Do Ukraine's Refinery Strikes Work? Lee and Putiata Disagree

Ukraine's refinery strikes do real damage but often fail to stop production, and probably only 15% to 30% of the drones get through, says Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Dmytro Putiata, a veteran sergeant of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, argues that burning refineries keep working because the critical components are not being hit, so in his opinion the efficiency is quite questionable.

Lee does not dismiss the campaign. He knows a certain percentage of Russian refining is offline and that some long-term damage appears, but he says the real verdict will have to wait until after the war. The two men argued it out in early August 2026, and the disagreement tells a reader more than either view alone.

How many Ukrainian deep-strike drones reach a refinery?

Lee's figure is low. Most of the drones are defeated and do not get to the target: "we're talking probably 15, 30% or something like that," he says. Russia jams them, and Russia has air defence.

The drones that do arrive are not precise. Ukraine's deep-strike drones navigate on a combination of inertial navigation and GPS or GNSS guidance, which Lee calls not perfect. He points to a video from the previous week in which a deep-strike drone, he was not sure of the type, missed a big factory. They are not really precision-guided munitions, he says, because the accuracy is not perfect.

That matters more at a refinery than at a warehouse. Lee draws the line himself. Huge factories such as Wildberries' are hard to miss. Refineries are big too, but hitting the right parts of one is difficult, and with ordinary guidance, maybe you hit the place you need and maybe you do not.

Why does a burning refinery keep working?

This is Putiata's objection. Ukraine strikes refineries and there is a decent picture of something burning, but the plant keeps working after the strike, because the critical components were not hit.

His analogy is a railway station. Destroying the depot is not the main thing. There are particular components, such as those that supply electricity to the lines, that need to be destroyed, and once they are, you do not need to destroy everything else. Refineries are the same, he says: the strikes look awesome, it is burning, and so on, but frankly speaking the efficiency is, in his opinion, quite questionable.

Lee concedes part of it. A video of a huge fire gets a lot of attention online, but if the fire is put out after a day or two, and sometimes it is only a small facility, Russia has lost some oil in storage while the plant itself keeps working. That is not huge long-term damage. Then he gives the other side: he knows a certain percentage of capacity is offline, and some long-term damage appears.

The exchange runs for about four minutes, with Lee's hit rate first and Putiata's railway station straight after it. Hear Lee and Putiata argue over refinery strikes at 1:34:47.

What would make refinery strikes more accurate?

Lee's answer is Starlink, which is not enabled inside Russia. If it were enabled across Russia, he says, the accuracy of deep strike would improve significantly, which he calls a real game changer. He separates two gains.

The first is terminal guidance. If an operator can manually guide a drone into the target, it can hit a very specific place: the component Putiata is talking about, rather than the site around it.

The second is immediate battle damage assessment. With a live link, Ukraine would know exactly what it hit, without waiting for satellite imagery or anything else. For a campaign whose central dispute is whether the right parts are being hit, that is the missing measurement.

Lee also floats a narrower request: open Starlink for something like 300 kilometres from the border, where the Iskander launchers are. Why that link matters so much to cheap drones, and where it stops, is set out in Rob Lee and Dmytro Putiata on Ukraine's Starlink dependence.

Can Russia keep fighting despite the refinery strikes?

For now, Lee says, yes. Is Russia's economy still running, will it keep chugging along, can it continue the war? The answer is yes, he says, for right now.

He places the refinery campaign inside a wider economic war of tit-for-tat strikes, with costs rising on both sides. Russia has gone after Nova Poshta for a long time. Ukraine has hit Wildberries. Russia had just struck Novus, Epicentr and Rozetka.

Shipping is now part of it. Lee's understanding, and he says he might be wrong, is that there was some kind of agreement early in the war, in 2023 or 2024, that neither side would go after the other's shipping because it would be too damaging for both. That is not holding. Ukraine knocked out tankers going to Crimea to try to isolate it, and Russia has gone aggressively after ships in and out of Odesa with Shahed drones. Much of Ukraine's grain went out through those ports. Land routes exist, but they are less efficient, and transit countries such as Romania may not want the grain or may not have facilities of the size needed.

Who does the fuel war favour?

Putiata thinks it is quite questionable who comes out ahead: Ukraine hitting targets near Crimea, or Russia hitting the whole Ukrainian economy through the vessels in the Black Sea. He drops a hint that Russia may win more from it than Ukraine.

Lee goes back to fundamentals. Russia is a bigger country, with more people and a bigger economy, and whenever both sides hit the same kind of target in a war of attrition, the question is who feels it more sensitively.

He ends on strategy rather than damage. Russia has shown a strong ability to take very heavy costs: its manpower losses are very high, there is no political uprising, and nothing suggests one in the near future. There are indications of another mobilisation this autumn, and if Putin can enlarge the force, the war could get much more difficult next year. Whether he will judge mobilisation a risk worth taking, Lee does not know. How close Russia is to running out of soldiers is the subject of Rob Lee on Russia's breaking point.