Russian oil installations: Ukraine's other front (2024)

When Ukrainian drones began raining down on Russian oil facilities earlier this year, Kyiv initially received a blunt admonition from its American ally. Less than a month after the first strike, which occurred on January 20 at the Novatek terminal in Ust-Luga, Leningrad Oblast, US Vice President Kamala Harris sent a first one privately to Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference, according to the Washington Post.

This warning has since been renewed, including during the surprise visit to Kyiv by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on March 20. Three days later, a refinery in Samara Oblast, located a thousand kilometers from the border, was also damaged. On April 9, the secretary of defense reiterated the call for restraint more explicitly. Appearing before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Lloyd Austin said he feared an unwelcome rise in world prices in the run-up to the US presidential election and urged his Ukrainian allies to focus on military targets instead.

Three days later, Kyiv issued a flat refusal to this request. The Ukrainian army has "not only the right but the duty to destroy" the Russian infrastructure that is contributing to the war effort, retorted Mykhailo Podolyak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Zelensky. "In other words, for Ukraine to achieve positive military results, it is necessary to destroy Russian infrastructure. Refineries are obviously military infrastructures," he added. "We used our drones. Nobody can say to us we can't," insisted the Ukrainian head of state himself a few days later in an interview with the Washington Post. Zelensky emphasized that no Western weapons were being used in this unprecedented campaign of deep strikes.

Strategic disagreement

In addition to this first strategic disagreement in US-Ukrainian relations, Washington's misgivings about drone raids on Russian oil installations even created divisions between allies. In an uncharacteristically firm tone toward Washington, Paris and London said in early April that they considered them acts of self-defense.

Since then, not only have American calls for restraint gone unheeded, but strikes have increased in frequency. In May alone, 12 Russian oil sites were targeted with varying degrees of success, and 27 had already been targeted between the end of January and the end of March, according to a breakdown produced by S&P Global. On Monday, May 20, the US financial analysis agency estimated the reduction in Russian refining capacity to nearly a million barrels per day after the shutdown of the Slavyansk-on-Kuban refinery in the Krasnodar Krai, close to Crimea, where six drones were shot down on Friday night, according to local authorities. The site had already been targeted twice, on March 17 and April 27, and production had just resumed. In the same region, a fire already broke out on Friday at Rosneft's Tuapse refinery, which had also recently been brought back into service after a first attack in January.

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