A damaged vehicle windshield at the scene of a Russian missile strike near a thermal power plant in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2023. In recent targeting of energy sites, Ukraine and Russia appear to be trying to raise political pressure on each other and send signals to Washington in case peace talks move forward. Photo / Brendan Hoffman, The New York Times
Fire engulfing a gas terminal near St Petersburg, Russia. Oil storage tanks lying toppled, twisted and burned in southern Ukraine.
Drone attacks briefly shutting down one of the world’s longest oil pipelines, used by Moscow to supply Central Europe.
Just as world leaders are attempting to jump-start peace talks, the energy war between Kyiv and Moscow is heating up as each side tries to weaken the other’s hand in negotiating an end to the war.
During just this month, the Ukrainian Army has claimed at least 10 attacks on Russian oil facilities, with Russian officials acknowledging half of them. The strikes temporarily knocked out as much as one-sixth of Russia’s refining capacity, analysts say, while petrol prices spiked.
Russian forces, for their part, have stepped up attacks on key Ukrainian gas and oil facilities, stoking fears of shortages this winter.
Ihor Klymenko, Ukraine’s Interior Minister, said in an interview on Tuesday that 20 energy facilities — including electrical substations, oil refineries and thermal power plants — had been damaged “over the last 10 nights”.
In all, this has become one of the most intense periods of energy strikes in the war.
After a period of relative calm this spring, “the energy war is back,” said Andrii Zhupanyn, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s subcommittee on natural gas policy.
Both sides have long targeted energy facilities to inflict damage away from a front line that is often deadlocked, but such strikes have failed to undermine their enemy’s war efforts. That leaves them hoping to create political and economic trouble for each other.
Russia has repeatedly hit Ukraine’s power grid to sap civilian morale. Ukraine, using a drone fleet that has grown immensely in number and sophistication, has struck Russia’s oil refineries in a bid to create shortages and curb one of the Kremlin’s main revenue sources.
But the latest round of attacks comes as Kyiv and Moscow vie for leverage amid a United States-led push to intensify peace talks.
The energy strikes serve that purpose, energy experts say, as each side tries to persuade the other that it cannot afford to prolong the war, and to signal to the White House that it has an advantage and is willing to keep fighting.
“For Ukraine, it’s important to pressure Russia during these peace talks,” said Andrian Prokip, an energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington. “These strikes are important leverage.”
Strikes on energy targets have been a defining feature of this war.
In the first three years, Russia systematically targeted power plants and substations, aiming to cut off electricity that powers Ukraine’s economy and plunge Ukrainians into darkness to break their morale.
Ukraine began attacking oil refineries only in early 2024, hoping to chip away at the profits Moscow makes from oil product exports.
Some of these attacks caused significant damage, including widespread blackouts in Ukraine, but they did not force either side to compromise on its war aims.
They proved harmful enough to push both countries to agree in March to a moratorium on energy strikes during the Trump Administration’s early efforts at brokering a peace deal.
The energy truce was hailed by the White House as a confidence-building measure on the path toward peace. But as negotiations intensified this summer, both sides renewed the strikes.
“You can definitely say that there is no truce of that kind at the moment,” said Sergey Vakulenko, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research group.
Russia began by striking a key oil refinery in Kremenchuk in mid-June, causing serious damage, according to Zhupanyn. Moscow has also hit Ukrainian gas facilities — targets it avoided during the first three years of the war, when pipelines through Ukraine were still used to transport Russian gas to Europe.
Gas is a crucial resource in Ukraine, fuelling most centralised heating systems in apartment buildings across the country.
It also accounts for more than half of the production of fertilisers and chemical compounds, said Klymenko. If shortages occur, he said, it “would lead to the shutdown of plants and factories, cold homes, social unrest and panic”.
Zhupanyn estimated that the attacks had cost Ukraine about 1 billion cubic metres of natural gas, about 5% of its annual needs, forcing the Government to urgently seek funding from European partners to buy and import gas supplies before the winter heating season.
Following these attacks, Zhupanyn said, Ukraine struck back with repeated attacks on Russian oil infrastructure. “That was our response,” he said.
Long-range Ukrainian drones attacked oil refineries in southwestern and central Russia, sparking extensive fires and knocking out operations at several facilities.
Among the targets was the giant Lukoil refinery in Volgograd, the largest in southern Russia and one of the country’s top 10 producers, according to Ukrainian and Russian officials.
The Reuters news agency calculated that recent strikes had disrupted 17% of Russia’s refining capacity. Analysts say repairs could take longer than usual because sanctions prohibit Western sales of key components to Russia.
Ukraine has long said its strikes on refineries have three goals: to disrupt Russian fuel supplies for tanks and aircraft, to curb Moscow’s profits from oil exports, and to disrupt daily life for average Russians.
Kyiv has so far fallen short on the first two goals, said Vakulenko, a former top manager at Gazprom Neft, one of Russia’s largest oil producers.
Russia’s slow advance on the battlefield, carried out largely by troops on foot or motorcycles, means fuel consumption is not a major factor, he said, and it has enough surplus refining capacity to absorb the impact of the attacks for now.
In addition, most of Russia’s oil export revenue comes from crude, not refined oil products.
But on the third aim, of disrupting daily life, Ukraine may be having some success.
The wholesale price of petrol rose 12% in a month through mid-August, and there were shortages around the country, though it is hard to quantify how much of that is due to drone attacks. The strikes coincided with peak holiday and harvesting seasons, when the demand for fuel is highest and when there were shortages in some years before the war.
In Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, local news outlets have reported long lines at service stations and drivers scurrying from one station to another trying to fill their fuel tanks.
In a televised interview, Sergei Aksyonov, the Russia-appointed chief of Crimea, said the disruptions were caused by “significantly lower” production at three oil refineries in southern Russia because of “objective reasons.”
In one region in Russia’s Far East, local authorities said service stations had to stop selling one type of fuel because of shortages.
In Vladivostok, a major Russian city on the Pacific, locals helped one another find fuel by reporting availability and prices at gas stations to a local news outlet. Local authorities blamed an influx of tourists for the shortages.
At the end of July, the Russian government banned petrol exports until the end of August. On Tuesday, it said it would extend the restrictions. The Government never mentioned drone strikes, instead referring to peak summer demand.
A new Ukrainian goal has been to cut Russian fuel supplies to Central Europe. Last week, Ukraine struck the Druzhba pipeline, which supplies Russian crude oil to Hungary and Slovakia, whose current leaders have maintained ties with the Kremlin and taken hostile positions towards Ukraine.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has partly blocked Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union, reacted angrily and wrote a letter to President Donald Trump to complain of an “unfriendly move” that threatens his country’s energy security.
Trump responded that he was “very angry” about the attacks, according to a letter released by Orban’s governing Fidesz Party. A White House official confirmed the letter’s authenticity.
Trump’s reaction does not seem to have caused concern in Ukraine. A day after the letter was published, the head of Ukraine’s drone forces even boasted about attacking the pipeline.
“The strikes,” Zhupanyn said, “are a good tool to show that, as Trump says, we have some cards in our hands.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Constant Méheut and Ivan Nechepurenko
Photographs by: Brendan Hoffman
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