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Russian Oil Giant Lukoil Halts All Main Refineries After Ukrainian Drone Attacks
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Russia’s oil giant Lukoil has emergency-halted crude processing and petroleum product manufacturing at its Nizhegorodnefteorgsintez (NORSI) refinery following a fire caused by a drone strike on August 26, three industry sources reported to Reuters.
With NORSI offline, all major Russian refineries belonging to Lukoil have ceased raw material processing, following earlier shutdowns at Permnefteorgsintez on August 21 and the Volgograd refinery on July 31.
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The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, Gleb Nikitin, confirmed a drone attack on Wednesday that damaged an industrial facility in the area, though he did not name the specific company.
According to Reuters sources, the strike damaged individual processing units, inter-shop communications, and general plant utility systems. The sources were unable to provide a timeline for repairing the damage or resuming refining operations at NORSI.
NORSI ranks as Russia’s fourth-largest refinery by crude processing volume and second by gasoline production, with an annual capacity exceeding 15 million metric tons of crude oil.
The facility is capable of producing roughly 5 million metric tons of gasoline, over 5 million metric tons of diesel fuel, more than 2 million metric tons of fuel oil, and around 0.5 million metric tons of road bitumen per year.
The August 26 disruption follows multiple recent shutdowns at NORSI caused by drone strikes, with previous processing halts recorded on July 2, June 24, May 20, and April 5.
Following the production shutdown, Lukoil did not put up wholesale lots of motor gasoline, diesel fuel, or other petroleum products from the NORSI refinery for sale on the St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange on Wednesday.
According to satellite imagery analysis from the Dnipro Osint project on August 25, 2026, Russia’s LUKOIL-Permnefteorgsintez oil refinery lost approximately 86% of its primary crude-processing capacity—totaling roughly 11.3 million tons of crude oil per year—following Ukrainian drone strikes more than 1,500 kilometers from the border.
Several key atmospheric-vacuum distillation units sustained severe damage, including the AVT-5 unit with an annual capacity of 4.53 million tons, where distillation columns and crude oil dehydration systems were critically hit.
Additional repair work and crane activity were observed at the AVT-4 unit, which processes 4.94 million tons annually, while the AVT-1 unit, capable of handling 1.83 million tons per year, previously suffered a fire during the attack.
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