Ukrainian Drones Hit Russia’s Baltic Oil Ports, Disrupting Exports and Jarring Global Markets

Black smoke curled above the cranes and storage tanks of Russia’s Ust-Luga oil terminal in the last week of March, as firefighters battled flames for the fifth time in 10 days. Tankers waited at anchor in the Gulf of Finland. Rail cars loaded with fuel sat backed up inland.

Hours later and 1,500 miles away, traders in London and New York were watching the same images, along with a market bulletin from Reuters reporting that roughly 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity had gone offline. The news service described it as the most severe disruption to Russian oil flows in modern history.

The fires at Ust-Luga and at Primorsk, Russia’s other major Baltic oil port, were the result of a sustained Ukrainian drone campaign that began around March 22 and stretched through the end of the month. It marked a new phase in the war: an effort not just to hit refineries and depots inside Russia, but to choke off the seaborne export hubs that underpin the Kremlin’s war finances.

Ukraine has not claimed every individual strike. But officials in Kyiv and sources in its security services have said drones from the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, and other special units targeted both Primorsk and Ust-Luga in late March as part of a deliberate push against what they call Russia’s “war-funding” energy sector.

A week that choked Russia’s western oil gateways

The campaign began around March 22–23, when long-range drones slammed into facilities at Primorsk, the end point of the Baltic Pipeline System 1 and Russia’s largest oil-loading port on the Baltic Sea. A fire broke out in loading infrastructure and storage tanks, forcing a halt to crude shipments for at least a day and a half, according to industry reports and regional media.

In the night of March 24–25, Ukraine launched what Russian officials said was a massive wave of nearly 400 drones across 13 regions of Russia and occupied Crimea. Russia’s Defense Ministry said most were shot down. But in Leningrad region, where Ust-Luga and Primorsk sit on the Gulf of Finland, authorities acknowledged a fire at Ust-Luga after what they said was a Ukrainian drone attack.

Aleksandr Drozdenko, the governor of Leningrad region, confirmed that “a fire broke out at the facility” after the overnight strike and later said “intensive work” was underway to strengthen air defenses around critical infrastructure in the area. He did not detail the extent of the damage.

Shipping and refinery sources said the impact was clear. Crude and oil product loadings at both Ust-Luga and Primorsk were suspended after the attacks. Rail unloading racks and loading equipment at Ust-Luga were damaged badly enough that the terminal temporarily stopped accepting volumes.

Follow-on strikes kept hitting the same targets. Regional officials reported new fires at Ust-Luga after additional drone attacks on March 27 and March 29. By March 31, Ukrainian and independent outlets were reporting that Ust-Luga had been struck five times in 10 days.

Export data showed the effect. Shipments of crude and refined products from Russia’s Baltic ports fell to about one-third of the previous week’s volume, according to tanker-tracking firms and energy analysts. One analysis of customs and shipping data estimated that Russia’s overall oil exports dropped by about 1.75 million barrels per day week-on-week, cutting weekly oil revenue from roughly $2.45 billion to $1.44 billion.

Strategic choke points

Primorsk and Ust-Luga have become central to Russia’s post-Soviet oil strategy.

Primorsk, on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland, is the seaward end of Baltic Pipeline System 1, which has a nominal capacity of around 76.5 million tons per year, or about 1.5 million barrels a day. It was developed to reduce reliance on transit through neighboring states and to give Russia its own Baltic outlet for Urals crude.

Ust-Luga, closer to the Estonian border, has been built up over the past decade as a multipurpose deep-water complex handling oil, petroleum products, coal, fertilizers and chemicals. Its oil terminal, tied to Baltic Pipeline System 2, can move roughly 30 million tons a year. The broader port shipped nearly 33 million tons of oil products in 2025, including naphtha and other feedstocks critical to European and Asian petrochemical plants, and handles around 700,000 barrels a day of crude and products, according to port statistics and recent operator data.

Both ports are tightly connected to refineries in northwest and central Russia. Plants in Kirishi, Yaroslavl and the Moscow region depend on Ust-Luga and Primorsk to export surplus gasoline, diesel and fuel oil. When exports stop, those refineries must cut runs or divert products to storage, raising the risk of regional fuel bottlenecks.

“The repeated strikes are making Russia’s oil export system more fragile, more expensive to operate and more exposed to cumulative disruption,” said Tatiana Mitrova, an energy expert who has advised Russian and international companies and is now a research fellow at Columbia University. “Even if individual pieces of infrastructure can be repaired, the overall flexibility is being reduced.”

Drones as economic weapons

Ukrainian officials have portrayed the Baltic strikes as part of a broader campaign to erode Russia’s capacity to wage war.

Security officials in Kyiv have said SBU-operated drones “caused significant damage” to facilities at Ust-Luga and Primorsk and argued that oil export infrastructure is a legitimate target because export revenues help fund Moscow’s invasion. Ukrainian leaders often point to years of Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian power plants and substations, framing the campaign against Russian energy assets as reciprocal and defensive.

The drones used in the March attacks were long-range, one-way systems capable of flying more than 1,000 kilometers from Ukrainian-controlled territory, according to Western and Ukrainian analysts. Ukraine has developed several such models domestically in response to limits on the use of Western-supplied weapons inside Russia. Officials and independent experts say Kyiv appears to be using swarm tactics, sending dozens of drones at a time toward a single target to saturate Russian air defenses.

Russia’s Defense Ministry regularly claims to have shot down most incoming drones, and state media stress that fires have been contained quickly and that exports can be rerouted or restored. But repeated blazes at flagship ports and sustained drops in exports have been harder to gloss over.

“It is a shock, of course. These are serious problems,” said Konstantin Simonov, a Moscow-based energy consultant who generally defends Russia’s industry. He has argued that estimates that 40% of export capacity was paralyzed are “more of a political statement,” but acknowledges that the strikes have forced a rethinking of security and logistics.

A global oil crunch gets tighter

The Baltic disruption hit at a sensitive moment for world energy markets. The attacks coincided with a widening conflict around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, in which U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian facilities and Iranian retaliation have damaged tanker traffic and export infrastructure in the Gulf.

The International Energy Agency has described the Hormuz crisis as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Benchmark Brent crude prices climbed above $100 a barrel in late February and spiked to around $116 in March as the crisis deepened.

Against that backdrop, the news that drone strikes, earlier pipeline damage and tanker seizures had combined to knock out about 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity intensified market jitters. Oil prices rose roughly 5% in the days after the late March attacks as traders weighed the risk that a prolonged outage at Primorsk, Ust-Luga and the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk could further tighten an already stressed market.

Russia has tried to mitigate the damage by rerouting some exports through its Pacific ports, such as Kozmino, and by drawing down stocks already loaded on tankers at sea. Energy analysts say those options, along with Arctic routes, have softened the blow but cannot fully replace the capacity of the Baltic hubs.

For Moscow, the timing is particularly awkward. The Iran-driven price spike promised an unexpected windfall that could help plug budget deficits and sustain military spending. By cutting volumes just as prices peak, Ukraine’s strikes have at least temporarily blunted that benefit.

Diplomatic and security ripple effects

The strikes have left Western governments balancing support for Ukraine with concern over global energy prices and escalation risks.

Publicly, U.S. and European officials have restated that Ukraine has the right to defend itself and choose its own targets. Privately, diplomats and analysts say some governments worry that repeated hits on Russian export infrastructure, layered onto the Hormuz crisis, could trigger more severe price spikes, especially if Russia responds with countermeasures against shipping or energy infrastructure beyond Ukraine.

The Baltic campaign has also raised new security issues for NATO allies bordering Russia. In recent weeks, officials in Estonia and Finland have reported incidents in which drones or debris from fighting over Russia fell on their territory, including one that struck the chimney of an Estonian power plant. No casualties were reported, but the episodes sharpened calls in the Baltic states and Poland for a more robust “drone shield” and integrated air defenses along NATO’s eastern flank.

Russian officials have denounced the Ukrainian strikes as “terrorist acts” and warned of retaliation. Past waves of Ukrainian long-range attacks on Russian territory have been followed by intensified Russian missile and drone barrages against Ukrainian cities and power infrastructure, causing blackouts and civilian casualties. Security analysts expect a similar pattern following the March operation.

A front line that runs through fuel lines

By the end of March, some operations at Primorsk and Ust-Luga had resumed. Tankers once again loaded Urals crude and oil products, though at reduced and uneven volumes. Additional air defense systems appeared around the ports, and local authorities spoke of ongoing fortification work.

The damage, however, is not measured only in burned-out storage tanks and interrupted loadings.

Russia’s oil export system has been exposed as vulnerable to relatively cheap, mass-produced weapons operated by a smaller adversary. Ukraine has demonstrated that it can reach deep into Russia and, at least for days at a time, disrupt the flow of hydrocarbons that remain central to Moscow’s economy and state budget.

As long as the war continues and Russia relies on oil revenues to finance it, analysts say, shipments from ports like Primorsk and Ust-Luga will remain targets. The front line will run not only across trenches in eastern Ukraine but also through pipelines, terminals and sea lanes that connect Russia’s oil fields to the rest of the world.