Informative · Drone warfare

Russia just got its oil refinery bombed for the seventh time this year

2 hours ago · 6 November 2026Share

Crude oil storage tank farm at an oil refinery. File photo. Tony Webster · CC BY 4.0

A Russian oil refinery just got hit by drones for the seventh time this year.

And this campaign isn't slowing down. It's speeding up.

Drones hit the Afipsky oil refinery in Russia's Krasnodar Krai a few hours ago overnight. A fire broke out right after. The refinery sits in the settlement of Afipsky, in Seversky district, about 20 kilometres southwest of Krasnodar city.

Air raid sirens went off across Krasnodar Krai just after 1am local time. Krasnodar airport activated its "Kover" protocol. That means no planes landing or taking off, as a precaution against drone strikes.

Russia's regional operational headquarters confirmed a fire broke out at an enterprise in Afipsk after drone debris fell. Nobody was hurt, they say. But they didn't name the refinery. Drone debris also smashed the windows of a flat in a nearby building.

So what actually caught fire?

Astra, an OSINT monitoring group, checked eyewitness photos from Krasnodar. Its analyst says the reservoir park at the Afipsky refinery itself was burning. Not just debris landing nearby. A local monitoring channel, Exilenova+, posted that new waves of drones kept coming at the refinery through the night.

Exilenova+ says quote "the attack on the Afipsky Refinery continues" and that new waves of drones were coming.

So here's the gap. Russia's regional government says debris hit an unnamed enterprise. Ukrainian-side OSINT says the refinery's own storage tanks were on fire. Nobody has closed that gap. And Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of Krasnodar Krai, still hasn't confirmed an attack on the refinery, or even a fire there, at all.

Russia's Defence Ministry says it shot down 142 Ukrainian drones overnight. Across Kursk, Belgorod, Tula, Oryol, Rostov, Astrakhan, Moscow, Krasnodar, Crimea, and the Black and Azov Seas. That number comes from Russia alone. Nobody else has checked it.

Ukraine has not said it carried out this strike. It hasn't commented at all.

But look at the pattern around this one refinery.

This is the seventh time Afipsky has been hit by drones this year. Previous strikes came on 21 January, 14 March, 11 June, 14 July, 25 August and 26 September. In the August strike, Ukraine's General Staff said its forces hit facilities at the refinery directly.

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So this isn't a one-off. It's the same target, hit roughly once every six weeks, for most of a year.

Afipsky is one of Russia's largest refineries. Kyiv Post and the Moscow Times put its annual crude-processing capacity at around 7.2 million tonnes. Other outlets, including Militarnyi and RBC-Ukraine, give its design capacity as about 6.25 million tonnes a year. Different measure, same plant. It makes petrol, diesel and aviation fuel. Some of what it produces supplies the Russian military.

And this strike didn't happen on its own.

Ukraine started hitting Russian refineries again in late October. It had paused for roughly two weeks under pressure from Washington. Since then it has hit the Novokuibyshevsk refinery on 30 October, the Ufa refinery on 31 October, the NORSI refinery in Nizhny Novgorod region on 1 November, a Transneft pipeline station near Samara on 2 November, and the Ryazan refinery on 5 November.

That's five major energy sites hit in the week before Afipsky. Six, counting Afipsky itself.

Donald Trump, the US President, says Ukraine's refinery strikes are to blame for rising global diesel prices. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's President, offered Washington a trade. He told Fox News he would stop hitting refineries for a month if the US supplied Patriot interceptor missiles for a month, or if Russia stopped striking Ukraine's own energy grid.

Zelenskyy says quote "provide us with Patriots for one month".

The US State Department approved a sale of 500 Patriot interceptors to Ukraine on 30 October, worth $2.1 billion. But Zelenskyy has warned the missiles could take years to actually arrive.

So Ukraine made an offer. Got a missile sale with no firm delivery date. And kept striking refineries anyway.

We still don't know if the fire at Afipsky came from a direct hit on the refinery, or from drone debris falling nearby, as Russia's regional government says. The scale of the damage isn't established. Russia's own governor in Krasnodar still hasn't confirmed the refinery was even hit.

What we do know is the count. Seven strikes on one refinery this year. Five more major Russian energy sites hit in the week before this one.

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Russia just got its oil refinery bombed for the seventh time this year

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