Blows To Russia: Ukraine Floods The Market With Cheap Oil
- 15.09.2026, 2:10
Why Trump Is Wrong.
With all due respect to the U.S. president, his statements about the need for Ukraine to stop striking Russian diesel fuel production facilities – are pure political pressure.
This is reported in "Uniana", financial analyst and member of the Ukrainian Society of Financial Analysts Vitaliy Shapran.
The fact is that Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries, on the contrary, are forcing the Russian Federation to export more oil and offer more substantial discounts to buyers of that oil. Because otherwise, it simply cannot be sold. The Russians cannot halt oil production because it is costly, and resuming it later would be problematic (and often impossible).
Thus, by striking Russian refineries, Ukraine is actually flooding the market with cheap Russian oil.
However, there is indeed a problem with a shortage of capacity to refine oil into fuel. But there’s a caveat here. Normal oil refining volumes in the Russian Federation amount to 5.3 million barrels per day, while in the Middle East they total 11.6 million barrels per day. Ukraine refines only about 1.5 million barrels per day.
It is true that there is a problem with certain types of fuel in Russia, where up to 50% of refining capacity has been taken offline, but this mainly concerns gasoline. Moreover, diesel fuel is not exported from Russia to the United States. Therefore, the statements by the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, and subsequently President Trump are political in nature. After all, the problem here needs to be resolved not in Russia, but in the Middle East—with Iran and the Houthis.
Incidentally, Iran received intelligence from Russia to carry out strikes on U.S. bases in the Middle East. Moreover, according to the FT, Iran approached Russia to obtain new UAVs for strikes against Israel, and since July 2026, Iran has been the largest buyer of Russian grain—grain that turned out to be unnecessary in the planned volumes even for China…
However, if the Trump administration has any information about how diesel fuel prices in the U.S. depend on production levels in Russia, then I think it’s entirely possible to suspend strikes on refineries—which produce precisely diesel fuel—for 1–2 months. After all, fertilizer plants in the Russian Federation burn very well (watch the video of the 2020 Beirut explosion), as do oxygen plants and coke-chemical units at metallurgical complexes, along with a dozen or so other potential targets.
But if Ukraine takes the U.S. president’s wishes into account, appropriate retaliatory measures must follow. For example, five hundred missiles for the Patriot system “as a gift.”
And I would very much like to remind our American friends that Ukraine did not attack Russia, but is now defending itself against aggression—not the other way around.
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