What Zelensky’s 40-Day Oil Campaign Achieved – and What It Didn’t

On June 25, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a named, 40-day operation run by Ukraine’s security service to force Russia toward the table. That deadline arrived Aug. 4, and it produced no ceasefire – Vladimir Putin has shown no sign of negotiating. But judged by a narrower standard – whether Ukraine can make the war costly to sustain – the campaign delivered results worth taking seriously. They point to where real leverage in this war now sits: not on the front line, but inside Russia’s oil sector. For most of the war, the Kremlin could count on that sector holding – sanctions, price caps, an EU embargo, and the loss of Western oil-service firms, absorbed without disrupting exports. That changed last year, when Ukraine stopped treating Russian oil infrastructure as a symbolic target and started treating it as a system with weak points. By early July, Ukraine’s General Staff assessed it had disabled 43% of Russia’s total projected refining capacity, with cumulative industry losses since August 2025 estimated at $13.5 billion. In a single month, strikes destroyed or critically damaged more than 60 storage reservoirs – split roughly 58/42 between refined product and crude – and storage is precisely what lets Russia buffer a shock like this instead of passing it straight to consumers.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. This is not a handful of showcase targets. Strikes have reached Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat and plants as far east as Ufa, hit repeatedly since April, most recently on Aug. 1 – the same night Russian missiles and drones killed at least nine people in Kyiv, a pairing that captures the war in miniature: refineries and cities, two theaters running in parallel. Days earlier, Ukrainian forces struck a Lukoil refinery in Perm, roughly 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) away on the Asian side of the Ural Mountains – nearly the furthest extent of “strategic depth.” The Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya, hit twice in June, reportedly won’t resume production before 2027; modern refining needs Western components that sanctions have cut off, so repairs that took weeks now take months. Other Topics of Interest Ukraine Repels Russian Assaults Across 12 Frontline Axes on Tuesday The Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk axes each repelled more than a dozen Russian assaults, the General Staff reported. Even Putin has stopped pretending otherwise, acknowledging petrol-station queues and shortages of the right fuel grade this summer, though he called it temporary. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has insisted the market is “fully supplied” – a claim that sits awkwardly beside rationing across more than half of Russia’s 83 regions, at least 17 with mandatory purchase limits. The fiscal bill shows in Moscow’s own books. To keep pump prices down, oil companies received roughly 1.03 trillion rubles ($13 billion) in April-June alone in subsidies, while the federal deficit for the first five months already topped 6 trillion rubles ($75 billion – 2.6% of GDP, exceeding the entire planned annual deficit. The Accounts Chamber projects a further shortfall of roughly 2.1 trillion rubles ($26 billion), over a trillion of it in oil-and-gas receipts alone. The central bank felt it too, citing declining fuel production as an inflation risk when it cut rates by just 25 basis points on June 19. Crimea crippled Crimea shows the endgame of that pressure. Occupation authorities declared a peninsula-wide state of emergency on June 26, and by early July, 19 towns were still without power. A Simferopol business owner summed it up simply: our products are perishable. Much of this traces to a sub-operation named “Molochka,” whose commander, Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, head of the Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (USF), said paralyzes the feeder fleet of tankers resupplying the peninsula. The peninsula was annexed in 2014 partly on the promise that Moscow could secure and supply it better than Kyiv ever had; a blockade that leaves it dark and short on fuel 11 years later and undercuts that promise in a way no diplomatic statement could. None of this has forced Moscow to the table. Russian glide bombs and drones kept falling on Ukrainian cities throughout, including a daytime strike on a Chernihiv supermarket that killed a 9-year-old girl. There’s an unresolved tension in the strategy, too: degraded refining has mostly meant more crude pushed onto the export market rather than less oil produced overall – costly to Russia’s margins and stability, but not obviously to its hard-currency earnings the way cutting exports outright would be. The timing makes the argument for Washington better than any press release could. Hours after Zelensky met Trump and a bipartisan Senate delegation working on the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 – legislation that would impose secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil and tighten tanker-fleet enforcement – Ukrainian forces hit two more major refineries. Intended or not, the message was that drones and sanctions legislation are now the same campaign by different means: a resource-constrained country imposing compounding costs on an economy several times its size, while Congress moves to cut off the financing that lets Moscow absorb the damage. Russia’s strategic depth – the assumption that its refineries, its budget, and its own annexed peninsula sat safely behind the front line – no longer holds. That is the real finding of these 40 days, not the ceasefire that never arrived. Kyiv has already shown the model works faster than Moscow can repair it. The open question is whether Washington moves at the same speed, or whether Russian repair crews and quiet budget transfers get there first. Maksym PanchokhaMaksym Panchokha is a researcher focused on Russian politics, historical memory, and the political economy of war. He studies Economics and Global & International Studies at Bard College in New York, USA, and has interned at Ukraine’s Permanent Mission to the UN.