Kost Elisevich

Within its borders, Ukraine confronts Russia’s military forces in the east and southeast and, otherwise, defends its civilians throughout the country from Russia’s aerial attacks upon its cities. Vladimir Putin’s war has primarily distilled into two immediate strategies: 1. capture and hold ground, particularly in the Donbas, in order to fully occupy some of the oblasts in the eastern territories, and 2. terrorize Ukrainian citizens to weaken their resolve and sue for peace. Over the past 3.5 years, Ukraine with the support of over 40 nations worldwide, has withstood the Russian assault upon its sovereignty and its people with the sort of resilience normally attributed to a comparatively much larger nation. It has managed this not only by courage manifest in battle but through cunning, innovation and remarkable boldness in execution. Whereas Putin has concentrated his efforts upon indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and infrastructure and the deliberate sacrifice of Russian troops for limited territorial gain, Ukraine has undertaken the highly strategic tact of undermining his war industry and the money supporting it.

A present-day elaboration of Carl von Clausewitz’s intellectual foundations on the nature of war would naturally encompass the several vulnerable elements that underlie the enemy’s war industry. These include not only munitions and armament factories, as well as warehouses, but electronic, radar and optical device manufacturing industries; fuel processing sites and pipelines; financial institutions, revenue-generating resources and export facilities; rail transportation; military training areas; and airfields. Likewise, similar interruption of electronic jamming capability and destruction of communications networks serve the purpose of disrupting logistical coordination and planning. Cyber warfare is used to hack sensitive data storage facilities and capture design layouts of military hardware and installations as well as war plans. More than before, the outcome of a war in its modern version will depend on whether a nation can defeat its foe on the battlefield before it loses its capacity to wage war from its home front.

A comprehensive, well-referenced listing of attacks upon the Russian mainland since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine can be accessed on Wikipedia taking the reader into the first quarter of 2025 and presents an excellent overview of the several events which have taken place during most of the war. The campaign escalated considerably in 2025. This essay provides an update of the state-of-affairs under the present circumstances to underscore the weaknesses manifesting within Russia resulting from these interventions. It by no means constitutes a complete compendium of the numerous recent attacks that have occurred on Russia’s territory but is meant to afford the reader a clearer image of the extent of destruction that has taken place and its impact upon the war. Russia is fast approaching an end to this metaphoric card game in which it’s playing a losing hand, leaving Putin to soon scurry off to China to ask the dealer for some favors.

The Fossil Fuel Industry                                                                                                       

A recent urgent meeting of Russian oil executives was called over government concerns regarding a price rise of almost 50% in the nation’s 2025 fuel market. The chief concern amounted to Ukraine’s recent focused campaign of bombarding Russia’s refineries. In the course of a week in early August, six major refineries were struck by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) collectively resulting in a 22% loss of refining capacity. Two of these, the Novokuibyshevsk and Ryazan refineries, belong to Russia’s largest oil producer, Rosneft, which refines 30% of the country’s crude through its 13 facilities. The campaign continued with further destruction of Rosneft’s Saratov and Syzran refineries. Profits of the oil giant had already sunk 57.4% by the first quarter of 2025 with production falling to a nine year low.

The price hike in the fuel market has further threatened Russia’s inflation rate which, as of June, was 9.41%, and unlikely to respond well to an overall consumer price index that had climbed by 8.2% over that in 2024. Adding to this situation, Russia’s fuel reserves on its independent domestic market are nearing bottom, while repairs of damaged facilities are protracted for lack of replacement parts due to internationally imposed sanctions. Gasoline shortages are now reported in a number of eastern regions of the Russian Federation (RF) and, ironically, affect Russian-occupied Luhansk Oblast in Ukraine giving its inhabitants a further taste of life under Putin’s regime. Russian gasoline reserves, if needed, appear sufficient for only five days of domestic consumption. The situation is unlikely to be remedied soon given Russia’s reduced refining capacity and prioritization for military use.

The second largest of Russia’s oil producers, Lukoil, representing about 15% of total production with its four refineries, has not been without similar concerns. A UAV strike on its Komi refinery, almost 1,250 miles from Ukraine, hit a reservoir and damaged a gas processing unit.Worse still was the more recent massive attack on its Volgograd refinery that accounts for 5.6% of all Russian refining, processing 15 million metric tons of oil annually for production of diesel, petrol and jet fuel for the military. The site had already been struck three times previously in 2024 with the company overall reporting a 26.5% drop in profits at year end, citing additionally significant loss of fixed assets.

Disruption of oil pipelines is also a recurrent concern that creates energy insecurity for Russia’s military and its domestic and foreign markets. Three separate attacks during August alone upon the Unecha pumping station in Bryansk Oblast, the main hub of the massive Druzhba pipeline resulted in critical regional shortages. The station moves 60 million tons of oil annually, distributing it to Hungary and Slovakia, both still heavily reliant on Russian energy, and to the Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga for export elsewhere. More strategically, however, is also its distribution to the Mozyr and Novopolotsk refineries in Belarus as Lukashenko’s regime is not only a major supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine but is also heavily dependent upon its oil supply domestically. The Ust-Luga port in Leningrad Oblast itself was struck by UAVs in late August at its Novatek PUSC gas processing complex, where upward of 13 million tons of liquid nitrogen flows annually, causing a massive explosion and fire with extensive damage. The same gas condensate processing plant was struck in January 2024, bringing significant financial loss to the company at the time. It was part of a rash of attacks which had occurred on facilities in St. Petersburg as well as the Oryol, Smolensk and Tula oblasts including the large oil storage depot near Klintsy in Bryansk Oblast.

The large Atlas oil depot in Rostov Oblast which supplies the Russian military in Ukraine nearby has been the target of repeated attacks with a recent strike in June following upon one in November 2024. Explosions and a massive fire was reported after a UAV attack more recently at the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery, one of the largest in southern Russia. The site continued to burn for at least five days at the time of this writing. The last such attack occurred in December 2024, resulting in the destruction of at least one fuel storage tank.

The past 18 months, in particular, has been marked by repeated attacks upon Russia’s fossil fuel industry with the intention of limiting energy availability for both domestic and military use and to reduce export profits. In 2025 alone, 42% of attacks have targeted oil refineries, 37% oil storage sites and 10% pumping stations, costing Russia 4% of its GDP. Damage to Russian energy infrastructure was estimated in early August to be upward of $900 million with reduction of its refining capacity by 15%. A more recent assessment in late August put that estimate at 17% amounting to a loss of 1.1 million barrels per day. The outcome from this has been a shift in export strategy to crude oil rather than more profitable refined derivatives.  

A recent ominous development on the global stage in all of this has been the imposition of tariff hikes by the United States (U.S.) introducing tighter import restrictions on Russia’s trading partners and a $47.6 per barrel price cap on Russian crude by the European Union (EU) which goes into effect on Sept. 3, 2025. India has remained one of the top purchasers of Russian crude and has drawn criticism not only for its support of Russia’s war but with accusations of profiteering from the cheap Russian oil imports. Its refineries convert the crude to gasoline and diesel for India’s domestic market with a large excess exported to nations that have sanctioned Russia.

The State Bank of India, in compliance with international rules, recently suspended foreign currency and international trade transactions with Nayara Energy which is partly owned by Russia’s Rosneft and is one of the top oil refiners in Asia. The same compliance concerns may ostensibly affect all Indian companies with ties to Russia as banks will perhaps wish to avoid regulatory scrutiny. The desire to purchase discounted Russian oil will likely remain a strong incentive to continue the practice in some fashion. Sanctions imposed by the G7 already have caused Turkey to reduce Russian crude import at least 31% by March 2025 so that it now accounts for only 19% of incoming crude oil. The EU likewise is stopping import of Russian natural gas and oil by the end of 2027 in order to reduce its economic security risk related to dependency on Russian energy.

Military Assets and Industrial Resources                                                                                               

By now, most have learned of the dramatic simultaneous UAV attacks by Ukraine upon four remote Russian military airfields in June 2025. Operation Spider’s Web launched 117 artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced semiautonomous first-person view (FPV) UAVs from locally delivered transport vehicles using local communications networks to damage or destroy an estimated 41 aircraft including Tu-22 and Tu-95 strategic bombers and A-50 surveillance planes. The assault reduced Russia’s tactical nuclear air fleet by more than 30%, worth a combined $7 billion, and draws some comparison with the destruction of a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet within the first two years of the war, rendering it functionally inactive.

The last such naval loss in early 2024 of the Corvette Ivanovets, valued at upward of $70 million with its four P-270 Moskit supersonic missiles, each costing $1.3 million, and its crew of 40, was sunk by a Magura V5 naval drone priced at $300,000. A further UAV strike on the Saky airbase in Crimea that plays a critical role in military operations in the Black Sea, struck five Russian fighters in early August, destroying a Su-30SM aircraft valued at about $40 million, damaging another Su-30SM along with three other Su-24 fighter-bombers in addition to an aviation weapons depot.

Of greater concern for Russia has been the lack of security extended to its military airfields. Numerous individual acts of sabotage have been undertaken by operatives infiltrating airbases throughout the Russian Federation (RF), using UAVs or planting explosives and incendiary devices on fighter-bombers and helicopters and causing ongoing cumulative losses of individual aircraft. Airfield infrastructure damage likewise compromises operational function. Much of this loss goes unrecognized because of the covert nature of these events and Russia’s coverup or denial of their occurrences. Beginning in 2022, two top tier Ka-52 attack helicopters were destroyed and two others seriously damaged on the ground in the Pskov Oblast, about 430 miles from Ukraine. In 2023, Belarusian partisans participated in a similar operation with the notable destruction of a $330 million A-50 surveillance plane outside of Minsk using locally launched UAVs. At the Chkalovsky airbase in the Moscow region, an An-148 transport aircraft, an Il-20 command and control reconnaissance aircraft housing electronic warfare assets and an Mi-28N gunship were destroyed by “unidentified persons.”

A significant escalation in Ukrainian sabotage operations occurred over the course of 2024 with reports of destruction of a Su-34 fighter-bomber in Chelyabinsk, a Ka-32 firefighting rescue helicopter in Moscow, a Tu-134 transport aircraft in the Orenburg Oblast and a Su-27 fighter in Krasnodar Krai. A continuation of the campaign in 2025 saw, in addition to the massive destruction of military aircraft at four airfields in June, two further attacks in July. In the Tver Oblast, 342 miles north of the Ukrainian border, a lone Ukrainian partisan entered an airbase and blew up another Mi-28N gunship valued at $18 million. And at the Borisoglebsk airbase in Voronezh Oblast where Su-34, Su-35S and Su-30SM fighters were stationed, an unspecified number of aircraft were damaged or destroyed in addition to a strike upon a glide bomb depot. Another attack in the same oblast at the Baltimore airbase destroyed a S-300 air defense system costing about $150 million and possibly two Su-24 fighter-bombers according to satellite imagery.

Other than airfields, sabotage operations targeting remote Russian military installations and logistics have been executed throughout the war. These have included railway lines and switching stations; bridges; fuel supplies; ships; armament and munitions factories; warehouses; and electronic and optical device manufacturing facilities. A recent mission carried out in early August 2025 targeted one of Russia’s elite air defense units, the 90th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade stationed in Afipsky in Krasnodar Krai, killing 12 servicemen, wounding several more and destroying equipment. This particular site, 310 miles west of the Ukrainian border, was armed with Buk-M2 medium-range surface-to-air missile systems used to shield Russian positions in the direction of the southeastern Ukrainian oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhia.

Early warning radar stations for detecting ballistic missile launches against Russia such as one in Krasnodar Krai, east of Crimea, were struck by Ukrainian UAVs to reduce aerial surveillance capability. Another attack badly damaged the Signal Radio plant in Stavropol in the neighboring district where critical electronic warfare (EW) and radar systems were produced, much of which required imported machinery currently under sanction. A chemical plant supplying nitric acid for the production of high explosives used in artillery shells was also recently struck on two separate occasions in the same vicinity. In similar fashion, a UAV strike on the Elektropribor plant in Penza, a city southeast of Moscow and more than 950 miles from Ukraine, significantly disrupted the manufacture of items for digital networks used in control systems for aviation, armored vehicles and ships. In addition, the plant produces telecommunications systems, cryptographic equipment and circuit boards for the Russian Aerospace Forces. The Radiozavod plant in Penza which produces mobile command units, automated combat control and military grade radio systems was also struck again recently with significant damage incurred.

Ukrainian UAV strikes have targeted Russia’s manufacturing of electronics, optical instrumentation and fiber-optic components used in the military. These have been a more recent development although a suspicious explosion near Moscow in August 2023 caused significant damage at the Zagorsk Optical and Mechanical plant. Among other devices, the plant produced night vision equipment for the military. More recent attacks appear to have started this summer in early July with an attack upon the Azov Optical-Mechanical plant in Rostov Oblast, a part of Russia’s Tactical Missile Armament Corporation. The facility produces high-precision electronics, optical and thermal imaging equipment including lenses, radar. rangefinders, homing heads and control systems for tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, naval systems and aircraft. The plant had been under sanction since March 2022 and was struck in early July 2025. The Arzamas Instrument-Building Plant in Nizhny-Novgorod Oblast which produces gyroscopic instruments, control systems and onboard computers for Kh-32 and Kh-101 missiles was struck in August 2025 causing significant damage.

The Optic Fiber Systems plant situated in Saransk, a city in the Republic of Mordovia, part of the RF, is about 620 miles northeast of Ukraine. It is the main producer of fiberoptic cable in Russia for use in UAVs to evade EW interference and is the major supplier of cable for the telecom industry. The extent of damage resulting from the April 2025 attack appeared sufficient to force the shutdown of the plant. Another specialized manufacturing site, the Instrument Design Bureau JSC in Tula, 120 miles south of Moscow, was struck in early May. It is one of the key producers of high-precision guided munitions used by ground forces, the navy and aerospace for air defense, automatic artillery systems and small arms. A neighboring plant, NPO Splav, a leading designer and developer of multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) and heavy flamethrower systems was struck in the same attack. The Kremniy EI microelectronics factory in Bryansk just 100 miles north of Ukraine’s border was struck in late April. It is one of the largest microelectronics manufacturers in Russia and provides components for S-300/400 air defense systems and UAVs.

One of the most troublesome of Russian aerial munitions is the Shahed UAV, used consistently to terrorize and kill civilians and for the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian infrastructure – residential buildings, energy facilities, hospitals, shopping venues, schools and administrative offices. These attacks increased significantly in late 2024 and have carried forward into 2025. They have become increasingly sophisticated, incorporating AI, carrying larger payloads and flying higher and faster. Since 2022, they have been imported from Iran but Russian domestic production during the latter part of 2023 began at a facility in Yelabuga in the Republic of Tatarstan, about 600 miles east of Moscow. A goal of producing 6,000 UAVs by September 2025 was set. Satellite imaging in April 2025 revealed that the facility had doubled in size. A second Shahed UAV production line was established in Izhevsk in the Republic of Udmurt about 630 miles east of Moscow. Since June 2024 there has been a steady increase in the number of Shahed UAV launches, reaching almost 2,700 in January 2025.

Regular repeated targeting of UAV manufacturing plants in Yelabuga and nearby Nizhnekamsk by Ukrainian UAVs have occurred since April with direct strikes rendered on several occasions. The success of these attacks ultimately can contribute to the collapse of these industries. The Yelabuga plant was attacked in June causing a fire to break out. The Izhevsk Electromechanical Plant Kupul that produces a variation of the Shahed-136 UAV, the Garpiya-A1, built using Chinese components and the Tor missile system, was shut down following another attack in July. In early August, a large storage terminal for Shahed-type UAVs and foreign components was destroyed by UAVs in Kzyl-Yul in the Republic of Tatarstan. more than 800 miles from Ukraine. Another UAV depot and launch site was struck in Primorsko-Akhtarsk in Krasnodar. Furthering the impact of attacks upon Russia’s domestic UAV production has been the targeting of Iranian imports that have continued to support the war industry. Again, in August, a large Russian cargo vessel carrying Shahed UAVs, munitions and other weapon components to Russia was partially sunk in the Caspian Sea by an Ukrainian UAV attack, the first of its kind upon a merchant vessel.

Russia’s Elastik gunpowder factory in Ryazan Oblast has a bunker complex extending several stories underground that stores explosives and ammunition. An explosion in August was attributed by authorities to a rogue shell detonation and resulted in the destruction of the facility with a recent death toll now risen to 24 and at least 157 injured. Although safety violations are notorious in Russian industry and a previous blast had occurred in 2021 killing 17, it would be premature to exclude sabotage under present circumstances. The Lukhovitsky Aircraft Plant in the Moscow Oblast was struck by UAVs in July. The plant upgrades Iranian-made Shahed-136 UAVs, designating them Geran-2 drones. It also manufactures and upgrades MiG-29 and MiG-31 fighters and is involved in the development of next-generation combat aircraft. In Dubna, also situated in Moscow Oblast, the Kronstadt UAV production facility which manufactures Orion strike and reconnaissance UAVs, previously attacked in May, was also targeted on this occasion.

Another major aerospace facility, the G.M. Beriev Aircraft Company in Taganrog in the Rostov Oblast was struck interrupting manufacture of amphibious aircraft and A-50 early warning radar aircraft. The plant also services naval aviation aircraft and upgrades strategic bombers such as the Tu-95MSM. Another large strike occurred in Tula which houses a number of defense industry facilities where explosions were witnessed in a district with three plants – the NPO Splav plant, previously struck in May, the KBP Instrument Design Bureau, also previously struck in May and June, which develops precision-guided weapons and the Shcheglovsky Val plant which produces weapons and guided munitions for ground forces and air defense systems including the Pantsir-S1. In Tula Oblast, the Azot chemical plant in Novomoskovsk, another producer of nitric acid for production of ingredients in artillery shells, was struck for a third time since May.

Russian Rail Lines

Russia moves the bulk of its military supplies and equipment by rail making its logistical importance a focus of Ukraine’s military campaign to unsettle its occupied territories. The campaign began soon after Russia’s invasion in February 2022 although sabotage and targeted aerial strikes increased progressively from 2023 onwards. The Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) has partnered with an extensive network of Ukrainian and Russian operatives to degrade rail infrastructure in both Russia and occupied Ukraine. Within a month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Belarusian saboteurs were already engaged in disrupting rail lines involved in Russian troop transport in southern Belarus. In January 2024, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Main Directorate for Public Order and Maintenance reported 184 sabotage events on Russia’s railway network spanning 58 of its 89 administrative regions. The entire network consists of 53,190 miles of rail making it a notable security liability when attacks may target not only rail lines but switching stations and supply depots. A cascading effect on Russian military logistics can result from disturbances in a variety of strategic locations to cause significant delays while increasing reliance upon road transportation that, in turn, is more vulnerable to weather conditions and aerial attack.

A dramatic example of sabotage occurred in November 2023 in the Republic of Buryatia of southern Siberia, 3,000 miles from the Ukrainian border, when the Itykit-Okusikan section of Russia’s Baikal-Amur Railway was destroyed with a massive explosion in the 9.5 mile-long Severomuisky tunnel. A 50-car train with 41 diesel-fuel and three aviation-fuel tankers passed through the tunnel at the time of detonation. When the Russians attempted to move what remained of the train over the Chortov Most bypass, further explosives nested in the bridge were triggered. The paired event resulted in considerable delay of rail traffic along the Baikal-Amur line which was the only rail connection linking central Russia with China and North Korea, a factor of major strategic importance when considering the alliance among these authoritarian regimes and the war they are conducting in Ukraine. Another sabotage operation in late August 2025 upon a fuel train in the city of Tver about 100 miles north of Moscow occurred at a major railway station causing a large explosion with fire spreading through station.

A May 2024 UAV attack derailed a freight train carrying diesel in Volgograd Oblast resulting in a fire and the destruction of several hundred meters of track. In July, the Atesh underground partisan group of Ukrainian, Russian and Tatar operatives destroyed a section of rail used to deliver North Korean ammunition and armament for Russia’s military. The attack was carried out near Yekaterinburg in Sverdlovsk Oblast of western Siberia. In late August, the Atesh partisan group destroyed a relay station along a railroad in Primorsky Krai bordering North Korea in Russia’s Far East, again compromising train movement and delaying delivery of military supplies while demonstrating the group’s omnipresence in all corners of the RF. A September explosion on a railway bridge in Samara Oblast near the city of Kinel damaged local infrastructure and suspended freight rail traffic along the Kuibyshev Railway. The attack impeded transport of explosives, chemicals and other materials for military and industrial use from the large Polimer JSC plant in Chapayevsk. A similar disruption of rail transport from the plant occurred earlier in March when an attack destroyed a bridge over the Chapayevka River.

The Kerch Bridge, an 11-mile-long structure, connects Krasnodar Krai of Russia to Crimea across the Kerch Strait and is a parallel bridge construction with a four-lane road alongside a double track railway that was fully completed in 2019 at a cost of about $3.7 billion after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. The bridge serves as a major road and rail thoroughfare for the Russian military. Detonation of a fuel tanker truck on the bridge in October 2022 caused two spans of the road deck to collapse and left the structural girders supporting the rail bridge likely weakened. Repairs were expected to be fully completed by July 2023 which is when a second attack with naval drones caused two explosions resulting in a partial collapse of a section of the road bridge with apparent minor damage of the rail bridge. In June 2025, shortly after Operation Spider’s Web was executed, underwater explosives delivered the equivalent of 2,425 lbs. of TNT to the base of the rail bridge’s mid-span abutments, targeting the reinforced concrete pile bundles. The mission was likely executed by a long-range Marichka uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV), a vessel 20 feet in length with a 620-mile range. The cumulative effect of the attacks upon the massive structure of the bridge is yet to be determined and further attacks remain likely with the sort of ingenuity shown to-date.

In late July, Ukrainian UAVs repeatedly struck a railway station over a three-day period in Salsk, a city in southeastern Rostov Oblast. This occurred along the rail line that supplies troops in Crimea and the Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. The attack on this occasion hit a locomotive and two fuel tankers resulting in a large explosion. A power substation for the same rail line in the neighboring town of Orlovsky to the northeast was also struck with loss of power along a segment of track while an earlier attack on a power substation near Okhtyabrsky in Volgograd Oblast immediately to the north had done the same. A recent UAV strike in Kamenolomni, a small town in Rostov Oblast, barely 24 miles from Ukraine and another major hub of strategic importance for Russia’s military, brought a halt in train traffic along a line ending in Donetsk Oblast in Ukraine. This long trail of destruction continued into Russian-occupied Ukraine where, in Zaporizhia Oblast, a fuel train was struck by FPV UAVs with explosions arising from as many as 11 tanks in the Tokmak district destroying not just the train but railway infrastructure.

Effect of Cyber Warfare

Cyberattacks upon banking systems are notorious for their temporary disruption of services as with crowd-sourced distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that disrupt online banking and their mobile apps. Several Russian banks, payment systems and large telecom operators have been affected by these interruptions initiated by Ukrainian hackers such as the volunteer “IT Army of Ukraine” at times in collaboration with Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) and from elsewhere since 2022. More serious attacks have rendered bank servers useless and operations such as the hacking of the Russian federal center, Osnovanie, that certifies digital signatures, prevent the efficient processing of business transactions.

Alfa-Bank was the target of a cyberattack in 2023 resulting in a dramatic data breach of 30 million customer records. The second largest bank in Russia, VTB, was hit in September 2024 by a hacktivist group with the worst DDoS cyberattack in its history. In December 2024, Gazprombank, one of Russia’s largest banks was hacked by Ukraine’s HUR causing a significant DDoS disturbance that involved both its domestic and foreign services and affected 45,000 businesses in the country. Other Russian banks including Sberbank, Raiffeisen Bank and Tinkoff Bank have been similarly disrupted creating insecurity and panic within Russia’s financial sector, the foundation of which has become increasingly precarious, and for which consumer confidence has been in decline since the second quarter of 2024.

Beginning in early 2024, Russian industry came under heavy attack by Ukraine’s HUR with the disabling of systems infrastructure deleting 60 TB of data belonging to IPL Consulting that managed Russia’s industrial sector. Exactly one year ago, HUR operatives launched a mass cyberattack on servers of Russian internet providers blocking more than 30 online platforms of industrial facilities where at least 33 servers and 283 office computers were compromised, and destroying 15 cloud and file storages. The platforms were said to support and finance the war. An earlier attack in June 2024 left much of Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine without communication. In February 2025, HUR hacked into Gazprom’s oil and gas contractor, Gaztroyprom, disabling over 120 servers and apparently wiping 2 PB of data storage. In June 2025, a week before the well-known UAV strike on four Russian airbases, HUR hacked Russia’s major state-owned aircraft manufacturer Tupolev capturing 4.4 GB of internal communications, purchase records and private meetings including the names of those who launched missiles at Ukrainian cities.

The Russian military specifically has been targeted by HUR and volunteer hacker groups in several attacks. In January 2024, a supercomputer at the Russian State Satellite data processing center for processing military satellite data used by the Ministry of Defense was rendered useless with the destruction of 280 servers and the loss of about 2 PB of data at a cost of $10 million. The attack was carried out by the volunteer BO Team. The following month, HUR disabled Russian servers used to modify commercial UAVs for military use causing the control software to be inaccessible to operators. The result confounded battlefield operations with the grounding of several UAV fleets. The internal information systems of a training center for UAV operators was compromised in October 2024 with the deletion of 150 TB of data.

Although much of the attention by Ukraine’s cyber campaign has been given to undermining Russia’s military, its industrial resources and financial institutions, it has also not lost sight of the psychological impact it might have upon Russian society by exposing its own vulnerabilities as a consequence of the war. Whereas Putin has chosen to overtly terrorize Ukrainian society by almost daily indiscriminate destruction of civilian infrastructure, killing 13,883 and injuring a further 35,548 as of August 14, 2025, the Ukrainians have sought merely to inconvenience the Russians. The current gasoline shortage crisis that is spreading throughout much of the RF, for instance, is a direct consequence of Ukraine’s destruction of Russian oil refineries.

A further disturbance has been the effect of Ukrainian UAVs threatening the skies in the vicinity of Russia’s civilian airfields canceling or delaying flights into and out of several cities. The problem continues to manifest with recurrent UAV attacks in the vicinity of major cities. In late July 2025, two cyber hacking groups, one Ukrainian named Silent Crow and, the other, Belarusian named Cyber Partisans, forced Russia’s main airline, Aeroflot, to cancel more than 50 round-trip flights. The episode caused the company’s shares to decline sharply by 3.9% in a market that was already underperforming and sparked alarm over the magnitude of the security breach.

Epilogue                                                                                                                             

Russia does not have the cards. In August, Reuters reported Russia’s budget deficit after the first seven months of 2025 already exceeded that intended for the entire year. A budget deficit of $60.9 billion was planned for the year amounting to 2.2% of a forecasted GDP. Expenditures for the January-July 2025 period were 20.8% higher than those of the same period in 2024 while revenues increased by only 2.8% before adjustment for inflation. Russia has already spent $316 billion of its allotted $530 billion for the year and, in July alone, expenditures were $48.9 billion, almost 20% higher than in June. Oil and gas export, Russia’s main source of revenue, has fallen 18.5% relative to 2024. The price of Russian Urals oil has been dropping because of reduced global demand, reaching some of its lowest levels since 2023. The price per barrel in July remained at $58, below the price cap currently imposed by Western nations.

Russia’s liquid reserves. have dropped to $31 billion from $117 billion in 2021 and are the lowest since 2019 raising alarm they may empty by this fall. The International Monetary Fund notably downgraded its forecast for Russia’s 2025 GDP in its July World Economic Outlook Update from its 2024 estimate of 4.1% to just 0.9%, a further drop from its April estimate of 1.5%. Russia’s Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina indicated that the resources fueling its war economy have been exhausted, pointing to labor shortages, a flattened production capacity and contraction of the National Wealth Fund as indicators. The Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov announced that Russia was facing an economic downturn.

Ukraine has not ended its assault upon Russia as witnessed with the most recent attack on the Ryazan-Moscow main oil pipeline supplying Russia’s capital. The strike occurred in Ryazan Oblast at a site about 120 miles southeast of Moscow disrupting indefinitely the transport of petroleum products to the city. The effect upon Russia’s oil economy within a relatively short time has been considerable and has markedly accentuated the effects of sanctions. This campaign of destruction may well worsen with Ukraine’s development of its own long-range weapon systems containing warheads capable of decimating an entire refinery with a single strike.

The stage has been reached where labor shortages have markedly intensified and sanctions upon shadow tankers and middlemen are tightening sufficiently to choke oil export revenue. Actual prosecution of crewmembers of a shadow fleet tanker is currently underway in Finland putting additional strain on the illegal export strategy as this sort of news spreads. Adding to this, national institutions are being cannibalized to keep the war moving forward. By contrast, domestic concerns have been largely neglected but are now coming into sharp focus by Russian society.

Ukraine’s war upon Russia’s home-front has proven to be as destructive to Russia as Ukraine’s fearsome defense of its own nation. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dating back to 2014 has been a blatant violation of international law and should not be dignified by appeasement through “negotiations” intended to reward Russia with territory it chose to invade. The warranted response requires that it suffer the consequences of its barbarity and leave Ukraine to decide its own future direction much in the way several nations were liberated after the world wars of the previous century. Vladimir Putin and his regime have shamed Russia sufficiently to declare him and his camarilla a failure of leadership and should serve as an example to other like-minded authoritarians of the 21st century of a road not to take.

Copyright @Kost Elisevich, MD, PhD 2025. All rights reserved. Any illegal reproduction of this content will result in immediate legal action.