Russia Rushes to Restart Refineries as Ukraine Drone Strikes Force Fuel Imports
Months of Ukrainian drone attacks have pushed Russia from fuel exporter to importer, with key refineries offline and domestic shortages spreading to neighboring states.
Russian authorities scrambled over the weekend of August 23-24 (2026-08-23/24) to reassure markets that fuel shortages are not worsening, even as the country continues to reel from a sustained Ukrainian drone campaign that has knocked out major refining capacity since spring. The effort to restore supplies, reported by OilPrice.com on Monday (2026-08-24), comes as several regions remain under pressure and at least one key plant faces a recovery timeline stretching into next year.6
Ukraine resumed near-daily drone attacks on Russian oil refineries in early August (2026-08-08), triggering fresh fuel shortages across multiple regions. The Kaluga region, neighboring Moscow, introduced a license plate-based rationing system for cars from Saturday (2026-08-08), according to Rigzone. That rationing is a signal of how localized the pain has become — a country that was a major petroleum exporter is now managing queues at the pump.5
The scale of damage to individual facilities helps explain why the recovery is proving so slow. The Moscow Oil Refinery, operated by Gazprom Neft, processes roughly 230,000 barrels of crude per day and supplies up to 40% of Moscow's petrol along with a significant share of the region's diesel, according to Western media reports cited in news.az. A second Ukrainian strike in June (2026-06) hit the Euro+ unit, which Reuters reported has capacity of around 140,000 barrels per day — roughly 47% of the refinery's total throughput. An earlier strike had already taken out the CDU-6 crude distillation unit, which accounts for approximately 53% of capacity. Both primary processing units damaged at the same facility within weeks of each other.2
The refinery halted operations after a drone attack on June 16 (2026-06-16), according to independent.co.uk's compilation of Ukrainian strike data. Industry sources told Reuters the week of June 22 (2026-06-22) that it is unlikely to resume fuel production before 2027 given extensive structural damage. That timeline matters: it removes a facility that normally handles close to a quarter of a million barrels per day from the Russian supply picture for at least the next eighteen months.4,3
NORSI, Russia's second-largest gasoline producer, has also been hit. The plant can process 16 million metric tons of oil per year — around 320,000 barrels per day — and its CDU-6 unit alone processes 25,700 metric tons daily, accounting for 53% of its overall capacity, according to independent.co.uk. Strikes against facilities of this size compound quickly. Each attack does not just remove barrels; it removes the conversion units that determine what type of product comes out the other end.4
Nikhil Dubey, a senior research analyst at Kpler, said some drones appear to have targeted hydrocracker units specifically, a detail reported by Yahoo Finance. Hydrocrackers upgrade heavy fuel oil into diesel and gasoline. Knocking them out disproportionately reduces output of the lighter, higher-value products that Russian motorists and its military logistics network depend on. Whether improved Ukrainian drone targeting accounts for this precision is something analysts are watching closely.1
The supply disruption was severe enough by mid-June (2026-06) to force Russia to start importing gasoline from Asia — a reversal for a country that has historically been a net exporter of refined products, Yahoo Finance reported. One Moscow fuel retailer, Neftmagistral, raised the price of AI-95 petrol by around 19% in a single week following the June attacks, moving from roughly 80 to 95 roubles per litre, according to news.az.1,2
The ripple effects have reached beyond Russian borders. Kyrgyzstan, which imports more than 90% of its gasoline from Russia, asked neighboring countries for alternative supply as the Russian crunch deepened, according to OilPrice.com. The country's Energy Ministry sought backup arrangements, a signal that Moscow's ability to fulfill even its most dependent export partners is now in question.3
The Caspian Pipeline Consortium added another complication. It stopped receiving oil from July 20 (2026-07-20) following a suspension of tanker loadings at its Black Sea terminal after attacks on oil vessels there, independent.co.uk reported. That bottleneck, combined with damaged refinery capacity, narrows the options Russia has for moving crude to where it can be processed.4
ICE Brent crude front-month stood at $89.42 per barrel as of August 25 (2026-08-25) at 13:48 UTC, while Urals was trading at $85.87 per barrel at the same time. The spread between the two benchmarks reflects the ongoing Urals discount rather than any immediate panic premium, suggesting markets are not yet pricing in a step-change in supply disruption from the refinery campaign. Whether that assessment holds depends on how quickly Moscow can bring damaged capacity back online — and whether Ukraine's drone operators shift their targeting again.