'Smell' of war comes to St Petersburg as Ukraine hammers Russian refineries

 Konstantin can smell the consequences of the war in Ukraine from his apartment in St Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city and President Vladimir Putin’s hometown.

Over the past two weeks, the asthmatic 53-year-old, whose full name has been withheld for fear of repercussions, has been sporadically aware of the odour of burning crude, fuel and other chemicals ignited by Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s two largest oil terminals on the Baltic, which handle two-fifths of Moscow’s seaborne oil exports and almost 2 percent of global oil supply, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The attacks are part of Kyiv’s wider effort to hit more than a dozen oil refineries deep in Russia and, ultimately, to reduce Moscow’s unexpected windfall income from oil exports after Washington and Tel Aviv began bombarding Iran at the end of February.

The terminals at Ust-Luga and Primorsk, which sit on opposite sides of the Gulf of Finland, 165km (102 miles) and 133km (82.6 miles) from St Petersburg, respectively, are a confluence of pipelines originating from oilfields along the Volga River, in the Ural Mountains and in western Siberia.

In each attack on these facilities, swarms of long-range drones have flown more than 1,000km (621 miles) from the Ukrainian border to destroy oil storage tanks and shipping infrastructure, sparking sky-high fires that have lasted for days.

Konstantin says the smell from the fires, which varies from that akin to diesel engine exhaust to burning plastic and rotten eggs, began in late March.

“I never thought it would come to this, that the war would be in the air around me,” Konstantin told Al Jazeera.

“Once again, we were fooled about why we’d gone to war and about the government’s ability to protect us,” says Konstantin, who has had nightmares about the nuclear war scare of the early 1980s as a child. He also remembers the Afghan-Soviet conflict and post-Soviet Russia’s wars in Chechnya.

The smell signalled the sharpest fall of Russia’s Baltic oil exports since 2022, when Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and has already cost Moscow $1bn, Bloomberg reported on March 31.

While the Primorsk port mostly handles crude oil, Ust-Luga boasts a colossal complex of oil-processing facilities and export terminals that appear damaged and blackened by fire in satellite images.

As a result, both ports are still unable to ship any cargo, forcing traders to send oil and oil products to smaller ports on the Baltic or the Black Sea, which, however, cannot handle the new load, Reuters reported on April 3.

Draining Russia’s war chest

Russian propagandists have accused European nations of “conspiring” with Kyiv to allow the flyover of drones over the Baltic states so that oil prices would skyrocket further.

But Ukrainian experts disagree.

The Baltic nations are peppered with hundreds of civilian and private airports and airfields, and obtaining permission to fly over them requires a large amount of time and resources, according to Andrey Pronin, one of the pioneers of drone warfare in Ukraine.

“If you fly over them, the cat’s out of the bag,” he told Al Jazeera.

Instead, the strikes have been scrupulously planned over Russian territory only, and the drones have been able to bypass air defence systems, he said.

Every $10 spike in global oil prices means $1.6bn of extra income for the Kremlin a month, so the US-Israel war on Iran, which has sent oil prices soaring because of the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf, directly contributes to Russia’s war chest.

Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries and terminals are, therefore, aimed at depriving Moscow of some of that windfall.

“The frequency of strikes is connected to the Iran war and Russia’s new opportunities to profit from it,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.

They hit 13 sites, seriously damaging at least eight refineries from the Baltic to the Volga region, according to officials and media reports.

Kyiv also sees the strikes as a new trump card in negotiations with the Kremlin.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “trying to gain from them by proposing, for example, a moratorium on strikes on energy sites” in Ukraine, Mitrokhin said.

But Ukraine’s strikes actually benefit Iran by contributing to rising global oil prices and indirectly giving Tehran additional leverage in negotiations with Washington.

They “objectively strengthen Iran’s influence and financial capabilities”, Mitrokhin said.