock the facilities out of service.

“Russia’s oil refineries are facing a lot of problems, but things are far from catastrophic,” he wrote in a report. “How the situation develops in the coming months depends on whether Ukraine is able to maintain the pace of … or even ramp up attacks.”

How Ukraine attacks oil facilities deep in Russia

Following Russia’s invasion, Western allies prohibited Kyiv from firing the weapons they provided at targets deep inside Russian territory for fear of escalating the conflict, leading Ukraine to develop its own drone capabilities.

Both sides in the war produced between about 1.5 and 2 million military drones of all types last year, according to officials, underlining the rapid expansion of aerial warfare. Zelenskiy said in November last year that Ukraine would produce at least 30,000 long-range drones in 2025.

The Ukrainian Liutyi and FP-1 long-range drones, powered by small engines and able to fly in excess of 1,000 km, are among the workhorses of the campaign to hit energy assets.

A source with knowledge of Ukraine’s long-range attacks against Russian energy facilities said that operations typically include between 20 and 30 drones designed to dive into targets laden with explosives, with a smaller number of decoys sometimes sent beforehand to drain Russia’s air defences.

Sometimes drone fleets can be much larger — Zelenskiy said at a news briefing in early October that up to 300 drones had been deployed in a single operation.

Ukraine’s main challenge is scale. Though it is constantly increasing production, it doesn’t have enough drones to routinely overwhelm Russia’s air defences, while Russia is also improving its interception rate, meaning a smaller proportion are reaching their targets, according to the source.

Satellite imagery verified by Reuters also shows what appear to be anti-drone nets and structures over key parts of the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat refinery located some 1,400 km away from the Ukrainian border.

The source familiar with Ukraine’s attacks said various means were used for navigation and targeting drone strikes.

One of the main methods is visual navigation, where the drone uses an on-board camera to match features on the ground to a pre-loaded map. Unlike GPS-guided navigation, this cannot be hacked or jammed by Russian electronic warfare systems.

Another common way is to use advanced satellite-navigation antennas designed to block out unusual signals that seek to jam or disorient the system, while the craft continues to receive its real position from satellites in space.

What the Ukrainians are targeting

The dozens of Ukrainian drone attacks identified by the OSC, from August to Oct. 13, have targeted various types of facilities across Russia’s complex oil system, including refineries needed to produce domestic petroleum products, depots for storing oil, pumping stations critical to maintaining flow along pipelines and export terminals at ports.

The OSC based its data on statements from one or both sides in the war describing attacks. In most cases, the attacks were corroborated by online videos and social media posts by witnesses. In some cases, it was possible to review satellite imagery of the aftermath of attacks.

More than half of the strikes — 29 — were aimed at oil refineries in the European part of Russia, stretching from the Black Sea’s Krasnodar region, to facilities near Moscow and St Petersburg and the Ukhta refinery near the Arctic Circle, the data showed. The most distant refinery targeted, in Tyumen, was 1,992 km into Russian territory.

Three refineries — the Syzran and Saratov plants in Volga region and the southern Afipsky facility — have been attacked at least three times in the last two months, according to the data.

Ukraine also carried out at least 18 attacks on pumping facilities. From Aug. 13 to Aug. 22, three Ukrainian attacks targeted western Russia’s Unecha and Nikolskoye stations, which lie on the Soviet-built Druzhba pipeline, Russia’s export artery to Hungary and Slovakia.

There have also been six Ukrainian attacks on Russian export terminals in the Black and Baltic seas using air and sea-borne drones, according to the OSC.

Fuel shortages have occurred sporadically across Russia in recent weeks and Russia has introduced a partial ban on diesel exports until the end of the year while extending an existing ban on gasoline exports.

One result of the disruptions has been a decrease in refining and an increase in the amount of unprocessed crude which Russia now needs to export to avoid  oil output cuts.

Russia exports both oil and refined products. Its crude sales mainly go to China, India and Turkey while products can be exported to many more destinations. Crude buyers might be unwilling to increase purchases further without deeper discounts than currently offered, several traders involved in Russian oil sales said.

Mykhailo Gonchar, a Ukrainian energy expert and president of the Kyiv-based Centre for Global Studies Strategy XXI, said interruptions to oil and product flows caused by damage to pumping stations would likely complicate the operations of state oil pipeline firm Transneft, though for disruptions to become critical Ukraine would need to continue to strike refineries and terminals on the Black Sea and Baltic Sea.

The Ukrainian campaign also means Russia must spend to repair these installations: “It’s big money,” Gonchar added.

The impact on Russia’s war economy

Oil and gas sales are the single biggest source of revenue for the Russian state, accounting for between a third and half of federal budget proceeds over the past decade. The trade has been strained by Western sanctions imposed over the war as well as the recent drone onslaught.

Oil and gas is expected to drop to about a quarter of Moscow’s overall revenue in 2025, according to official estimates.

In August, Russia’s revenue from sales of crude oil and oil products slumped to one of the lowest levels seen since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, according to the International Energy Agency.

The dip to near 5-year lows is reducing tax revenues and exacerbating Russia’s economic slowdown, the agency said.
Moscow’s latest budget estimates forecast oil and gas revenues will continue make up an ever smaller share of overall revenue in the coming years.

Kremlin officials have said the Russian economy is not stagnating and pointed to forecast growth rates similar to those of EU countries.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s strikes have curbed Russian refinery runs and contributed to shortages of certain fuel grades. This, along with high borrowing costs, has left private filling stations unable to afford to stockpile fuel, according to traders and retailers.

Gasoline prices have shot up 9.5% and diesel more than 3% since February, while shortages have led to rationing in Russian-occupied Crimea.

The disruptions to Russia’s refineries have upset the usual balance of Russia’s oil and gas trade.

Normally, about half of all crude oil produced is refined in Russia and used to supply domestic demand or exported as refined products. The bulk of crude oil exports is sent to markets in Asia.

Refinery stoppages have led Russia to increase crude oil exports as exports of refined products have dropped. Around 3 million tonnes of refined oil products were shipped from Russian ports in September, significantly less than the monthly average of 4.7 million tonnes in 2025, while crude oil volumes were about 10% higher.

Most of Russia’s federal revenue from oil and gas is paid by producers through mineral extraction taxes at the oil field. So increases to crude oil exports have allowed producers to maintain output despite potential refining bottlenecks, helping Moscow maintain the revenues coming in for the time being.

Any change in producers’ output has a direct impact on Moscow’s bottom line — exactly what Kyiv hopes will force Putin to the negotiating table where years of Western economic sanctions have failed.

American influence

Ukraine’s strikes have played out against the backdrop of a shifting political landscape since Trump came to power in January.

Despite providing billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, U.S. officials under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden had asked Kyiv not to attack Russian oil infrastructure, a senior Ukrainian government source said.

Under Trump, there has been no such request so far, the source told Reuters.

A senior U.S. official and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters that the United States has been sharing intelligence with the Ukrainians to help them strike Russian energy targets. 

The U.S. State Department declined to comment for this article, while the White House didn’t respond to queries.

Kyiv has nonetheless been buffeted by Trump’s unpredictable approach, which saw him clash with Zelenskiy in February, court Putin at a summit in Alaska and, at one point, stop arms supplies and intelligence-sharing with Kyiv.

Now the U.S. president has moved towards supporting Kyiv, talking up its chances of winning the war, voicing frustration with Putin and touting the idea of supplying American Tomahawk missiles that could greatly enhance Kyiv’s strike capabilities.

Russia has said it would respond harshly to such a move.