“Russia is considering limiting exports of diesel and jet fuel,” Bloomberg and other sources reported Tuesday, “as refinery run rates fall to multi-year lows amid Ukraine’s escalating attacks.” An Interfax source claimed that the decision to ban exports is at “an advanced stage,” but no date has been set.
If it comes to pass, that would be bad for diesel prices and inflation right here at home, but worse for Moscow’s finances. Just the fact that the Kremlin is considering an export ban is more evidence that Kyiv’s drone campaign is increasingly effective — against Russia’s energy production at home, and closer to the frontlines in Ukraine.
The brutal math is that most months this year, Ukraine managed to kill or wound more Russian soldiers than Moscow was able to recruit. After nearly four-and-a-half years of remorseless attritional warfare, that’s not a good place to be. And it wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
ISW’s George Barros said on Monday, “The war in Ukraine has entered a new phase.”
Well, maybe take a statement like that one with several grains of salt. While ISW’s reporting is rock solid — everything they post in their daily Russo-Ukraine War updates is open-source and verifiable — the organization’s analysis can be somewhat (ahem) less reliable.
Estimates vary, but ISW believes that Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory in April, while others claim it happened in April and in February. There are still a few days of fighting to go in May, but Russia is believed to maybe have lost a little ground again this month.
Through the end of April, Russian advances in 2026 average about 2.9 km² per day, down sharply from 9.76 km² per day in early 2025. Russian casualties are much higher, too.
Two things seem to have changed. One is that Ukraine finally has enough mid-range drones to do to Russian forces what Russian forces spent 2025 doing to Ukraine: interdicting soldiers and logistics well behind the front lines “by fielding new technologies such as the US-made Hornet strike UAV, among other systems,” as Barros put it.
The other is that Ukraine is now systematically going after Russian fuel trucks, further complicating Moscow’s logistical problems.
Numbers matter when you are talking 50 destroyed Russian trucks on their most important logistical roads in a week. 50 out of a 1,000 trucks is 5%.
50 out of 2,500 trucks is 2%
Say half that 50 (25) are fuel trucks out of a fuel truck fleet of 150 tanker trucks.
1/ https://t.co/iKj7bumAEt— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 24, 2026
Trent wonders if the losses are “enough to cause fuel shortages, fuel rationing & the shutdown of civilian motor traffic between Crimea and Russia?”
Regardless, Kyiv spent 2025 giving up ground, yes, but also destroying Russian air defenses faster than Russian industry can replace them. The bloody results speak for themselves on the ground, and in Moscow’s concerns over fuel exports.
With no end in sight to this stupid war, there’s no doubt in my mind that Barros is correct when he says that “Ukraine’s advantage in intermediate range strikes is notably not permanent,” and that “Russia will very likely eventually develop countermeasures to mitigate Ukraine’s advantages.”
In a CNN interview on the war’s fourth anniversary earlier this year, Ukrainian member of parliament Inna Sovsun said, “Everybody keeps on asking, how do you think the war will end? I don’t know how the war will end. I know what I have to do today. I know what I have to do tomorrow, and we have to do our best just to last to the next day, to last one day longer than the Russians will.”
Neither you nor I know how or when the war ends, either. But over the last few months, the Ukrainians bought themselves an awful lot of days.
Recommended: Mamdani Did the Right Thing on Crime, and the Left’s Reaction Is Priceless
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