What Moscow doesn't know about its own oil refineries

Western analysts keep asking whether Ukraine's campaign against Russian refineries is actually working. I ran Russia's largest oil company and my answer is yes.

The gasoline lines are back in Russia. The fuel situation had only just begun to stabilize when new strikes hit the refineries and brought back the shortages at gas stations.

In the West, this keeps raising the same question: can Ukraine inflict damage on the Russian oil industry so critical that routine, background-mode repair no longer replaces the losses? Or will Russia simply patch things up, as it has so far and as Moscow insists it always will?

The short answer: yes, it can.

Repairing — seriously repairing — a plant that has been hit with tens or hundreds of kilograms of explosives, a plant that has burned and been doused with water, is impossible without shutting it down. Work like that requires major capital repair, with the replacement of the units themselves.

That is not being done. What is being done is the opposite. Scheduled maintenance is being stopped, and by that means the plants squeeze out somewhat more fuel. The quality fuel they can no longer produce is being replaced with low-quality fuel, which duly ruins car engines. This relieves some of the tension on the gasoline market, and on the fuel market generally. But it’s not equal to repairing the plants, even if they’re kept operational and there’s no immediate shortage, they are dramatically degraded compared to baseline.

If that's the case, at what point do patches on top of patches on top of patches become critical, and everything breaks down completely?

No one will tell you that, and neither can I.

But this is the thing I know for certain: if fire burns around a refinery unit for long enough, and the unit heats up, then its structural strength decreases — its ability to hold weight, withstand pressure, and withstand temperature. By how much does it decrease? That can be calculated, but only by conducting very serious studies, and for those studies the units have to be stopped. And yet, nobody is stopping them. So in reality, the calculation can only be done approximately.

This is the detail that outside observers don’t get: it is not that Moscow is hiding the true condition of its refineries from the world.

They themselves don’t know it.

And no one will tell you that this particular strike will be the last one, the one after which the unit simply collapses. But the Ukrainians are continuing to strike the refineries and at some point this will lead to very heavy technological consequences that cannot be made good while the plants keep running. That is what irreparable means here: not that the damage looks dramatic today, but that it accumulates in the steel itself, faster than anything the current mode of operation can restore.

I very much hope these consequences stop at technology and do not claim more human lives. But that, too, is possible: if a hole has simply been punched in a unit, that is a disaster — but it is one kind of disaster. If at some moment a unit or a storage tank collapses and the fuel splashes out in all directions, and there are people standing nearby, that is a disaster of a completely different kind.

I remember from my Yukos years that a significant number of units, and a significant number of storage tanks, stand on rises — they are placed so that fuel can drain from them downhill, by gravity; not all of them, but a significant share. Around them, there are containment berms.

But if such a tank, an enormous vessel, loses its structural strength in a single minute, and that can happen if it has been hit several times, then the fuel inside will spill out all at once. And it will flow downhill. Where will it flow? Who and what will be on its way? In some cases, people have managed to build settlements in these areas: somewhere dacha plots, somewhere outright residential neighborhoods. And, of course, no Russian official is going to tell those people any of this. If a catastrophe like that comes, the responsibility will lie with the man who started this war and works and lies every day to hide its consequences from his citizens.

No one can name the day when the patches give out — not in Kyiv, not in Washington, and not in Moscow. But the question is no longer whether Ukraine’s campaign is working, it’s what happens as the breaking point approaches.