\n<\/p>\n
In one section<\/span> of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these electronic panels from scratch: This company wants to use as few imported parts as possible, avoiding anything American, anything Chinese. Jewelers, I was told, have turned out to be well suited for this kind of finicky manufacturing. Ukraine\u2019s justly celebrated manicurists are good at it too.<\/p>\n They are not alone in being new to the job. Everyone in this factory had a different profession three years ago, because this factory did not exist three years ago. Nor did the Ukrainian drone industry, of which it forms part. Whatever their job description before Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, everyone at this production site is now part of a major shift in the politics and economics of the war, one that hasn\u2019t been fully understood by all of Ukraine\u2019s allies.<\/p>\n Once almost entirely dependent on imports of weapons from abroad, the Ukrainians are now producing millions of drones, large and small, as well as other kinds of weapons, every year. They are using them most famously on the front line, where they have prevented the Russians from making large-scale gains this year, despite dire headlines, and where they have ensured that any territory occupied by the Russians comes at a terrible price, in equipment and lives. The Ukrainians have also used sea drones to clear their Black Sea coast of Russian ships, an accomplishment that seemed impossible even to imagine at the start of the war.<\/p>\n Finally, they are using drones to hit distant targets, deep inside Russia, and lately they are hitting so many military objects, refineries, and pipelines that some Ukrainians believe they can do enough damage to force the Russians to end the war. On Monday, they once again struck Gazprom\u2019s fuel-processing plant in Astrakhan, for example, one of the largest gas-chemical complexes in the world and an important source of both gasoline and diesel. Yesterday, they hit a key part of an oil pipeline in Bryansk. Presumably President Volodymyr Zelensky transmitted this optimism to President Donald Trump, who again upended his administration\u2019s previous policies yesterday and declared that Ukraine is \u201cin a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.\u201d<\/p>\n The company that I visited, Fire Point, specializes in weaponry for these long-range attacks, producing large drones that can travel up to 1,400 kilometers and stay in the air for seven hours. Fire Point recently attracted attention for its newest product, the Flamingo cruise missile, which can hit targets at 3,000 kilometers, and the company is testing ballistic missiles, too. These capabilities have put Fire Point at the cutting edge of Ukraine\u2019s most ambitious strategy: the campaign to damage Russian refineries, pipeline stations, and other economic assets, especially oil-related assets. Trump has still never applied any real pressure on Russia, and is slowly lifting the Biden administration\u2019s sanctions by refusing to update them. By targeting Russia\u2019s oil and gas industry, the Ukrainians have been applying \u201csanctions\u201d on their own.<\/p>\n This campaign is<\/span> not new. I spoke with a Ukrainian officer responsible for helping coordinate the long-range-bombing campaign, and he told me that \u201csporadic\u201d attempts to hit targets deep in Russia began immediately after the start of the invasion. After the Ukrainians received some American drones under the aegis of a program called Phoenix Ghost, their efforts became more serious. Made for different kinds of wars, the American drones were susceptible to Russian jamming, and the U.S. imposed restrictions on their use. One former soldier now involved in drone manufacturing told me that the Ukrainians weren\u2019t necessarily prepared to use them either. He and some colleagues found boxes of drones in a warehouse along with some other U.S. equipment in the first year of the war, and figured out how to use them from videos they found on the internet. Only later did they receive real instruction. (I agreed not to identify the officer or the former soldier, who fear for their security.)<\/p>\n Whatever their faults, these American donations did inspire the creation of long-range-drone units. Some are part of the military; others are connected to Ukrainian intelligence. As they grew to understand the technology, the commanders of these units, just like the teams deploying battlefield drones and sea drones, concluded that they needed their own drones, as well as their own drone research and development, with a constant feedback loop between the operators on the front lines and the industrial engineers. As the officer told me, \u201cEverything interesting started a year ago, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine started to receive mass numbers of Ukrainian-made drones.\u201d Once their own production lines were in place, they were not trapped by technology invented somewhere else, and they could continually update it to counter advances in Russian tactics and electronic-warfare technology: \u201cWhat we had two years ago or a year ago,\u201d the officer said, \u201cit\u2019s dramatically different from what we are operating right now.\u201d A weapon that worked last winter might no longer have been useful over the summer.<\/p>\n As a result of both new technology and expanded capacity, the numbers of attacks inside Russia have increased. The officer told me that Ukraine\u2019s long-range-drone units now launch several dozen strikes on Russia every night.<\/p>\n Until recently, the impact of the long-range-drone campaign was hard to measure. The Ukrainians do not always admit to hitting targets deep inside Russia, and many of the targets are in obscure places, where no one is around to record the strike on a cellphone. Russian authorities also make a major effort to hide these strikes and the damage they do, both from their own population and from the rest of the world. On one occasion, Ukrainians learned from satellite pictures that their drones had successfully struck a military airport. They could see debris, oil spills, and other evidence of a successful attack. Just three hours later, all of that evidence was gone: The Russians had cleared the airfield and cleaned the tarmac.<\/p>\n Sometimes evidence emerges anyway, usually via a home video, posted to Telegram, made by a Russian who happens to be near a burning factory or exploding refinery and is shouting for his wife to come and look. But even so, it can be hard to know whether these dramatic fires are caused by drones or by Ukraine\u2019s even more clandestine sabotage campaign inside Russia, alleged to have both Russian and Ukrainian participants. The vacuum has left the field open for what the officer called \u201cfake experts,\u201d and sometimes false claims from those who want to steal credit.<\/p>\n But the Ukrainian military does keep careful track of the damage being done, and has thought carefully about how to prioritize certain targets. It has disrupted airports and hit weapons factories and depots. The Ukrainian officer told me that, early on in the war, his colleagues realized that the Russians are not deterred by the deaths of their soldiers: \u201cRussia can sustain extremely high levels of casualties and losses in human lives. They don\u2019t care about people\u2019s lives.\u201d However, \u201cit is painful for them to lose money.\u201d They need money to fund their oligarchy, as well as to bribe their soldiers to fight: \u201cSo naturally, we need to reduce the amount of money available for them.\u201d Oil and oil products provide the majority of Russia\u2019s state income. This is how the oil industry became the Ukrainians\u2019 most important target.<\/p>\n The campaign against<\/span> the oil industry has been helped by the degradation of Russian air defenses, which had been moved closer to the border of Ukraine and at the moment aren\u2019t numerous enough to cover every possible economic target across a very large country. Since August, 16 of 38 Russian refineries have been hit, some multiple times. Among them are\u00a0 facilities in Samara, Krasnodar, Volgograd, Novokuibyshevsk, and Ryazan, among others, as well as oil depots in Sochi; an oil terminal at Primorsk, in the Baltic; and pumping stations along another pipeline that supplies crude oil in Ust-Luga, in the northern part of the Baltic. In August, the Ukrainians also hit the Unecha pumping station, a crucial part of the Druzhba pipeline that links Russia and Europe and still supplies oil to Hungary and Slovakia, the two European countries that have sought to block or undermine sanctions on Ukraine (and the only two European NATO states who, alongside Turkey, import Russian oil at all).<\/p>\n The result: Russian overall oil exports are now at their lowest point since the start of the war, and the Russians are running out of oil at home. The commander of Ukraine\u2019s Unmanned Systems Forces has said that more than a fifth of Russian refining capacity has been destroyed. The regime has banned the export of refined oil products, because there isn\u2019t enough for the domestic market. Gas stations are closed or badly supplied in areas across the country, including the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Telegram accounts post videos of cars waiting in enormous lines. Earlier this month, Izvestiya<\/em>, a state-owned newspaper, actually admitted to its readers that severe fuel shortages are spreading across central and eastern Russia, as well as in Crimea, a problem it attributed, laughably, to \u201cthe seasonal increase in fuel demand and the growth of tourism activity.\u201d<\/p>\n Quietly, Europeans are backing Ukraine\u2019s strategy. The Germans will invest $10.5 billion in support for Ukraine this year and next, a large chunk of which will be spent building drones. Sweden has pledged $7.4 billion. The European Union\u2019s decision to invest $6 billion in a \u201cDrone Alliance\u201d with Ukraine is mostly designed to build anti-drone defenses along Europe\u2019s eastern border, but that money will also accelerate production and benefit Ukraine as well.<\/p>\n Both the Ukrainians and their European allies are also looking harder at the so-called shadow fleet, the oil tankers now traveling around the world under flags of convenience, fraudulent flags, or no flags at all, carrying illicit Russian oil. Many are old, dangerous boats, with inexperienced crew and little or no insurance. Some have been involved in accidents already, and they could do real environmental damage in the Baltic Sea. Sweden, Germany, and Denmark have all announced that they will check the papers of these shadow tankers and sanction those that aren\u2019t insured, adding them to a growing list of sanctioned ships. The point, for the moment, is not just to protect the environment but to raise the costs of Russian oil exports and thus to reduce the amount of money flowing into Russia and back up Ukraine\u2019s air campaign. More extreme measures, including banning these unmarked, uninsured ships from the Baltic altogether, are under consideration too.<\/p>\n But that will take time, which no one in Ukraine wants to waste. No one wants to wait for Trump to impose new sanctions on Russia either. Drones, which can defend the front line and take the battle deep into Russia, can do more. In an address to the nation on September 14, Zelensky put it very clearly: \u201cThe most effective sanctions\u2014the ones that work the fastest\u2014are the fires at Russia\u2019s oil refineries, its terminals, oil depots.\u201d In the absence of an American policy that offers something other than rhetoric, the Ukrainians, backed by Europe, will pursue their own solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In one section of a sprawling warehouse in central Ukraine, workers have stacked what appear to be small airplane wings in neat rows. In another section, a group of men is huddled around what looks like the body of an aircraft, adjusting an electronic panel. In makeshift locations elsewhere in Ukraine, workers are producing these<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2993,1436,672,7230,4371,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-23570","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-machine","9":"tag-plan","10":"tag-russian","11":"tag-starve","12":"tag-ukraines","13":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}