I build oil refineries as my day Job! You don't really need to knock out the whole plant to make the production to zero. Hitting just 2 to 4 towers is enough. And this knowledge is not some kind of secret. Anyone in the industry can figure out the softest spot.
As for world over production collapse, Saudi has got enough capacity. Even we (India) have good amount of spare refining capacity available.
Obviously Russia doesn't publish any data about how long it takes them to repair their refineries, but some of them showed significant damages from the pictures and videos you can find online.
Past hits were on a much smaller scale and limited to a single tank or other construction. These new hits are on a completely new level, the fire covers an area that must be kilometers. In the past the fire fighters had a chance to stand near and try and their luck.
The current fires are on a completely new level that make humans ants as the fire reaches into the sky. No fire fighting force even from those from countries like mine would have a chance, and we Australians know when fires are that scale theres nothing we can do but run. These fires are like the bush fires we have seen.
Lets hope Ukraine can continue to attack all other refineries because i hope theres nothing stopping them.
There's one party that can very much easily stop this massacre. Unfortunately ending this massacre would be admitting a defeat, which is a no-go for people involved.
Let me be clear, I truly believe Ukraine has a right to defence itself, by itself. Currently Ukraine need the support of other countries to defence against Russia, and that support depends on the support of the citizens of those countries. No matter what you think, when the energy price gets high enough, people will be angry and their governments will not be able to keep sending money and ammunition to Ukraine.
This is about finished products, not crude oil. We have enough supply of crude oil to go around but not enough refinery capacity. That's why diesel price is at all time high nominally . People in first world countries will be fine, people in developing countries will suffer greatly if this goes on.
Russia contributed about 1/4 of all oil products in the past. The damage they are rightfully taking will take years to fix. Nobody in the west will be selling the replacement equipment for a long time.
What about the right to eat food of people in developing countries? High diesel filters to everything in the economy, not just personal transportation.
That is literally not true lol. Hitting Russian refineries means there is more crude for people outside Russia, as they are forced to export what they don't refine lol.
Part of the strategy here is knowing what parts to knock out because not all parts are easily replaceable. I know they have been hitting a specific part, waiting for the fix to be implemented, and then hitting it again.
There are certainly people at CIA and other intelligence agencies who focus entirely on which refinery parts are on the Pareto frontier of easiest to destroy, hardest to replace, and most important to functionality.
An important distinction, and it makes Ukraines attacks all the more impressive since the reported impact is with respect to "operational refining capacity" rather than just a reported percentage of sites that have experienced any form of attack.
I remember earlier on in the war when some Ukrainian drones would make their way to Moscow and explode against the side of an apartment building or something, where the physical impact wasn't so big even if the headline was big. But the growing scale and speed of attacks that impact operational capacity are much harder to brush off as meaningless.
One thing we're likely to see is Russia building more smaller "teapot" refineries. These are less efficient and produce lower quality products. But they're cheap and more difficult to target.
> Russia building more smaller "teapot" refineries
This would turn Russia into a suzerainty. Whose, who knows. But at this point I’d be fine with Beijing calling the shots over the war-mongering nutters in Moscow.
I have heard said elsewhere that Ukraine is awaiting a deep onset of winter to ravage natural gas pipelines throughout Russia, which will plunge substantial percentages of the populace into freezing cold (unexpectedly?).
I wish this were not happening. I miss the days that I drank with Russians and Ukrainians, and we were all friends. It seems like a lifetime ago.
Feels like drones and rockets have created a similar dynamic to mutually assured destruction, except for much smaller actors with far fewer resources. It's not hard to imagine a future where e.g. Taiwan is just armed with so many cheap drones and rockets that for even a great power like China the guarantee of enormous economic damage at home is just not worth it.
china can turn taiwan into rubble with conventional resources, there is a rather large body of water seperating the two as well which allows for very easy defense compared to something like ukraine where you have to deal with forests and radar noise.
Surely that just means tactics change? The attacking force needs to coordinate tightly to block airwaves and have total control as quickly as possible before any meaningful counter measure can be attempted - meaning more drone swarms, more boots on the ground and more direct attack and control of comms channels.
It also means that any potential victim probably needs to account for that scenario and be ready to retaliate at a moments notice.
Tactics will change but not all communication channels can be blocked. Some fraction of the drones used by Russia and Ukraine are now controlled using fiber optic cables. Those are relatively slow, have a maximum range of about 40 km, and can't be used over water. But they're immune to jamming and very effective against ground targets. Within line of sight, tight beam spread spectrum radio signals are also very difficult to jam.
As for putting more boots on the ground, geography and weather make it tough to put a large amphibious force ashore in Taiwan. There are only a few harbors or beaches where it could even be attempted.
I don't disagree with the principle necessarily, but I think it goes too far to think there's always just some tactical adjustment you can make that wholly neutralizes every next emerging combat technology.
Seems like lasers that fry drones en masse will become more important, and the scale and automation at which drones can be produced will be a BFD. But those are specific inputs that impact in specific ways, and those nuts and bolts need to be the target of analysis. That work can't be replaced by assuming eternal strategic equilibrium regardless of tech.
>Seems like lasers that fry drones en masse will become more important
Eh you don't need lasers, bullets are fine. You just can't have air defense these days that only relies on individual shots costing tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars each.
What's funny to me is that it's not unreasonable that a nontrivial amount of future air war is going to look like Top Gun dogfighting on the scale of childrens' toys.
They’ve been exporting crude to India (who pays a much discounted price) and then buying back refined products…at full market price.
How long can they keep that up? Reminds me of the Spanish bank default in the early 17th century thanks to India swapping silver for all the plundered gold Spain had taken from the Americas.
I wish that was true but Russia can keep this up indefinitely. Even with severe damage to their oil infrastructure they can still export enough to fund the war effort. The real question is how much pain the elites in the core Moscow - St. Petersburg region are willing to endure.
The overall trend is downwards and even if the war ended tomorrow the Russian economy would be in rough shape. But at the same time the civilian economy still hasn't been fully mobilized to anywhere near the extent it was in WWII. They have room to cut back domestic energy consumption (especially in the outer provinces) in order to maintain the war effort. Essentially turn Russia into something like North Korea.
Headline: "Ukraine knocks out 36% of Russia's oil refining capacity in under two weeks" (same in the bolded subheading).
First paragraph: "The combined annual processing capacity of the Russian plants hit over the past 13 days exceeds 120 million metric tons of crude oil—accounting for 36% of the aggressor state’s entire domestic oil refining capacity."
The latter paragraph is likely true, but it's unlikely that all of the ones hit were taken completely offline, so the headline is a complete lie. (In this case, the same structure - lying headline + more accurate text below - is already present in the source they provide. In other cases, sources are often misleadingly mis-cited over several levels to arrive at a click-getting but still misleading or outright lying headline.)
The refineries are huge structures, often with multiple instances of the same type of processing unit, so it's rare that one of them gets taken out completely. Also, there is no information about the actual damage done. At least in some cases, I haven't seen any claims about the actual damage, just claims that there was a strike, i.e. there is a good chance the strike didn't cause significant damage.
Further down in the article, it explicitly references "operating capacity" itself and notes that it has been reduced by 30%, which isn't quite 36%, and I'm curious as to what the former describes that the latter doesn't. But it seems to be talking about a real thing that I wouldn't characterize as a lie.
That they have Starshield at all is a miracle. That tech didnt exist 6 years ago and wouldnt exist at all without Musk. The fact it's temporarily limited to 100mph vehicles isn't some conspiracy.
It is. It just requires federal intervention since his Board is useless.
Fortunately, a lot of his supporters have publicly undermined themselves by coming out in favor of undermining American national security and sleeping with direct reports.
Maybe they are trying to prevent Ukraine from using Starshield for offensive operations, but don't have a way of doing that without also preventing defensive operations. Preventing defensive operations is not politically viable [I would be suing Musk right now if this led to death of a family member], so maybe Ukraine has to launch their offensive operations only when they are actively being attacked.
Unfortunately Putin and his close advisors believe that they are essentially Lincoln fighting the Confederacy in an epic battle of good and evil for which no permanent peace can be accepted. Convincing them to see sense is the only non-military resolution to the war.
Dictators have always been paranoid about everyone else, this is why they are always extremely careful about personal protection.
What you dont appreciate is that Russia is a multi tiered society. Im not denying a small number of thousand European Russians have died, but the only cities or peoples that Putin fears are Moscow and St P. So far only a few thousnad have died from there and basically everyone in those cities knows they are effectively spared from being forced into the army.
Most of the dead and fighting are from places you and me have never heard of, that is cities and towns and regions filled with the many other non European peoples that are under Russia. Russia is a land of over a 100 peoples, there are dozens if not more different cultures and languages. Those are the people being killed.
The European type Russians in Moscow and St P know this, and they wont dare protest because they are not the wons dying.
The only language fascists understand is an overwhelming display of force.
There will be no non-military resolution. Either Russia wins by subverting Western governments - which has been a partial success so far, but not the knock-out Putin was expecting - or Russia implodes.
No, The type of Nazi's which invade their neighbors. Like Russia did when it co-started the second world war by invading Poland and shortly there after Finland. And then occupying eastern Europe til about 1990. And then occupying the Crimea and invading Ukraine. And of course Moldavia, Georgia, etc. Basically Russia has always been occupying countries in Europe (or pieces thereof) in the last century.
You got more Nazi/fascist apparatus in France by an order of magnitude than Ukraine.
And Putin is a stone-cold authoritarian war criminal, whose reign of terror in Ukraine goes from invading Crimea with little green men, to shooting down civilian airliners, to mass graves, to stealing kids, poisoning the opposition, to drones hitting hospitals and schools.
France, true to form, is popularly supporting their neo-Nazis, elevating their pro-Putin sell-outs to power. Like Israel, they seem to have missed the global wave of anti-corruption elections.
Nah, both sides have no choice but to fight because Ukraine can't make territorial concessions, and Russia can't leave a militarized Ukraine intact. If either government compromises the nationalist factions of their own countries will lynch them. The only resolution to this war is to fight it out until one or both sides collapse.
Except Ukraine never threathened to invade Russia.
Why would they?
Russia literally invades Ukraine so any territorial concession is just giving up your position for nothing. They will just continue from their new position.
This is their house and they are attacked by robbers. Luckily they are armed.
You dont understand the mind of the dictator especially a Russian dictator. They have always been paranoid about their neighbours, this is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years because of geographic luck they have no defensive boundaries.
The UK famously has the sea, which has helped it for a thousand years. Its no conincidence that the boundary of Spain and France are the Pyrenees or France and Italy are the Alps or China and India have the Himalayas.
Powerful countries like natural boundaries like this because they are always worried about the other side. Russia for all its size has mountains or water stopping others. Putin wants Ukraine because he wants to push RUssia back to the USSR boundaries which were mountains in Europe. WHen Russia controlled and had roops in East Germany the open plains were narrow, today they are thousands of kms. Yes Im not defending Putin his violence and aggression and changes to Finland are all his fault, but thats not whwat im discussing.
He wants the boundary to the sea and mountains. Unfortunately he doesnt care how many millions die, all he cares about is his imperial amb itions.
Russia can absolutely leave a militarized Ukraine intact. Give back the pieces of the country they tried to steal, pay war reparations, send some people to The Hague to get fitted for new ties. Move on.
No one wants a war with Russia, even now. The whole "the West will invade" trope is just a way to keep Russians from focusing on their own situation. If the populace paid even knew a little of what Western media said about a potential conflict between the West and Russia, they'd realize this... "The Day After", etc.
Russia believes they have to attack their neighbours, because they believe they need to push all the way to geographic boundaries like the sea or mountains.
Unfortunately this is how dictators think. Nobodies die for their ambitions and tahts what we see.
Putin believes he needs the boundaries to be what Stalin took after WW2 from the old and sick Roosevelt who gave him too much of Eastern Europe.
Why would Putin care what ordinary Russians think ?
Every single Russian citizen is scared of Putin, because they know he owns everything including their lives.
They also know that most of the dead and fighting are not even European white Russian, most of the unfortunates are from the many other cultures and peoples that have been conquered.
I don’t think Putin can. He certainly doesn’t believe that would be a better outcome than continuing to fight (although he’s definitely not being realistic about that). That would be complete defeat, and he can’t admit that.
Alternatively, it could reduce Russia’a chances of moving onto attacking other nations and escalating violence/the chance of nuclear war in the region. The world is complicated
Because people are stupid. When given a problem they can't solve, they create new problems while the old one still festers - Theory of Bounded Rationality.
Independent sources say that damage wasn’t critical. The cost of such attacks is too high to justify, the sad truth is - such operations are funded by regular taxpayers in EU. Such news are written to shake global oil prices in order to gain profits
I am not buying the assertion that Ukraine was unable to inflict critical damage when I saw explosions in Moscow earlier this year.
It it hard to believe that I saw this, and the world did not come to an end. I cannot imagine what the United States would do in a similar event. Or perhaps I already saw it.
As for world over production collapse, Saudi has got enough capacity. Even we (India) have good amount of spare refining capacity available.
Obviously Russia doesn't publish any data about how long it takes them to repair their refineries, but some of them showed significant damages from the pictures and videos you can find online.
The current fires are on a completely new level that make humans ants as the fire reaches into the sky. No fire fighting force even from those from countries like mine would have a chance, and we Australians know when fires are that scale theres nothing we can do but run. These fires are like the bush fires we have seen.
Lets hope Ukraine can continue to attack all other refineries because i hope theres nothing stopping them.
Do you like an energy crisis? Because this is how we get an energy crisis.
This is why oil prices, while high, have no reason to hit stratospherical levels. The world will be fine.
Prices are not going down for a years.
They have the right to defend their homes and kids first above your right to drive a car. Go buy a bicycle.
I remember earlier on in the war when some Ukrainian drones would make their way to Moscow and explode against the side of an apartment building or something, where the physical impact wasn't so big even if the headline was big. But the growing scale and speed of attacks that impact operational capacity are much harder to brush off as meaningless.
This would turn Russia into a suzerainty. Whose, who knows. But at this point I’d be fine with Beijing calling the shots over the war-mongering nutters in Moscow.
I wish this were not happening. I miss the days that I drank with Russians and Ukrainians, and we were all friends. It seems like a lifetime ago.
In any case, it will be a cold winter.
It also means that any potential victim probably needs to account for that scenario and be ready to retaliate at a moments notice.
As for putting more boots on the ground, geography and weather make it tough to put a large amphibious force ashore in Taiwan. There are only a few harbors or beaches where it could even be attempted.
Seems like lasers that fry drones en masse will become more important, and the scale and automation at which drones can be produced will be a BFD. But those are specific inputs that impact in specific ways, and those nuts and bolts need to be the target of analysis. That work can't be replaced by assuming eternal strategic equilibrium regardless of tech.
Eh you don't need lasers, bullets are fine. You just can't have air defense these days that only relies on individual shots costing tens of thousands to tens of millions of dollars each.
What's funny to me is that it's not unreasonable that a nontrivial amount of future air war is going to look like Top Gun dogfighting on the scale of childrens' toys.
New air defense tactics need to include mitigations for targets that fly low, are very cheap, and numerous.
In the end I think the cheap drone advantage will be entirely accounted for but it will take time and real world experience to figure out what works.
How long can they keep that up? Reminds me of the Spanish bank default in the early 17th century thanks to India swapping silver for all the plundered gold Spain had taken from the Americas.
Financially, the Iran oil shock provided some financial breathing room, but the overall trend is downwards.
Total Russia/China trade (2025): ~$228B Indian imports (2025): $55 billion EU imports (2025): $30–31 billion
Much of that energy related. U.S. had $3.5B of trade mostly fertilizer and chemicals.
That the EU is still there is for geographical reasons. Some locations just had no alternatives.
But I believe trade with Russia from EU has declined something like 90% since 2022 and is on a decline from there.
First paragraph: "The combined annual processing capacity of the Russian plants hit over the past 13 days exceeds 120 million metric tons of crude oil—accounting for 36% of the aggressor state’s entire domestic oil refining capacity."
The latter paragraph is likely true, but it's unlikely that all of the ones hit were taken completely offline, so the headline is a complete lie. (In this case, the same structure - lying headline + more accurate text below - is already present in the source they provide. In other cases, sources are often misleadingly mis-cited over several levels to arrive at a click-getting but still misleading or outright lying headline.)
The refineries are huge structures, often with multiple instances of the same type of processing unit, so it's rare that one of them gets taken out completely. Also, there is no information about the actual damage done. At least in some cases, I haven't seen any claims about the actual damage, just claims that there was a strike, i.e. there is a good chance the strike didn't cause significant damage.
Fortunately, a lot of his supporters have publicly undermined themselves by coming out in favor of undermining American national security and sleeping with direct reports.
When was the last time, Ukraine was not actively being attacked?
Dictators have always been paranoid about everyone else, this is why they are always extremely careful about personal protection.
What you dont appreciate is that Russia is a multi tiered society. Im not denying a small number of thousand European Russians have died, but the only cities or peoples that Putin fears are Moscow and St P. So far only a few thousnad have died from there and basically everyone in those cities knows they are effectively spared from being forced into the army.
Most of the dead and fighting are from places you and me have never heard of, that is cities and towns and regions filled with the many other non European peoples that are under Russia. Russia is a land of over a 100 peoples, there are dozens if not more different cultures and languages. Those are the people being killed.
The European type Russians in Moscow and St P know this, and they wont dare protest because they are not the wons dying.
There will be no non-military resolution. Either Russia wins by subverting Western governments - which has been a partial success so far, but not the knock-out Putin was expecting - or Russia implodes.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4799...
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/congress-has-remo...
You got more Nazi/fascist apparatus in France by an order of magnitude than Ukraine.
And Putin is a stone-cold authoritarian war criminal, whose reign of terror in Ukraine goes from invading Crimea with little green men, to shooting down civilian airliners, to mass graves, to stealing kids, poisoning the opposition, to drones hitting hospitals and schools.
F*ck off into yr little discord world, chud
Does this make Ukraine any less invaded? Or make them defending themselves wrong?
France, true to form, is popularly supporting their neo-Nazis, elevating their pro-Putin sell-outs to power. Like Israel, they seem to have missed the global wave of anti-corruption elections.
Why would they?
Russia literally invades Ukraine so any territorial concession is just giving up your position for nothing. They will just continue from their new position.
This is their house and they are attacked by robbers. Luckily they are armed.
The UK famously has the sea, which has helped it for a thousand years. Its no conincidence that the boundary of Spain and France are the Pyrenees or France and Italy are the Alps or China and India have the Himalayas.
Powerful countries like natural boundaries like this because they are always worried about the other side. Russia for all its size has mountains or water stopping others. Putin wants Ukraine because he wants to push RUssia back to the USSR boundaries which were mountains in Europe. WHen Russia controlled and had roops in East Germany the open plains were narrow, today they are thousands of kms. Yes Im not defending Putin his violence and aggression and changes to Finland are all his fault, but thats not whwat im discussing.
He wants the boundary to the sea and mountains. Unfortunately he doesnt care how many millions die, all he cares about is his imperial amb itions.
And Moscow being threathened or conquered by Swedes, Napoleon and Hitler
But since when did Ukraine, Poland, Finland get to choose their neighbors? I am sure they would also love to pick and choose.
Is the world going to just give up and lie down because Dictator is paranoid? I know who's got to go.
Neither side is willing to lose face, there's only three ways out:
1. One side achieves total military victory (unlikely and would drag on for years)
2. A new president takes office on either side and opens a fresh diplomatic path
3. Outside mediators broker a truce
No one wants a war with Russia, even now. The whole "the West will invade" trope is just a way to keep Russians from focusing on their own situation. If the populace paid even knew a little of what Western media said about a potential conflict between the West and Russia, they'd realize this... "The Day After", etc.
Year after year the west issue attacked. How many times has Russia attacked its neighbours?
Unfortunately this is how dictators think. Nobodies die for their ambitions and tahts what we see.
Putin believes he needs the boundaries to be what Stalin took after WW2 from the old and sick Roosevelt who gave him too much of Eastern Europe.
Every single Russian citizen is scared of Putin, because they know he owns everything including their lives.
They also know that most of the dead and fighting are not even European white Russian, most of the unfortunates are from the many other cultures and peoples that have been conquered.
If you look at what Putin actually writes and says there's no comparison at all to anything Lincoln-like.
https://archive.khpg.org/en/1520890100
Additionally here, the only reason why the EU isn't getting invaded is because Russia is being stopped in Ukraine.
Just listen to what they say. They were fully intending on taking all of Eastern Europe if they could get away with it.
Fortunately they can't and are being held up in Ukraine without EU people having to suffer any direct damage.
It it hard to believe that I saw this, and the world did not come to an end. I cannot imagine what the United States would do in a similar event. Or perhaps I already saw it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mpzObWu06yQ
Edit: I have upvoted you. I would like to hear what you have to say.