Thursday Essay: So How's That Russo-Ukraine Oil War Going?

It's been months since Ukraine began its drone war on Russian energy extraction, distillation, and distribution, so the time has come to reassess the campaign — or as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch always put it in his favorite refrain: "How'm I doin'?"

Not as well as hoped — if Kyiv would only focus. Alas.

When we first looked at Ukraine's then month-old War Against Oil, I reminded VIPs that "No drone campaign will shut down Russian oil drilling," but that Russian energy production has vulnerabilities that can be exploited, provided Ukraine goes after those soft spots — or even just one — ruthlessly and without pause. 

There's the rub.

By the middle of last year, Ukraine often launched “swarm” attacks of up to 100 drones at major facilities in oil towns like Ryazan, Nizhny Novgorod, and Volgograd. Other attacks struck the Taman oil terminal on the Black Sea to impede the exports that provide the hard currency Moscow needs to fund the war—energy money that used to make up roughly 35–50% of Russia’s federal budget.

While Ukraine's War Against Oil has complicated Russian logistics and planning — not to mention having to budget scarce money, skilled labor, and parts to unscheduled repairs — the attacks seem to lack the systematic focus needed to put a meaningful dent in Russian output or distribution. 

For what it's worth, Ukrainian intelligence estimates those strikes cost Russia roughly 4% of GDP in 2025, accounting for lost production, repair costs, and destroyed inventory. 

However, as I've written here before over the last four years, you can't go by Kyiv's figures. If Western intelligence is any good (and it's probably the closest we'll get to whatever the reality is), Kyiv tends to inflate enemy casualties — or in this case, costs — by about 25%. Moscow's figures are even less reliable, but that's hardly germane to this week's topic. 

That said, the rule of thumb I came up with fairly early on in this stupid war is to knock 25% off of whatever Kyiv claims to have done to Russia, and knock 50% (or more) off of Moscow's hype. The first casualty in war is always truth, but some countries like to maim it first. 

So maybe the real figure is something closer to 3% of GDP lost to Kyiv's drones. That's an inconvenience, not a kneecapping. 

That said, somebody's War Against Oil seems to be having the desired effect, or at least it's starting to.

That somebody is Donald J. Trump.

While the previous administration — I hate to remind you of the Biden cabal, but it's sometimes unavoidable — dithered around with toothless sanctions that allowed Russia's "shadow fleet" of 1,400 tankers to sell oil around the globe, Trump's sanctions have teeth.

Putting Rosneft and Lukoil on the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list bit hard, along with seizing the occasional shadow tanker. By January, Russian oil and gas revenue fell to a five-year low ($108 billion for 2025, down 24% in real terms from 2024). In late 2025, Urals crude prices in some ports dipped to $33–$35 per barrel — when the benchmark Brent crude sold for $60 or more — as buyers demanded massive "risk discounts" in case they incurred Trump's wrath.

Russia closed the federal budget gap with tax hikes and continued raids on the country's Sovereign Wealth Fund, but the fund is already low on liquid or easily liquidated assets, and there are only so many more tax hikes the people can pay. 

And Another Thing: The black ink in Russia's national ledger is actually gold. The Bank of Russia holds massive physical reserves, about 2,330 metric tons — or about $326 billion at today's price. The Central Bank views this as its ultimate "doomsday" insurance against sanctions. Maybe the Kremlin would rather seek peace than start selling off its gold, but who knows. 

Trump accomplished more with an executive order and a couple of seized tankers than Kyiv did with six months of drone strikes. 

One vital lesson from the history of warfare, so little remembered, is that if your enemy has a weak spot, a pressure point, grab it and squeeze it until the pain is unbearable.

A great "What if?" of WWII — a war filled with more than most any other — is how the Battle of Britain might have transpired if Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe had systematically gone after the power lines and transmitter huts that kept Britain's primitive (yet still indispensable) radar net in operation. 

Let's back up a bit for the non-WWII buffs in the audience.

In the summer of 1940 with France under his thumb, Adolf Hitler turned his gaze across the Channel, where that stubborn Winston Churchill refused to accept the Nazi conquest of the Continent, much less Britain. 

And Another Thing: Another big WWII "What if?" is whether the Germans could have pulled off a seaborne invasion, even with both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy effectively neutralized. It would have been a makeshift amphibious assault, and a supply nightmare. The invasion likely would have failed due to lack of support. On the other hand, the British Army barely existed on paper after Dunkirk. I'm glad we'll never know for sure. 

Göring promised Hitler that the Luftwaffe could first knock the Royal Air Force out of action, and with air superiority, keep the Royal Navy at bay — or sink whatever ships dared to challenge them. Hitler would then give the GO! order for Operation Sea Lion, and make himself master of two former enemies. 

Easy-peasy. Not.

The Royal Air Force had an ace up its sleeve: the Dowding System that used early radars to give RAF fighter pilots insurmountable advantages. The RAF knew when, where, and in how many numbers the Luftwaffe came each night. Command directed pilots to direct intercepts, giving them vital fuel advantages over German pilots whose fuel restraints allow for very little "loiter time" over Britain before being forced to return home — or sputter out and crash. 

Without those radars, standing patrols would have burned through precious fuel and exhausted RAF pilots. They might also be caught on the ground or at the wrong altitude, losing their tactical advantage, or even spend hours searching the sky for bombers they couldn't find.

If the RAF had lost the Battle of Britain, forget about Operation Sea Lion because Churchill might have had to accept an armistice.

Instead, the Luftwaffe made just one attempt at destroying British radar — rather than their power stations, which are far easier to destroy — decided it was too ineffective, and gave up. Göring changed priorities often, and squandered whatever chance the Luftwaffe might have had in the Battle of Britain.

The rest is history. Literally.

As innovative and effective as Ukraine's tactical drone program is, at the operational-strategic level, it appears as though nobody is in charge — or at least nobody with a single vision they can make stick. If Russia's energy infrastructure has a weak spot, a pressure point Kyiv could hit again and again until something systemic cracks, either they haven't found it, or have chosen poorly not to go after it.

Worse, Russia does have one well-known pressure point that would likely make a much better target for Ukraine's drone swarms: the electrical grid that keeps its trains running.

It's impossible to overstate how reliant the Russian army and the Russian economy is on rail transport, and that rail is mostly electrical. Almost three years ago now, military analyst Trent Telenko posted, "Electric power to Russian railway logistics is RuAF's Achilles' heel," and that "Ukraine has both the long range drones and patriots to stab that heel."

"You will be seeing more Ukrainian power grid attacks in Russia and Russian occupied Ukraine in the coming weeks," Telenko predicted.

Yet nothing of the kind ever happened.

Instead, 30 months or so after Telenko detailed how to shut down Russian logistics, we have this:

Ukraine launched likely close to 40,000 drones into Russia last year, if 1 out of every 322 drones had been dedicated to the 124~ rail traction stations, there literally would be zero electrified rail in the following are thanks to @BruckenRuski mapping of traction stations near… https://t.co/6FC13SYwDw pic.twitter.com/coJWCXFZxn

— Intelschizo (@Schizointel) January 20, 2026

"I don't get why they didn't start with the electrical infrastructure nearest the front lines and worked back as their capabilities increased," another X user wondered. "They could've begun the campaign years ago and by now every bit of Russia for like 1000 miles out would be a transportation desert."

Well, probably not a thousand miles — but just a 250-mile desert would cripple Russian forces on the front, and 500 miles could very well lead to a systemic transportation collapse.  

Ukraine's tactical efforts are nothing short of amazing, including "a fundamentally new organizing principle" for drone warfare, what Battleswarm blogger Lawrence Person calls "the gamification of combat."

Here's how Euromaidan put it:

"Modern warfare is a war of data, speed, and precise decisions," Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov wrote on 26 January. "The Army of Drones Bonus program has become a game changer on the battlefield."

The system pulls real-time data from the front line: confirmed kills, destroyed vehicles, and successful reconnaissance missions. All of it converts to ePoints. Units that perform get better equipment. Units that don't, don't.

Birds of Magyar, a full brigade, dominates the scoreboard. Magyar's operators flew over 11,600 sorties in March 2025 alone—hitting more than 5,300 targets in a single month.

Don't worry about the numbers — focus on the incentive system and how it's designed to maximize tactical lethality. But when outnumbered as Ukraine is, tactical smarts, no matter how innovative, aren't enough — you've got to go after the other guy's ability to fight. And that's where Kyiv's inability to find a pressure point and keep squeezing it comes in.

"Ukraine is penny packing OWA drones everywhere to no great effect based on which military 'Union' faction was last in the room with President Zelenskyy before a decision," Telenko concluded last week, and "Even Ukraine's vaunted oil offensive is a bare plurality of total drone strikes."

What a waste. 

Instead, Kyiv keeps trying to turn out the lights in Crimea, which they are unlikely in the extreme to ever take back, when they could be turning off the lights on Russia's most vital transportation system.

I'm reminded of an early scene in the excellent 1988 Ralph Peters novel, Red Army. It was just his second book, and it turned the popular Tom Clancy-inspired WWIII techno-thriller genre upside down. Instead of focusing on the gee-whiz tech, Peters wrote about people. And instead of heroic American soldiers and spies, every single character in Red Army is Soviet, usually Russian. 

Peters at the time he wrote Red Army was still an army intelligence officer, fluent in Russian, and apparently with a genuine feel for the people. He's a masterful novelist. Even though a World War III story like Red Army went out of date just a year or two after publication, the book remains a great read because it's much more about the men who fight, and all their reasons why, than it is about a particular war.

That's the stage I need to set before taking you to the eve of World War III, where the Russian front commander, Gen. Malinsky must calm his worried chief of staff. "Pavel Pavlovich, you worry too much about perfection," Malinsky said. "You must remember that wars are not won by the most competent army. They are won by the least incompetent."

After almost four years, it still isn’t clear which is which in the Russo-Ukraine War — but unlike those two Soviet generals joking about the air war, Kyiv's confusion has very real consequences.

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