Russia's third fuel crisis could be its worst as Ukraine's drones hit refineries

Ukrainian drones have hit refineries making about 55% of Russia's petrol and diesel, oil analyst Sergey Vakulenko estimated on November 13, as a third fuel crisis this year takes hold.

"The petrol situation in Russia is becoming very serious," Vakulenko, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote on X, counting the strikes on the Omsk refinery on November 11 and the Volgograd refinery a day later. Nobody knows how badly each plant has been hit or which units are down, he said, "but given how massive the recent raids have been, the assumption that production has been halted completely may well be valid."

This crisis looks worse than the first two because the damage is lasting longer. After the second wave of shortages in September and October, supply was easing: Rosneft had lifted its retail limits in several regions by late October, and Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak put the petrol deficit at about 5% on October 16. Now the drones are reaching plants deep in Siberia, coming back to the ones that have been repaired and hitting the units that take longest to fix.

Strikes resume

Ukraine largely held off after US President Donald Trump announced an energy ceasefire on October 11, under pressure from Washington to spare Russia's refineries while global fuel prices soared. The strikes resumed on October 30, and Ukraine's General Staff said on November 11 that it had since hit Russia's five largest refineries. IntelliNews' refinery damage ledger records eight strikes on Russian refineries in the first 13 days of November, against seven in the whole of October.

Special forces said their drones flew almost 3,000 km to hit Gazprom Neft's Omsk plant, Russia's largest refinery with capacity of more than 21mn tonnes a year, for the third time on November 11. Omsk governor Vitaly Khotsenko said one person was injured, but NASA fire-detection data showed no new hotspot at the plant. Drones then struck Lukoil's Volgograd refinery, which Ukraine says processes more than 15mn tonnes a year, about 5.6% of the national total, overnight into November 13. Regional governor Andrei Bocharov said four workers were killed at an industrial site he did not name. The Defence Forces "systematically return to targets that the enemy restores," the General Staff said.

The Kirishi refinery near St Petersburg, the second-largest in the country, was hit on November 9. Ukraine's military intelligence agency HUR said in early November that strikes had put 15 of Russia's 38 major refineries out of action by the end of September, a figure that could not be verified.

Longer repairs

Minor damage to a crude distillation unit is usually fixed within weeks, but serious damage to secondary units such as catalytic crackers, hydrocrackers and reformers takes six to eight months on average, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a commentary in September, adding that Western sanctions limit Russia's access to equipment suppliers. A Russian refinery was hit on average once every three days in the first eight months of the year, the agency counted. In October Bloomberg reported that Rosneft was stretching repairs that could take days into months at most of its damaged plants.

Vakulenko wrote in June that strikes had shifted from primary processing to isomerisation, cracking and hydrotreating units, which often need imported parts, and that "the amount of gasoline available in Russia at the moment is determined by a race between Ukrainian drones and Russian repair teams". Ukrainian drone units are briefed on which pipelines, fractionating towers and connections would take longest to replace, the Financial Times reported in July. The Moscow refinery, knocked out in June, was expected to stay offline for the rest of this year and was hit again in September.

Ukraine has also started firing highly accurate British-made drones at refineries in the Moscow region, Yaroslavl and Volgograd, among them the jet-powered Nyan one-way attack drone built by BAE Systems' Callen-Lenz unit, The Times reported in August, raising fears of Russian retaliation against the UK. Russian military bloggers say the drones have also become smarter: the Russian Telegram channel Dnevnik Razvedchika claimed that Ukrainian operators now watch strikes in real time and send drones still in the air on to other units, storage tanks or nearby substations once a target has been hit.

Rationing returns

Rosneft reimposed limits of 30 litres of petrol per vehicle at urban filling stations and 50 litres at roadside ones in Karelia, Buryatia, Novosibirsk Oblast and Krasnoyarsk Krai on November 9, and the Leningrad region set caps of its own. Kazakhstan has shipped just 8,000 tonnes of petrol to Russia since the summer and has extended its own fuel export ban to May 2027. The share of jet fuel that oil companies must sell on the exchange was cut to 5% from 11% for the winter.

Diesel and gasoil shipments from Russian ports fell 31% in the first seven days of November from the week before, to about 337,000 barrels a day (b/d), and no petrol cargoes were seen at all, Bloomberg reported on November 13, citing Vortexa data. Total product exports rose 4% to 1.64mn b/d as fuel oil shipments jumped 63% to about 805,000 b/d and refinery feedstock exports nearly quadrupled to 186,000 b/d. "Persistent attacks on Russian energy infrastructure continue to choke off the country's diesel supplies," the IEA said in its November Oil Market Report.

Rationing by decree

Vakulenko expects strikes on the Nizhnekamsk, Perm and Tyumen refineries in the coming days, which would put the plants hit at almost exactly two thirds of petrol supply to the domestic market, and nearly three quarters if Moscow is added.

Moscow is probably last in line because of the dense air defences around it, he said. November demand is about 5% below July's and stocks built up in a quiet October may cover about a week of national consumption.

"If petrol output does fall by the volumes described, the government will have to introduce measures to bring demand into balance with the available supplies. That can no longer be done through market mechanisms," he wrote. "The government will be forced to restrict private petrol consumption drastically, almost to zero."

Russia has run at that level before. Petrol consumption fell to about 30% of normal in April 2020 at the peak of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when travel restrictions rather than shortages kept cars off the road. Diesel is in better shape because export-oriented capacity can be switched to the home market, but Russia could already face a shortage of about 35% against normal demand, rising to about 60% in the worst case, according to Vakulenko.

In 2024 Vakulenko called the refinery attacks a nuisance that imposed costs, and in 2025 he said they would not seriously disrupt petrol supplies at the scale of the time. In July this year he put the fall in petrol output at at least 13.5%. "In June 2026 I noted that the country was coming right up against the threshold at which trouble and inconvenience turn into major problems. It appears that in November 2026 this threshold is being crossed," he wrote.

"If, however, Ukraine proves able to strike Russia's oil refining sector again with the same reach and intensity every two to three weeks over several months, this will create a fundamentally new reality in which the Russian economy has to function."