Half of Russia's primary oil refining capacity is now offline, according to Ukrainian energy analyst Mykhailo Honchar, president of the Centre for Global Studies "Strategy XXI," after a year of intensifying Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on the country's refineries.
Honchar's calculation, published 30 June in ZN.UA, puts the figure higher than independent trackers — the International Energy Agency and Reuters-cited industry sources have put offline capacity at roughly 33-40% through June — but the trajectory all sides agree on is the same: the second quarter of 2026 was the most intense and damaging phase yet of Ukraine's campaign against Russian fuel production.
The losses are forcing Moscow toward decisions it spent over a year avoiding. Gasoline and jet fuel exports are already banned. A diesel export ban was floated by Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak on 23 June, then walked back within days — Russia's Energy Ministry advised against it "for now" after a 27 June meeting, even as Novak admitted the country had "maxed out capacity across all oil refineries" and shortened repair timelines to cope. The reversal shows a government caught between a fuel crunch severe enough to consider cutting off one of its last major export earners and a fuel crunch not yet severe enough to justify the economic hit of doing so.
What changed in the second quarter
Honchar dates the campaign's symbolic start to 22 June 2022, when a Ukrainian drone first struck the Novoshakhtinsk refinery in Russia's Rostov Oblast — production capacity 7.5 million tonnes a year, knocked offline for only a few days at the time, but the first proof that a cheap drone could reach a target generating billions in war-funding revenue. Four years later, almost to the day, that same refinery was hit again, this time by two RK-360MTs Neptune cruise missiles converted for land-attack use, destroying both of its primary processing units — two-thirds of its total capacity — in a single strike on 31 May.
That shift from drones to missiles is, in Honchar's reading, the real story of the quarter. A drone warhead weighs tens of kilograms; the Neptune's weighs in the hundreds. Heavier ordnance means longer, costlier repairs — and Honchar argues that is the only way to permanently cripple Russia's largest refineries, pointing to Ukraine's own three-year campaign against its Kremenchuk refinery, which finally stopped operating in June 2025 after absorbing 260 drones and 60 missiles, a tally Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal gave the Verkhovna Rada in March.
The Moscow region has already felt what a single heavy strike can do. The Kapotnya refinery — Gazprom Neft's plant that supplies roughly 40% of the capital's gasoline and around half its diesel — was hit twice in 72 hours in mid-June, disabling both of its primary crude-processing units. Reuters reported the plant will not resume operations until 2027.
The next target: Russia's tankers
Honchar's piece is as much prescription as report. With drone strikes alone unable to permanently disable the heaviest infrastructure — pumping stations on Russia's pipeline network use 100-150-tonne pump assemblies that drone-delivered warheads cannot meaningfully damage — he argues Ukraine's logical next phase is maritime: a sustained campaign against tankers loading Russian crude and refined products in Black Sea and Sea of Azov ports, extending to the Mediterranean and beyond.
That escalation is already underway in smaller form. A Ukrainian naval drone struck the Arctic-class tanker Arctic Metagaz, reportedly carrying Yamal liquefied natural gas, in the central Mediterranean on 3 March. Honchar wants that scaled into a systematic blockade: burn storage tanks in port zones from the air, strike tankers and product carriers approaching Black Sea and Azov ports, then extend to cargo and container vessels carrying Russian exports outward.
Why this matters
Russia branded itself an energy superpower — what Honchar calls, in the piece's recurring shorthand, a "petrostate." He argues that identity is now being dismantled by the same tool that built it, with cheap Ukrainian drones doing in reverse what Russian missiles spent four years doing to Ukraine's power grid. Whether the numbers back his most dramatic claim or land closer to the more conservative 33-40% range tracked by the IEA and Reuters, the direction is not in dispute: Russia is rationing fuel in dozens of its own regions, importing gasoline by sea, and now debating — and for the moment declining — whether to choke off one more of its own export lifelines.
