The vacuum unit at the Tuapse refinery burned down on January 25. Within days, the plant on Russia’s Black Sea coast had stopped refining oil altogether, and Reuters, citing industry sources, said it could not restart quickly, with repairs pencilled in for late February or early March.
It was one hit in a run of them. Tuapse, owned by Rosneft, processes as much as nine million tonnes of raw material a year and is among Russia’s ten largest refineries. It was at least the fourth strike in a week on Russian energy sites. On the night of January 20 to 21, the SBU had already hit the sea terminal at Ust-Luga, and a Novatek plant on the Baltic coast suspended operations. A Ukrainian source said the SBU security service had flown the drones and would keep going after facilities that supply fuel to Russia’s war effort. The strikes also forced Sochi airport to close.
A campaign with three aims
By March 2024, Ukrainska Pravda counted more than ten major refineries and depots damaged since the start of the year, some of them more than once. Large-scale attacks had begun the previous year, when drones hit the Ilsky and Afipsky refineries in May and an explosive device went off at the Kuibyshev refinery in Samara in July.
Ukrainian sources describe the goals in three layers. The first is military. “War is about provision and supply,” said Andrii Yusov of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence, and fuel from these plants keeps Russian armor, infantry carriers and warplanes running. The second is money, since oil and gas sales pay for the fight. The third is morale. There is a side benefit too: every strike deep inside Russia, one source argued, gives Moscow a reason to pull air defenses back from the front.
How much damage, really
Analysts were cautious. A refinery has several production lines, and crude can be routed to those still working, said Serhii Kuiun of A-95 Consulting Group, so a single strike rarely disables a whole plant. Bloomberg reported that the plants hit in recent days together hold 12% of the country’s refining capacity. Market participants stressed that this is nameplate capacity, not what was actually lost. One source in an energy company expected total refining to fall by only a few percent. Energy expert Hennadii Riabtsev called them spot strikes that hurt logistics without moving annual totals much.
Still, pressure showed up at the pump. Russian petrol hit RUB 60,000 per tonne, a six-month peak. Most Russian refineries run on Western equipment bought before sanctions, which makes repairs slow. The head of the SBU, Vasyl Maliuk, said Ukraine would not stop: the “cotton” in Russia “has been burning, is burning and will continue to burn.”
Sources
- Russian oil refinery in Tuapse stops operation because of Ukrainian drone attack (Ukrainska Pravda via Yahoo)
- "The burning shall continue": What lies behind Ukraine's attacks on Russia's oil refineries (Ukrainska Pravda via Yahoo)
- "The burning shall continue" (continued, Ukrainska Pravda via Yahoo)
