Over the past three weeks, Ukraine has wreaked havoc with Russia’s energy infrastructure. Soon after the new year, someone attached explosives to train carriages in the Urals city of Nizhny Tagil. A blast took place next to facilities owned by Gazprom Neft, the country’s third biggest oil producer. Next, a kamikaze drone crashed into an oil depot in the Oryol region.
On 18 January, another oil terminal, in St Petersburg – Vladimir Putin’s home city – came under attack. It was the first time since the invasion in February 2022 that unmanned aerial vehicles had reached the Leningrad region.
There was more to come. A large-scale fire broke out at an oil depot in the town of Klintsy, not far from Belarus and Ukraine.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The attacks are part of a growing asymmetrical campaign by Kyiv to cripple the industry and to deprive Moscow of the billions of dollars in global revenue it uses to fund its war.
After his early failure to seize Kyiv, Putin has ramped up arms production, transforming Russia into a war economy, and he has sourced additional munitions from North Korea.
According to Anders Åslund, a former Atlantic Council senior fellow, Sullivan has advised Zelenskiy not to try to recapture Crimea or to strike the Kerch Bridge that connects the occupied peninsula with Russian territory.
“We would expect Ukraine to hit further refineries, depots and export ports in these areas,” he said on Twitter/X, adding: “By insisting on being independent from transit countries, and maltreating them, Russia has made itself vulnerable.”
Sergey Vakulenko, an oil expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said drones could not destroy a whole Russian refinery because modern firefighting equipment was available and so far the fires had been put out in a few hours.
Speaking in Kyiv last week, one military intelligence official said Ukraine’s international partners had previously been squeamish when it came to the question of attacking Russia directly.
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