Putin’s oil in flames: Ukraine strikes key hubs in massive drone blitz

The fuel that keeps Russia’s war effort moving runs through a handful of giant storage and refining hubs far from the front line. Overnight into Friday, Ukrainian drones hit two of them.

Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed strikes on the Lukoil-Volgogradneftepererabotka refinery in Volgograd and the Samara linear production and dispatch station near the settlement of Prosvet, with fires recorded at both sites.

Russia’s defense ministry said its air defenses had intercepted or destroyed 646 Ukrainian drones between 20:00 Moscow time on October 1 and 08:00 on October 2, across 14 regions, Crimea and the Black and Azov seas, Kyiv Post reported.

The numbers from the Russian authorities hace not been independently verified, and Ukraine’s General Staff has not disclosed the number of drones used in the attack.

The Volgograd refinery, run by Lukoil subsidiary Lukoil-Volgogradneftepererabotka, is among Russia’s ten largest oil refineries, with an annual processing capacity of about 14.8 million metric tons of crude.

The adjacent JSC Kaustik chemical plant, which Kyiv Post describes as a major chemical-industry enterprise supplying Russia’s military-industrial complex, sits in the same industrial zone.

A hit on Russia’s export pipeline

The Samara station is a Transneft facility often described as Europe’s largest oil storage tank complex. It covers more than 216 hectares and holds 71 storage tanks with a combined capacity of over 1.6 million cubic meters.

The hub blends high- and low-sulfur crude to produce the Urals export grade, which accounts for up to 50% of Russia’s total oil exports, according to Ukrinform.

NASA’s FIRMS satellite monitoring detected fire hotspots at the Volgograd refinery near the delayed coking unit and the ELOU-AVT-1 and ELOU-AVT-5 primary processing units, Ukrinform reported.

Local officials confirm the attack, not the fires

Volgograd governor Andrey Bocharov said the region had seen a “massive UAV attack on the industrial infrastructure,” adding that only an apartment-building fire on Udmurtskaya Street and one hospitalization had been recorded, United24 Media reported.

In Samara, aboveground public transit was halted and the metro was opened as shelter after missile and drone alerts, Samara mayor Ivan Noskov said, but city and regional authorities issued no official reports of the fire at the oil hub, Meduza reported.

Ukrainian drones previously struck the Samara station in April, damaging five crude oil tanks of 20,000 cubic meters each, Kyiv Independent reported.

This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation