KINEF, Russia’s second-largest oil refinery, caught fire in a Ukrainian drone strike on August 30, just weeks after the plant resumed operations from its last round of repairs. Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed the strike on a facility with a design capacity of about 20 million tonnes of crude a year that remains under Western sanctions.
Two units, AVT-6 and AT-1, took the direct hit, together making up roughly half the refinery’s processing capacity — the half that had kept the plant running through earlier strikes this year. Its other two units were already offline, so the fresh damage left KINEF with no functioning capacity at all, Reuters sources told the outlet.
The refinery typically supplies roughly 7% of Russia’s total refining output and is the only major refinery serving northwestern Russia and St. Petersburg. KINEF’s owner, Surgutneftegaz, has offered no public comment on the outage.
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Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko said air defenses shot down 42 drones over the region overnight and confirmed a fire at the Kirishi industrial zone, adding only that “combat operations continue.” He said nothing about damage to the refinery itself.
The plant has been a recurring target throughout the war, ceasing operations in September 2025, then again in March and May of this year. Attacks that same week also hit refineries in Novoshakhtinsk, Nizhny Novgorod and Yaroslavl, part of a wider push that knocked out or curtailed production at seven major Russian refineries in August alone.
