The fire that devastated Novatek‘s terminal in Ust-Luga, on the Baltic, is not just yet another episode in the war chronicle.
It is the confirmation of a truth that analysts sometimes struggle to accept even though it has been obvious for years: Russia can be stopped if it is hit at the heart, i.e. in its oil and gas industry.

What’s in Ust-Luga

The attack, attributed to Ukrainian drones, affected a strategic infrastructure.
It is not a marginal storage facility, but a hub that transforms gas condensate into finished products for export. Novatek’s terminal is located a few kilometres from a Gazprom mega-complex nearing completion, designed to process up to 45 billion cubic metres of gas per year and produce 13 million tonnes of LNG, along with ethane and LPG.

From here the liquefied gas is then exported via the Baltic Sea: Ust-Luga is one of the three ports of loading together with Primorsk (on the Pacific) and Novorossysk (on the Black Sea).

At this nerve centre, therefore, a large part of the Russian energy chain is condensed, the same one that guarantees the tax revenues with which the Kremlin fuels its war machine.

A systematic campaign…

The idea of attacking oil and gas refineries and export terminals with long-range drones first came to the Ukrainians in January 2024.

Within three months, Liutyi drones (similar to small monoplanes carrying about 50kg of explosives) had targeted most of the refineries on this side of the Urals. Starting from the west: Nivksy, Pervyi, Ryazan, Novoshaktynsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd (the old ‘Stalingrad’), Saratov, Syzran, Novokuibyshev, Kuibyshev, Nizhnekamsk and Salavat.

Another wave of similar attacks was unleashed between August and September 2024, in conjunction with the Kursk incursion. It only failed to strike in deep Siberia.

Finally, last December saw the first Ukrainian attacks on facilities serving Baltic Sea terminals.

The objective was twofold.
On the one hand, shutting down more than 10% of oil refining meant decreasing the amount of fuel available in Russia.
Now, since a large share of the fuel goes to fuel the military units occupying Ukraine, there was less fuel available for civilians and for exports.

Well: less fuel for civilians meant soaring prices, not only for motorists but also for businesses, while less fuel for exports (especially to Turkey and Brazil) meant less revenue to continue the war.

…but proceeding intermittently (partly due to the US)

The 2024 campaign, however, faced harsh obstacles.

First of all, the Ukrainians did not yet have sufficiently developed drone technology. Their drones were only rarely able to ‘breach’ Russian anti-aircraft defences and carried little explosive.
Today, in contrast, Ukraine has become a planetary hub for drone production, with over 4 million drones produced each year, some of which, like the ten that hit Ust-Luga yesterday, are capable of flying more than 2,000 km with over 70 kg of explosives on board.

In 2024 the world oil price was high, with OPEC still imposing maximum production quotas on all its members.
A Ukrainian attack on Russian loading terminals, for obvious reasons, would have pushed the price of crude oil even higher, while attacks on refineries (which in theory should have forced Russia to put more crude oil on the market, thus driving the price down) also made financial operators fear a counter-attack against similar installations in Western countries, which would have devastated the entire sector.

And since no ally of Ukraine could afford too high an oil price, these initiatives were discouraged.
In March 2024, the Financial Times, reported by Reuters, revealed that Joe Biden’s US had urged Kyiv to suspend attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, fearing an escalation of global energy and commodity prices. Washington was the first to see the strikes as a risk to international equilibrium and a potential boomerang on Western economies.

The Biden administration, in short, saw the Ukrainian campaign as a risk rather than an opportunity, and preferred to put pressure on Moscow with traditional sanctions and political-diplomatic isolation.

Thus, the campaign has continued apace, while Moscow has demonstrated an astonishing capacity for rapid restoration. Severely damaged refineries were often back in operation within weeks, thanks to the ability to import replacement components from China or the West itself (via triangulations).

But now all chickens come home to roost

In this summer of 2025, however, the picture has radically changed.

Oil prices fell below $70 per barrel, the lowest since Covid: partly because OPEC increased production by more than a million barrels per day, partly because Trump’s tariff wars cooled expectations of economic growth across the globe.

And speaking of Trump, as was easy to imagine, his hostility to Ukraine has made the latter feel much more disengaged from Washington in its choice of war tactics.

Trump is looking less at global stability and more at the direct impact on “America First“.
He has openly criticised Ukrainian attacks because, in his view, they end up driving up energy prices for American consumers.
In addition, he used the issue as negotiating leverage vis-à-vis Putin: the US can at any time come back to pressure Ukraine to stop its attacks on refineries, but the Russian dictator must offer their president something in return.

Let us add, finally, that the Russian oil trade is facing increasing difficulties, with much of the ‘shadow fleet’ sanctioned by the US, the EU or Great Britain.
One figure makes the biggest impression: in the first seven months of 2025, the Russian state increased revenue by 3% and expenditure by 20%.

Faced with the inevitable flare-up of domestic prices, the Russian government had already been forced to temporarily suspend petrol exports to secure domestic supplies when Ukraine, this time in less than three weeks, shut down seven refineries (about 14% of Russian refining capacity).
Moreover, for the first time, it repeatedly bombed the ‘Brotherhood’ pipeline, which not only serves Orbán’s Hungary, Fico’s Slovakia and Lukashenko’s Belarus, but also the Ust-Luga terminal itself.

Fuel price out of control

The consequences have not been slow to make themselves felt. The vastness of the Russian Federation means that entire regions, especially the Siberian ones where the factories of the military-industrial complex are located, are finding themselves without petrol or with petrol at ‘European’ prices (over 80 cents per litre for consumers earning 400 euro per month).

In short, in this year’s changed environment, the strategy seems to be paying off.

The blockade on petrol exports imposed by Putin is a political rather than an economic fact: it means that the Ukrainian attacks are directly affecting domestic stability, forcing the Kremlin to make painful choices.

Striking at the heart

Kyiv claims these attacks as legitimate and strategic. Striking Russia’s energy heartland is tantamount, in the words of many Ukrainian exponents, to imposing a form of ‘armed sanction’ capable of eroding the oil revenues that finance the war. Analysts such as those of theAtlantic Council have pointed out that these targeted blows are already creating a real fuel crisis in Russia, with more incisive effects than international sanctions alone.

Ust-Luga, Saratov, Syzran: the geography of the energy war tells a clear message. Russia is not invulnerable. Its plants, although quickly repairable, are precious bottlenecks, difficult to protect and expensive to put back into operation. Each attack not only deprives Moscow of immediate revenue, but also forces the Kremlin to disperse capital, expertise and time.

For Europe and the West, this dynamic has a precise meaning. Sanctions are not enough, containing the Russian army on the front line is not enough. The most effective way to shorten the war and bend Putin’s strategy is to dry up the very source of his power: oil and gas revenues.

The war is increasingly being decided not in the trenches of the Donbass, but in the distillers, cryogenics and pumping stations. That is where Russia is vulnerable. And that is where it must be hit if it is really to be stopped.