Name: Why Ukraine focuses its long-range strikes on Russian oil infrastructure | DW News
Uploaded: 2025-12-12T16:51:09.000Z
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Russian forces pounding Ukrainian front lines.

Moscow says it has taken control of the key city of Pokrovsk.

After months of brutal combat, Ukraine says its forces still hang on to a sliver of the city.

Taking Pokrovsk, which sits at a key road and rail crossroads, was a priority for Russia.

Russian forces are now trying to encircle Konstantinivka.

Taking both cities would make it easier to access Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

Russia controls just over 19% of Ukrainian territory, however, just 1% more than the end of 2022.

Most of those gains came this year, while taking almost 400,000 casualties.

Ukraine is suffering from a shortage of manpower and worsening morale.

But the frontline is saturated with killer drones, making quick Russian advances almost impossible.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pressing allies to keep supplies flowing.

And whether there will be peace depends on Russia, on our collective pressure on Russia, and

on the correct negotiating positions of the United States, Europe and all our other partners.

Far behind the front lines, Russia has again ramped up its attacks on Ukraine's energy and heating infrastructure to record levels.

As winter starts to bite, many regions have suffered rolling blackouts and emergency power cuts, including the capital.

People in Kyiv have been getting electricity for only about 10 hours a day.

Ukraine is meanwhile stepping up its own attacks on Russia's oil sector in an effort to cut off Russia's ability to finance the war.

Last month saw the most attacks so far, mainly conducted by drones on refineries and storage sites in Russia itself.

Ukraine has also started to attack oil tankers in the Black Sea using sea drones.

Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to target Ukrainian ports and commercial vessels, as well as ships belonging to Ukraine's supporters.

If that continues, well, the most radical option is to cut Ukraine off from the sea.

I hope that Ukrainian military leadership, the political leadership and those behind them will consider whether it's worth continuing this practice.

Both sides are trying to hit the other as hard as possible as the US and Europe prepare different peace plans, trying to secure the most favorable terms they can get.

She's a military analyst in the Department of Defence Studies at King's College, London.

Do you see any significant changes on the battlefield since these negotiations this back and forth started?

What we're seeing on the battlefield is essentially a continuation of what we have been seeing in the past months, namely Russia's offensive into multiple directions, including the obelisk of Dimoropetrovsk, including Zaporizhzhia.

So the fact that such cities such as Pokrovsk are now appearing more frequently in the news.

The Ukrainian side is denying is an effort of many months, if not years.

So essentially, of course, the Russians will try to push as much as they can during this time and continue offensive.

That being said, I don't know in how far we will be seeing immediate results from the actions because it always takes time.

Ukraine has increasingly taken aim at Russia's infrastructure.

There have been attacks on oil refineries and tankers at sea.

Is this having a real effect that's being felt?

In order to be able to say whether the attacks on Russian shadow fleet and Russian oil production facilities are having an effect, you would have to construct a statistical model and see how much effect those attacks do have.

So it is impossible to say because the Russian economy is suffering.

So it's very difficult to construct a causal relationship between the attacks and the effect on the Russian economy.

That being said, of course, given Ukraine's situation and given its capabilities, Ukraine's military intelligence as well as security services have been trying to find other ways to weaken Russia's resolve on the one hand, on the other hand, to weaken the economy further, arguing basically that Western sanctions are not doing their job and Ukraine should be taking it into its own hands and do whatever it can to at least create some sort of damage.

And again, we also have to remember that this is a sequential strategy.

But if it is continued over a prolonged period of time, it might have an effect.

But this is a kind of a long term effect that we might be able to see and to study later on.

As of now, it is psychological, of course, it is informational.

Winter is arriving, it's December, the weather's going to get worse in the coming months.

Does that favor the attacker or the defender?

It favors the best prepared side, quite simply because preparations for winter campaigns do not start in December.

They start and each side is preparing for winter operations, changing to winter uniforms, getting lubricating vehicles, and

So it's quite an extensive operation to prepare for winter offensive or defensive operations, depending on which side we're looking at.

it's probably not easier than attacking or defending in spring where you have a lot of mud.

So from that perspective, I would say it depends on who prepared better for winter.

We can now talk to Simon Diggins, defence and security analyst and a former British army officer.

Simon, in your opinion, which side is currently more successful in improving its negotiating position through acts on the battlefield direction, the battlefield?

I think the real issue in terms of who is actually winning or losing is who the strategic partners and supporters are.

I think at that point we have a position where Russia has pulled through negotiation and through shared common interests, appear to support America rather more than it has supported in terms of its support.

So the battlefield is a very, very close fight the whole time.

For example, the city of Cross, which was mentioned in, in your report, the Russians been trying to get hold of that for 18 months, and

the literally hundreds of thousands of casualties as a result.

So what really counts is who's making the big changes at the operational and at the street level on that point.

At the moment, I would say Russia has the advantage.

When we look at the advantage, the advances that Russia is making on the battlefields, they have been very slow.

They have been limited and extremely costly, of course.

I think in terms of the role of attrition sometimes is not just to bring down casualties, but

And that's where Russia has the advantage in terms of resources, in terms of its manpower, It's a much larger country than Ukraine.

It has, has the economy to, to match and it has the manpower to match.

So that's the real, that's the advantage that Russia over this.

I mean, but we shouldn't underestimate the kind of the pain that these casualties are causing within Russia.

Over a million killed and wounded so far in this campaign, but

they're getting over it by paying people lots of money to fight for them.

So I think people are looking at and going, you know what if I die, my family's going to be sorted out for life.

And that's what they're looking to try and to try and do.

But it means it makes for a very slow warfare on the ground itself.

I Think both sides have worked out modern warfare is this game of attrition, the use of drones, use of artillery, defense in depth, none of which makes for an easy operational breakthrough in order to achieve a decisive result on the battlefield.

Have combat dynamics changed at all since peace negotiations started?

I think not particularly, except that what we have seen is a ramping up of some attacks on, for example, infrastructure.

So the Ukrainians at the moment are focusing a lot of their long range missile strikes on oil infrastructure and everything that goes alongside that.