Ukraine's drone campaign bites into Russian fuel supply as refinery damage forces emergency imports from Belarus

Russia's purchases of Belarusian gasoline on the St Petersburg commodity exchange exceeded 17,000 tonnes in early May — roughly 58-times the volume bought in the same period last year – as persistent Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries reduce throughput by 10-15% this year y/y, according to a report by The Insider.

Ukraine's long-range drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure has shifted the baseline of Russian oil products production, but it is not yet causing a crisis. The cumulative effect of hundreds of strikes on refineries in western and central Russia — facilities that process crude into the fuel that moves Russian military vehicles, agricultural machinery and civilian transport — is now showing up not just in satellite imagery of burning distillation columns but in the St Petersburg exchange data and the domestic fuel market.

Due to rising shortages on the domestic market, Russia has been forced to turn to its closest ally for emergency supply. Belarus is home to two of the most modern refineries in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) that came online shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union and remain heavily used by Russian oil companies to refine their crude.

The arithmetic of attrition

The drone campaign's impact on Russian refining capacity has been gradual, deliberate and strategically coherent. Unlike strikes on ammunition depots or command infrastructure, attacks on refineries impose costs that compound over time. And as Kyiv rolls out ever more drones with ever longer range, more and more of Russia’s refineries are coming into range. The drawback is to fly thousands of kilometres to reach them, the payload of the drones is limited. They are able to cause significant damage and debilitating fires, but they do not carry enough explosives to destroy the refineries, which are forced to temporarily close for repairs but are usually back on line within a few weeks. The Ukrainian assault is a tactical win, but not a strategic game changer.

The 10 to 15% reduction in output this year represents a meaningful bite out of a system that was already operating under sanctions-related pressure on spare parts, maintenance equipment and technical expertise. It is also showing up in the ballooning budget deficit, which has risen well beyond the 1.6% of GDP plan for the whole year and is currently already 2.5% of GDP at the end of the first quarter.

The Belarusian gasoline purchases are the most visible symptom of that pressure. Russia's domestic consumption of gasoline runs at over 100,000 tonnes per day, which makes the 17,000 tonnes bought from Belarus in early May a significant share. "Volumes remain small compared with Russia's daily consumption of over 100,000 tons," noted energy expert Sergei Vakulenko. “This is not yet a crisis of supply, but it is a signal of the strain on the system.”

Geography of the damage

The refineries that have taken the heaviest damage are concentrated in western and central Russia — the facilities geographically within range of Ukraine's expanding drone fleet and closest to the front lines of the war economy. These include plants in the Saratov, Ryazan and Nizhny Novgorod regions, as well as facilities further south that process fuel for both civilian and military use.

Strikes on refineries in western Russia maximise the disruption to military logistics — fuel for armoured vehicles, helicopters and ground transport that supplies the front — while simultaneously affecting civilian supply chains in regions that are politically sensitive for the Kremlin. Domestic fuel shortages in Russian cities carry a different kind of political cost to losses at the front as they bring the impact of the war home to regular Russians – something that president Vladimir Putin has worked hard to avoid.

Whether that political cost is currently registering in any meaningful way is uncertain. Russian state media has largely avoided coverage of refinery strikes and their downstream effects.

Belarus, for its part, is well positioned to fill a short-term gap. The country operates several large Soviet-era refineries — most notably the Mozyr and Naftan plants — that process Russian crude under long-standing bilateral energy agreements and produce gasoline and diesel to broadly compatible specifications. Minsk has become, in effect, an emergency overflow valve for a Russian refining system absorbing physical damage it was not designed to sustain.

The arrangement carries its own complications. Belarus is itself under western sanctions, and the commercial flows between Minsk and Moscow operate in a financial environment increasingly insulated from — and constrained by — the dollar-based international payment system.

For Ukraine, the calculus behind the drone campaign has always been one of asymmetric cost imposition as it fights an asymmetric drone war with Russia. A drone that costs tens of thousands of dollars to produce and launch can, if it reaches its target, impose hundreds of millions in repair costs, lost output and emergency procurement on the Russian system. As in the Iran war, the cost-to-kill ratio of using cheap drones to inflict expensive damage is one of Kyiv’s biggest advantages in its conflict with Russia.

Vakulenko's caution about the scale of the Belarusian purchases underscores that Russia is not running out of fuel. Its refining system, despite the damage, continues to operate. The country's vast crude production capacity gives it a comfortable buffer. The military has reportedly prioritised its own fuel supply with sufficient ruthlessness to avoid the kind of operational paralysis that genuine shortage would produce.