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The Second Theatre of War: How and why the spring campaign against Russian infrastructure is shifting the balance of power in the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Over the past three months alone, Ukraine has carried out 55 successful strikes against Russian oil infrastructure and a further 18 against other industrial facilities. While the intensity of this campaign has not exceeded the levels seen in the final months of last year, improvements in drone strike capability and the cascading nature of the attacks have significantly increased the damage inflicted.
Ukraine’s aerial campaign in 2026 appears to represent another turning point in the war. Throughout the previous three years of fighting, one of Ukraine’s critical weaknesses was its lack of long-range precision-strike weapons, particularly cruise and ballistic missiles.
By increasing the strike power, range and production volume of its drones, Ukraine has come close to offsetting this disadvantage to the greatest extent possible. Although upgraded Ukrainian drones still deliver less destructive force than heavy missiles, they are considerably cheaper and therefore easier to scale. As a result, they are capable of reliably overwhelming air defences and enabling cascading strikes against selected targets.
As a result, Ukraine has succeeded in definitively transforming Russian territory into a second theatre of war. This irreversible shift in the character of the Russia–Ukraine war is already producing, and will continue to produce, significant military, economic and political consequences. Moreover, the technological sophistication and scale of Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory are likely to increase further in the near term.
The spring offensive: the dynamics and logic of strikes against Russian infrastructure
According to calculations by Re:Russia based on an analysis of reports by the Ukrainian news agencies UNIAN and UNN, the Ukrainian Armed Forces conducted 68 strikes against various elements of Russia’s oil infrastructure during the first five months of 2026, with 55 of those strikes occurring in the last three months alone. In addition, 18 strikes were carried out against other industrial facilities on Russian territory. This dataset clearly captures only successful strikes against significant targets and is therefore intended to reflect the dynamics and intensity of such events rather than the total number of attacks.
Throughout 2025, according to our calculations, the Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out 157 successful strikes against Russian oil infrastructure and 55 against other industrial facilities. The average monthly intensity of successful strikes in 2025 and 2026 was therefore broadly comparable, at 17.7 and 17.2 respectively. As shown in Figure 1, however, the data reveals two distinct periods of particularly intense deep-strike activity: August to December 2025 and March to May 2026. Although the first period recorded a somewhat higher rate of strikes, averaging 28.4 per month compared with 23.7 during the second period, the latter campaign, which appears to be only beginning to unfold, substantially exceeds the earlier one in terms of effectiveness and strike power.
Figure 1. Ukrainian strikes against oil infrastructure and other industrial facilities, 2025–2026
The main target of Ukrainian long-range strikes, as is well known, is Russia’s oil infrastructure, which Kyiv regards, not without reason, as the Achilles’ heel of Russia’s war machine. In 2025, strikes against oil infrastructure accounted for 75% of all successful long-range attacks, while in the first five months of 2026 the figure rose to almost 80%. Attacks on Russian oil refineries accounted for around 40% of all successful long-range strikes both in 2025 and in the opening months of 2026. The most notable change, however, has been the growing share of attacks on offshore oil export terminals. In 2025, these facilities accounted for just 4% of successful strikes, with nine attacks recorded over the course of the year. In early 2026, by contrast, they accounted for more than 20%, with 18 attacks recorded in the first five months alone.
As in 2025, the Ukrainian Armed Forces employed a strategy of cascading strikes against the same key facilities, seeking to maximise disruption and damage (see Table 1 in the Appendix). Unlike last year, however, the new campaign initially focused specifically on oil export infrastructure, including both export terminals and the refineries linked to them that produce petroleum products for foreign markets (→Re:Russia: The Kremlin’s Baltic Hormuz). In March–April, the Baltic ports of Primorsk and Ust-Luga were struck five and six times respectively. A further seven successful strikes targeted Black Sea export infrastructure: three against facilities in Novorossiysk, two in Taman, and one each against the port of Temryuk and the Feodosiya oil terminal in Crimea.
Moreover, 12 strikes against oil export infrastructure in Ust-Luga, Primorsk and Novorossiysk were carried out within the short period between 22 March and 7 April. As we have previously noted, this resulted in a sharp decline in Russia’s seaborne exports of crude oil and petroleum products. According to vessel tracking data used by Bloomberg, export volumes remained depressed for approximately three weeks, from 22 March to 12 April. Following 7 April, however, attacks on export facilities ceased. One plausible explanation is that this reflected requests from the United States and Ukraine’s European allies, who were concerned that a reduction in Russian supplies could exacerbate the oil market disruption caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Kyiv appears to have accepted a compromise and temporarily scaled back this line of attack. At the same time, the oil terminals at Taman, Temryuk and Feodosiya continued to come under attack throughout May.
Following this, Ukrainian strikes concentrated primarily on Russian refineries. Between 16 April and 31 May, 21 strikes were carried out against ten refineries. The most frequently targeted facility during this period was the Tuapse refinery, which had already been attacked three times in 2025 and was struck a further four times between 16 April and 1 May. Prolonged fires in the refinery’s storage facilities significantly worsened local environmental conditions, with reports of an 'oil rain' phenomenon. The Yaroslavl refinery, which had been struck four times in 2025, was again subjected to a series of attacks in March-May 2026. Four strikes targeted the refinery itself and two targeted an associated oil pumping station.
Furthermore, since the start of 2025, we have recorded 76 successful Ukrainian air strikes on other industrial facilities not related to oil, 18 of which occurred during the first five months of 2026. Throughout 2025, the most frequent targets were electronics manufacturers, which suffered 15 strikes, followed by producers of explosives and ammunition with nine strikes and missile manufacturers with eight. In 2026, fertiliser plants have so far been the most common targets, with four strikes, followed by aircraft manufacturing facilities, electronics producers and explosives manufacturers, each of which has sustained three attacks (see Table 2 in the Appendix).
In 2026, Ukrainian forces struck industrial facilities in the Tver, Novgorod and Ulyanovsk regions for the first time. By contrast, enterprises in Tula region, which had been among the principal targets in 2025, experiencing nine strikes in total, including three against the Shipunov Design Bureau and two against the Aleksin Chemical Plant, have not been attacked at all in 2026. The electronics manufacturer Kremniy El, a producer of components used in missile guidance systems, was struck three times. Following Storm Shadow missile strikes in March 2026, the facility was likely critically damaged or destroyed. Another notable success was the strike carried out on the night of 22 February against the Votkinsk Plant in Udmurtia, which manufactures components for the Iskander, Oreshnik and Yars missile systems, among others. Thus, this category of strike is directed almost exclusively at undermining Russia’s military-industrial production base and identifying critical bottlenecks within its supply chains.
How severe is the refinery crisis?
Assessing the actual damage inflicted on Russia’s oil sector by Ukrainian strikes remains difficult at present, not least because Russian statistics on oil and petroleum product production remain classified. According to the monthly reports of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Russian oil production in February and April 2026 was 5% below the levels recorded a year earlier. It is impossible to determine how much of this decline is directly attributable to Ukrainian attacks. However, one highly revealing indicator is that, despite severe pressure on budget revenues and the suspension of US sanctions on Russian oil exports, which in principle created opportunities to increase export volumes, Russia has consistently failed to utilise its full production quota under the OPEC+ agreement. According to IEA data, actual oil production in February-April amounted to only 92% of the permitted quota (see Table 3 in the Appendix). Furthermore, according to recently published Rosstat data, petroleum product output in April 2026 was 9% lower than in April 2025. Whether these trends prove durable, however, will become clearer only once the May statistics become available, given that the most intensive wave of Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries occurred during the second half of April and throughout May, when 18 attacks were recorded.
According to Reuters’ calculations published on 15 May, approximately 700,000 barrels per day of refining capacity at 16 Russian refineries had been taken offline since the beginning of the year, roughly twice the level recorded during the same period in 2025. Reuters attributed this to the shutdown of 35 primary distillation units with a combined capacity exceeding 2.85 million barrels per day (mbpd). During the equivalent period in 2025, Ukrainian strikes led to the shutdown of 12 units with a combined capacity of 1.37 mbpd. In the second half of May, Reuters reported that 'virtually all major refineries in central Russia were forced to suspend or reduce fuel production’ during the spring campaign. As Forbes reports, citing analysts at Freedom Finance Global, attacks on the Tuapse refinery in spring 2026 completely destroyed 24 of the facility’s 47 storage tanks. The refinery was forced to halt operations and, should repairs take longer than a quarter, Rosneft’s exports of petroleum products could decline by 8-10%, according to the publication’s sources. Meanwhile, according to estimates by the analytical firm OilX, whose data is cited by Bloomberg, oil refining in Russia as a whole totalled 4.58 million barrels per day in May, which is 13% less than in May of last year.
Whatever the precise scale of the damage, the Russian government has imposed a complete ban on petrol exports from 1 April and on aviation fuel exports from 1 June. Shortages of AI-95 petrol were already evident on the domestic commodities exchange during the first ten days of May, as reported by Kommersant. In the consumer market, fuel shortages are currently worsening most rapidly in Crimea, although this appears to be linked not to refinery disruptions but to conditions along the Novorossiya highway, where Ukrainian drone activity has significantly disrupted transport movements.
The full extent of the consequences of Ukraine’s spring offensive against Russia’s oil sector is likely to become clear over the next two to three months. Last year, the Russian authorities managed to contain the growing petrol shortage on the domestic market, in part by drawing on surplus refining capacity in Belarus (→ Re:Russia: Petrol Punch) . However, in 2025, the intensive campaign of drone attacks did not begin until August, and its striking power was significantly lower than that of the current campaign.
Although Russia’s tightly controlled media describe the causes of stress in the fuel market exclusively through the euphemism of 'unscheduled refinery maintenance', public perceptions of Ukrainian drone strikes shifted markedly at the end of April. In FOM’s weekly polls conducted since late April, 'shelling of Russian territory' moved into first place among the events respondents remembered from recent weeks. Such incidents were cited by 15-18% of those surveyed, compared with only 5-6% in previous months. This suggests that Ukrainian strikes have dominated the information environment over the past six weeks. Typical responses included comments such as 'endless attacks and we are doing nothing', 'they are bombing Moscow', and 'we constantly have sirens and drones'. Notably, in the survey conducted at the end of May, Ukrainian shelling ranked ahead of the strike on the dormitory in Starobilsk as the most widely recalled event, receiving 14% of mentions compared with 9%.
Strategic significance: the second theatre of war and the ‘democratisation of precision’
The Ukrainian Armed Forces rarely disclose the specific weapons used in their long-range attacks. Available evidence nevertheless suggests that the use of missiles remains highly constrained and largely limited to individual strikes. The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed that in 2024 the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched more than 90 Storm Shadow missiles at Russian territory, but only around 45 in 2025. Military analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko identified nine verified strikes using the ‘Flamingo’ missile during the first five months of 2026, most of them directed against military facilities and defence-industrial plants, including the Votkinsk Plant in Udmurtia. The use of Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles also appears to remain relatively rare. We identified six verified attacks involving these systems in 2026, including strikes against the Kremniy El plant in Bryansk region.
The increasing effectiveness of Ukrainian attacks is therefore primarily linked to advances in domestically produced drones. These include the expansion of Ukraine’s portfolio of long-range systems, such as the FP-1, Beaver and Sichen drones, as well as upgrades to the Liutyi UAV. Since the second half of last year, they have been fitted with a more powerful warhead of up to 75 kg instead of 50kg. The design of the drone has also been upgraded, including the introduction of versions without landing gear that can be launched from fixed catapults or mobile launchers. This reduces fuel consumption and increases both range and speed.
The most significant breakthrough has been the extension of operational range. New drone variants are capable of travelling more than 1,500 km and, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, may soon reach ranges of up to 3,000 km. One notable feature of the 2026 deep-strike campaign has been the increasing share of successful attacks conducted at distances exceeding 900 km. Of the 32 successful strikes recorded during the first half of 2025, only two occurred at such distances. In the second half of the year, 25% of successful strikes reached this depth, while in the first half of 2026 the figure rose to 45% (see Table 3 in the Appendix).
A third critical factor has been the growing number of long-range drones available to Ukraine. Russia’s ability to protect facilities located far from the front line has been weakened in part by Ukraine’s successful mid-strike campaign, which has systematically degraded Russian air defence and electronic warfare assets (→ Re:Russia: A War of Attrition in The Skies). However, air defence systems face inherent limitations when confronted with large-scale swarm attacks. Their capabilities are sufficient to protect only a limited number of targets simultaneously. As Atlantic Council analyst Peter Dickinson astutely observed, Russia’s vast territory has been transformed from a strategic advantage into a vulnerability in the age of drone deep strikes. Ukrainian drone forces now have access to an almost unlimited range of potential targets, far more than Russia can defend at once.
However, the drone attack against Moscow on 17 May demonstrated the limitations even of a dense and layered air defence network. A wave of approximately 160 drones penetrated successive defensive rings and struck multiple targets in Moscow and the surrounding region. Analysts noted as early as the beginning of 2026 that Ukraine was increasing both the size of attack waves directed towards Moscow and the overall number of long-range drones launched against Russia, exceeding the number Russia was launching against Ukraine. Russian authorities appear to have recognised the significance of this shift by April, as reflected in the extraordinary security measures implemented ahead of the 9 May Victory Day celebrations. Vladimir Putin was reportedly forced to rely on a combination of diplomatic efforts, public threats and external mediation, including assistance from Donald Trump, in order to secure the event. Eight days later, however, Ukrainian forces demonstrated once again the fundamental vulnerability of the Moscow region to large-scale drone attacks.
This is the central and, in some respects, historic significance of Ukraine’s spring 2026 deep-strike campaign. For much of the war, it was assumed that even approximate parity with Russia in long-range strike capabilities would remain unattainable unless Ukraine acquired substantial stocks of cruise and ballistic missiles. Although the strike power of drones remains considerably lower than that of heavy missiles, the relative advantage of missiles is diminishing rapidly. The principal reason is cost. Drones are substantially cheaper to produce, allowing their shortcomings to be offset through larger numbers and steadily improving accuracy.
The essence of this ‘revolution in warfare’ is accurately described by Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a visiting expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (and former Minister of Defence of Ukraine in 2019–2020). First, technologies such as Starlink have significantly enhanced the capabilities of strike drones, particularly FPV systems. In some respects, these now possess advantages over cruise missiles, which cannot provide continuous situational awareness or allow targets to be reassigned during flight.More importantly, however, the key change is the combination of lower costs and scalability. The logic of previous military-technological development was to replace mass with precision. Yet this made long-range precision weapons exceptionally expensive. Against this backdrop, Ukraine has effectively 'democratised precision', making the mass use of precision strike capabilities possible at relatively low cost, writes Zagorodnyuk. This technological revolution is likely to continue, including through further increases in drone strike power. As it does so, the balance of comparative advantage between long-range drones and precision-guided missiles is likely to shift increasingly in favour of the former.
At the very least, it can already be argued that, despite never receiving sufficient quantities of long-range precision weapons from its Western partners, Ukraine has succeeded in definitively transforming Russian territory into a second theatre of war. This shift is irreversible. The technological sophistication, operational reach and scale of Ukrainian attacks are all likely to continue expanding in the near future.