Originally Posted by
Tartiflette Fan
Have to say- albeit as someone with no knowledge of the oil-industry - I can't believe that they have destroyed 12% of Russia's refining capacity.in 2 days as Bloomberg claims. Believable for me would be " have hit refineries responsible for 12% of ......" which might then mean destruction of 1-2% ( pure guess ) refining capacity.
Good news is that ZSU is able to hit the very core of refineries = distillation columns. If this is destroyed the whole refinery will halt. It is not known how quickly they can replace them (e.g. in Ploiesti during WW2 Germans were able to get them on line within weeks after the first raid) but with lack of workforce and sanctioned import of technologies it may be a problem either due to added time or it will become very expensive.
Russia had over 40 operational refineries before the war but some of them stopped production due the fact that refined oil products couldn't be exported due the sanctions. On other hand less operational refineries caused outages during harvest in September 2023 and surprisingly Putin forbid export of diesel for quite a long time. Attacks on refineries seem to have visible effects as outages of petrol at fuel stations are widely reported since the beginning of the year and even gasoline export was forbidden. All this cause logistics nightmare, overstretching forces which must protect infrastructure and can't be stationed on the front line, it also hurts the Russia's income. With current trend we may expect that Russia's funds will run out sometimes in the beginning of 2025. We may hope that Putin will try to continue fight but there will be a complete break down at a certain point.
Good analysis by Joe Blogs: