Published on August 6, 2025, 2:08 PM EST – Key Points and Summary – Heeding a decade-old warning from the late Senator John McCain that Russia is a “gas station masquerading as a country,” Ukraine is now systematically attacking Russia’s economic lifeline with long-range drones.
-Successful strikes on August 2 forced major oil refineries in Ryazan and Novokuibyshevsk to halt or slash production, crippling a key source of revenue for Putin’s war economy.
-This campaign targeting Putin’s “cash cow,” combined with a looming U.S. tariff deadline, creates a “double whammy” for Moscow and includes strikes on other military targets like the Saki airbase in Crimea.
Ukraine’s John McCain Strategy to Fight Russia
A decade ago, the late Republican Senator John McCain famously told the US Cable News Network (CNN) Sunday morning program that Russia was a giant gas pump pretending to be a real nation-state. McCain had just returned from a visit to Ukraine, a few months after Russian President Vladimir Putin had invaded the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Putin then later used his military to support a proxy invasion of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
“Look, Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country,” McCain said in discussing how far the former KGB Lt. Col., who is today still the president of Russia, was prepared to go to destroy the neighboring nation of Ukraine. He was also brutally accurate in characterizing just how much Moscow would come to depend on its oil and gas revenues to finance its military incursions into other nations.
The only way to stop Russia from rolling over the rest of Ukraine, he concluded, was to cut off the revenue stream to its oil-dependent economy. Little did the Arizona lawmaker and former Naval Aviator realize just how accurate his vision for the future was.
“It’s kleptocracy,” he said of Russia. “It’s corruption. It’s a nation that’s really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy, and so economic sanctions are important.”
Striking At Putin’s Cash Cow
These are observations not lost on today’s Ukrainian government.
The former Soviet republic that Putin invaded in February 2022 has progressively developed more accurate and longer-ranged drones with heavier warheads. It has then begun to increasingly use them to strike at Russian oil facilities—to get at the source of cash that Putin uses to keep his war economy running.
Following the Ukraine drone attacks on August 2, Russia’s Ryazan oil refinery cut its production in half. At the same time, the Novokuibyshevsk refinery brought its operations to a complete halt. Both facilities rolled back operations as a consequence of the Ukrainian drone attacks, according to anonymous sources speaking to the Reuters news agency.
Two sources who spoke to Reuters said the Novokuibyshevsk refinery in Samara Oblast, which the Rosneft oil company runs, shut down its operations last week after Ukrainian drones damaged its main primary oil refining unit. The facility is located 560 miles from the Ukraine-Russia border and produces 8.3 million metric tons of oil per year.
A second Rosneft facility, the Ryazan oil refinery in western Russia, took half of its refining capacity off-line following a Ukrainian drone strike last week, according to three Russian oil industry sources speaking to Reuters for the same story. Two of the facility’s main oil refining units closed down operations after August 2.
Reuters also reported that the one refining unit still operational accounts for 48 percent of the facility’s capacity, or 23,200 tons of product per day.
Russia’s Great Weakness
Oil and gas revenues are estimated to account for up to one-third of the Russian federal budget’s income. Moscow now stands to be hit with a “double whammy” as Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil production sites are chipping away at the revenue that Putin earns from this industry.
On the other end, US President Donald Trump has previously threatened to impose secondary tariffs on Russian oil exports if Putin does not agree to a peace deal in Ukraine by August 8. If the US president follows through on this plan, the combination could further complicate Putin’s war plans.
Military Bases Also Being Targeted
The Ryazan refinery is approximately 300 miles from the Ukraine border and processed 13.1 million metric tons of crude oil last year, reported Reuters. Rosneft is one of Russia’s largest state-owned oil processing companies. It has also been under sanctions since 2014 following the Crimea invasion – economic restrictions imposed on Moscow just as Sen. McCain had suggested.
These were not isolated attacks. Ukrainian drones operated by different armed service formations and state agencies struck a variety of industrial and military facilities in other regions of Ukraine on August 2. Large explosions at these refineries were shown on local Telegram channels, followed by footage of large, spreading fires at both the Ryazan and Novokuibyshevsk refineries.
Russian officials would only confirm that the drone attacks had taken place, but they did not call out the facilities that were targeted and seriously damaged. Ukraine’s military confirmed the strikes, and added that it had conducted an attack by Ukrainian drones against the Annanefteprodukt fuel and lubricants storage base near the village of Anna in Voronezh Oblast.
Ukrainian drones operated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) attacked the Primorsko-Akhtarsk military airfield in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai and the Elektropribor plant in Penza, according to the SBU.
Two nights later, SBU drones struck five Russian fighter jets on an aerodrome in Saki, a city in Russian-occupied Crimea that was a major naval aviation center during the Soviet period, said the security agency.
These Ukrainian drones, in a what was called a Special Operations Center “A” mission, destroyed a Sukhoi Su-30SM aircraft, damaged another, hit three Su-24s, and also struck an aviation weapons depot.
The Saki base has a pivotal role in Russian military operations in the Black Sea. The damage from this attack, while not anything on the scale of the famous June 1 Operation Spider Web attack that hit many Russian bombers, was still considered “significant.”
Just one Su-30SM alone has a price tag of $35-50 million, said the SBU.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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Swamplaw Yankee
August 9, 2025 at 5:06 am
Many US citizens do have an accurate vision of the captive nation “Federation” that the tsarling Putin dictates to.
McCain saw that the 2014 POTUS Obama Democrat Cabal unilaterally greenlighted the loss of the WEST’S geopolitical advantage in the ownership of the Ukraine’s Crimean soil, families, and Black/Azov Sea zones to the prime vile cold war enemy, tsarling Putin. Obama delighted in being secretive, betraying the West to his marxist blood brothers as Putin hand started Putin’s “little green groomer” military mass Ukrainian child abduction, redocumentation, air shipping and free, no-cost giveaway to very, very needy russian language teachers and table top dancing instructors.
A genuine war hero, McCain seemed opposite to the hand fed rich boy Obama who never saw a USA asset that could not be betrayed.
The rump russia that depended on the GNP of the sex trade income of Ukrainian children being abused and sold for Ottoman muslim gold was now the russia that depended on huge GNP income from the Siberian Far east nations that the rump russians held in permanent captivity.
The analogy that McCain used was simple, had form and functionality. The average Yankee could understand the evolution of the common gas pump. But, marxist Obama refused to assist the captive peoples of Siberia’s far east escape the czarist prison guards who changed political costumes as if it was Halloween.
The MAGA POTUS trump should be facing pressure from his rank and file to help Ukraine ramp up huge drone production to attack any and all russian military facilities. The small window of opportunity is based on a time frame that many Ukrainian men died to get. Make more drone/missile stock right now!
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