Putin Deploys Private Army to Guard Oil Assets Decimated by Drones

Vladimir Putin's internal military force will work with Russian authorities to beef up security measures around oil facilities that have been besieged by drone attacks.

Since the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, fuel depots and oil refineries across a swathe of Russia have been targeted by drones in strikes Moscow has blamed on Ukraine, although often Kyiv does not claim immediate responsibility.

The strikes often force the facilities to suspend operations, hurting Russia's sales of its main export as well as its ability to maintain its war machine.

In response, Russia's energy ministry said it was working with the National Guard—Rosgvardiya—to toughen up protection for the refineries using missile defense systems, according to state news agency Interfax.

"Work on security is underway, it is a really urgent issue," Artem Verkhov, gas industry development director of Russia's energy ministry, said on Tuesday.

Work was underway with the National Guard "on how to secure facilities and install the necessary protection systems of the Pantsir type," he said, referring to the self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery systems.

"As far as I understand, we can always redirect fuel flows in the event of a breakdown of some equipment, as long as Russian Railways does not let us down," Verkhov told a meeting of Russia's Federation Council.

Thomas O'Donnell, a Berlin-based energy analyst, told Newsweek that a strike on a refinery did not mean the whole facility was taken out of operation.

"Refineries are built in such a way that blowing up part of it doesn't blow the whole place up because you could have accidents," he said, "but in some cases they've hit the crucial part of the refinery, the column, and that takes quite a while to repair."

Last week, it was reported that more than a tenth of Russia's oil production capacity had been impacted by strikes.

"Even though you hit refineries these that represent 12 percent of the output, that doesn't mean the refineries are totally down," said O'Donnell, a global fellow with the Wilson Center think tank.

Meanwhile, whether the drone strikes harm Russia's war machine or its export industry more depends on where they take place. "To wage a war, you need huge amounts of diesel and hitting all those refineries in the region to the east of Donbas inside Russia will disrupt that," O'Donnell said.

"Those strikes would be directly related to the war," while an attack further north on facilities closer to the Baltic Sea "kills revenues."

Last weekend, the Slavyansk oil refinery in the Krasnodar region was hit in a strike that Ukrainian media reported had been carried out by Ukrainian special forces and Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU).

It follows a spate of strikes in recent weeks in Ryazan and Pervyy Zavod south of Moscow, the Rostov region by the Ukrainian border, Nizhny Novgorod almost 300 miles east of the capital, and another hit near St. Petersburg.