On the night of January 30 and early on the morning of January 31, Ukrainian drone units and drones of the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Service launched a large-scale drone attack on the Lukooil-Volgo Gradnefet Ferrepera Boka refinery in Volgograd Oblast of the Russian Federation. Andrei Kovalenko, the anti-disinformation center of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, confirmed the attack in a cable.
Earlier on January 31, Volgograd Oblast Governor Andrei Bocharov confirmed that information about a fire at the Lukoil refinery had been obtained from the allegedly intercepted drone wreckage, and that "an injured factory worker has been taken to hospital," claiming that the fire was "quickly extinguished."
Of course, this is Russia's official standard answer, where targets in Russia are attacked by Ukrainian drones, not all of them are shot down, or no damage is caused.
It was the second time in less than a month that the refinery, Russia's sixth largest, was set ablaze by a Ukrainian drone.
Volgo Gradnefet Pereira Boka refinery is the largest refinery in southern Russia, with an annual crude oil processing capacity of 14.8 million tons, the refinery is 400 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and its fuel production is mainly to support the Russian army in the Ukrainian battlefield.
On the night of January 28 and 29, Ukrainian drones attacked the Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the Nizhny Novgorod region, resulting in the shutdown of Russia's fourth largest refinery, which has a refining capacity of 17 million tons per year, accounting for more than 6% of Russia's total refining capacity.
Russia has 30 large and medium-sized refineries, with a daily processing capacity of 5.5 million barrels, but most of these Russian refineries are separated within 2,000 kilometers of the Ukrainian border, and there are few places where Ukrainian drones have not been hit, the only difference is that Ukrainian drones have been damaged, and some have been attacked more than once or twice. It is possible that many of the refinery facilities had just been repaired and were again attacked by Ukrainian drones.
The reason why Ukraine did not continue to attack the refineries may be that it hoped that after destroying the refineries and shutting them down, Russia would invest financial resources to repair them, and then attack them after they were repaired and put into operation.
This cycle is the maximum consumption of Russia's war resources. In essence, this is similar to Israel's attack on Iranian targets in Syria: when the Iranians were building military bases in Syria, Israel, with its superior intelligence capabilities, ignored them, but when the bases were built and the munitions were transferred in, an Israeli warplane bombed them to the ground.
In contrast, it is much easier to attack oil refineries than military targets, and Russia's vast territory is a disaster for air defense, and Russia simply does not have the number of air defense systems and air defense forces to maintain such a large area of air defense.
There is little need to use high-yield bombs like those used to attack hardened military targets, and even a few kilograms of ammunition carried by a Ukrainian suicide drone could lead to a devastating shutdown of tens of millions of tons of refineries.
This will not only delay the supply of fuel to the Russian military logistics, but also cause the price of domestic oil products in Russia to soar, driving inflation.
Since January, Ukrainian drones have destroyed 16 percent of Russia's total oil refining capacity.
"Slovo i Dilo" shows that since September 2024, Ukrainian forces have used suicide drones to carry out about a hundred attacks on Russian oil refineries and oil depots, which are often more effective than attacking military targets. After all, oil refineries are flammable targets that can be set alight by even a cigarette butt, let alone a suicide drone.
Ukraine's drone strikes against Russian oil refineries, which began early last year, have arguably been a far more effective and quicker attack on Russia's wartime economy than Western sanctions, and have created considerable difficulties for the other side compared to the damage to civilian infrastructure caused by Russian attacks on energy targets in Ukraine. Drone strikes are far from the point at which Russia's reliance on energy exports for revenue to sustain the war will be completely destroyed, and may never be enough.
Russia's largest oil export port, Ustiluga, on the Baltic Sea, has been taken out of service because of damage from drone strikes, leading to a sharp drop in Russian oil exports in January, which averaged 650,000 barrels per day, or about 20 percent of Russia's total oil exports.