Ukraine Claims 2,000 km Strike Reach as It Hits Russian Refineries, Bridge and Bases
Ukraine’s intelligence chief says Kyiv can now hit targets more than 2,000 km away, while President Zelensky confirms strikes on Russian oil refineries, a drone launch site in Kursk and military infrastructure in occupied Crimea and Luhansk.
Ukraine is putting Russia’s rear areas under sustained pressure, combining new long‑range strike claims with a campaign against bridges, depots and command posts that underpin Moscow’s war effort.
Ukraine can now hit targets more than 2,000 km away, the head of the country’s military intelligence agency said, describing those deep strikes as “very critical” for forcing Russia to change how it fights. He said such attacks have compelled Russian forces to shut down production lines, carry out repairs, reconfigure logistics and redeploy air defenses. According to his account, Ukrainian planners are concentrating on energy infrastructure that powers Russia’s military, logistics hubs and facilities supporting the defense industry.
President Volodymyr Zelensky separately confirmed that Ukrainian forces have struck oil refineries in Russia’s Ryazan and Perm regions and in Tatarstan. He described the operations as a response to Russian strikes on Ukraine. Zelensky also said Ukrainian forces hit a storage and launch site for attack drones in Russia’s Kursk region, as well as a target in the Black Sea, without naming the latter facility.
On occupied Ukrainian territory, Kyiv is working to cut the arteries that feed Russian troops. Ukrainian forces struck a railway bridge over the North Crimean Canal near Vladyslavivka in Crimea, a structure used for military logistics, according to the Ukrainian General Staff. In the same wave of attacks, they reported hitting command posts in Nyzhnii Naholchyk and Dovzhanske in occupied Luhansk, and in Azovske in the Zaporizhzhia region, alongside a Russian automated reconnaissance post at Perekop and an ammunition depot near Teple.
Ukraine’s special operations forces later said their Ballista unit destroyed a Russian field artillery ammunition depot overnight on 7 September in Teple, describing the site as a former poultry farm now supplying units of Russia’s 8th Combined Arms Army. Satellite imagery analysis of an earlier Ukrainian strike on Russia’s Yeysk airfield, on 30 August, identified impact and detonation marks at the site, with a Russian Pantsir‑S1 air defense system likely destroyed there.
For Russian forces deployed far from the front, the expanding reach of Ukrainian drones and missiles turns rear areas into contested space. Fuel depot workers, refinery technicians and railway crews now operate with the knowledge that their facilities are no longer out of range. On the Ukrainian side, civilians living near airfields, radar sites and power plants that support Russian operations face the retaliatory risk that deep strikes can bring.
Strategically, the campaign forces Moscow to make harder trade‑offs. Every refinery or logistics hub pushed offline complicates the task of keeping ammunition, fuel and equipment flowing to units in Ukraine. The need to defend targets deep inside Russia and across occupied territories can spread air‑defense systems thinner, potentially opening gaps closer to the front. Targeting drone launch sites in regions like Kursk is aimed at the systems Russia uses to sustain its own long‑range pressure on Ukrainian cities.
The strikes also challenge Russia’s narrative that the war can be isolated from its own industrial heartland. Hitting refineries in Ryazan, Perm and Tatarstan signals that assets central to Russia’s energy economy are within reach. For global energy markets, damage to individual facilities has been limited so far, but a pattern of attacks against refineries that serve both domestic and export needs is harder for traders and policymakers to ignore.
In this phase of the war, the front line is no longer only where soldiers dig in; it is any rail bridge, refinery or drone hangar that keeps the conflict supplied. Distance, which once protected deep infrastructure, is becoming a shrinking buffer as Ukraine’s strike complex matures.
Next signals to watch include independent confirmation of the damage at the named refineries, any visible reductions or rerouting in Russian fuel and ammunition flows to the front, and further evidence of Ukrainian drones or missiles operating at or beyond the 2,000 km mark. Russian redeployments of air defenses deeper into its own territory would be another indicator that the pressure is forcing strategic recalculations in Moscow.
Sources
- OSINT