Posted on 02/24/2024 5:59:01 AM PST by SpeedyInTexas
“Ukraine has to make a mega strike on Moscow that will make it lights out for a few days.”
Here is a link, where they discuss and analyze that strategy.
https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/4056716-can-ukraine-black-out-russia-in-winter.html
Ryazan oil Refinery (just knocked offline) is (was) the primary supplier of Moscow for several fuels, including gasoline and aviation fuel (Moscow is the superhub of domestic Russian aviation). The pipelines between Moscow and that refinery have also been struck.
I think it likely the Moscow will have its worst Winter of the war. Big blackouts would be quite a development.
“out for 3-4 months” (Novorossisyk’s Oil export terminal)
That is the hard freeze period of Winter, when we are watching for Russian oil flow to back up, and wells to be capped for widespread secondary damage.Shutting the flow out of Novorossisyk would be a big part of getting that done.
Here are additional links and information about Ukraine’s destruction of Russian oil and electric power bases.
Ukraine unleashes missiles: Power plants burning across Russia
RFU News — from Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc6A3ZDRj8M
This almost 6 minute video sets out in mapped detail how Ukraine is upscaling its attack on Russian power and especially electricity. It shows how Ukraine is developing a coordinated strike in many areas at once with interlocking damage to multiple military and industrial plants, and to residential heat and light. Eleven sites were shown and described, including one that is now out and affecting a large number of surrounding industrial activities. Longer range more powerful missiles are now carrying out the expanded Ukraine plan.
Huge Russian convoy ambushed and burned on the road to Pokrovsk
RFU News — from Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1stLURlA7D8
This five and one half minute video maps in detail the failure of a Russian column attempting to take advantage of fog to slip past Ukraine drones to enter the east side of Pokrovsk. The map then turns to showing how Russians are trying to move all the way into Pokrovsk from south to northern border. Using teams of 2 or 3 men with a hundred drones they attempt to destroy Ukraine troops. Ukraine is succeeding in destroying Russian soldiers hiding in Pokrovsk buildings using heat detection equipment and sailing drones right into these hideouts and blowing up the troops there.
In both videos, RFU explains how they have developed a Timeline Builder tool to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the planning and complexities of Ukraine’s efforts. We may see this site was bombed, that site was bombed, but we are not normally seeing how all these individual events form part of a preplanned whole. I first became aware of this intelligent complexity a few days ago when viewing a video of the major Moscow blackout. There it was explained how over months Ukraine had learned the complex connections of various parts of the Moscow area power grid. They were then able to strike the various sites in the right order to develop a cascading failure throughout the Moscow area. Later I heard that this failure had even set off cascading failures much further to the east in Russia.
“about Ukraine’s destruction of Russian oil and electric power bases... we are not normally seeing how all these individual events form part of a preplanned whole... over months Ukraine had learned the complex connections of various parts of the Moscow area power grid. They were then able to strike the various sites in the right order to develop a cascading failure”
I can’t imagine that these strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure and energy infrastructure could be proceeding WITHOUT such an overarching strategy, to achieve a Strategic effect.
NATO planners and NATO Intelligence Agencies would naturally be asked to evaluate this for Ukraine’s Military aid and budget requests. As you point out, Ukraine has already demonstrated that they approach this Campaign in such a planned manner. Far too much has come together on a coordinated timeline, for me to think it is not a sequenced Campaign Plan being executed, to achieve Strategic effects.
As such, I expect to see some significant (game-changing) effects on Russia this Winter.
In one week, we will be seeing the start of serious sub-zero temps in the West Siberian oil fields. Russian oil is seriously boxed in already.
Nowhere for Russian oil to go.
In addition to Russian refineries, petrochemical plants and export terminals getting blown offline, there is a record amount of oil backed up at sea aboard tankers.
Conditions are perfectly set.
OilPrice.com (15 Nov):
Floating Oil Storage Surge Puts Market Balance on Edge
“Crude from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela is piling up in floating storage, with Asian volumes reaching up to 70 million barrels.
Iran’s exports to China have dropped sharply, while shadow fleet storage rose by 20 million barrels in just two weeks.
Analysts warn that if these stranded barrels find buyers, oil markets could tip into deep oversupply...
... Bloomberg also cited floating storage data from OilX, Vortexa, and Kpler to report that oil from Russia, Venezuela, and Iran accounts for between 20% and 40% of the strong increase in barrels on water since August. “The fate of all that crude on water, affected by sanctions or not, will go a long way to shaping how oil prices move over the next few months,” the publication wrote, citing traders.
The warning echoes a remark made by the chief executive of Gunvor, who said earlier this month that oil in floating storage was running at record rates...
... The International Energy Agency poured some fuel on the oversupply flames on Thursday as it reported that global oil supply had swelled by 6.2 million barrels daily since January...
... Overall, the message from analysts seems to be that the oversupply is here, and it will keep pressuring prices.”
I have only seen you and I talk here about the freeze and burst problem with Russian oil infrastructure in their far north-permafrost regions. I said before, first mention of this was Peter Zeihan in March 2022.
It is so dangerous, that if oil backs up, Russia would give it away to customers, just to ship it out of Russia. To keep oil moving flowing from North to south, where Russia’s refineries n ports are. Oil has its own Potemkin village there.
Bad Vlad’s energy weapon, his oil weapon gets nullified by the current world over supply of oil. Too bad for this demon and his aggression against innocent nations.
“the freeze and burst problem with Russian oil infrastructure in their far north-permafrost regions”
That was a disaster for the old Soviet infrastructure after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since that damage in the 1990s, Western oil companies rebuilt/retrofitted that infrastructure to make it more resilient. Nonetheless, Russia has used that as an excuse to the Saudis ever since, to avoid having to do their part within OPEC+, when production had to be cut to support prices.
Those same Western oil companies that built the upgraded infrastructure, can inform Western Intelligence Agencies about the greatest vulnerabilities to disable it.
Sure looks like it will be put to the test.
Posted on September 29, 2025
By Peter Zeihan
In Oil, Russia
Transcript
Hey, all Peter Zeihan here come to you from Colorado. And today we’re going to talk about the net effect of all of these recent waves of attacks by drones and by the Ukrainians on energy infrastructure in Russia. Now, this is following up to a video I did a couple of weeks ago talking about how we were starting to see some really very real damage in the energy complex of Russia, with somewhere between 15 and 20% of the refining capacity going offline.
Since then, the Ukrainians have massively upped their target set, going in and hitting things that are further away. Now, some of these attacks are more political and mine the ones that places like Moscow, where the political elite lives, or Sochi down in the Black Sea, where the political elite vacations. But the far more important attacks, from the two general categories.
The first one is the Ukrainians are showing that they can hit targets more than a thousand miles away from their borders. Specifically a place called Bashkortostan. It’s a province in western Siberia, eastern European Russia, populated by ethnic Bashkuri, who are, a Turkic minority. Pretty large one in the Russian space.
But the fun thing about Bashkortostan is it sits at a pipeline nexus that links pretty much all of the southern Siberian energy fields into the European pipeline network. And so if there’s meaningful damage in Bashkortostan and you’re not just looking at problems with refining their production, you’re talking about upwards of 3 million barrels a day that could get locked in.
And the Ukrainians have figured out that going after a pumping station is a really good idea if you want to disable some of the pumping infrastructure. That’s part one. Part two. Primorsk. Primorsk is a port on the Gulf of Finland, very close to Saint Petersburg. Gulf of Finland an arm of the Baltic Sea.
It is arguably, Russia’s top export destination. That the Gulf of Finland writ large. Not only is there Primorsk, there’s a place called Ust-Luga. Both of them have been hit recently, and both of them now are operating below half effectiveness. So Primorsk used to export about a million barrels a day. Now it’s about half that Ust-Luga.
It used to be about 700,000 barrels a day. Now it’s about half that. You put all this together, and the Russians are facing a crisis point in their energy sector that honestly, I’m a little surprised it hasn’t happened to this point. You see, the Russian energy sector has limited export points that are not well linked together. They’ve got a single spot out on the Far East that kind of has its own network and then out on the western side, they’ve got a few ports on the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, and the rest are piped exports that go through Ukraine or Belarus into Europe proper.
Those pipelines have now been shut down. That just leaves the maritime ports. And if something happens, that would prevent crude from, say, reaching for some might be able to go to the Black Sea, but none of it could go out to the Far East. So the Russians are losing flexibility within their system. And now that we’ve got roughly three quarters of a million barrels per day of throughput on the Baltic Sea that can’t flow, and now that we have 20% of refining off line, all of a sudden there’s somewhere in the vicinity of about 2 million barrels a day of crude produced that can’t go anywhere.
Unlike the American system, where there’s massive tank farms in every major city, the Russians don’t have that. They’re used to producing crude, sending it to refineries, having it turned into fuel and consumed locally or exported. And the rest goes to an export point and is exported. If you have friction in that system where the fuel can’t be produced, then the crude has to go somewhere else.
It has to go to a port, and if the ports can’t take it, pressure builds up back in the pipeline system all the way back to the wellhead, which means if something doesn’t change in just the next 2 or 3 weeks, there’s going to be so much pressure in the system that either we’re going to have a rupture in the pipeline, which would be really, really bad for any number of reasons, or the Russians are going to have to shut down their production sites back at the wellhead and lock in a million barrels a day or more.
The problem is, it’s already late September. Winter is almost upon us. And if these pipes are shut down, or if those wells are shut in in the winter, the crude will freeze in the wellhead. And if they want to turn it back on, they can’t just flip a switch. They have to re drill the well. And a lot of these wells are either old or were produced with Western technology, which means it has to be done from scratch with what the Russians can do with themselves or import from the Chinese, which isn’t sufficient for the technology required in order to make it all work.
So we could be three years into this war, finally on the verge of a crude shortage, because the Russians just can’t play. Well, no. Real soon, repairing things like refineries takes time. Especially if you’re talking about this distillation columns that the Ukrainians have been hitting, the pressure testing that is required to make sure the thing doesn’t explode is something the Russians and the Chinese cannot do themselves.
They import all of that from the West. It’s going to be a problem getting the parts. And in the case of Primorsk, not only did the Ukrainians hit a pumping station, they also had a couple of ghost fleet tankers. So all of a sudden, whatever insurance the Russian government or the Indian government or the Chinese government has been providing to these ships all of a sudden has to be paid out.
And that hasn’t happened yet. And so, lo and behold, tankers aren’t going to risk in the volume that they need to be going if the pipeline system is going to stay online. We’ve been waiting for all of these things to happen, either one or the other, for three years, and all of a sudden they’re all happening at the same time.
It’s kind of exciting.
Transcript
Hey, all Peter Zeihan here come to you from Colorado. And today
we’re going to talk about the net effect of all of these recent
waves of attacks by drones and by the Ukrainians on energy
infrastructure in Russia. Now, this is following up to a video I
did a couple of weeks ago talking about how we were starting to
see some really very real damage in the energy complex of
Russia, with somewhere between 15 and 20% of the refining
capacity going offline.
Since then, the Ukrainians have massively upped their target
set, going in and hitting things that are further away. Now,
some of these attacks are more political and mine the ones that
places like Moscow, where the political elite lives, or Sochi
down in the Black Sea, where the political elite vacations. But
the far more important attacks, from the two general
categories.
The first one is the Ukrainians are showing that they can hit
targets more than a thousand miles away from their borders.
Specifically a place called Bashkortostan. It’s a province in
western Siberia, eastern European Russia, populated by ethnic
Bashkuri, who are, a Turkic minority. Pretty large one in the
Russian space.
But the fun thing about Bashkortostan is it sits at a pipeline
nexus that links pretty much all of the southern Siberian
energy fields into the European pipeline network. And so if
there’s meaningful damage in Bashkortostan and you’re not just
looking at problems with refining their production, you’re
talking about upwards of 3 million barrels a day that could get
locked in.
And the Ukrainians have figured out that going after a pumping
station is a really good idea if you want to disable some of
the pumping infrastructure. That’s part one. Part two.
Primorsk. Primorsk is a port on the Gulf of Finland, very close
to Saint Petersburg. Gulf of Finland an arm of the Baltic Sea.
It is arguably, Russia’s top export destination. That the Gulf
of Finland writ large. Not only is there Primorsk, there’s a
place called Ust-Luga. Both of them have been hit recently, and
both of them now are operating below half effectiveness. So
Primorsk used to export about a million barrels a day. Now it’s
about half that Ust-Luga.
It used to be about 700,000 barrels a day. Now it’s about half
that. You put all this together, and the Russians are facing a
crisis point in their energy sector that honestly, I’m a little
surprised it hasn’t happened to this point. You see, the
Russian energy sector has limited export points that are not
well linked together. They’ve got a single spot out on the Far
East that kind of has its own network and then out on the
western side, they’ve got a few ports on the Baltic Sea and the
Black Sea, and the rest are piped exports that go through
Ukraine or Belarus into Europe proper.
Those pipelines have now been shut down. That just leaves the
maritime ports. And if something happens, that would prevent
crude from, say, reaching for some might be able to go to the
Black Sea, but none of it could go out to the Far East. So the
Russians are losing flexibility within their system. And now
that we’ve got roughly three quarters of a million barrels per
day of throughput on the Baltic Sea that can’t flow, and now
that we have 20% of refining off line, all of a sudden there’s
somewhere in the vicinity of about 2 million barrels a day of
crude produced that can’t go anywhere.
Unlike the American system, where there’s massive tank farms in
every major city, the Russians don’t have that. They’re used to
producing crude, sending it to refineries, having it turned
into fuel and consumed locally or exported. And the rest goes
to an export point and is exported. If you have friction in
that system where the fuel can’t be produced, then the crude
has to go somewhere else.
It has to go to a port, and if the ports can’t take it,
pressure builds up back in the pipeline system all the way back
to the wellhead, which means if something doesn’t change in
just the next 2 or 3 weeks, there’s going to be so much
pressure in the system that either we’re going to have a
rupture in the pipeline, which would be really, really bad for
any number of reasons, or the Russians are going to have to
shut down their production sites back at the wellhead and lock
in a million barrels a day or more.
The problem is, it’s already late September. Winter is almost
upon us. And if these pipes are shut down, or if those wells
are shut in in the winter, the crude will freeze in the
wellhead. And if they want to turn it back on, they can’t just
flip a switch. They have to re drill the well. And a lot of
these wells are either old or were produced with Western
technology, which means it has to be done from scratch with
what the Russians can do with themselves or import from the
Chinese, which isn’t sufficient for the technology required in
order to make it all work.
So we could be three years into this war, finally on the verge
of a crude shortage, because the Russians just can’t play. Well,
no. Real soon, repairing things like refineries takes time.
Especially if you’re talking about this distillation columns
that the Ukrainians have been hitting, the pressure testing
that is required to make sure the thing doesn’t explode is
something the Russians and the Chinese cannot do themselves.
They import all of that from the West. It’s going to be a
problem getting the parts. And in the case of Primorsk, not
only did the Ukrainians hit a pumping station, they also had a
couple of ghost fleet tankers. So all of a sudden, whatever
insurance the Russian government or the Indian government or
the Chinese government has been providing to these ships all of
a sudden has to be paid out.
And that hasn’t happened yet. And so, lo and behold, tankers
aren’t going to risk in the volume that they need to be going
if the pipeline system is going to stay online. We’ve been
waiting for all of these things to happen, either one or the
other, for three years, and all of a sudden they’re all
happening at the same time.
Read just above how Russia has a problem with burst pipelines and frozen well heads in the winter. When the permafrost oil is not moving south. When it get stuck in place.
“and all of a sudden they’re all happening at the same time.” (Hitting Russia’s refineries, pipelines, export terminals and the shadow fleet)
I doubt that it is coincidence that it is all happening at once, coinciding with the onset of Winter, a Global supply glut, Bone-crushing sanctions, and Ukrainian production of long range precision strike weapons with large warheads hitting high production rates.
I remember the look of amusement on President Trump’s face, when a reporter told him that Putin had said that President Trump’s new sanctions (on Lukoil and Rosneft) would have no effect on Russia. He just said knowingly, “wait six months.” (Through this Winter)
I think that SecState Rubio’s recent statement that the US has done what it could with sanctions, and now it would be up to the Europeans to do more, was a message/encouragement to them to move to throttle the shadow fleet tanker traffic from the Baltic Ports of Primorsk and Ust-Luga, in support of this overall Strategic effort to crush Russia’s oil industry (as well as stopping their own damn purprchases), for maximum secondary damage from the freezing,
The Doom of Russia, is losing its oil and gas industries.
Putin has brought the Doom upon Russia. Poverty. Food coupons. The 1990#, all over again.
The strikes have been building since Summer, and the replacement supplies are already on the market.
Another night, another Russian oil refinery exploding (Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery in Samara).
Impressive fireball.
Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery in Samara Is owned by a former cash cow for Russia, Rosneft. (Putin screwed that up too).
It is (was) one of the big ones.
“Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery in Samara Is owned by a former cash cow for Russia, Rosneft. (Putin screwed that up too).”
Traitor Schroeder worked for Roseneft, Nord Stream and other Russian oil and gas firms. All owned by Putin’s most favored & prime oligarchs. His skims from Russian energy sector is what made Putin worth 200 billion dollars
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Gerhard Schröder
Gerhard Schröder worked for Rosneft, serving as its chairman from 2007 until his resignation in 2022. He was a prominent figure in Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG and Gazprom, and has faced significant criticism in Germany for his ties to Russia, especially following the invasion of Ukraine.
Wikipedia
+2
Ukraine has been stockpiling drones and missile for the cold months. I think the real mass unleashing will come in late December —early January — Some to coincide with Russian Orthodox holy days and their Christmas
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Russian Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on January 7th, following the Julian calendar. This holiday is marked by a series of holy days, including the Nativity Fast, the Holy Supper, and Theophany.
“Gerhard Schröder worked for Rosneft”
They passed a law in Germany, designed to punish/deter that kind of compromise of politicians by foreign interests, that was named after him. He is a real poster boy for selling out his country - a modern day Quisling.
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