Moscow’s Largest Fuel Refinery Halts Operations Following Ukrainian Drone Strike

A Ukrainian drone strike targeted the largest fuel refinery supplying the Moscow region, sparking a massive fire and forcing the facility to completely halt its operations, Reuters reported on June 16.

Industry sources told Reuters that the strike on Gazprom Neft’s refinery in southeast Moscow severely damaged a primary refining unit responsible for 53 percent of the plant’s production capacity. Although local emergency services claimed the fire was quickly extinguished without affecting output, industry insiders contradicted those statements, confirming the operational shutdown.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin acknowledged damage at the site but refrained from providing specific technical details. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking from the G7 summit in France, noted that the refinery was successfully struck from a distance of 500 kilometers and framed the operation as a just response to ongoing Russian aggression.

The successful strike comes as Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries have doubled since the beginning of 2026, increasingly straining Russia’s domestic fuel market and forcing unprecedented retail restrictions, Reuters wrote.

Following a separate drone attack on its TANECO refinery in Tatarstan on June 12, Russian oil producer Tatneft became the first major retailer to implement nationwide caps on fuel purchases. According to a Reuters witness at a Tatneft station in the Serpukhov district, sales were strictly limited to 20 liters of gasoline or 40 liters of diesel per vehicle, with the station only accepting cash payments.

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War in Ukraine

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These disruptions have triggered localized supply crises across several regions, manifesting in long lines of motorists in southern Krasnodar and temporarily Russian-occupied Crimea, where fuel restrictions were introduced earlier this month to preserve dwindling stocks.

The shortages have also hit the temporarily Russian-occupied Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine particularly hard, where some gas stations completely ran out of fuel while others saw drivers waiting up to three hours to refuel. As the Russian energy ministry attempts to reassure agricultural sectors ahead of the critical summer harvesting season, the widening supply deficit highlights the deep domestic fallout from Ukraine’s targeted economic warfare, according to Reuters.

An attack on a Moscow oil refinery marks a major tactical success for Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, which coordinated the strike alongside the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). It was reported that the drones penetrated at least three concentric air defense rings shielding the Russian capital—which heavily rely on Pantsir systems mounted on specialized towers—and bypassed protective anti-drone netting installed around the facility.

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