Sergey Vakulenko is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. He has twenty-five years of experience in the oil and gas industry as an economist, manager, executive, and consultant, including Royal Dutch Shell and IHS CERA. Until February 2022, he served as head of strategy and innovations at Gazprom Neft.
With a quarter of the global tanker fleet transporting Russian cargo in 2024, the so-called “shadow fleet” is neither as separate nor as obscure as might have been thought.
The sanctions deployed against Russia have failed to break Vladimir Putin’s war machine, and now the West is looking for ways to make them more potent. In doing so, Western policymakers should remain clear-eyed about potential risks and side effects.
In response to “Why Ukraine Should Keep Striking Russian Oil Refineries” by Michael Liebreich, Lauri Myllyvirta, and Sam Winter-Levy.
The bulk of the current analysis of the attacks on refineries is celebratory, with a strong element of confirmation bias—and that is a classical folly that prevents learning. Russia’s refining sector, unlike its Black Sea Fleet, has proven to be resilient to the recent type of attacks, rather than the Achilles’ heel of the Russian economy that many were hoping it would be.
Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center's nonresident scholar Sergey Vakulenko discusses Ukraine's drone attacks on the Russian oil sector and assesses the degree to which they have been strategically successful.
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Vladimir Putin has reason to be confident that Russia can maintain current military spending levels for a relatively long time. This is bad news for Ukraine, its Western partners and neighbors, and overall global security.
If the scale of Ukrainian drone attacks is maintained at the levels of March and Russian air defenses do not improve, Ukraine will be able to keep damaging Russian refineries faster than they can be fixed, slowly but steadily eroding the country’s refining capacity.
Extending the transport of Russian gas via Ukraine after 2024 would likely benefit both Russia and Ukraine. Stopping the flow of gas, on the other hand, would be painful for whichever side initiates it.
Ukrainian aerial attacks could cause significant problems as international isolation makes it harder for Russian companies to fix broken equipment.
The state has taken an ever-greater role in Russian energy markets in recent years, and the system for regulating domestic fuel prices has become more and more cumbersome. The war in Ukraine has shown both that the system is no longer fit for purpose, and that a government filled with technocrats is unable to see the forest for the trees.
