Ukraine has pounded Russia’s refineries with deep strikes in the past week, worsening its petrol shortages and causing Moscow to extend a ban on exports of petroleum products.
Russia responded with a deadly attack on Kyiv and a barrage of statements portraying Moscow’s “special military operation” as a success and Ukraine as teetering on the edge of surrender.
Russian President Vladimir Putin used his appearance at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit to suggest Russian energy exports to China and India were booming, but reports suggested that Moscow is heavily discounting its crude to hold onto clients.
Ukraine’s European and regional allies are meeting on Thursday to try to finalise security guarantees in case a ceasefire should come about, while calling on US President Donald Trump to use sanctions to press Putin into direct negotiations with Kyiv.
Russian offensive operations
Russia redeployed marines and paratroopers – elite units – from Ukraine’s northern Sumy region to the eastern region of Donetsk on September 1, suggesting it may be preparing a renewed push for the city of Pokrovsk, which Ukraine has identified as a Russian key tactical objective in the east since August 2024.
Russia last week gave up on an offensive for Dobropillia, a town whose capture would have enabled an encirclement of Pokrovsk from the north, after stiff Ukrainian resistance.
Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskii confirmed that Dobropillia and Pokrovsk remained among the most intense battle zones along the front last week, along with Lyman, a city further north.
Between Lyman and Pokrovsk lies the so-called “fortress belt” of cities – Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhivka and Konstiantynivka – considered one of Ukraine’s most heavily fortified sections of the front, suggesting Russia may be intending its encirclement rather than head-on assault.
Ahead of Putin’s visit to Tianjin, China, on Sunday to attend the SCO summit, Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov on Saturday said the Russian “unstoppable offensive” had seized more than 3,500 square kilometres (1,350 square miles) and 149 settlements since March.
“Gerasimov is inflating most of his claims,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, assessed, concluding that Russian gains stood at 2,346sq km and 130 settlements since March.
The ISW also disagreed with Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov’s claim on Friday that “at the beginning of the year, we were liberating 300–400 square kilometres monthly, and this figure has reached 600–700 square kilometres”. The ISW said Russia had taken 445sq km in July and about 500sq km in August.
Ukraine’s head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, also disagreed with Gerasimov’s claim to have captured half of the city of Kupiansk in the north.
“All the fantasies of Russian war correspondents about control over half of the city of Kupiansk up to the centre do not correspond to reality,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging service. “The traditional tactic is that runners with flags run around, they are filmed by a drone, and then propagandists do their job.”
Russia did score operational success in the western Black Sea for the first time since 2022, when it had lost its flagship guided missile cruiser Moskva and control over Zmiinyi Island.
On August 28, the Russian Ministry of Defence said it had sunk the Ukrainian reconnaissance ship Simferopol in a drone strike at the mouth of the Danube river. Surface kamikaze drone footage depicted an approach towards a ship matching the Simferopol, and separate footage recorded an explosion.
Ukraine pioneered the use of naval drones to sink Russian ships in the western part of the Black Sea. This may be the first recorded instance of Russia successfully using the same tactics and doing so at the very edge of European Union territorial waters.
On the same day, Russia conducted one of its largest aerial attacks on Kyiv, aiming much of its salvo of 598 drones and 31 missiles there.
The death toll eventually reached 26, including four children, after a residential building in the Darnytskyi neighbourhood was destroyed by two missiles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy laid flowers there the following day.
Between August 28 and September 3, Russia launched 2,189 drones and 108 missiles in all at Ukraine’s cities behind the front line. Ukraine intercepted 88 percent of the drones and 79 percent of the missiles.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries
Ukraine struck back in the Black Sea on August 28, when its military intelligence rendered the Kalibr-carrying ship Buyan-M inoperable, after striking it with two drones.
But its main effort was on Russian soil.
On the same day, Ukrainian drones struck the Kuibyshev refinery in Russia’s Samara region, 1,000km east of Ukraine. They also struck the Afipsky refinery in Krasnodar Krai, some 400km from unoccupied Ukraine.
The two refineries can process over 13 million tonnes of oil a year, just under 5 percent of Russia’s total capacity, said Ukrainian officials, and are key to the Russian war machine.
Industry sources told Reuters that Kuibyshev’s two primary refining units had been hit and all oil processing had stopped. Processing had resumed only a week earlier, after a Ukrainian strike on August 2.
On Friday, Kovalenko said drones had struck the Krasnodar and Syrzan refineries, both of which have been struck before. Geolocated footage confirmed the Syrzan hit, and Krasnodar officials admitted a fire in their facility.
Reuters estimated that in August alone, Ukraine had taken out 17 percent of Russian refining capacity.
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi put the figure at 21 percent.
Russia last week extended an export ban on refined petroleum products by a month, until October 31, to maintain “a stable situation in the domestic fuel market”. The ban has been in force since March 1.
Russian officials have documented petrol rationing in Russia and the occupied territories. Russia said it would seek to raise its exports of crude oil by 200,000 barrels a day, because it couldn’t process the oil itself.
Crude oil sells for less than refined products anyway, but reports last week suggested Russia was heavily discounting its crude in an effort to retain customers. According to Bloomberg, Indian refiners were being offered a $4 a barrel discount compared with Brent crude prices, up from $2.5 a week before and $1 in July.
Ukraine has also sought to limit Russian exports, which bring cash for its war economy.
Last week, officials at the Ust-Luga export terminal near St Petersburg said the terminal would operate at half of its capacity due to pipeline damage from Ukrainian drones.
Ukraine has been developing its own long-distance kill vehicles to strike deep inside Russia without Western weapons, whose use is often restricted.
Last month, it unveiled its first heavy cruise missile, the FP-5, nicknamed the Flamingo, capable of a 3,000km range carrying a 1,150kg warhead, and on Monday may have made a first battlefield use of that missile against a Russian border post near occupied Crimea.
