(WARSAW) – Ukrainian drone strikes have exposed serious vulnerabilities across Russia’s oil industry, contributing to fuel shortages, lost export revenues and a mounting repair burden for Moscow.
The campaign against Russian refineries is now creating problems well beyond the petrol pump. After months of Ukrainian drone strikes, Russia is experiencing shortages of automotive lubricants. Reports suggest suppliers are facing disruptions across multiple product lines while some commonly used motor oils have disappeared from the regular market altogether.
Two main pressures are driving the shortage. Damaged refineries have been forced into unscheduled repairs, disrupting production. Russian manufacturers also continue to depend on imported additives used to produce modern lubricants. Sanctions and disrupted supply chains have made those components harder to obtain.
The result is showing up in Russian garages. One industry representative reportedly said prices for some lubricants have increased by roughly 50 to 100 percent in just two months. Delivery times that previously averaged two days can now stretch to two weeks. Another major repair network reported more moderate increases at 15 to 20 percent since January, but warned that some products could become another 40 per cent more expensive.
The lubricant shortage is colliding with Russia’s wider fuel problems. Authorities in at least 10 regions have tightened controls on petrol sales amid supply disruptions. In some areas, shortages of higher quality gasoline have pushed motorists towards lower grade alternatives.
Ukrainian strikes have disrupted a significant share of Russia’s refining capacity in recent months. Refineries remain attractive targets due to their role in transforming crude oil into fuels and other products needed throughout the economy. Damage at a refinery does not remain at the refinery. It can eventually reach filling stations, transport companies, workshops and ordinary Russian motorists.
Ukraine’s campaign against Russia’s oil industry is not new, but in 2026 it has become broader, more sustained and significantly more disruptive. The first major wave came in early 2024 when Ukrainian long range drones repeatedly struck refineries deep inside Russia. By April, NATO estimated that attacks may have affected more than 15 per cent of Russian refining capacity.
Moscow was initially able to repair much of the damage relatively quickly, but there was also pressure coming from Washington. In March 2024, the Financial Times reported that the Biden administration had urged Kyiv to stop attacking Russian energy infrastructure, partly because of concerns about global oil prices and possible Russian retaliation. Ukraine publicly maintained that Russian refineries were legitimate military targets.
Two years later, the campaign looks very different. Ukraine has developed longer range and more capable domestically produced drones, allowing strikes far beyond the border. This year, attacks have repeatedly hit major refineries from central Russia to facilities approaching the Urals. The cumulative impact is becoming harder to absorb.
Reuters reported in May that virtually every major refinery in central Russia had been forced to either halt or reduce production. By July, Russian seaborne petroleum product exports had fallen by a third compared to June. Ukraine’s strategy has evolved from occasional disruption into sustained economic pressure, repeatedly hitting the same refining network faster than Russia can fully restore it.
Beneath the drone strikes sits a much quieter crisis. Russia’s oil industry is trying to run one of the largest energy systems on Earth using enormous amounts of infrastructure inherited from the Soviet Union. Pipelines are getting older and tankers are wearing out. Existing oil fields are being depleted and the new fields Moscow wants to develop are increasingly located in some of the most hostile terrain on the planet.
Russia has roughly 250,000 kilometres of oil pipelines, according to the environmental organisation Arcta. More than half of that network is already worn out and requires repair or replacement. In some areas, as much as 80 per cent of the oil infrastructure may need replacing.
The last official Russian figures give an idea of what that looks like in practice. In 2023, the final year for which Moscow published the relevant data, Russia recorded 14,716 major pipeline ruptures. Each rupture risks spilling oil into rivers, forests and soil. It also means less oil reaching refineries, ports and export customers.
For a government whose budget depends heavily on hydrocarbons, every leaking pipeline is also a small leak in the Kremlin’s finances. Moscow increasingly does not want people looking too closely. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian authorities have stopped publishing growing amounts of economic and industrial data. This makes it much harder to measure how badly parts of the energy system are deteriorating.
The next problem is geography. Russia’s older oil fields are gradually being exhausted. Maintaining production means moving further north, particularly into the Arctic. There is one fairly awkward problem with building thousands of kilometres of oil infrastructure in the Arctic. The Arctic is melting.
Much of Russia’s northern infrastructure is built on permafrost. As temperatures rise, that frozen ground becomes unstable. Engineering can compensate for some of that, but compensation costs money. Russia is currently spending rather a lot of money on something else.
The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin did not create Russia’s aging pipelines, thaw its permafrost or exhaust its older oil fields. He did not slash environmental enforcement or build an economy that depends heavily on hydrocarbons while simultaneously starving infrastructure of investment. The drone campaign matters because it places additional stress on all of those weaknesses at once.
Paul Goble, distinguished senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, said the attacks have put a serious dent into the Russian refining operation. He said he would not go as far as to say it is in a state of collapse, but the amount of oil the Russians can process is clearly falling.
“That has led to the gas crisis domestically and to the reduction of export sales on which Moscow relies for earning money to pay for the war,” Goble said. “It is going to be very difficult for Russia in the short term to restore these damaged facilities. What we are talking about is a major problem that is going to last for months and months if not even years.”
Goble said the attacks have put about a third of Russian refineries out of action, but the problems with oil pipelines are far greater, though not yet much noticed. Much of the pipeline network dates to Soviet times and should have been repaired. The Russian government has skimped on repairs, trying to build new things without repairing the old. Now the old is breaking down and Russia is paying the price.
The Soviet government hyper centralised its pipeline system. Almost all the pipelines that carry oil that could be exported to the west pass through a very small area of the country, roughly 20 miles by 40 miles. This means the ability of Ukrainian drones to destroy far more than would otherwise be the case if there was a decentralised system.
Goble said he expects to see not only the collapse of the oil pipeline system but also the collapse of other kinds of infrastructure. Water pipes are beginning to break down. Electric power lines are breaking down. Over 26 years of Putin’s rule, Moscow has not made the investments in repair. It has occasionally built new things but has not kept everything else up to date.
“You are not getting oil delivered, you are not getting water delivered, you are not getting electricity delivered,” Goble said. “All of those things have a domino-like effect on other parts of the economy and are hurting Russia very much.”
Putin has said in recent days that none of the attacks have been fundamental. Goble said that may be true for any one of them, but together the attacks on infrastructure are having an enormous effect that Russia is not going to be able to recover from unless it redirects money now being spent on Ukraine to domestic infrastructure.
“I do not think that is going to happen under Vladimir Putin,” Goble said. “As long as he is in power, we are going to see this situation deteriorate. It will be up to his successors to decide whether they are going to try to make Russia the great country domestically that they have always claimed it is, or allow it to continue to deteriorate, in which case I think you will have far greater political crisis in the future.”
On the question of whether Ukraine might use larger weapons against refineries, Goble noted that Ukraine is achieving a lot with drones alone. Drone technology has allowed more destruction than anyone thought possible. Five years ago, people would have laughed at the possibility that Ukraine would have put a third of Russia’s refineries out of operation using drones carrying only a few kilos of explosives.
“That is exactly what has happened,” Goble said. “The Ukrainians will develop better weapons. They will have greater impact, but it is wrong to think that we are waiting for that to see real damage. The damage is serious. It is something that the Russian government has not figured out how to counter.”
The Russian targeting has not been very good. Russia has been attacking urban areas in an indiscriminate fashion primarily because it is not as good at using drones as the Ukrainians are. The Ukrainian ability to target and bring drones into precise targets is incredibly impressive. The Russians can attack a city several hundred square kilometres large, but the Ukrainians are attacking pipelines where destruction requires getting a drone into an area of a few square centimetres.
“The disaster is spreading,” Goble said. “It is spreading with the pipelines being destroyed. It is spreading with people waiting for gas for their cars. It is spreading with industry that is not getting the fuel it needs or the electricity or the water. The consequences for the economy will have political consequences as people begin to connect the dots and recognise that the policies of the Putin government are failing to develop and improve and take care of the infrastructure of the country in order to pay for this horrible war in Ukraine.”
In other developments, Putin has ordered the Russian government to prepare a programme to rebuild logistics hubs damaged by Ukrainian drone strikes. He acknowledged that the attacks are hurting Russia’s economy and slowing growth, but insisted they have caused no critical consequences.
Since July, Ukrainian strikes reportedly hit 23 Wildberries warehouses, cutting the online retailer’s logistics capacity by around a quarter. Earlier attacks on Russian oil refineries also pushed refining volumes sharply lower. Strikes on Black Sea ports have disrupted grain exports. Putin said damaged warehouses and logistics facilities should be rebuilt with state support and upgraded using newer technologies, including automation and artificial intelligence.
Record numbers of Russians are crossing into Georgia amid growing rumours of a possible new mobilisation this autumn. Russia’s Federal Customs Service says more than 19,000 people left via the Upper Lars checkpoint between 15th August and 16th August, with the figure exceeding 20,000 on 18th August. Officials said the numbers were significantly higher than during comparable periods in previous years.
Long traffic jams have formed at the border. Upper Lars became a major exit route during Russia’s September 2022 mobilisation when tens of thousands fled the country. Demand for rental housing in Armenia has also reportedly surged in recent weeks. The Kremlin has not announced a new mobilisation, but speculation has intensified amid Russia’s continuing battlefield losses and reports that officials are considering further measures to boost military manpower.
The report was broadcast by TVP World, Poland’s English language channel.
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