Russia Is Running Out of Fuel. Crimea Is Running Out of Time.
As we predicted, Ukrainian drones have destroyed more than half of Russia’s refining capacity. Now Trump’s Russia trap is closing around Putin’s prized Crimea.
by Rod D. Martin
July 24, 2026
On May 23, I wrote: “Omsk, home of Russia’s largest refinery, has not yet been hit. But Ukraine is walking the strike map east.”
Six weeks later, Omsk was burning.
Ukrainian drones flew roughly 1,700 miles to reach the giant Siberian refinery, one of the deepest strikes of the war. The attack damaged CDU-10, which accounts for 38 percent of the plant’s capacity, and forced the shutdown of CDU-11, another 37 percent, after critical network connections were hit. As a result, Omsk — Russia’s largest refinery and its biggest producer of gasoline — stopped processing oil and stopped selling gasoline and diesel on Russia’s principal commodities exchange.
Omsk was supposed to be the sanctuary. When Ukraine shut down refineries west of the Urals, Russia could shift production east. When Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Saratov, Syzran, and the rest were damaged, distant Siberia would make up the difference.
There is no “distant” anymore. Even Hitler couldn’t hit Omsk. Now nothing is safe.
By mid-July, unplanned outages and attacked capacity at Russian refineries had reached approximately 4.3 million barrels per day. That represents roughly 58 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity. Actual crude processing has fallen to about 3.8 million barrels per day, the lowest level in twenty-one years.
The practical result is unmistakable: the country that was once the world’s largest oil producer can no longer produce enough of the fuels its people, industry, and military require. But worse than that: at this rate of decline Russia will not be able to pay for its war. And the attacks are only increasing
This is the point I’ve been making for over a year. Trump has offered Putin both the carrot and the stick. Given time, peace will come, one way or the other. The carrot includes lifting sanctions, normalizing relations, vast U.S. investment into impoverished Russia, and crucially for Putin, relief from China’s predatory embrace.
Putin didn’t choose the carrot. So he’s getting the stick: first Shadow Fleet seizures, increasingly the destruction of Russia’s ability to fill that fleet, and at some point, bankruptcy. To achieve that, Trump has removed Biden’s limits on Ukraine’s ability to conduct deep strikes, has just greenlit a deal for Ukraine to locally produce Patriot air defense systems, with Raytheon now working toward co-production, and will soon ship the first of the 3,350 ERAM missiles I told you were coming late last year.
Putin should have taken the carrot.
An Oil Giant That’s Running Out of Fuel…and Cash
The scale is astonishing. Ukraine is not playing whack-a-mole with Russian refineries, nor is it fighting with one hand tied behind its back as it had to under Biden. It is dismantling a network.
In April, that looked like this:
