A series of large-scale strikes by the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) on Bryansk, Moscow, Perm, Tuapse, and many other targets deep inside Russia has left a clear impression: Kyiv’s long-range campaign is hitting harder than it used to. The images are certainly vivid: “oil rain” blanketing an entire city, a mass drone raid on Russia’s capital, and refineries under near constant attack. Despite all this activity, however, it’s hard to tell whether anything has changed in Ukraine’s strategy. Assessing the frequency and effectiveness of the strikes is challenging — both Moscow and Kyiv conceal their real losses and exaggerate the impact of their own strikes. The available sources that offer a reliable picture of the long-range war’s progress are few and far between. Meduza examines what we can confirm under these conditions.

Our main findings

• The frequency and depth of UAF strikes on Russian territory have risen substantially since mid-2025 and have held at a stable level — more than 30 verified attacks per month.
• There has been no surge in strike intensity in 2026, despite a number of high-profile attacks on Moscow, Tuapse, Perm, and other major cities.
• Strikes on oil infrastructure represent approximately one-third of Ukraine’s long-range campaign in 2026, consistent with the second half of 2025. Ukraine’s military has likely learned in recent months to target the refinery equipment that is particularly difficult to repair.
• The average range of UAF strikes against targets deep inside Russia has increased recently: in May, the figure doubled year-on-year, from 400 kilometers (249 miles) to 800 kilometers (497 miles).
• This may indicate that Russia’s air defenses are being depleted, but we don’t yet have enough data to verify.
• The UAF’s long-range campaign was most effective in its first phase, in late summer and early fall of 2025, when Russian refineries suffered their greatest capacity losses.
• By mid-fall of that same year, oil industry operators had adapted — judging by available data — to the more intensive strikes on their facilities, and had learned to repair damaged equipment quickly or draw on spare capacity.

What we know (and don’t know) about Ukraine’s strikes on Russian territory

The main source of objective data on long-range strikes by both sides is a network of projects that collect, verify, and geolocate video evidence of strike damage. These include the international projects Geoconfirmed and Project Owl, the pro-Russian Slivochny Kapriz, and several others. Meduza independently collects, verifies, and geolocates strike videos published by both sides. Our database, however, covers only frontline events and does not extend to the long-range campaign that both sides wage using ballistic and cruise missiles and long-range drones.

Beyond geolocations, only a handful of alternative sources are suited to assessing the campaign’s effectiveness. One is satellite data: both high-resolution imagery and data on “hot spots” — concentrations of thermal radiation detected by NASA’s MODIS and VIIRS spectrometers.

Neither imagery nor “hot spots,” however, can be used independently of geolocations themselves. They can usually only confirm the result of a known attack — not detect a new one. Commercial high-resolution satellites do not monitor targets continuously, and “hot spots” contain a great deal of “noise” from fires and other heat sources. No satellite, however, can detect strikes by light drones like those that attacked Moscow in May: strikes are only visible from space if they produce large-area fires. The only practical case in which this method identifies previously unknown targets is large fires at oil storage facilities and refineries.

Economic statistics offer another potential avenue for gauging the effectiveness of Ukrainian strikes. Neither the refineries themselves nor Rosstat has systematically published such data for some time, however. One exception: international information and analytics services like IRR, Kpler, and Argus do publish relevant data. Some of them likely purchase — through intermediaries — refining data that market participants submit to the CDU TEK, giving their databases global coverage. This is an important source of information, but it too is limited to refining and to the indicators companies are willing to share with the media.

Official statements by local authorities about strikes can also serve as a source. In late 2025, for example, our colleagues at the independent Russian investigative outlet Verstka compiled virtually all such reports relating to strikes on oil infrastructure. Unfortunately, our own analysis of that data shows only partial overlap with verified geolocations. Much of what authorities report is not confirmed by geolocations. Conversely, many geolocated strikes do not appear in official summaries.

In the end, geolocated reports from international projects remain the most complete and objective source for strikes deep inside Russia.

That data, too, has its shortcomings:

• First, not every strike is filmed on a bystander’s phone and posted online. How likely a strike is to be filmed depends heavily on population density at the point of impact. A strike on Moscow, St. Petersburg, or another major city will almost certainly be filmed and added to the geolocation database. The same cannot be said of industrial zones or oil storage facilities on the outskirts of small settlements.
• Second, geolocations rarely reveal the scale of a strike or how many drones were used. Footage captures the aftermath — what caused it, how many drones went astray, or how many were shot down by air defenses remains unknown.
• Third, a single event in densely populated areas may be filmed from dozens of different vantage points, and merging that footage into a single verified account is tricky, so counting the number of published videos directly is of limited value.

Nevertheless, we can draw some conclusions from analyzing published geolocations. We analyzed data from the Geoconfirmed project with the following parameters:

• We excluded strikes on areas just behind the front — that is, territory less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the UAF-controlled zone that can be used to launch drones.
• We considered only Russian territory proper, excluding Crimea and other Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.
• We grouped individual strike reports into spatiotemporal clusters, which we call “strikes.” This equates a single attack on a remote industrial facility with a mass bombardment of an entire city, but it partially compensates for observer bias, whereby strikes on densely populated areas are “overrepresented” relative to other targets. Since geolocated videos cannot in any case be used to assess the scale of damage, this clustering approach is justified.
• We counted the total monthly number of such unique “strikes” over the course of the full-scale war — both against oil infrastructure targets and against other targets in Russia.
• We estimated the average (more precisely, the median) distance of struck targets from the UAF-controlled zone, which allowed us to assess Ukraine’s long-range capabilities and how those capabilities have evolved.

So, is Ukraine striking more frequently and more deeply in 2026 than in previous years?

Our main finding is this: Over the course of the war, the frequency and depth of UAF strikes on Russian territory have risen substantially, but the key changes occurred as early as mid-2025. In quantitative terms, 2026 differs little from last year.

• On average, the UAF carried out 35 strikes per month on Russian territory in 2025, and 32 per month in 2026.
• In 2024, by contrast — the year before the mass campaign began — that figure was nearly half as large (the specific values depend on how clusters are defined, but this does not affect the trend).

Taken together, the numbers point to one continuous long-range campaign — not the turning point that news coverage this spring sometimes implied.

In 2026, the total number of attacks has remained unchanged, as has the share of strikes on new targets — defined as those located more than 10 kilometers (about 6 miles) from any previously struck facility. That share held steady at 10–20% last year.

Strikes on oil infrastructure account for the same share as in the second half of 2025 — about a third. Within this category, even the broad choice of target type has not changed: we separately compared strikes on major refineries and on standalone oil storage facilities and found that both are being targeted at the same frequency as before.

Macro-level stability doesn’t rule out shifts in which specific refinery targets the UAF has been selecting, however. Sergei Vakulenko, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, notes that in recent months the Ukrainian military has been striking not only the units where all incoming crude is distilled — the so-called atmospheric and vacuum distillation units (AVT) — but also secondary processing units that are more complex to repair and maintain. These include ”cracking” units. We cannot yet confirm these changes quantitatively. Counting geolocations is too blunt an instrument for that kind of analysis.

The one notable change in the UAF’s long-range campaign this year is an increase in the average — more precisely, median — strike range in recent months. In May, that figure doubled year-on-year — from 400 kilometers (249 miles) to 800 kilometers (497 miles). Note that our analysis excludes the nearest 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the UAF-controlled zone.

The trend could reflect the depletion of Russia’s air defenses or improved UAF strike planning. But we don’t know whether that trend will continue. Given that the total number of attacks is around three dozen per month, the observed shift may simply reflect statistical outliers.

The campaign to intensify Ukrainian strikes on refineries in August 2025 was clearly successful in its initial phase. A chart IRR included in a December publication shows the number of oil distillation units taken offline.

The chart shows, first, that Russian refineries operated without disruption from May through August 2025, free of the widespread outages that had occurred in earlier periods — months during which a moratorium on long-range strikes against infrastructure was in effect.

In August 2025, as the number of strikes began to rise sharply, the share of offline refining capacity jumped. The damage from the Ukrainian campaign peaked in mid-September, at 1.6 million barrels per day of “offline” capacity.

The same chart shows, however, that the effects of the campaign were short-lived. By late October, offline refinery capacity had returned to normal levels (though some remained disabled). This occurred even as strikes on the oil industry continued and their intensity declined only slightly. Russia’s oil industry has apparently learned to bring spare or repaired distillation units back online relatively quickly.

We do not yet have more recent data on refining volumes in Russia. Given, however, that the number of geolocated strikes on oil infrastructure is currently no higher than August–October 2025 levels, the sector is probably not faring much worse in 2026 than it did last year.

Meduza’s Analysis Team