Ukrainian drones hit Moscow refinery again, airports shut

For audiences in Serbia, this is a war that long ago moved from the front line to the screen, and it has now returned to a sphere that concerns Belgrade directly: energy. In the hours before June 18, Ukrainian drones hit the Kapotnya refinery in southern Moscow for the second time in a week, striking a plant that supplies the core of the Russian capital. For a country that watches every swing in the oil market closely, because domestic fuel prices and the fate of the Pancevo refinery under American sanctions both depend on it, a strike like this is not an abstract war dispatch but a sign that Russia’s energy infrastructure is being drawn ever deeper into range.

According to Russian accounts, air-defence systems shot down roughly 555 Ukrainian drones overnight, nearly 180 of them over Moscow and its surrounding region. As is usual in this war, the figures cannot be verified independently, but their sheer scale speaks to the size of the attack. In the Moscow region, near the refinery that was hit, sixteen people were injured. In the Rostov region one man was killed and two were injured, while in Belgorod a man lost his life in a vehicle struck during the attack.

Why is a second strike on the same target more than symbolism?

Hitting the same plant again within days is not chance but doctrine. Kyiv is systematically targeting Russian refineries to cut refining capacity and disrupt the fuel-export revenues that fund the war machine. Kapotnya is a particularly sensitive target because it sits in southern Moscow, close enough that any fire becomes visible to the capital’s residents and important enough that a shutdown has a measurable effect on supply. A second hit in a short span sends the message that the first defence was not enough.

The fastest consequence was the temporary closure of all Moscow airports. Russia’s aviation agency suspended flights for safety reasons, a standard procedure during drone waves but also a measure that each time affects tens of thousands of passengers and confirms that the capital is no longer out of reach. For a city that spent three years treating the war mostly as distant news, the sight of shuttered runways has become part of daily life.

What is the Kremlin signalling with its retaliatory missiles?

Russia did not stay on the defensive. Early on Thursday the Kremlin answered with ballistic missiles on Kyiv, continuing a pattern in which every Ukrainian deep strike on Russian territory is paid for with a missile wave on Ukrainian cities. Ukraine’s General Staff said Russia had fired at least seven ballistic missiles and 239 drones overnight, and that at least 216 targets were shot down. In Sumy, one person was killed during the drone attack, a reminder that the civilian cost of this war is rising on both sides of the front in step with the technological escalation.

The pattern is now clear: Kyiv strikes energy and infrastructure deep inside Russia, Moscow responds with mass missile and drone waves on Ukrainian cities, and each side bets it can break the other through exhaustion rather than along the front line. For European chancelleries, which have warned for months about the risk of the conflict spreading, every fresh strike on a target inside the Russian capital shifts the threshold of what counts as acceptable escalation. The open question concerns us too: how many more strikes on Russian refineries can the oil market absorb before the effect is felt at the pumps in Serbia as well?