Kyiv Independent reported this a few hours ago and says it cannot yet confirm the damage. Ukraine's military hasn't confirmed it. Russia hasn't said anything either.
That's everything we know.
Why this mattersSo let's talk about why these two places matter.
The Volgograd refinery is one of the biggest in Russia. It can process around 15 million tonnes of crude oil a year. Lukoil owns it.
Ukraine has hit this refinery before. Strikes earlier this year damaged its main refining units and knocked out production for a while.
Then there's Samara. The station there, near the settlement of Prosvet, blends crude oil into Urals — that's the main grade Russia uses to sell oil abroad.
Ukrainian drones hit that same station back in April. It caused a big fire and damaged five crude oil tanks, each one able to hold 20,000 cubic metres.
And a day before this latest report, Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had successfully hit an oil facility in Samara. He said it was part of a wider run of long-range strikes on Russian military and energy sites.
So that's Ukraine's own president confirming a hit on this same region, one day before.
Now here's the bigger picture. Ukraine has hit Russian oil facilities more than 300 times since the full invasion started in February 2022. That's according to a CNN analysis.
Attacks picked up hard in the second half of last year. By the middle of this year, Russia was in a real fuel crisis. Russian-controlled Crimea even declared a state of emergency and banned fuel sales in June.
An independent oil and gas analyst, Boris Aronstein, says these repeated drone waves have caused the worst refining crisis Russia has seen in years. The reason? Facilities can't get repaired before the next wave hits.
So this strike fits a pattern. It's not a one-off. It's another hit on a campaign that's already damaged Russia's ability to fuel its own war, and sell oil abroad.
Russia hasn't given any damage assessment today. In the past, Russian officials have blamed fires at refineries on their own air defences shooting down drones, rather than the drones themselves.
Vladimir Putin has said before that Ukraine's strikes on Russian refineries have cost Russia 1% of its GDP.
So what don't we know? How badly either site was hit. Whether production has stopped. Whether anyone was hurt. And what Russia does next.
