Ukraine Hits Russian Refineries as Moscow's Strikes Kill Six
Kyiv presses a new campaign against the oil money funding the war, even as Russian missiles keep landing on Ukrainian cities
By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
The math of this war keeps changing, and this week it changed again. Ukraine says its military struck two Russian oil refineries in targeted attacks, part of a widening campaign to choke off the revenue Moscow uses to keep fighting. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the strikes hit "Russia's oil revenues, which it uses to finance the war and the killing of Ukrainians."
Russia did not stop shooting back. Overnight attacks on the eastern city of Balakliia and the northern Sumy region killed at least six people and wounded 36, Ukrainian officials said. Separately, Russia said it intercepted 605 drones, while Ukrainian officials reported three deaths in the Kharkiv region and three more in Sumy from the latest barrage — figures that may overlap with the toll cited elsewhere, a reminder that casualty counts in an active war zone shift fast and rarely settle into one tidy number.
The port city of Odesa has become a fresh target. Blackened ships and smashed docks now mark what the BBC describes as a surge in Russian strikes on Ukraine's Black Sea coastline — an attempt, Ukrainian officials believe, to strangle the sea lanes that carry the country's grain and goods to the world.
Meanwhile Ukraine has been escalating its own strikes on Russian shipping, hitting hundreds of targets in recent weeks in what officials call a new front of pressure on Russia's hold over occupied Crimea.
None of this points toward an end. It points toward a war settling into a grinding exchange of infrastructure for infrastructure — refineries for ports, drones for missiles — with civilians on both sides paying the difference.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE -
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian, the BBC, and Al Jazeera.
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