“Ukraine has every possibility under international law for what it is doing. That has to be said explicitly.” Olaf Scholz said so at a press conference in Meseberg, outside Berlin, in May 2024, when he was still German chancellor. The question he was answering has not gone away: can Ukraine lawfully hit targets on Russian soil?
Where governments drew the line
For much of the war the limit was political rather than legal. Germany and other suppliers tied their weapons deliveries to conditions, among them a ban on attacking targets in Russia, out of fear of escalation. In May 2024 that began to shift. Emmanuel Macron stood next to Scholz and said Ukraine should be allowed to neutralize the military sites from which missiles were being fired at it. He was explicit about the boundary, though. Everything else in Russia, and “obviously civilian capacities”, should stay off limits.
Scholz was more cautious in tone but saw no legal objection. Provided Kyiv kept to the rules of international law, and to whatever terms the arms suppliers set, it was “allowed to defend itself”, he said. He found it strange that anyone would argue otherwise. Vladimir Putin had already warned of “serious consequences” if Western states permitted such strikes.
Other governments went further. David Cameron, then the British foreign secretary, said in Kyiv that Ukraine “absolutely has the right to strike back at Russia”. Antony Blinken, visiting Kyiv on May 15, 2024, avoided a policy change but left the door open. Washington, he said, had neither encouraged nor enabled attacks beyond Ukraine’s borders, yet Kyiv had to make its own decisions about how to fight.
The practical argument ran alongside the legal one. Christopher Morris of the University of Portsmouth, writing in the UK Defence Journal after Russia’s offensive in the Kharkiv region began on May 10, argued that the US ban handed Moscow a sanctuary. Air bases and supply depots just across the border were out of reach, so Russia could mass forces in relative safety. Kharkiv, home to roughly 1.4 million people, had faced missile fire every day since February 2022.
Refineries and the self-defence argument
The debate moved on from border positions to the oil industry. In October 2026 Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, told Euronews that hitting refineries was lawful. “If we look at international law, it is clear that [hitting refineries] is in defence of Ukraine because that is where the funding comes from for this war to kill Ukrainian people every day,” she said. Her reasoning was financial: most of the war’s funding comes from oil, so Ukraine targets refineries while Russia goes after Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
The scale of the campaign is large. Ukraine’s Defence Ministry counted strikes on 12 major refineries during September. The International Energy Agency calculated that by late August just five of Russia’s 32 big plants had escaped drone attacks, and some had been hit as many as 15 times. Washington, meanwhile, pushed an “energy ceasefire”, announced after Donald Trump unveiled a diesel arrangement under which Russia would sell over 300,000 tonnes. Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Financial Times that Kyiv would resume the strikes. The block on hitting refineries was lifted, he said: “We’re done.”
Kallas added that the war has one aggressor and one victim, and that ending the war is the fastest way to stop the refinery strikes.
Sources
- Macron, Scholz: Ukraine can strike some targets in Russia (DW)
- Kallas: Ukraine's attacks on Russian refineries constitute self-defence (Euronews)
- Should Ukraine attack Russian territory with western weapons? (UK Defence Journal, op-ed by C. Morris, Univ. of Portsmouth)
