Ukraine launched a major long-range drone strike overnight on a key oil terminal in St Petersburg, Russia’s second city, hitting what Kyiv described as one of the largest petroleum facilities in the country. Ukrainian President Zelensky confirmed the strike, identifying the terminal as “infrastructure that generates revenue for Russia’s war.” The facility reportedly has a production capacity of 12.5 million tonnes of petroleum products per year. St Petersburg’s Governor Aleksandr Beglov acknowledged the attack, reporting that 72 Ukrainian drones were intercepted over the city and Leningrad region, with no casualties. The BBC independently verified the terminal was struck. Ukraine also claimed a simultaneous hit on the Kronstadt naval base, home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet, though Moscow has not publicly commented on that element. The strikes came roughly a week before the NATO summit in Turkey — a timing that is almost certainly not coincidental.
The received wisdom
The mainstream framing of Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign is sympathetic, even celebratory. Kyiv is doing what Western governments were too timid to enable earlier in the war: hitting Russian revenue streams and military infrastructure deep inside Russia. Every oil terminal struck is, the argument goes, a barrel fewer to fund missiles. The Biden-era reluctance to permit attacks inside Russia looked, in retrospect, like the kind of managerial risk-aversion that prolongs wars while pretending to limit them. Now that Kyiv has demonstrated the capability and the resolve — and Russia hasn’t retaliated with anything that has changed the Western calculus — progressive commentators argue that any hand-wringing about escalation is residual cold-war reflexes. If Putin hasn’t gone nuclear yet, he probably won’t. And if striking St Petersburg’s oil economy forces him to the table, so much the better.
There is something to this. The moral case for Ukraine defending itself by the most effective means available is robust. And the operational record does suggest that strikes on Russian energy infrastructure have imposed real costs: Putin himself made a rare public admission of fuel shortages caused by Ukrainian strikes, and he signed new domestic fuel legislation the same Saturday the St Petersburg terminal burned.
A different read
But the celebration of each escalatory step carries a risk that the mainstream framing obscures: the absence of catastrophic retaliation so far is not a stable equilibrium, it is a data point from a sequence that has not yet reached its terminus.
Russia has absorbed drone strikes on its capital, on border regions, and now on its second-largest city’s critical energy infrastructure. Each previous episode produced predictions of crossing a red line, followed by the observation that Putin did not, after all, cross it. This creates a narrative of impunity that quietly raises the ceiling for the next strike. But deterrence theory does not actually work this way. The logic of the opaque threat — the kind Putin has maintained throughout — is precisely that it preserves the option to act at a moment of his choosing rather than at a moment of ours. The West’s habit of learning from past non-escalations that there is no escalation risk is exactly the epistemic error that strategists worry about.
Consider the historical analogy. During the First World War, unrestricted submarine warfare was escalated gradually, each step rationalised by the absence of consequence from the last. The German High Command’s calculus was that they could absorb American anger up to the point where the war was over. They were wrong about the timeline, catastrophically so. The lesson is not that escalation always leads to catastrophe — it often doesn’t — but that confident predictions of the other side’s ceiling, made from outside their decision-making apparatus, have a poor track record.
What is actually happening here is a form of economic siege warfare conducted at drone range. Ukraine claims to have disabled roughly 43 percent of Russia’s oil refining capacity through the cumulative campaign, though that figure is unverified and contested. Even if it is half right, it represents a significant degradation of one of Russia’s main war-financing mechanisms. There is a genuine strategic case for this: a Russia running short of refined petroleum struggles to move armour, sustain air operations, and maintain logistics chains. Economic attrition has historically ended wars when it reaches a tipping point — the British blockade of Germany in 1914–18 being the most studied case.
The trouble is that a cornered petrostate with a nuclear arsenal and a leadership that has made national survival the explicit justification for the war is not a predictable opponent. Putin’s domestic political position depends substantially on maintaining the narrative of an existential Western assault on Russia. Every strike on St Petersburg — a city with five million civilians and enormous symbolic weight as the former imperial capital — feeds that narrative rather than undermining it. The risk is not just military escalation but political consolidation: each dramatic Ukrainian attack may be doing more to cement Russian public resolve than to fracture it.
There is a further issue that Western commentators consistently underweight: the NATO summit in Ankara next week. Both sides are positioning. Ukraine’s strikes are designed to demonstrate military relevance and to resist pressure for a ceasefire on terms that would freeze Russian territorial gains. Russia’s willingness to absorb the strikes without major retaliation may itself be positioning — demonstrating that it can endure the pain, while reserving the right to respond at a diplomatic moment of maximum leverage. The stakes around that summit are higher than the drone campaign on its own.
None of this means Ukraine shouldn’t fight, or shouldn’t use long-range weapons. It means the triumphalism that greets each new strike is doing analytical work that the facts don’t fully support.
What to watch
The Kremlin’s response in the next 72 hours will be telling: a proportionate strike on Ukrainian infrastructure or diplomatic signalling toward Ankara suggests Moscow remains in managed-escalation mode. Watch also whether Putin uses the St Petersburg strike in public messaging ahead of the NATO summit to depict Ukraine as an aggressor — that framing has been attempted before and partially stuck in some European publics. Finally, pay attention to whether Western governments quietly condition further long-range weapon supplies on Ukraine engaging in Ankara talks; that conditionality has appeared before and may reappear.
— J