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27-04-2026
MOSCOW/ KYIV: Ukraine has succeeded in depriving Russia of much of the windfall profits it would have made from oil exports during March and April, as the war in the Gulf sent prices soaring to above $100 a barrel, a series of sources suggest.
Ukraine intensified a long-range strike campaign against Russian port and energy infrastructure on March 21 in a calculated bid to prevent Russia from offloading oil onto tankers and to counteract the suspension of US sanctions on Russian oil, which had been in place since 2022.
“In March alone, Russia’s oil revenue losses from our long-range capabilities are estimated at no less than $2.3bn. In just one month. We continue this work in April,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address on Sunday, April 19. Russia’s oil transshipments in March fell by 300,000 barrels a day, and refined products by 200,000 barrels a day, Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service cited S&P Global Platts as saying.
The US waived sanctions on Russian oil in early March after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping in response to US and Israeli strikes, in order to ease pressure on global crude oil prices. On April 13, it renewed the waiver to May 16.
The waiver does not seem to have helped Russia much, and April may have been even worse than March, according to some reports.
Russian business newspaper Kommersant reported that exports had declined to “their lowest levels since the summer of 2024”.
“By the end of the month, they could fall to their lowest since 2023,” it added.
April exports were so weakened that Russia has been forced to cut crude production by 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day, media has calculated, adding that five sources backed that assessment.
Sweden’s military intelligence chief Thomas Nilsson told the Financial Times that Russia would need oil to remain above $100 a barrel for the rest of the year simply to address this year’s budget deficit, without fixing any of the other economic weaknesses engendered by four years of war.
Ukraine has kept up its pressure on Russian energy infrastructure over the past week.
On April 16, it struck oil loading berths and the refinery at the Russian port of Tuapse on the Black Sea, its General Staff said. Ukrainian officials posted video of Tuapse being hit again on Monday and on Tuesday, causing large fires and black rain in the city.
Sources told media the refinery had been forced to halt operations because shipping refined products had become impossible.
On Saturday, Ukraine struck the oil refinery in Sizran and the nearby Novokuibyshevsk refinery, about 1,000km (620 miles) from the Ukrainian border, said Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation. Geolocated footage has confirmed fires at the two refineries.
The following night, Ukraine struck the Atlant Aero company, which produces Molniya drones and components for the Orion reconnaissance and strike UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, a type of drone), Kovalenko said.
On Friday, Kovalenko said Ukraine had struck the Samara refinery, more than 1,000km (620 miles) east of Ukraine, and the Gorky refinery in Nizhny Novgorod, 500km (310 miles) from Ukraine’s border.
After repeated strikes on the Baltic Sea ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk, Leningrad regional Governor Alexandr Drozdenko told an assembly on April 15 that St Petersburg had become a “front-line region”, and that he would recruit reservists to form mobile fire groups stationed near industrial facilities to shoot down drones. He also called on Ukraine war veterans to volunteer their services. (Int’l News Desk)
