General Staff: long-range strikes have knocked out 45% of Russia’s oil refining capacity

Ukraine’s ongoing campaign of long-range strikes against Russian oil refineries has knocked out 45 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced on Sunday, September 21. “One of the consequences is the shortage of high-quality fuel in the Russian Federation,” the report says, also noting a sharp drop in gasoline and Euro-5/K5 standard diesel production.

The assessment comes a day after major Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on the Moscow Oil Refinery on September 20. According to Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, Russian forces shot down over 1,600 drones across Russia, 450 of them aimed at Moscow. According to Reuters, citing industry sources, the Moscow refinery, owned by Gazprom Neft, halted production after the September 20 attack: the main crude distillation units were hit, and repairs could take weeks.

The Moscow strike was only the latest in a wave of attacks on Russian refineries — two others, in the Yaroslavl and Samara regions, have been hit since September 14, according to the Ukrainian military. The campaign has been made possible by the dramatic expansion of Kyiv’s arsenal: long-range drones and missiles not only regularly reach targets more than 1,500 kilometers from Ukrainian-controlled territory, but are launched in sufficient numbers to overwhelm Russia’s dense air defense networks, such as the one protecting Moscow.

In his report on the strike, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine used several weapon systems produced mostly domestically, including the Flamingo cruise missile. He also mentioned a “Pelican” — some media mistakenly reported it as the first confirmed use of the FP-7 ballistic missile, but later reports clarified that the Pelican is a drone.

Source: The Kyiv Independent