Ukraine is fighting not one but two hot wars against Russia. The first, a conventional, bloody land war along an 810-mile front line, has descended into stalemate. But the second – drone and missile strikes and sabotage raids deep into enemy territory – may prove to be a game-changing strategy for hitting Russia where it hurts.
Last week, two Ukrainian kamikaze drones scored a spectacular hit on an oil and gas refinery and an oil export terminal in Ust-Luga near St Petersburg. At a range of 775 miles from Ukraine, the strike has severely dented Russian ability to produce and export naphtha, jet fuel and gasoil, and export liquefied natural gas (LNG). It might take weeks or months before the refinery returns to significant capacity. Effectively, those Ukrainian-made drones have proved more successful at enforcing their own violent brand of sanctions on Russia’s hydrocarbon trade than all the West’s failed efforts to cap prices and embargo Russian exports.
‘Russia needs to know that we will be able to respond devastatingly… That will be our answer to them’
Preserving Russia’s capabilities to export oil and LNG has been the core of Vladimir Putin’s sanctions-busting strategy, and it has so far protected his economy from the worst effects of western economic warfare. Though the war now consumes close to 40 per cent of the Kremlin’s state spending, oil and gas receipts are actually higher than before the war thanks to tensions in the Middle East and Houthi attacks on tankers in the Red Sea. China and India, backed by a cynical inter-national network of tanker fleets, many of them Greek-owned, have kept Russian oil flowing out and the petrodollars flowing in. Russia’s hydrocarbon infrastructure is the economic lifeblood of Putin’s war machine.
That infrastructure is the ultimate target-rich environment. Pumping stations, LNG terminals and refineries are huge, sprawling industrial facilities conveniently filled with highly combustible product.