Executive Summary:
- Ukraine’s successful drone attacks on Russian refineries and ports have significantly reduced Moscow’s ability to meet domestic needs and sell oil abroad. They highlight serious bottlenecks in Russia’s critically important oil sector.
- These chokepoints reflect the fragility of Russia’s oil pipeline network. As a result, damage at a relatively few places has an outsize impact, and their concentration near Russia’s few ports makes them tempting targets for attack.
- Beyond these attacks are ever-more pressing causes. Global warming is damaging pipelines, easily accessible oil reserves are being exhausted, and developing more difficult-to-exploit alternative fields entails enormous costs and extreme challenges.
Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russian refineries and ports have significantly degraded Moscow’s ability to meet domestic needs and sell oil abroad to fill Russian government coffers. They highlight serious bottlenecks in Russia’s critically important petroleum sector (Svobodnaya Pressa, June 21). These chokepoints reflect the lack of redundancy in Russia’s oil pipeline network in many parts of the country, especially in the north, where natural resources such as oil are most plentiful, yet highways, rail lines, and pipelines are scarce. That situation means that any damage to a relatively small number of the latter has an outsized impact, especially as their high concentration near Russia’s few ports makes them particularly tempting targets for attack (Nakanune.ru, March 30). Beyond those problems, however, are now two even more serious ones. Pipelines are increasingly damaged by global warming, which undermines political will for such pipes. Existing fields are being exhausted, and finding new fields is difficult. Additionally, using new technologies that were not available earlier to extract oil is challenging (The Moscow Times, April 12, 2024; Yesli Byt’ Tochnym, December 4, 2025; Versia, February 10; Window on Eurasia, May 10; Sibirskiy Ekonomist, June 17). Consequently, these bottlenecks are not the marginal or short-term problems some imagine, but rather ones that will remain critical for Moscow not only as long as its war against Ukraine goes on, but even once that conflict is settled, unless it directs new resources into this sector.
The successful Ukrainian drone attacks on the two largest Russian oil ports on the Baltic Sea, Ust-Luga and Primorsk, and on other ports and refineries elsewhere, highlight the sophistication of Ukrainian military planners and the skills of Ukrainian forces. They also highlight the logistical bottlenecks Moscow has taken remarkably few steps to overcome, leaving itself at risk of such attacks. Despite Russia’s enormous size, the two ports on the Baltic alone had been handling almost half of Russia’s oil exports. This is a reflection not just of the absence of other ports that might do so but of rail, road, and pipeline connections from the point of extraction to these points of export (Nakanune.ru, March 30). Few other industrialized countries, and none anywhere near as large as the Russian Federation, have so many bottlenecks of this kind and thus, in time of war, are at such enormous risk of serious losses from attacks on a relatively small number of sites. So far, however, instead of working to improve its logistics network, the Kremlin has adopted a short-term approach, focusing on improving its anti-drone systems and waiting for better times to do anything else. Until it makes a denser and more complete logistical network a priority, something that by its very nature will take enormous time and money, however, Russia will remain far more vulnerable to analogous attacks by foreign countries or domestic opponents with consequences far greater than they’d be in the case of other countries.
These bottlenecks and the lack of a concerted effort to overcome them are, in the first instance, inheritances from Soviet times. Central planners sought to address this or that problem with little thought given to redundancy or even survivability. It has also affected and continues to affect Moscow’s thinking not only in the petroleum sector but in many others as well (Kommersant, June 19, 2023). While the Russian economy, especially in extractive industries such as oil, has expanded dramatically since 1991, this approach has remained remarkably unchanged. Moscow has sought to boost production with little thought given to the risks of having so much of its oil flow through such a limited network. These risks have increased exponentially since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his expanded war against Ukraine.
Unfortunately for Moscow, the effects of this failure to build redundancy in the oil sector have been dramatically exacerbated in recent years by two other developments unrelated to any attack. Global warming has led to the damage or even collapse of some pipelines (Yesli Byt’ Tochnym, September 22, 2023). The exhaustion of easily exploited fields has meant that Russia has had to invest far more in exploring for others or in extracting oil using technologies that are far more difficult and expensive (Sibirskiy Ekonomist, June 17). According to official Russian government estimates, more than 60 percent of Russia’s oil reserves are now in the difficult-to-exploit category. Most of these new fields are in the Russian north, where there are few people and even fewer roads, rail lines, and pipelines than in the rest of the country, and where attracting and retaining residents and developing such infrastructure are especially difficult (see EDM, February 18, March 5).
The challenges and costs of increasing redundancy in the oil sector are so great that Russian officials have instead come up with more imaginative proposals rather than focusing directly on these problems. They reflect Moscow’s proclivity for extensive rather than intensive solutions, however problematic some of these ideas are. Among the most problematic of these ideas are calls for developing and using dirigibles to export coal, developing oil fields in the Antarctic, and relying on riverine shipping to move oil and other raw materials even though Russia has a severe shortage of ships equipped to do so (EastRussia, July 9, 2024; see EDM, August 13, 2024; Sibirskiy Ekonomist, December 11, 2025). Such attitudes and proclivities also help explain proposals for new gigantic infrastructure, such as the Bering Strait tunnel, which would certainly require enormous sums but, because of the absence of rail links on either side, would not have the positive impact its advocates claim (see EDM, June 11).
Bottlenecks are now a characteristic of the Russian economy, not just in the oil sector. (For a useful discussion of such bottlenecks in other parts of Russian economic life, see The Insider, August 13, 2025.) The Putin regime has not taken the steps needed to overcome this general problem or even to convince industry managers that they must do so It is certainly worried, however, about it not only because of the immediate consequences of bottlenecks on the Russian economy and how such chokepoints are limiting Russian growth but also because of the widespread belief that bottlenecks played a key role in the demise of the Soviet state, something the Kremlin is committed to avoiding any repetition of (Profile, December 22, 2022). The results of Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure will only heighten those concerns, and that should lend more attention to bottlenecks in Russia that were routinely given to bottlenecks in the years leading up to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
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