More than four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv is shifting the pressure onto the Russian home front. Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries are driving up gasoline prices, forcing severe fuel-sale restrictions, and creating huge lines at gas stations hundreds of kilometers from the front. Reporting cited from The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times says the Kremlin is finding it increasingly difficult to present normal life at home while shielding civilians from the war’s consequences.
This week, swarms of Ukrainian drones repeatedly hit a strategic refinery in the Moscow area that supplies more than a third of the fuel for the capital and its surroundings. Social media footage showed massive fireballs from storage tanks and major fires across the facility. The attack was the latest in a campaign of more than 25 strikes on Russian refineries since March. Although Moscow no longer publishes official crude-processing data, analysts estimate the current wave has knocked out more than 20% of Russia’s refining capacity. The International Energy Agency in Paris called the disruption “unprecedented in the history of the conflict.”
The fuel shortages and restrictions have spread to at least 53 regions in Russia and occupied territories, including remote Arctic areas and Siberia, as authorities try to prevent stockpiling. Frustrated drivers are flooding social media with complaints. In one video, a woman said she waited two and a half hours to refuel on the toll road between Moscow and St. Petersburg. One driver said, “People are now willing to pay any price for gasoline.”
The same drone advantage is also changing the battlefield. Ukrainian drones are destroying air bases and military convoys at distances of about 150 kilometers or more behind the front. According to Black Bird tracking data, Moscow’s forces captured only 164 square kilometers between February and May this year, down sharply from 1,151 square kilometers in the same period last year. A person involved in the war effort told the Financial Times, “Robotics has made troop numbers much less important. You need 20,000 drone operators, not hundreds of thousands of men in trenches.”
Russia still retains one major advantage, glide bombs dropped by its aircraft, which continue to devastate Ukrainian positions, defenses, and civilian concentrations. But Ukraine’s lack of advanced air defenses allows Russian planes to release those weapons dangerously close to the front. Meanwhile, Russia’s defense industry is stretched to its limits, its low unemployment makes skilled hiring difficult, and units such as the elite Rubikon drone unit remain cumbersome and less advanced than their Ukrainian counterparts.
