According to its own account, Ukraine has set several oil tanks on fire at the “Samara” pumping and distribution station in Russia’s Samara region and hit several targets at the Lipetsk-2 military airfield in the Lipetsk region. Both attacks are said to have taken place as early as Friday, as Ukraine’s General Staff announced on Saturday, 14 November.
At the station near the settlement of Prosvet, several storage tanks caught fire, reported the military news agency ArmijaInform, citing the General Staff, as written by the Berliner Zeitung. According to Ukraine‘s domestic intelligence service SBU, long-range drones of its “Alpha” special unit attacked the station; hits on storage tanks have been provisionally confirmed, reports the Ukrainian news outlet LB.ua. A Russian statement was initially not available. An independent confirmation of the reports was also not available.
According to the General Staff, the facility is one of the important transshipment points in the Russian pipeline network. There it receives crude oil from Tatarstan, western Siberia and other producing regions, various crude oil grades are blended into the export mix Urals and then forwarded via long-distance pipelines. According to figures from Bloomberg cited by the Berliner Zeitung, the storage capacity comprises more than 1.6 million cubic metres. Crude oil from Kazakhstan is also routed through the hub, including towards the Druzhba pipeline and the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.
The General Staff explicitly placed the attack in the context of Russian war revenues. “Urals accounts for up to half of all Russian oil exports. Every damaged tank in Samara therefore directly hits the most important source of money from which the aggressor pays for missiles, drones and the war against Ukraine,” the Kyiv Post quotes from the statement.
One hub, hit several times
The Samara station has already been the target of Ukrainian drones several times. According to Radio Svoboda, satellite images from 8 November are said to show considerable damage after earlier attacks – up to ten tanks were burnt out, and the surrounding infrastructure was also heavily damaged. After an earlier attack, Kazakhstan had to temporarily suspend transport via the Atyrau–Samara pipeline. How much additional damage the facility suffered on Friday and what consequences this has for ongoing operations initially remained open.
At the Lipetsk-2 military airfield, which according to the General Staff houses Russian combat aviation forces, a hangar with special equipment for aircraft maintenance, an aviation fuel tank and the central flight control centre were hit on Friday, reports the Ukrainian news agency UNN, as written by the Berliner Zeitung. n-tv.de also reports, citing the General Staff, hits on the command and control point, a fuel tank and a hangar for storing special equipment for aircraft maintenance. The airfield is located around 360 kilometres north-east of Kharkiv.
Attacks on the oil industry as a strategy
According to the Kyiv Post, the operations in Samara and Lipetsk are part of a series of Ukrainian long-range attacks on Russian armaments and energy infrastructure. In the night to 13 November, the Ukrainian navy reportedly deployed sea-launched Neptune cruise missiles against three drone-related facilities in Rostov-on-Don, including a production workshop and a warehouse of the drone manufacturer Ionos LLC as well as a front-line maintenance centre of Aero-Hit LLC, the manufacturer of the FPV drone Veles. In early November, according to the Kyiv Post, Neptune systems hit the Proton-Elektroteks microelectronics plant in Oryol, which produces components for Iskander missiles and cruise missiles; at the end of October, two Su-34 fighter-bombers were also said to have been destroyed at the Marinovka airfield in the Volgograd region.
According to figures from Bloomberg cited by the Berliner Zeitung, Ukraine had resumed its intensified attacks on Russia’s oil industry at the end of October. Previously there had been a pause of almost two weeks, which coincided with demands by US President Donald Trump for restraint; Trump had sought lower fuel prices before the congressional elections.
The latest attacks fall in a phase of intensive diplomatic efforts. Russian and Ukrainian delegations had negotiated in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday under US mediation; afterwards the US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Dublin.
The editorial assessment: As long as Kyiv relies on attacks against oil and armaments infrastructure, the number of hits from Ukrainian sources is likely to continue to rise – they are usually only independently verifiable with a time lag, for example via satellite images or Russian operator statements.
