Ukraine Drone Attack on Russia: Volgograd Refinery Hit

Ukraine has carried out one of the largest drone attacks of the war on Russia overnight on November 13, with the Russian Ministry of Defence stating that its air defences intercepted 1,198 Ukrainian drones over more than a dozen Russian regions, the Moscow region and occupied Crimea. Volgograd Region Governor Andrei Bocharov reported a massive attack, stating that drone debris had started fires at an enterprise in the city’s southern industrial zone, killing four employees and injuring two. Officials did not name the enterprise, but images published locally placed the fires at Lukoil’s Volgograd refinery, one of Russia’s ten largest. The raid highlights how Ukraine’s long range drone campaign has shifted from isolated attacks to mass salvoes aimed at the refining industry that fuels Russia’s war effort.

The Volgograd plant processes around 14 to 15 million tonnes of crude oil a year, roughly five percent of Russia’s refining capacity, and lies around 400 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. Bocharov added that windows and balconies were damaged in three five storey apartment buildings and a youth centre in the Svetly Yar district, with no injuries reported there, while Kiev had made no statement on the strike by the morning of November 13. In the same raid Rostov Region Governor Yuri Slyusar reported that a production building had burned in Rostov-on-Don and a warehouse had caught fire in Aksai, with one man hospitalised and five apartment buildings in the city and five private houses in the Azov district damaged by falling debris.

The attack follows the strike on the Naro-Fominsk in the Gulf of Finland only two days earlier, and came the day after trilateral negotiations in Abu Dhabi that were expected to be followed by a wider round of talks including European governments. Since Ukraine resumed its strikes on Russian refineries on October 30 after a pause, its drones have hit nine of Russia’s roughly 35 major refineries in about two weeks, including the Novokuibyshevsk, Ryazan, Yaroslavl, Omsk and Kirishi plants, with industry estimates putting the disrupted share of the country’s refining capacity at around 30 percent by November 10. Restrictions on fuel sales have since been introduced in several Russian regions, with Russian point defences, led by the Pantsir-S1 gun and missile system, considerably overstretched by the number of industrial sites now within reach of Ukrainian drones.

The strike is far from the first on the Volgograd refinery, which has been hit repeatedly since February 2022 and has had its output interrupted several times this year alone. A drone attack on October 2 damaged equipment and halted crude processing at the plant, while after an earlier strike on May 29 the Ukrainian General Staff stated that four primary distillation units, the AVT-1, AVT-3, AVT-5 and AVT-6, had been damaged, after which the plant suspended processing.