Ukraine used its latest technology to deepen strikes against Russian oil storage, ports and refineries in the past week, bombing targets in the Urals 1,600 kilometres (990 miles) from its borders and prompting protests about “terrorist attacks” from the Kremlin spokesman.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday announced “a new stage in the use of Ukrainian weapons to limit the potential of Russia’s war”.
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The Ukraine Security Service (SBU) later clarified it had struck Transneft’s oil pumping and distribution facility in the city of Perm that day, from where oil was pumped to the Perm refinery and via pipeline in four directions across Russia.
The facility is “a strategically important hub of the main oil transportation system”, said the SBU, and preliminary information suggested that “almost all oil storage tanks are on fire”.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence confirmed the strike and said it had downed 98 Ukrainian UAVs across various regions.
“The Urals are now within reach, be vigilant,” wrote Russia’s presidential envoy to the region, Artem Zhoga.
Ukraine’s campaign has begun to elicit reactions from the Russian government.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the attacks on oil facilities “terrorist attacks”.
A Russian Defence Ministry announcement – that military cadets and a column of equipment would not take part in this year’s Victory Day parade commemorating the end of World War II “due to the current operational situation” – was also widely interpreted as a precaution against potential Ukrainian drone strikes.
Ukraine’s strikes are part of a strategy of depriving Russia of windfall profits from soaring oil prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Zelenskyy said Russian internal documents seen by his foreign intelligence service admitted that Ukraine had deprived oil offloading ports of much of their capacity.
Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea had lost 13 percent and 43 percent of capacity, respectively, and the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk 38 percent.
“We believe that such internal Russian data may be underestimated,” Zelenskyy said.
The internal figures roughly agree with a Reuters March estimate that Russia had lost approximately 40 percent of its export capacity.
That translated into revenue losses of $2.3bn in March, Zelenskyy estimated.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said that Ukraine had likely conducted at least 18 strikes against Russian oil infrastructure in April.
Kyiv’s attacks have been “steadily increasing the range, volume, and intensity” with “outsized impacts on Russian oil exports”.
Ukraine struck other oil and military targets during the past week.
On April 23, it damaged three storage tanks at the Gorky oil pumping station in Nizhny Novgorod and struck the Novokuibyshevsk petrochemical plant in Samara.
The next day, it destroyed two production facilities at the Atlant-Aero factory in Taganrog, Rostov, which builds the Molniya drones used to attack Ukrainian cities.
On Sunday, Ukraine struck the Yaroslavl oil refinery, and on Tuesday, they struck the Tuapse oil refinery on the Black Sea for the third time this month. Even before this latest strike, at least 24 oil storage tanks at the site had been destroyed, said Ukraine’s head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko.
Russian President Vladimir Putin dispatched his Civil Defence, Emergencies, and Disaster Relief minister, Alexander Kurenkov, to oversee the response personally.
An emerging air power
Ukraine has been developing its own long-range strike capabilities and devotes 20 percent of its defence resources to new technologies, said Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.
One of its leading drone manufacturers, Wild Hornets, recently said a drone operator had used its remote piloting system to fly a Sting interceptor drone at a distance of 2,000km (1,240 miles).
On April 23, Fedorov said Ukraine had successfully tested remote control technology that enabled pilots to operate from the relative safety of Kyiv or Lviv, “at distances of hundreds and thousands of kilometres”.
Ukraine is now touting its battlefield innovations in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in the wake of Iran’s attack on the Gulf nations.
Zelenskyy met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Riyadh on April 24 to discuss “the export of our Ukrainian security expertise and capabilities in air defence”.
Days later, he said Kyiv produces as many as twice the number of certain types of weapons as the military needed, and that “Ukrainian companies will get a real opportunity to enter the markets of partner countries, provided that our military have the right to take the necessary amount of weapons first”.
The burgeoning relationship with the Gulf, he said, had invoked Moscow’s concern.
“Russia is particularly irritated by our contacts in the Middle East and the Gulf region,” he told Ukrainians on Wednesday.
More surprisingly, he said some allies, too, were irritated by the competition.
“We are also aware of the complex attitude of some of our other partners towards this – partners who would prefer to limit our state’s independence,” Zelenskyy said in an evening video address. “We consider this their mistake.
