Ukrainian drones swept into Novorossiysk overnight on May 23 and set the Grushovaya oil terminal ablaze, sending thick smoke above a facility that sits at the heart of Russia’s Black Sea crude export network. Two people were injured in the attack.
The strike is the third time in under three months that the Sheskharis complex — of which Grushovaya forms one of two industrial sites — has been hit. Ukrainian drones struck the same terminal on March 2 and again on April 6. Novorossiysk port absorbed a separate large-scale drone assault in early April, after which the Sheskharis terminal partially resumed oil exports within days.
The Grushovaya facility, also known as the Grushovaya Balka oil depot, serves as the endpoint for pipelines operated by Transneft and previously handled approximately 700,000 barrels of oil per day. At that throughput, it is one of the few major Russian crude outlets on the Black Sea coast, which goes some way toward explaining why Ukraine keeps coming back to it.
Krasnodar Krai’s Operational Headquarters attributed the fires to fallen drone debris, saying fragments landed on the terminal’s territory and ignited several technical and administrative buildings. The blaze was confirmed independently by NASA’s FIRMS satellite data, which detected the fire at the facility’s location above Novorossiysk. Open-source analysts and social media channels tracked the attack in real time as the drone swarm targeted both the terminal and the broader port area.
Three strikes on the same complex in roughly ten weeks point less to opportunism than to a deliberate campaign against Transneft’s pipeline endpoint. Each attack has forced disruptions and temporary halts to exports through one of Russia’s most exposed energy chokepoints.
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