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Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡
@shanaka86
Author of The Ascent Begins. Independent Analyst. Money, geopolitics, AI, science, and sovereignty. Trying to understand the reality a bit better.
Joined July 2009
3.6K Following    308.1K Followers
On 20th September Ukraine hit Moscow's oil refinery again, on the final day of Russia's first wartime parliamentary election. Three days earlier the International Energy Agency had written that the same 250,000 barrel a day plant was reported to be offline until early 2027. You cannot destroy production that has already stopped, and nobody has published what was running there on Friday. Reuters reported in June that two strikes two days apart had taken out both halves of the plant, one unit carrying 53 per cent of capacity and the second carrying the other 47. Saturday's list is where this stops being a repeat. After the 18th June strike Ukraine's General Staff named the AVT-6 primary refining unit, the integrated refining unit and four fuel tanks, and after Saturday it named the AVT-6 primary refining unit, the integrated refining unit and an isomerization unit. Two of the three names are identical, the tanks have dropped off, and in their place sits a machine that was not there in June. That machine is the story. The IEA's repair clock sits in the same document. Minor damage to a crude unit can typically be repaired within one or two weeks, while repairs to more complex secondary units that have suffered serious damage take six to eight months on average. Isomerization is a secondary unit. The only new name on Saturday's list is the only one carrying the long delay. Sergei Sobyanin said several drones reached the refinery premises. That confirms arrival. It does not confirm damage. Every detail of what broke inside the fence comes from Kyiv. The number travelling with the story is 11.6 million tonnes, which is what the plant processed across 2024. A full year of work from two calendar years ago is not supply lost in a night. Moscow is also not where Russia's fuel problem lives. Saratov was reported halted on 11th September and Syzran on 15th September, and Yaroslavl was struck overnight into 17th September with the damage confirmed by its own Russian governor. The IEA has June refinery runs at 3.8 million barrels a day, roughly 30 per cent below a year earlier and the lowest in more than twenty years, with a Russian refinery hit on average once every three days this year. By late August only five major Russian refineries had never been touched. The drone totals cannot be stacked. Russia's defence ministry claimed 1,110 destroyed overnight and Sobyanin claimed more than 1,600 since Saturday, including 450 headed for Moscow. Different speakers, different clocks, one figure sitting inside another, and every one of them a Russian claim about interceptions rather than a count of launches. Ukraine published no launch total, so no success rate exists. Two people were killed in the Moscow region and about 20 hurt, and roughly 400 left a 21 storey block in Ramenskoye after a drone set its roof alight. Trump posted on Monday that Ukraine had agreed not to hit Russian energy targets and Russia had agreed to do likewise. By Tuesday morning Russia had hit petrol stations in Kyiv and Ukraine had hit Syzran, the Kremlin called the idea good without ever agreeing to it, and on Wednesday Zelensky was asked whether an energy truce existed and said no. There was no truce to collapse.
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