Kyiv Under Missile Fire, All Three Lukoil Refineries Down

The cost of the war in Ukraine, for Serbia, isn’t measured only in the diplomatic language coming out of Brussels, but also in the price of gasoline at the pump, since every new strike on Russian oil infrastructure shifts the global oil and fuel markets that domestic supply depends on. That is exactly what happened overnight between August 26 and 27, when a Ukrainian drone struck the NORSI refinery in the Russian city of Kstovo, leaving all three of Lukoil’s largest refineries without production, according to a Reuters report. Hours later, Russia retaliated with an hours-long missile and drone attack on Kyiv.

Explosions rang out across the Ukrainian capital around three in the morning local time on August 27, with at least six detonations recorded in rapid succession. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down seven ballistic missiles, either Iskander-M or North Korean KN-23 types, one Oniks anti-ship missile, and three Banderol cruise missiles, though the total number of projectiles launched was never disclosed. The attack also involved 222 drones of various types. Debris fell in Kyiv’s Podilskyi and Shevchenkivskyi districts, damaging two schools.

Were Dynamo’s Stadium and the Gulliver Mall Really Hit?

No. Early reports out of the city spoke of smoke and fire near Valeriy Lobanovskyi Stadium, Dynamo Kyiv’s home ground, and the Gulliver shopping mall in central Kyiv, but both were later confirmed undamaged. The club said the stadium had not been hit, and a spokesperson for the mall’s owner, Oschadbank, confirmed the same for Gulliver. Confirmed damage remained limited to the two schools. By half past one in the afternoon, Mayor Vitali Klitschko had reported two people injured in the capital itself, after a drone came down on a main road in the Holosiivskyi district around midday. The attack spread through the day to the Odesa and Zaporizhzhia regions, where, according to governor Ivan Fedorov, at least seven people were injured, including three children.

The strike on Kyiv followed a string of Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refining, the latest of which, overnight on August 26, hit NORSI itself in the Nizhny Novgorod region. Governor Gleb Nikitin confirmed on his channel that “an industrial facility was damaged,” without further detail. Lukoil did not comment on the attack. According to Reuters sources within the industry, several processing units, inter-unit infrastructure, and general facilities were damaged, though the sources could not estimate how long repairs would take or specify exactly which units were hit.

NORSI is Russia’s fourth-largest refinery and the country’s second-biggest gasoline producer, with an annual crude processing capacity of around 15 million tons. Its yearly output includes roughly 5 million tons of gasoline, more than 5 million tons of diesel, 2 million tons of fuel oil, and about 500,000 tons of bitumen. With NORSI down, it joins the refineries in Perm, offline since an attack on August 21, and in Volgograd, which halted processing on July 31. That means, per Reuters, all three of Lukoil’s largest Russian refineries are currently out of operation.

The fallout is spreading beyond oil itself. Ukrainian strikes also damaged Ozon logistics hubs in Ufa and Orenburg, with the Ufa facility closed for additional inspection. MSC, the world’s largest container shipping line, has suspended new bookings for the Russian port of Novorossiysk following drone strikes, though it continues operating through other Russian ports, including Saint Petersburg. It is the same kind of pressure on Russia’s energy and logistics infrastructure that hit the Afipsky refinery in late August, where, as we reported earlier, a drone attack killed two people.

Ukraine’s General Staff, in its report on the attack, also said Russian forces lost 1,400 troops in the past 24 hours, a figure that, like the overall casualty count since the invasion began, could not be independently verified. With repairs at NORSI expected to take weeks rather than days, and Kyiv still waiting on additional Patriot interceptors, the next test will be whether Moscow can defend its oil infrastructure at home while keeping up its aerial pressure on the Ukrainian capital.