Оригинал материала
Summer Infrastructure Offensive: Ukraine’s drone front becomes a systemic factor in Russia’s economic and social life
Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine has carried out at least 96 successful drone strikes on Russian infrastructure. A quarter of these occurred in January 2025, after which the intensity of attacks sharply declined; however, from early July to 7 September, there were 43 successful strikes. The sharp increase in their intensity and effectiveness makes it possible to speak of a specific 'infrastructure' offensive by Ukraine, or the emergence of an 'infrastructure' front in the Russia–Ukraine war.
Ukrainian strikes are focused on three types of targets. The first is oil refining. Since the beginning of the year, there have been 37 successful strikes by Ukrainian drones on 16 oil refineries. The second area is oil transportation, as well as railway and aviation transport infrastructure. There have been no fewer than 20 drone strikes on oil transport and storage infrastructure, six on railway infrastructure, and threats to airports have led to over 500 temporary closures. In July alone, at least twice these closures resulted in a transport collapse. Finally, the third area is military-industrial complex enterprises. At least 33 strikes have been carried out against them since the start of the year.
The key features and main innovations of the 'infrastructure' offensive have been the expansion of its geographical scope and the tactic of repeated strikes, preventing the full restoration of operations. For instance, the Ryazan refinery was attacked six times, the Volgograd and Syzran refineries four times each, the 'Druzhba' oil pipeline eight times, and the Shipunov Instrument Design Bureau three times.
It is difficult to accurately assess the scale of the damage. The Russian authorities not only refuse to disclose it, but also seek to hide and downplay the losses. It is clear that the most significant and high-profile damage has been inflicted on Russian oil refining. From a social perspective, airport collapses during the peak holiday season proved no less significant: 76% of respondents in a July poll expressed concern over them. An indirect consequence of the 'infrastructure' offensive has also been widespread internet and mobile network shutdowns, which became a mass phenomenon this summer (over 70% of those surveyed expressed concern over them as well).
The systemic challenge of the ‘infrastructure’ offensive lies in the absence of effective countermeasures. The nature of drone warfare is such that traditional air defence systems cost several times more than the attacking arsenal. The question is whether Ukraine can maintain the level of intensity and effectiveness it achieved in August (28 targets hit in one month). The first eight days of September saw six strikes, which so far corresponds to the August trend.
The Ukrainian offensive against Russian infrastructure: general characteristics and timing
The Russian army’s offensive in the summer of 2025 has so far neither collapsed the Ukrainian front nor led to the capture of key cities in the north-east of Donbas. Against the backdrop of positional battles and deadly, yet already routine, Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian cities, one of the central themes of late summer has been the wave of Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil, transport and industrial infrastructure. While such strikes were carried out by the Ukrainian army before, in 2025, and particularly over the past two months, they have turned into a systemic factor of the Russia–Ukraine war and caused tangible problems for both the Russian economy and millions of Russian citizens.
Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine has conducted at least 96 successful strikes on Russian industrial and transport infrastructure (as of 7 September). These include 37 strikes on 16 oil refineries, 20 on oil and petroleum transport and storage facilities, 6 on transport infrastructure (not including numerous attacks that disrupted airport operations), and no fewer than 33 on industrial plants (see tables listing the strikes in the Appendix).
Graph 1 clearly illustrates the timeline of these attacks and their distribution by target type. Twenty-three strikes occurred in January, targeting all three main types: oil processing, transport and storage facilities, and industrial plants. After that, the intensity of strikes dropped sharply. Nevertheless, in the first three months of the year, the Ukrainian Armed Forces struck Russian oil refineries 20 times. However, as reported by The Financial Times, at the end of March, the US authorities asked Kyiv to halt strikes on Russian oil infrastructure over fears of destabilising the global oil market (in reality, this was in connection with preparations for a US–Israeli operation against Iran). In April, there were no strikes at all (with the exception of a strike on the Ryazan refinery on 29 April), and in May–June, strikes were carried out almost exclusively against industrial plants. From July, a new wave of attacks began to mount (11 strikes in that month), peaking in August. Including the first week of September, since early July Kyiv has carried out 43 successful strikes on Russian infrastructure, nearly half (45%) of the total since the beginning of the year. The intensification of strikes in the past two months is clearly linked to the appointment of Robert Brovdi, 'Madyar,' as head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, which took place on 5 June. Their scale allows one to speak of the formation of a new, specific 'infrastructure' front in the Russia–Ukraine war.
1. Ukrainian strikes on Russian industrial and transport infrastructure, 2025
The main innovations of the current phase of the war on the ‘infrastructure’ front are both its territorial scope and the tactic of multiple strikes on the same targets, which prevents them from being fully restored. The most frequently targeted oil refineries have been in the Samara and Krasnodar regions (eight attacks each), the Ryazan region (six), and the Volgograd region (four). The Ryazan refinery has been successfully struck six times, the Volgograd and Syzran refineries four times each, the Ilsky, Saratov and Afipsky refineries three times each, and the Kuibyshev, Novokuibyshev and Novoshakhtinsk refineries twice each. Infrastructure belonging to the 'Druzhba' pipeline has been hit eight times. Among industrial targets, the Aleksin and Nevinnomyssk chemical plants have each been struck twice, and the Shipunov Instrument Design Bureau three times.
Three main categories of strikes
Since the start of the year, Ukraine has successfully attacked Russian oil refineries 37 times (16 of them in the past two months). This is the most significant direction of the strikes and has attracted the greatest attention from commentators and the media.
The Ryazan refinery, with a capacity of 17–18 million tonnes of oil per year (6.9% of Russia’s total oil refining), has been the largest and most regularly targeted facility. Of the six successful strikes against it, at least two led to the suspension of operations: on 26 January and 2 August. In the latter case, drones hit the AVT-3 and AVT-4 units, halving the refinery’s capacity,Reuters reported. On 5 September, a strike was carried out on the AVT-6 primary oil processing unit, with a capacity of around 6 million tonnes per year. The second most frequently targeted refinery has been the large facility in Volgograd (15 million tonnes/year, 5.8% of Russia’s oil refining). This year, drones have struck it four times; the most recent, on 14 August, damaged two pipelines and a primary oil processing unit, causing the refinery to halt operations, according to another Reuters report.
The most severe single-strike damage was likely inflicted on the Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the Rostov region (5 million tonnes/year, 1.9% of Russian oil refining). A drone strike on 20 August destroyed six storage tanks and partially damaged two more. The fire at the plant was extinguished only on the sixth day, according to the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, citing satellite imagery. During the summer, the three refineries in the Samara region (Syzran, Novokuibyshev and Kuibyshev, with a combined capacity of 25.2 million tonnes/year, or 9.5% of refining) suffered the greatest number of attacks – five in total. Of these, the Syzran refinery appears to have sustained the most serious damage, with a 24 August strike damaging the AVT-6 primary oil processing unit, the L-35-6 secondary oil processing unit, and a pumping station, according to ASTRA.
However, reliable information about the extent of the damage is lacking, as the Russian authorities conceal and downplay it. For example, although Ukrainian drones regularly struck the Ilsky, Afipsky and Krasnodar refineries (up to 16.6 million tonnes/year, or 6.4% of total refining) in the Krasnodar region over the summer, the damage inflicted is unknown, and none of the plants, based on available information, halted operations.
The second category of Ukrainian strikes has been oil transport and storage infrastructure. Open sources record 20 successful strikes in this area. In January, Russian oil depots were popular targets, with seven strikes against them. Later, the military shifted its focus to more complex facilities. For example, the 'Druzhba' pipeline nodes in the Bryansk region were attacked eight times this year (as already mentioned); in August alone, the 'Unecha' oil pumping station of the 'Druzhba' pipeline was successfully struck three times, leading on at least two occasions (12–13 August and 21 August) to the suspension of Russian oil supplies to Hungary and Slovakia. Sergey Vakulenko, an expert at the Carnegie Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies in Berlin, notes the vulnerability and importance of 'Unecha' for Russian oil exports: on the one hand, it is located only 47 km from the Ukrainian border; on the other, it is the branching point for the pipeline’s southern route (towards Hungary and Slovakia) and northern route (towards Belarus, Germany and Ust-Luga).
Another significant event of the Ukrainian drone campaign this summer was the strike on the 'Novatek' terminal on 24 August in the geographically remote port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad region. As a result, a gas condensate fractionation and transhipment unit was hit, and according to Reuters, the port may lose up to half its export capacity in September, according to Reuters.
This 'transport' category also includes strikes on railway infrastructure. According to Colonel Roman Svitana of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, they are intended 'to destroy logistics chains, particularly in the rear up to a depth of 500 km'. So far, however, the scale of these strikes has been fairly modest. In July and August, the Ukrainian Armed Forces struck six railway facilities, including two within Russia (in the Rostov and Voronezh regions), with the rest in occupied territories. In four cases, this led to disruptions in railway services following strikes on the Liski station in the Voronezh region (17 August), the Dzhankoy station (21 August) and the Urozhaynaya station (26 August) in Crimea, and the destruction on 19 August of a train carrying fuel tanks between Urozhaynaya and Tokmak in Zaporizhzhia. Petro Andryushchenko, head of the Centre for the Study of Occupation, commenting on the latter attack, wrote that 'there is no longer any Russian railway connection through occupied Zaporizhzhia'.
In addition, drone strikes have caused significant disruption to Russian air traffic. According to Meduza, as of 22 July, flight restrictions were imposed at least 469 times across 43 airports (compared to just 100 closures affecting 26 airports in the whole of 2024). According to calculations by Re:Russia, supplementing Meduza’s figures, in the final week of July (after the 22nd) airports were closed 24 times, in August 130 times, and in the first week of September another 17 times. That’s a total of 171 instances over the past month and a half.
Finally, the third category consists of strikes against industrial facilities, primarily those of the military–industrial complex. Gathering reliable data on the number of such attacks is even more challenging. As already mentioned, the Russian authorities seek to conceal information about successful Ukrainian strikes. While it is harder to do this with oil and railway facilities, military–industrial enterprises are often restricted sites or located in closed zones, making it easier to keep the 'claps' and explosions heard from them shrouded in secrecy. For example, on the night of 5 September (when the Ryazan refinery was successfully attacked for the sixth time), explosions were also heard in the Yelets area (Lipetsk region). There is a plant there, PJSC Energia, which had already been attacked by Ukrainian forces in May. There is no information on whether the recent attack was successful or whether the plant’s operations were halted.
In total, we have managed to gather information on 33 Ukrainian strikes against Russian industrial facilities since the beginning of the year. The main targets have been chemical production plants, microelectronics assembly sites, and facilities for the manufacture and storage of drones (see the relevant table with a list of enterprises in the Appendix).
Consequences: oil refining and the fuel market
It is impossible to accurately assess the total scale of damage caused by Ukraine's actions on the new ‘infrastructure’ front. Only the main factors of the consequences can be characterised. At the same time, the consequences of strikes on oil refining and oil transportation infrastructure have caused the most comments and controversy.
Rosstat has not published data on oil refining volumes in Russia since spring 2024, but their total estimate for 2024 is 266 million tonnes. According to Reuters, in August, the average level of downtime for primary oil refining capacities was 6.4 million tonnes. This is more than 20% of the total volume. However, part of the capacity is idle due to scheduled maintenance (which traditionally takes place at this time of year) and other reasons. In addition, the decline in output was not so significant — according to Reuters, only 5% of the usual level; according to Kommersant sources — 10%.
Nevertheless, in August, the situation on the fuel market was approaching a crisis. However, this was the result of two factors — traditional tension on the fuel market in Russia during this period and Ukrainian attacks. At the end of each summer, the peak consumption season at the beginning of the harvest, coinciding with scheduled repairs in oil refining, causes price spikes and sometimes market shortages. To avoid shortages, the authorities have imposed embargoes on the export of petroleum products several times. This year, it was also introduced — first until 31 August, then until the end of September for producers and until the end of October for everyone else.
Formally, the summer price surge in 2025 was even smaller than in the previous two years (see Chart 2). However, in annual terms, the picture looks different. In August 2023, the price of petrol rose by 9.7% compared to August 2022, in August 2024 the annual increase was 5.8%, and in August 2025 it was 9.5%. As can be seen in Chart 3, unlike in previous years, petrol prices rose significantly throughout the autumn and spring periods this year. At the same time, the strengthening of the rouble should have contributed to price stabilisation (when the rouble strengthens, the dollar price of petrol sold on the domestic market increases even without an increase in the rouble price). Apparently, the price increase was determined by the generally high inflationary background and, most likely, by additional costs incurred by oil refiners as a result of both last year's drone attacks and the wave of attacks in January–April.
2. Changes in retail petrol prices, month-on-month, %
3. Dynamics of retail petrol prices, January 2022 = 100%
However, retail petrol prices are, on the whole, not the best indicator of market conditions in Russia: for many years, the government and oil refineries have cushioned summer petrol crises through a special mechanism (recently analysed in detail by Sergei Vakulenko). Wholesale prices (producers are obliged to sell at least 15% of their petrol output on the exchange) show a more pronounced dynamic. On 2 September, the average price for a tonne of AI-95 during trading on the St Petersburg International Commodity Exchange reached 80,900 roubles — more than 17% higher than on 1 July. However, as in Soviet times, under conditions of price regulation (even partial), the key indicator of the real market situation and the gap between actual and market prices is shortage. At the end of August, physical petrol shortages were recorded at filling stations in about ten regions, including Primorye, Altai Krai, and Crimea.
It is still too early to draw final conclusions about the petrol crisis. Delivery times for fuel to independent retailers (not part of vertically integrated fuel companies) range from 30 to 45 days. Sources in the fuel market told Kommersant that disruptions in retail fuel supplies in Siberia may begin precisely in September, when shortages will be felt by independent suppliers. The government, however, is also concerned about this issue, as evidenced by the meeting with oil companies held by Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak on 25 August. According to Interfax sources, the meeting discussed the possibility of saturating the market with petrol from reserves that companies build up for such crises. However, this year reserves turned out to be low due to high lending rates, Kommersant’s sources added.
It is too early to say that Ukrainian air strikes are capable of triggering a full-fledged fuel market crisis. At the same time, their effect is evidently cumulative, and if the intensity of attacks does not decrease in the near future, we are likely to see sustained market tension far beyond the traditional crisis period of July to September. Prices this year, as last year, are likely to continue rising during the off-peak autumn–winter period: fuel companies will spread price increases across the year to compensate for losses. One way or another, Ukrainian strikes on petrol infrastructure have become a social factor: the public tends to attribute fuel problems to them even more than is actually the case.
Consequences: a systemic challenge and the echo of shutdowns
Another social factor this summer has been airport shutdowns, also linked to Ukrainian air attacks. A genuine collapse of civil aviation occurred on 5 and 6 July following a mass drone raid, which paralysed three major airports in the European part of Russia: Sheremetyevo, Pulkovo and Strigino (Nizhny Novgorod). Several hundred flights were cancelled and about 2,000 rescheduled. According to estimates by experts interviewed by Kommersant, Russian airlines’ losses from the disruption on just these two days may amount to 20 billion roubles. According to the Ministry of Transport, between 19 and 22 July, 517 more flights were cancelled at Moscow and St Petersburg airports, affecting 75,000 passengers.
The airport chaos in July, at the height of the holiday season, had a huge impact on public opinion. 76% of those surveyed in July by the Levada Centre (in the last week of the month) said they were concerned about airport closures and flight delays linked to Ukrainian drone attacks.
The key question today is whether, following the August offensive on Russian infrastructure, there will be a decline in the intensity of air strikes, as happened in the first half of the year, or whether August’s intensity will become the new norm (six successful strikes were recorded in the first eight days of September, matching early August’s pace). In the latter case, it would be fair to say that the new 'infrastructure' front has become a source of significant economic and social damage. The systemic problem at present is that there is no effective way to counter such attacks. As we have already noted, this is primarily due to the economic asymmetry of drone warfare: traditional air defence systems are several times more expensive than the attacking arsenal (→ Re:Russia: The Missile-financial Balance). Scaling up air defence systems in sufficient quantities is simply not possible.
Most likely, the Russian authorities are currently relying on internet and GPS signal jamming to make drone control more difficult. However, this creates a separate infrastructural problem – mass shutdowns of mobile (and, more rarely, fixed) internet and even mobile communications, which have become another key feature of Russian life this summer. While disruptions in certain areas affected by Ukrainian attacks had been observed for some time, the mass spread of this practice began in May during the Victory Day celebrations.
In May, the ‘On the Line’ project counted at least 69 local shutdowns (the project collects user reports and open-source data on disruptions), but in June their number rose tenfold, to 662, and the geography extended far beyond the zones of Ukrainian drone strikes. In July, according to the project, the number of shutdowns increased several times more, to 2,099. Although final data for August have not yet been published, the daily pattern was close to July’s: on average, reports of shutdowns were coming in daily from 65 regions of the country, including Siberia, the Far East and Kamchatka. Some regions were left without mobile internet for several days, and in some areas for as long as two months (for example, in the area of defence enterprises in the Nizhny Novgorod region).
However, neither the geography nor the frequency of outages can be explained solely by current security needs. It is more likely that we are seeing the implementation and testing of network segmentation technologies that allow access to resources from a pre-approved 'white list', to be maintained during blockages, which has already been developed by the Ministry of Digital Development. However, the white list will not solve the GPS problems.
One way or another, the practice of mass shutdowns has become yet another infrastructural consequence of the expansion of the 'infrastructure' front of the Russia–Ukraine war, which has significantly altered the daily life of Russians this summer. According to an August poll by the Levada Centre, 71% of those surveyed experienced mobile internet outages (among younger people, aged 18–39, the figure was 81%). 53% said that these difficulties had affected their lives (among the youngest, aged 18–24, the figure was 67%). Thus, the intensification of drone warfare on the ‘infrastructure’ front has meant that the consequences of the war have affected most Russians in their daily lives.