[Itse]

Ukraine has really ramped up it's attacks on Russia. oil refineries, hurting at least 14 just in August. In comparison, last year it took a 4 month campaign to hit less targets not as hard as they've been hit this year. Russia is also reporting that it's shooting down 3 digit numbers of drones and other things per day. (They don't release numbers on what they haven't shot down).

Here's Perun with longform analysis on the topic of Ukraines "kinetic sanctions" campaign, AKA "falling debris delivery system", or the artist previously known as "smoking accidents".

Some non-obvious points:
- Hitting oil refineries amont means that Russia needs to dump crude oil to global markets, which isn't just much less profitable than selling refined products, it also lowers the price of crude oil globally, creating an additional profit cutting effect.

- Fuel trains have also been a popular target for both drones and Ukrainian special forces. This is likely less about oil infrastructure though, and more about the fact that fuel trains are very soft targets that creates a nice big mess on the tracks that takes (relatively speaking) lot of time and effort to clean up and repair before that part of the railway system.ia back in use.

- Another target has been the oil pipeline delivering oil to, among other places, Hungary. Hungary being one of the two countriea that hasn't done much anything to cut down on buying oil from Russia (the other is Slovakia), so that hits their economy pretty bad. Hungary is also a major exporter of electricity to Ukraine, and as a response to the strikes on the pipeline, Orban has threatened to cut down on those electricity exports.

- Despite the West saying it has lifted restrictions on the use of western weapon systems, we still haven't seen a single case of a western weapon system used against the refineries. The most likely reason is of course that the West is full of s***, and they're still putting restrictions on the use of their weapons. While they aren't explicitly saying it anymore, it seems the West is still generally speaking very much against the strategy of bombing oil infrastructure, and that is also likely a big reason why they still won't sell more long range weaponry to Ukraine. This despite the fact that a prolonged campaign with better weapons that would overwhelm Russias ability to repair their facilities would quickly beat the crap out of Russian economy and very likely force them to pull out of the war in a matter of months.

- That said, while we can't say for sure what the exact impact of the campaign has had, and even estimates will take time, it's very likely a significant drain on Russia economically.

- The timing of this intensified campaign against the refineries is not accidental. This time of year is peak fuel consumption time in Russia, as their vast agricultural sector is busy harvesting. Plus it's holiday travel season. Like we have already seen in previous years, Russia has again been forced to ban export of refined oil products for this period.