Ukraine's record-range drone strike hits Russia's Omsk refinery, evading Su-57 interception

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Key Points

• What Zelensky means when he says this war will be won in the sky
• Super deepstrike on the Omsk refinery: the largest facility, 2,500 km from the frontline — Ukrainians hit it anyway
• An impressive list of Russian refineries hit, according to Meduza
• Exactly what the Ukrainians are targeting and why it hurts the Kremlin so much
• August is coming and then… Khodorkovsky explains how bad it really is
• Videos of the day: further strikes by the commander of the drone forces
• Map of the day: deadly attacks in Kyiv and its porous air defence

Ukraine Strikes Russia's Largest Refinery in Omsk

In its escalating pressure on Putin's regime, Ukraine recorded another significant success against Russia when its long-range drones struck the key and largest refinery in Omsk on Monday. The facility lies as far as 2,500 km from the Ukrainian border.

What Zelensky and His Drone Units Are Aiming For

Whoever wins this war will win it in the sky, Volodymyr Zelensky said, and the videos of the burning refinery and several successful attacks from the same day (analysed below) are proof that Kyiv currently holds good cards.

Donald Trump has started to notice this as well; to the Kremlin's irritation, he has endorsed them in a similar way to NATO leaders. Today, they are meeting for dinner in Ankara. They see this as Kyiv's pressure on Putin to abandon his unrealistic goals and to force him towards peace talks.

"Victory in this war belongs to the one who is smarter," Zelensky said in an interview with the Financial Times, describing what Ukraine has been trying to achieve in recent weeks:

"If you stop the enemy on the battlefield, if you stop the war on land, and if you prevent it from having supremacy at sea – as we have done with our naval drones that drove out the Russian fleet – then the next battlefield becomes the sky."

As he rightly added, in this contest it does not matter that much whose territory is bigger. Who, back in 2022, would have said that in this war Ukraine could compete with Russia in the air and even threaten on a daily basis its greatest asset, on which its economy is built?

In recent months, however, that is exactly what has been happening.

How Omsk Was Hit

"This is not just the last plant that had not been hit, but the largest among refineries of this type – out of a total of 11 such facilities, the one in Omsk is the biggest," Ukrainian military analyst Olexander Kovalenko told Denník N. Its capacity is roughly 21 million tonnes of oil per year.

As NV wrote, the Omsk refinery produces a wide range of oil products:

• Petrol (AI-92, AI-95 and G-Drive 100)
• Diesel fuel that meets the Euro-5 standard
• Aviation kerosene
• Other petrochemical products

It is an important source for the Russian army.

This strike, apparently carried out by two FP-1 drones, was very demanding purely because of the distance, which is why the media gave it the label super deepstrike. Ukrainian special forces claimed that the drones flew as far as 3,000 km, which is so far the deepest-reaching strike on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Ukrainians gained the ability to attack the Omsk refinery thanks to the modernisation of their own arsenal. One of the first to boast about the strike was Denis Shtilerman, co-owner and chief designer of the company Fire Point, who said their FP-1 drone was capable of flying 3,400 km.

Russian Su-57 Fails to Prevent Damage

The Russian Su-57 fighter jet, which tried to save the situation, still did not completely prevent damage to the refinery.

Only a few days earlier, a publicly available photograph of this fighter in an "anti-drone configuration" had appeared, according to NV. The aircraft was reportedly armed with four short-range air-to-air missiles, either R-73 or R-74.

Russian propagandists had high hopes for this, the Ukrainian website wrote, but so far no case is known in which it actually worked, according to the photograph published by the Exilenov.