The Tide is Turning - Russia Rattled as Refineries Razed

 

President Trump, at the UN General Assembly on September 23, told his audience that Ukraine can "win all of Ukraine back in its original form," and get back "the original borders from where this war started." This turning of the tide may seem far away and of no particular relevance to the maritime community, but it is about to become so.

Such a forecast is a radically different outcome which until recently leading figures of the US administration had assumed - that Ukraine needed to sue for peace immediately, give up even Ukrainian land as yet unconquered by the Russians, all to forestall an inevitable defeat. Accompanying this narrative were suggestions that Ukraine was losing strategic positions to an unstoppable Russian war machine, underwritten by news organizations insufficiently skeptical of the Russian narrative.

Reality on the battlefield is that Ukraine has only lost marginal ground. No significant town has fallen to Russia in 2025. The key front line fortress of Pokrovsk remains in Ukrainian hands, despite having been Russia’s principal objective all year. Russia is sustaining huge manpower losses for the gains it has made, and sooner or later the anger of Russian mothers will coalesce. Russia’s air, missile and drone campaign has intensified, at huge cost, but seems not to have dented Ukraine’s will to resist, nor inflicted damage which cannot be repaired. At sea, Ukraine has confined most of the Russian Black Sea fleet to port, and can now trade more or less freely through the ports of Pivdennyi, Odesa, Mykolaiv and Chornomorsk. These essentially are components of stalemate.

However, two factors are changing the character of the conflict. In recent months, the use of small armed drones by both sides has created a dead zone either side of the front line which neither side can penetrate successfully. Both sides are exhausted, short of manpower, and unable to generate new strike forces. In the foreseeable future, the likelihood of a decisive breakthrough in the ground war has diminished sharply.

But the dynamic new element is the much improved prosecution by Ukraine of long-range air attacks by drones and cruise missiles, all the more effective because this new campaign is being skillfully targeted and coordinated.

The complex extended attack on Novorossiysk on September 23 showed the plan in action. Sea drones, possibly including the Toloka underwater drone with a one ton warhead, penetrated defenses of the harbor, currently the main base of the Black Sea Fleet. The headquarters of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, whose pipeline from Kazakhstan terminates in the port, was attacked by aerial drones. The Russian authorities said they had shot down 25 drones, giving an indication of the scale of attacks.

The port at Gelendzhik, 18 miles away, was also closed down. Tuapse harbor 75 miles away was attacked. Evacuation orders were issued in Sochi, 125 miles to the South East. Psychologically, the population of the Krasnodar Krai can now be in no doubt that President Putin’s pretense that the Ukrainian "special operational" is going splendidly is a sham, and no doubt civil unrest and Circassian separatism has been stirred. 

This type of attack is about to be intensified. Ukraine is scaling up production of its home-designed FirePoint Flamingo cruise missile, from one to seven per day by October, at a unit cost of $1 million. A factory in Denmark should be producing solid fuel for the missiles by December. The missile has a one ton warhead and a range of 1,750 miles, sufficient to target Moscow and St Petersburg from unexpected vectors. Russia’s oil infrastructure in the West and the Caspian area is at serious and sustained risk, as is Russia’s main drone production facility at Alabuga.

The existing Ukrainian drone and missile attacks of the oil infrastructure is already creating shortages - for which the Russian population, fed a deceitful diet of successes in the war, is unprepared. On top of the war deaths, who can be sure that political unrest will not break out as shortages begin to be felt everywhere?

A measure of President Putin’s concern is the outbreak of unattributable drone and fighter intrusions over Poland, Estonia, Sweden and Denmark - receiving special attention probably because of its contribution to the Flamingo program. Putin may calculate these micro-aggressions will provoke discord within NATO, maybe even achieving the ultimate objective of splitting the Unites States away from NATO. But it hasn’t worked yet, and the clear risk for Russia is that a carefully modulated response will strengthen NATO rather than weaken it. One of the most obvious consequences could be the creation of a NATO no-fly zone stretching into Ukraine, enforced at long range without NATO needing to enter Ukrainian airspace.

The political consequences of an intensified Ukrainian attack of Russia’s economic infrastructure are difficult to quantify. But an almost certain consequence will be major disruption to Russia’s oil and gas export system. Attacks on oil export ports and pipeline infrastructure, combined with an intensified assault on Russia’s tanker dark fleet, means that the global shipping market will need to readjust, switching oil carrying capacity to new tanker routes as importing nations lose access to traditional providers and have to seek supply from elsewhere.