Russia’s Leningrad Oblast lies some 600 kilometers from the closest corner of Ukraine.
But on April 15, its governor declared it a “frontline” region. Part of his explanation: From January through March, a total of 243 Ukrainian drones were shot down over the province, he said.
Some drones were not shot down, though. From export terminals on the Gulf of Finland to refineries inland, oil facilities in the region that surrounds St. Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin’s hometown, have been among the hardest hit in an upsurge of Ukrainian strikes on Russian hydrocarbon production, storage, and export infrastructure.
The attacks, which often hit hundreds of kilometers or more from the front lines, have changed the tenor of Russia’s war on Ukraine, now in its fifth year since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of the neighboring country in February 2022.
To what degree they may change the war's trajectory is not yet clear. But the strikes -- mainly with drones but also with missiles, and also targeting military installations such as air defense systems, airfields, and weapons plants -- come as Russia struggles on the battlefield, advancing at a glacial pace and at a massive cost in soldiers killed and wounded.
They have hampered Russia’s ability to profit from sharp increases in the price of oil -- a key source of funding fueling its war on Ukraine that have resulted from the US-Israeli war with Iran and Tehran’s throttling of the Strait of Hormuz.
They have made images of black smoke billowing over Russian oil facilities seem suddenly almost commonplace and brought Moscow’s war on Ukraine home to Russians in the Black Sea port of Tuapse, for example, where residents reported oily droplets raining down amid a series of strikes in recent weeks.
And they have led Putin to scale down plans for the May 9 military parade in Red Square commemorating Nazi Germany’s World War II defeat: The Victory Day event is set to take place without a show of heavy weapons such as tanks and intercontinental ballistic missiles for the first time in almost 20 years. Smaller parades in several cities have been cancelled.
According to French open-source researcher Clement Molin, Ukraine launched about 1,000 drones into Russia in August 2024, 3,000 in July 2025, and 7,000 in March -- for the first time, more than Russia launched into Ukraine.
The number, based in part on Russian Defense Ministry figures, decreased moderately in April. But in any case, measuring the effects is a matter of quality in addition to quantity, in part because Moscow's claims about the number of drones its military has downed are unreliable.
"I would be careful about drawing too strong conclusions from the raw figures alone.... That said, the broader trend is real," John Helin, co-founder of the research organization Black Bird Group, told RFE/RL. "Ukraine has clearly expanded its long-range drone strike capacity, and Russia is now challenged to defend a much larger rear area against regular Ukrainian attacks."
The numbers "suggest a change in scale, but the success of Ukraine's long-range campaign should be judged more by effects," Helin said, such as "what was hit, how often, how deep inside of Russia, whether the strikes forced Russia to disperse air defence, disrupted logistics, reduced refinery output, or imposed real economic and military costs."
"On those counts it’s clear that the Ukrainian long-range campaign is becoming increasingly effective," he said.
Ukraine struck Russian oil infrastructure at least 21 times in April, including nine strikes on processing facilities, which helped cut the country’s crude oil processing volume to its lowest level since 2009, according to Bloomberg News.
On the battlefield and in air attacks carried out by both countries, drones have become a massive factor in the deadliest war in Europe since 1945, and both sides are seeking to build, acquire, and improve them as fast as they can.
“Today, our Ukrainian drones have fundamentally changed approaches to warfare,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at a demonstration in April marking Ukraine’s Gunsmith Day, where he showed off more than 30 types of drones.
Ukraine’s new defense minister, Mykhaylo Fedorov, said in late April that Kyiv purchased more drones in his first three months in office than it did in all of last year.
“We are now seeing the moment when the capabilities of Russia's air defense are much smaller than the growth in production of Ukrainian drones,” Oleksandr Karpyuk, a soldier with the 59th Assault Brigade of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces who goes by the call sign Serge Marco, told RFE/RL.
Targeting Russian air defense systems is a crucial element in Ukraine’s strategy, soldiers, officials, and military analysts suggest -- whether it means damaging or destroying them with direct strikes or neutralizing them by sending multiple drones their way, keeping them busy and unable to protect targets against missiles and other attacks.
If Russian systems shoot down dozens or hundreds of drones, those systems will be depleted, opening the skies for further strikes, Karpyuk said: "First the drones arrive, then the missiles arrive. They take out the air defense systems -- and that means some Flamingos, with a 1,000-kilogram warhead, can strike [the targets] with ease.”
Ukraine has been touting the homegrown Flamingo cruise missiles. It fired several of them on May 5, Zelenskyy said, including in an attack on a plant in Cheboksary, some 1,200 kilometers from Ukraine, that makes navigation components for Russia's military. The regional governor said at least two people were killed and more than 30 injured.
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces destroyed 41 Russian air defense units in March, according to the service’s commander, Robert Brovdi, stepping up the pace after destroying 54 units over the previous three months.
Analysts caution that such claims are hard to verify. Oryx, an outfit that monitors wartime military equipment losses, counted 18 destroyed or damaged Russian surface-to-air air defense systems and seven radars in March.
Whatever the numbers, the destruction or incapacitation of air defense systems can help Ukrainian forces at the front repel Russian advances and make their own gains.
It also “opens a window for deep strikes, middle strikes, and effective strikes. We see them in the Leningrad region and along the Black Sea coast," Oleksiy Bezuhliy, spokesman for the 413th Separate Regiment of the Unmanned Systems Forces, told RFE/RL, referring to the recent wave of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil facilities.
Russia’s vastness increases its vulnerability to Ukrainian “air defense suppression strikes,” according to University of Oslo researcher Fabian Hoffmann, because the loss of a single system can mean an entire area is no longer under the umbrella.
A focus on protecting Putin, the government, and Moscow may leave far-flung energy and military facilities or forces near the front more exposed -- a factor that has come to the fore ahead of the May 9 parade in Moscow, a high-profile annual event that Putin presides over from a grandstand near Lenin's Tomb.
"Russia's apparent reluctance to redeploy assets from the tight ring of air defense and missile defense around Moscow -- likely due to fears of bringing the realities of war closer to the regime's door -- exacerbates the problem," Hoffman wrote.
In an April 12 blog post, he wrote that the “strike campaign alone does not win Ukraine the war, nor does it eliminate Russia’s economic potential.”
However, he added, the cumulative effects of the restraints it imposes “are real, bearing meaningfully on Russia’s budget and planning even if they fall short of collapsing its capacity to wage war.”
