Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin’s envoy, called it “an important and truly historic moment.” On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending provisions of the Graham Act, the sanctions law aimed at Russia’s energy revenues, its buyers and the shadow fleet of tankers that carries its oil. A week earlier Washington had licensed trade in Russian diesel in return for Moscow releasing more cargoes onto world markets. European Council President António Costa struck a different note : “This is no time to relieve Russia’s sanctions.”

The waiver is the clearest sign yet of how Ukraine’s war on Russian energy has collided with Washington’s priorities at home. On Thursday, Ukrainian drones set fire to Rosneft’s oil refinery in Ryazan , a plant that supplies the Moscow region and accounts for roughly 5% of Russia’s crude processing capacity. In an interview with the Financial Times published that morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had paused refinery strikes for three days to observe the “energy ceasefire” Trump announced on October 11 , and that the pause was over because Moscow had kept hitting Ukraine’s power grid and fuel depots.

What happened during and just before that brief pause reveals a deeper dilemma in Kyiv’s war strategy. After months in which Ukraine’s refinery strikes added to a global diesel squeeze and drew fierce pushback from the White House, Ukrainian forces widened their long-range campaign to civilian-facing digital and transport infrastructure inside Russia. Between October 7 and October 14, drones disabled three of tech giant Yandex’s data centers , hit a $1.4 billion data center under construction for state lender Sberbank in Balakovo, and twice forced prolonged shutdowns across Moscow’s four airports.

The logic behind the wider target set is understandable, yet its strategic payoff is far from clear. Having seen how hitting global energy supply chains alienated Washington, Kyiv appears to have looked for targets that impose visible disruption inside Russia without raising Western pump prices. Neither track has produced conclusive results. In practice, Ukraine’s infrastructure campaign increasingly looks like an effort to make Russia lose rather than a strategy that can make Ukraine win, and the latest market and technical data suggest it is struggling to achieve either goal.

Why Did The Refinery Campaign Backfire In Washington?

Ukraine’s campaign against Russian oil refineries showed that long-range drones could reach deep into Russia’s industrial heartland. Estimates compiled by the Belfer Center’s Russia Matters project put the share of capacity knocked out at peak disruption at 20% to 30% or more, and energy analyst Sergey Vakulenko puts current Russian refining at 3.8 million to 4 million barrels per day , against 5.5 million when the system runs normally. According to the International Energy Agency’s October Oil Market Report , combined net diesel and gasoil exports from Russia and the Middle East fell by 1.3 million barrels per day to 820,000 barrels per day in September, down more than 60% from a year earlier. The IEA ties the Russian share of that drop to a lack of operational refinery capacity after drone damage.

The problem for Kyiv is that refined fuel markets are globally connected, especially at a moment when Hormuz is becoming a fee-and-permission regime and soaring freight costs are driving a wedge between headline Brent crude prices and delivered physical barrels. As Vakulenko noted for the Carnegie Endowment, diesel now trades at roughly twice the price of crude, compared with a usual premium of 20% to 30%. Even though the United States is the world’s largest diesel exporter, domestic prices follow the global market, feeding into American freight, farming and consumer costs little more than two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections.

Instead of forcing the Kremlin to scale back its war aims, the diesel squeeze prompted Washington to step outside its own sanctions architecture, first with a license and now with the Graham Act waiver. Trump had pressed Zelensky to stop the refinery strikes as early as a September 20 phone call, according to Axios. On October 9, after a call with Vladimir Putin, Trump said Russia would release more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel in October and 500,000 tons in November, and the Treasury issued a license allowing transactions in Russian diesel through April 7, 2027 . The next day Trump told reporters that Kyiv had been told it could do “whatever you want to Russia” but not hit refineries, adding: “He better damn well stop.” Meanwhile, European Union member states paid €7.88 billion for a record 12.18 million tonnes of Russian Arctic LNG in the first nine months of 2026, according to Urgewald figures based on Kpler data.

Even inside Russia, the fiscal damage from refinery strikes proved more ambiguous than headline outage numbers suggested. Vakulenko points out that Russia shipped 1.6 million to 1.8 million tons of diesel by sea during its summer export ban, possibly under different customs codes, because it has little room to store surplus distillate. And under Russia’s domestic fuel damper mechanism, higher global diesel prices require the Russian budget to pay larger subsidies to domestic refiners. A dip in world diesel prices cuts the Kremlin’s subsidy bill.

Do Strikes On Russian Data Centers Change The Equation?

Faced with American resistance to refinery attacks, Ukraine widened its aperture to targets that affect Russian corporate and civilian life without tightening global fuel balances. Strikes between October 8 and October 11 on Yandex’s data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir knocked half of the company’s data centers offline . Yandex Cloud told customers to move workloads elsewhere, users reported disruption to ride-hailing, payment and navigation services , and Yandex shares fell by about 3% and then 4% on the Moscow Exchange after the first two strikes. Overnight into October 14, drones hit Sberbank’s 55,000-square-meter Balakovo complex, which Russian state media have said will house the country’s largest supercomputer from 2027. The same night, Moscow’s mayor said 493 drones were flying toward the region, and restrictions at all four Moscow airports disrupted more than 500 flights.

Online commentators initially hailed the Yandex strikes as a decisive blow against Russian cyber and disinformation capabilities after traffic from Yandex networks plunged by roughly 90% or more. The most viral claim, a chart purporting to show pro-AfD activity collapsing by 56%, did not survive scrutiny, and several of those who spread it backtracked. Polish military analyst Jarosław Wolski apologized for having “unwittingly caused disinformation.” German Green councillor Robin Schlingheider amended his post to say he had shared the graphic without checking it, and Czech MEP Tomáš Zdechovský told fact-checkers he should have flagged that its source was missing. And a detailed telemetry analysis published by Cloudflare on October 14 found no evidence that the strikes crippled automated abuse or social media manipulation. Yandex’s search network is almost entirely automated, and 93.6% of its bot requests came from verified crawlers indexing web pages. On Yandex’s cloud network, where unverified bot scripts operated, the scripts reappeared on other Russian hosting providers such as Radist and Selectel immediately after the October 8 disruption, with the same TLS fingerprints, request paths and headers.

As Cloudflare’s researchers observed, operators can move workloads in hours, while physical infrastructure stays put. Yandex itself said rival cloud firms had agreed to let its clients transfer data and applications quickly . A separate assessment by network analysis firm Graphika found that none of the Western online communities named in viral claims, from AfD to MAGA circles, lost their active accounts or heaviest posters. Sberbank said its banking systems and online services kept operating normally. Hitting server farms and airport approaches imposes real financial costs and psychological discomfort on Russian cities, yet it does not stop Russian military command networks or halt drone and missile production.

What Happens When Attrition Replaces A Theory Of Victory?

The deeper strategic problem for Kyiv is that a campaign designed to make Russia hurt is operating across a steep asymmetry in physical endurance. While Ukraine’s drone strikes have created manageable fuel bottlenecks and temporary cloud migrations in Russia, Russian missile and drone barrages have destroyed or damaged more than 80% of Ukraine’s power generation and about 90% of its food-logistics infrastructure, according to Ukrainian ministers, and disabled the three remaining major steel plants responsible for 90% of national output, according to the Financial Times. Those estimates are compiled by Russia Matters . Ukraine’s Economy Ministry expects damage from Russian attacks to reach about $10 billion this year, and the EBRD has cut its growth forecast for Ukraine to 1.5%, with some economists expecting none.

That gap between operational disruption and strategic leverage is now reshaping the political debate around the war’s endgame. As Washington loosens Russian diesel restrictions to calm domestic fuel prices and European buyers keep importing Russian Arctic LNG, critics argue that prolonged attrition is eroding Kyiv’s negotiating position faster than Moscow’s. On October 10, the same day Trump said “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new President,” a line Elon Musk amplified on X by writing that “Zelensky has gone too far,” Vadym Novynskyi published a statement calling on Zelensky to resign and for Ukraine’s parliament to send a negotiating delegation to Moscow.

Novynskyi is an industrialist and former member of Ukraine’s parliament who founded the Smart Holding group and is a principal figure behind London-listed Enwell Energy, three of whose Ukrainian gas licenses have been suspended since late 2024 and produced no gas in the third quarter , even as Russian strikes on gas facilities have cut Ukraine’s output and pushed it to plan winter imports . Enwell is contesting the suspensions in Ukrainian courts and through international arbitration. Ukraine sanctioned him in December 2022 , and in January 2025 Ukrainian prosecutors notified him in absentia of suspected high treason and inciting religious hatred , allegations he denies. He has lived outside Ukraine since 2022. Saying he had been involved in organizing the negotiation process in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, Novynskyi argued that Zelensky missed a chance to end the war then. “We must realize that now any peace terms will be more difficult for Ukraine than those proposed in Istanbul,” he wrote, adding that Ukraine has lost “millions of citizens, thousands of square kilometers of territory, entire sectors of the economy,” which he called “irretrievable losses.” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, responded to the calls from Washington by saying that only Ukrainian voters can decide who governs the country.

One does not have to share the political agenda of Kyiv’s critics to recognize the structural bind that Ukraine’s infrastructure campaign exposes. Striking Ryazan’s refining units or Yandex’s server halls demonstrates technical reach and imposes real costs on Russian balance sheets. Yet when energy strikes push Washington into sanctions relief for Moscow, and digital strikes prompt cloud workloads to relocate in hours while Ukraine’s own power grid and industrial base absorb heavier blows, punishment ceases to function as a substitute for strategy. Making Russia pay a higher price is a tool of leverage only when it connects to a viable path for Ukraine to win, or at least to secure better terms than another winter of attrition will leave behind.