Yet another Hacker News

Ukraine knocks out 36% of Russia's oil refining capacity in under two weeks

146 points kaycebasques 1 hour ago 35 comments

loceng 1 hour ago | parent

So what's the consequences going to be for that - and when will that be unleashed?

collinfunk 1 hour ago | parent

If Russia stopped its "special military operation", then its oil refineries would still be intact.

OgsyedIE 1 hour ago | parent

Unfortunately Putin and his close advisors believe that they are essentially Lincoln fighting the Confederacy in an epic battle of good and evil for which no permanent peace can be accepted. Convincing them to see sense is the only non-military resolution to the war.

t-3 46 minutes ago | parent

Nah, both sides have no choice but to fight because Ukraine can't make territorial concessions, and Russia can't leave a militarized Ukraine intact. If either government compromises the nationalist factions of their own countries will lynch them. The only resolution to this war is to fight it out until one or both sides collapse.

fifilura 41 minutes ago | parent

Except Ukraine never threathened to invade Russia.

Why would they?

Russia literally invades Ukraine so any territorial concession is just giving up your position for nothing. They will just continue from their new position.

This is their house and they are attacked by robbers. Luckily they are armed.

lenerdenator 30 minutes ago | parent

Russia can absolutely leave a militarized Ukraine intact. Give back the pieces of the country they tried to steal, pay war reparations, send some people to The Hague to get fitted for new ties. Move on.

No one wants a war with Russia, even now. The whole "the West will invade" trope is just a way to keep Russians from focusing on their own situation. If the populace paid even knew a little of what Western media said about a potential conflict between the West and Russia, they'd realize this... "The Day After", etc.

lostlogin 10 minutes ago | parent

> the West will invade

Year after year the west issue attacked. How many times has Russia attacked its neighbours?

TheOtherHobbes 45 minutes ago | parent

The only language fascists understand is an overwhelming display of force.

There will be no non-military resolution. Either Russia wins by subverting Western governments - which has been a partial success so far, but not the knock-out Putin was expecting - or Russia implodes.

lovegrenoble 34 minutes ago | parent

What Nazis are you talking about? These ones?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4799...

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/congress-has-remo...

rsingel 23 minutes ago | parent

Tankie/rightwing whataboutism

You got more Nazi/fascist apparatus in France by an order of magnitude than Ukraine.

And Putin is a stone-cold authoritarian war criminal, whose reign of terror in Ukraine goes from invading Crimea with little green men, to shooting down civilian airliners, to mass graves, to stealing kids, poisoning the opposition, to drones hitting hospitals and schools.

F*ck off into yr little discord world, chud

lovegrenoble 13 minutes ago | parent

They exist in France, I won't argue with that, just like everywhere else. But only in Ukraine are they part of the national armed forces...

lostlogin 8 minutes ago | parent

There may or may it be extremely right wing soldiers in Ukraine’s military.

Does this make Ukraine any less invaded? Or make them defending themselves wrong?

epistasis 11 minutes ago | parent

That's not it at all, Putin talks about eliminating Ukraine, all Ukrainian culture, the language, the people, their history...

If you look at what Putin actually writes and says there's no comparison at all to anything Lincoln-like.

kristofferR 1 hour ago | parent

Already is - Starlink is throttled again: https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/zelensky-accuses-m...

lostlogin 13 minutes ago | parent

Nvidia’s relationship with China is a problem, but Musk and Trump’s with Russia somehow isn’t.

dyauspitr 1 hour ago | parent

Take away trump’s support for Russia and further hobble their oil infrastructure and Russia is not going to be able to keep this up for much longer.

nradov 53 minutes ago | parent

I wish that was true but Russia can keep this up indefinitely. Even with severe damage to their oil infrastructure they can still export enough to fund the war effort. The real question is how much pain the elites in the core Moscow - St. Petersburg region are willing to endure.

TheOtherHobbes 47 minutes ago | parent

They can't export and supply domestic needs - including military - at the same time.

Financially, the Iran oil shock provided some financial breathing room, but the overall trend is downwards.

nradov 10 minutes ago | parent

The overall trend is downwards and even if the war ended tomorrow the Russian economy would be in rough shape. But at the same time the civilian economy still hasn't been fully mobilized to anywhere near the extent it was in WWII. They have room to cut back domestic energy consumption (especially in the outer provinces) in order to maintain the war effort. Essentially turn Russia into something like North Korea.

danmaz74 53 minutes ago | parent

Refineries are huge, and hitting one doesn't automatically knock it out - Ukraine has actually already hit lots of Russian refineries this year, many of them more than once: https://www.reddit.com/r/RussianHitlists/comments/1ugfpiw/ru...

Obviously Russia doesn't publish any data about how long it takes them to repair their refineries, but some of them showed significant damages from the pictures and videos you can find online.

fifilura 37 minutes ago | parent

I believe the attacks are rather precise and aim at taking out the distillation columns to focus on the critical parts.

throwadobe 15 minutes ago | parent

God I hope so

ramijames 10 minutes ago | parent

Part of the strategy here is knowing what parts to knock out because not all parts are easily replaceable. I know they have been hitting a specific part, waiting for the fix to be implemented, and then hitting it again.

nradov 7 minutes ago | parent

One thing we're likely to see is Russia building more smaller "teapot" refineries. These are less efficient and produce lower quality products. But they're cheap and more difficult to target.

tgsovlerkhgsel 51 minutes ago | parent

Headline: "Ukraine knocks out 36% of Russia's oil refining capacity in under two weeks" (same in the bolded subheading).

First paragraph: "The combined annual processing capacity of the Russian plants hit over the past 13 days exceeds 120 million metric tons of crude oil—accounting for 36% of the aggressor state’s entire domestic oil refining capacity."

The latter paragraph is likely true, but it's unlikely that all of the ones hit were taken completely offline, so the headline is a complete lie. (In this case, the same structure - lying headline + more accurate text below - is already present in the source they provide. In other cases, sources are often misleadingly mis-cited over several levels to arrive at a click-getting but still misleading or outright lying headline.)

The refineries are huge structures, often with multiple instances of the same type of processing unit, so it's rare that one of them gets taken out completely. Also, there is no information about the actual damage done. At least in some cases, I haven't seen any claims about the actual damage, just claims that there was a strike, i.e. there is a good chance the strike didn't cause significant damage.

cobychapple 47 minutes ago | parent

IEA says repairs are getting slower: https://www.ogj.com/general-interest/economics-markets/news/...

mindwok 20 minutes ago | parent

Feels like drones and rockets have created a similar dynamic to mutually assured destruction, except for much smaller actors with far fewer resources. It's not hard to imagine a future where e.g. Taiwan is just armed with so many cheap drones and rockets that for even a great power like China the guarantee of enormous economic damage at home is just not worth it.

illwrks 15 minutes ago | parent

Surely that just means tactics change? The attacking force needs to coordinate tightly to block airwaves and have total control as quickly as possible before any meaningful counter measure can be attempted - meaning more drone swarms, more boots on the ground and more direct attack and control of comms channels.

It also means that any potential victim probably needs to account for that scenario and be ready to retaliate at a moments notice.