Ukraine has succeeded in depriving Russia of much of the windfall profits it would have made from oil exports during March and April, as the war in the Gulf sent prices soaring to above $100 a barrel, a series of sources suggest.

Ukraine intensified a long-range strike campaign against Russian port and energy infrastructure on March 21 in a calculated bid to prevent Russia from offloading oil onto tankers and to counteract the suspension of US sanctions on Russian oil, which had been in place since 2022.

“In March alone, Russia’s oil revenue losses from our long-range capabilities are estimated at no less than $2.3bn. In just one month. We continue this work in April,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address on Sunday, April 19.

Russia’s oil transhipments in March fell by 300,000 barrels a day, and refined products by 200,000 barrels a day, Ukraine’s foreign intelligence service cited S&P Global Platts as saying.

The US waived sanctions on Russian oil in early March after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping in response to US and Israeli strikes, in order to ease pressure on global crude oil prices. On April 13, it renewed the waiver to May 16.

The waiver does not seem to have helped Russia much, and April may have been even worse than March, according to some reports.

Russian business newspaper Kommersant reported that exports had declined to “their lowest levels since the summer of 2024”.

“By the end of the month, they could fall to their lowest since 2023,” it added.

April exports were so weakened that Russia has been forced to cut crude production by 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day, the Reuters news agency has calculated, adding that five sources backed that assessment.

Sweden’s military intelligence chief Thomas Nilsson told the Financial Times that Russia would need oil to remain above $100 a barrel for the rest of the year simply to address this year’s budget deficit, without fixing any of the other economic weaknesses engendered by four years of war.

Refineries on fire

Ukraine has kept up its pressure on Russian energy infrastructure over the past week.

On April 16, it struck oil loading berths and the refinery at the Russian port of Tuapse on the Black Sea, its General Staff said. Ukrainian officials posted video of Tuapse being hit again on Monday and on Tuesday, causing large fires and black rain in the city.

Sources told Reuters the refinery had been forced to halt operations because shipping refined products had become impossible.

On Saturday, Ukraine struck the oil refinery in Sizran and the nearby Novokuibyshevsk refinery, about 1,000km (620 miles) from the Ukrainian border, said Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation. Geolocated footage has confirmed fires at the two refineries.

The following night, Ukraine struck the Atlant Aero company, which produces Molniya drones and components for the Orion reconnaissance and strike UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles – a type of drone), Kovalenko said.

On Friday, Kovalenko said Ukraine had struck the Samara refinery, more than 1,000km (620 miles) east of Ukraine, and the Gorky refinery in Nizhny Novgorod, 500km (310 miles) from Ukraine’s border.

After repeated strikes on the Baltic Sea ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk, Leningrad regional Governor Alexandr Drozdenko told an assembly on April 15 that St Petersburg had become a “front-line region”, and that he would recruit reservists to form mobile fire groups stationed near industrial facilities to shoot down drones. He also called on Ukraine war veterans to volunteer their services.

The ground war hasn’t been going well for Russia, either. Several platoon-sized mechanised assaults were stopped in the eastern hotspots of Pokrovsk and Huliaypole in the past week. Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov said Russia had seized 1,700 square kilometres (1,056 square miles) this year. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, used open-source geolocated sources to put the figure at 381.5sq km (237sq miles), however, and said Russia has suffered a net loss of 60sq km (37sq miles) since March.

A poll published by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center found that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity, solid throughout the first four years of war, has begun to decline in the fifth year.

According to the centre on April 17, Putin’s approval rating fell for six straight weeks from 72.9 percent to 66.7 percent.

Ukraine’s air defence expertise

Ukraine has invented mobile fire groups, mounting heavy machineguns on pick-up trucks to form a first line of defence against the Shahed-type drones Russia launches at its cities.

Last week, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces unveiled a further innovation, announcing that a Sting interceptor drone had successfully downed a Shahed drone after being launched from an unmanned surface vehicle.

“Using surface drone carriers to deploy interceptor drones expands air defence options and creates an additional layer of protection for Ukrainian cities,” said the unit.

If successfully deployed, the seaborne Sting interceptors could thin out the number of Shahed-facing inner lines of defence and protect the ports of Mykolaiv and Odesa on the Black Sea.

The Ukrainian government has also been trying to organise drone defences mounted by private companies, in part to bring order to the electromagnetic soup created by businesses buying their own electronic warfare units to disorient drones headed towards their premises.

On April 17, Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said a private defence system had for the first time downed a jet-powered Shahed travelling at 400km/h (249mph).

“Currently, private air defence groups are being formed at 19 enterprises,” said Fedorov. “They are integrated into a single air force management system and operate as part of the overall air defence architecture. The next step is to scale up the project.”

Ukraine’s acknowledged air defence expertise is such that it has now signed 10-year defence cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, Zelenskyy has announced.

“We already have requests from 11 countries – the Middle East and the Gulf, plus we’re also gradually turning our attention to the Caucasus,” Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine is building a defence alliance from scratch, and has already signed bilateral agreements with several European countries for export or co-production of Ukrainian-designed systems.

Gulf countries contacted Kyiv after the US was unable to protect them from Iranian retaliatory strikes, Zelenskyy has said.

Turning a corner with Europe

After three months of delay due to a Hungarian veto, the European Union released a 90-billion-euro ($105bn) loan to Ukraine on Thursday, two-thirds of which will help Ukraine’s military.

“Deadlock over. The EU just cleared the way for the €90-billion-loan for Ukraine and the 20th sanctions package,” posted EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas on social media.

The 20th package will make it even harder for Russia to sell energy by closing loopholes in current sanctions, says the EU.

Ukraine is set to run out of money in April, just as the loan’s first tranches arrive in Kyiv.

Hungary, where pro-Russia Prime Minister Viktor Orban suffered a landslide defeat in parliamentary elections last week, had also held up the opening of Ukraine’s EU membership talks. The deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office said Ukraine was ready to start.

“Our country has fulfilled 75 percent of the Association Agreement and will definitely become a full member of the EU,” Ukraine’s Deputy Chief of Staff Ihor Zhovkva told Germany’s minister of state, Florian Hahn, over the phone.