Reporting Indicates Consequential American Role In Facilitating Ukraine's Targeting Of Russian Energy Infrastructure
🇷🇺 🇺🇦 🇺🇸 News Analysis
News analysis-themed posts typically focus on recent developments. These posts will tend to be much shorter and less detailed than analysis-themed posts.
Ukraine initiated another strike campaign targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure over the summer. While full of spectacle, the preceding Ukrainian strike campaigns had limited effects on the course of the Russia-Ukraine War for reasons that I discussed in a post from August 2025.
The most recent Ukrainian strike campaign targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure has, however, been far more effective and far more consequential. While there is disagreement as to the exact level of damage sustained against specific nodes of Russia’s energy infrastructure, Russia is currently experiencing country-wide shortages of refined petroleum products, including both gasoline/petrol and diesel, following concerted Ukrainian strikes on dozens of sites across western Russia, including pipeline pumping stations and oil refineries. It bears emphasis that Russia remains the world’s third-largest oil producer—refining and distribution, not extraction, appear to be the primary targets of Ukraine’s latest strike campaign—and that only specific parts of sprawling Russian oil refineries have been targeted—most of the structures at the targeted refineries are undamaged and intact. It remains to be seen how quickly Russia can bring the affected refineries back online, even if in a degraded capacity, so as to alleviate the ongoing country-wide shortages of petroleum products across the country.
Given the above, Ukraine has evidently managed to increase the penetration rate of its long-range strike munitions, which is to say propeller-driven fixed-wing strike drones and turbojet-powered cruise missiles. That is, Ukrainian planners appear to have developed a far more sophisticated and more holistic understanding of the dispositions and limitations of Russian air defences in a given sector. As I explained in the post from August 2025, we are likely dealing with a situation in which only a small fraction of Ukrainian strike munitions launched penetrate Russian air defences and reach their intended targets, but the non-zero number of leakers—in some cases just one or two Ukrainian propeller-driven strike drones—leave their mark as a result of Russia’s ineffectual implementation—non-existent in many areas—of rear-area short-range air defences across the vast expanse of Russian territory west of the Ural Mountains. Furthermore, the outsized damage resulting from the repeated targeting of very specific types of essential equipment at Russian oil refineries in Ukraine’s latest strike campaign against Russia’s energy infrastructure suggests substantially improved target intelligence and weaponeering.
In the absence of contradictory information, observers operating with access to publicly available information had reason to think that Ukraine had—somehow—managed to independently constitute an increasingly effective long-range strike capability against Russia, one that neither depended on the United States and European countries for the provisioning of the involved strike munitions or, crucially, the provision of the requisite intelligence and targeting support. Recent reporting from the Financial Times, however, indicates that the United States has, since July 2025, been directly enabling Ukraine’s strike campaign against Russian energy infrastructure as part of a gambit to weaken the Russian war economy and bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.
The US intelligence helps Kyiv shape route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions, enabling Ukraine’s long-range, one-way attack drones to evade Russian air defences, said the officials familiar with the matter.
Three people familiar with the operation said Washington was closely involved in all stages of planning. A US official said Ukraine selected the targets for long-range strikes and Washington then provided intelligence on the sites’ vulnerabilities.
Uncertainties notwithstanding, the latest reporting suggests that while Ukraine may now possess an increasingly sophisticated arsenal of more or less indigenous propeller-driven strike drones and cruise missiles, it appears to still lack the intelligence and targeting capabilities required to employ these in as effective and consequential a manner as it has against Russian energy infrastructure in recent months. It remains to be seen how Ukraine’s steadily expanding and improving strike capabilities will fare if and when a mercurial White House decides to pull the proverbial plug on this previously unpublicized form of support. This saga includes an important lesson that is relevant beyond the Russia-Ukraine War: there is more to effective long-range strike capabilities than the mere existence of strike munitions of requisite range.