Ukraine's long-range drone campaign against Russian oil refineries has become routine enough that analysts are now describing it as a predictable cycle rather than a series of shocks: strike, assess damage, repair, restart - repeated across plant after plant for months.

As IntelliNews reported, Russia’s oil refining sector is battered but not broken. Ukraine’s long-range drones have now hit all 30 of Russia’s major refineries, but as it is firing drones, not the far more destructive ballistic missiles Russia has, Russia’s oil refineries are able to repair much of the damage fairly quickly.

"We seem to be getting more information than usual on drone-struck Russian refineries lately," the account according to the Russian Oil & Gas Monitor, noting Perm had lost 38% of its primary distillation capacity and Ryazan may be offline for two weeks after both were struck within days of each other. "This take-damage-repair-restart cycle is starting to become routine."

As IntelliNews reported, while the fall in oil refining through put has fallen from a 13.5% decline in May to an estimated 45% now, according to the Financial Times, the shortages and queues at tank stations are receding as more imported oil from Belarus, Kazakhstan and India begin to reach Russia.

Perm: a symbol of the campaign's reach

A drone attack caused a fire at Lukoil's Perm refinery on July 30 and forced the shutdown of its CDU-5 primary crude distillation unit, which has a throughput capacity of 12,930 tonnes a day and accounts for around 34% of the plant's total processing capacity, two industry sources told Reuters. Perm has a project refining capacity of about 13.1mn tonnes a year, ranking it among Russia's 10 largest refineries.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said his forces had also struck an export terminal and a military enterprise in Rostov region the same week, part of what Kyiv frames as a systematic effort to degrade the refining capacity and export infrastructure funding Russia's war effort.

The campaign has been running for months, including the Omsk refinery strike in July, at the time the largest and deepest strike of the campaign.

Tuapse: the strikes' visible legacy

Damage from earlier strikes on the Black Sea refinery at Tuapse - the plant Vladimir Putin once visited in 2013 to launch what was then Russia's most sophisticated oil-processing unit - remains visible from space months later, the Financial Times reported, calling the plant a symbol of how far Ukraine can now strike with precision deep inside Russian territory.

The cumulative effect across plants is genuine but not catastrophic in any single instance: Russian Oil & Gas Monitor cautioned there is "no way to estimate the impact on gasoline and diesel output" from any one strike in isolation, since damaged plants have also been coming back online over the same period, complicating any clean read on how much fuel Russia is actually producing at a given moment.

Friendly countries step in to refine Russian crude

Russia's escalating fuel shortages, driven by Ukraine's sustained drone campaign against its refineries, have forced Moscow to lean increasingly on Belarusian gasoline. Belarus shipped a record 141,000 tonnes of gasoline to Russia between June 1-25 alone - 2.4 times May's volume and a huge jump from the mere 1,000 tonnes it sent a year earlier - as Minsk's two modern refineries became a critical crutch for Moscow's stricken fuel market, reversing the two countries' traditional trade relationship. The windfall briefly made Belarusian fuel a fixture on the St Petersburg commodity exchange before Minsk's refineries sold out their July batches and sales collapsed.

India has also become a stopgap supplier. With roughly a quarter of Russia's refining capacity knocked offline and gasoline output down at least 13.5%, Moscow banned diesel exports until July 31 and imported at least 60,000 tonnes of petrol from India, on top of existing supply from Belarus and Kazakhstan. Deputy prime minister Alexander Novak has now admitted the shortages are directly tied to Ukrainian refinery strikes - a crisis spreading from filling-station queues into freight, agriculture and retail just as peak harvest season pushes diesel demand higher.

And Kazakhstan is in talks to refine Russian crude as Moscow faces fuel shortages, with the resulting products sold on the Kazakh domestic market and some potentially re-exported back to Russia, Reuters reported, though Kazakhstan says any deal must first guarantee supply for its own consumers. Astana's Kondensat refinery is already processing Russian oil and exported petrol to Russia for the first time in July - a small but symbolically significant reversal of the usual regional flow of refined products.