Ukraine Struck The Last Oil Refinery Supplying Moscow And The Moscow Region
- 16.07.2026, 14:02
Explosions in Yaroslavl.
On Thursday morning, Ukrainian drones attacked Yaroslavl. One of the drones exploded on the grounds of a local oil refinery, according to a video geolocated by an OSINT analyst from “The Agency”. The Yaroslavl Oil Refinery is the last of four major oil refineries that supplied fuel to the Moscow region and continued to operate after attacks by Ukrainian drones.
The Yaroslavl Region came under a massive drone attack on Thursday, according to Governor Mikhail Evraev. According to him, “19 drones were shot down in the first wave alone.” The official reported one fatality and four injuries.
The Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Supernova+ has published a video of a drone attack, allegedly in Yaroslavl. The footage shows the drone flying over an industrial zone and then diving, followed by an explosion.
An OSINT analyst from “The Agency” determined that the drone exploded on the grounds of the Yaroslavl Oil Refinery.
The Yaroslavl Oil Refinery is the fifth-largest oil refinery in Russia in terms of processing capacity. It can process 15.72 million metric tons of crude oil per year. Today’s attack on this refinery was at least the seventh since the beginning of the year.
Significance. This plant is one of three refineries (the other two are in Ryazan and the Nizhny Novgorod region) that, according to Sergey Vakulenko, an expert at the Carnegie Eurasia Center, supply gasoline to the Moscow region via the petroleum products pipeline, and all of them have already been attacked.
The Ryazan refinery suspended operations after a drone strike on May 15, Reuters reported. There have been no reports of the refinery resuming operations.
In late June, the Kstovo refinery in the Nizhny Novgorod region suspended oil refining following another strike. Ukraine continued to launch strikes against it even after that.
There had been no reports of the Yaroslavl Oil Refinery suspending operations until today.
Another key supplier to the Moscow region—the Kapotna Refinery—is located in Moscow itself. It meets about 35–40% of the Moscow region’s fuel needs. According to Reuters, this refinery halted operations after two attacks in June and is unlikely to resume operations before the end of the year.
The fuel crisis in Russia continues to escalate. In seven regions (including the annexed Crimea and Sevastopol), the average price of 95-octane gasoline has already exceeded 100 rubles per liter, according to Rosstat data. Over the past week, the number of such regions has nearly doubled.
At the same time, a second region has introduced QR-code-based fueling, and an eighth has adopted the “even-odd” system. The “GdeBenz” service, whose data was analyzed by German economist Janis Klug, also does not show any significant improvement in the availability of gas stations in Russian regions.
According to Klug’s analysis, only in Moscow and St. Petersburg do most of the gas stations tracked by “GdeBenz” operate without lines or with short lines of up to five cars. At the same time, the situation in St. Petersburg has improved significantly in recent days.