War / Ukraine
Ukrainian drones hit the Bashneft-Novoil refinery in Ufa on Saturday and a fire broke out at its L-35 catalytic reforming unit, the Institute for the Study of War reported — the second straight day of Ukrainian refinery strikes after a two-week pause. Kyiv says a second Ufa refinery was also hit; Russian officials have not confirmed any damage, and the scale of it has not been independently established.
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UFA, October 31, 2026 — Ukraine strikes Ufa refinery targets deep inside Russia for a second straight day: Ukrainian drones hit the Bashneft-Novoil oil refinery in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, on Saturday, and a fire broke out at the plant's L-35 catalytic reforming unit, according to the Institute for the Study of War's October 31 assessment. Ufa lies about 1,200 kilometres from Ukraine's internationally recognised border. Ukraine's Strategic Communications Center said Ukrainian forces struck both the Bashneft-Novoil and the Bashneft-Ufaneftekhim refineries; Russian officials had not confirmed any damage at publication time, and Rosneft, Bashneft's parent company, did not immediately respond to Bloomberg's request for comment. Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the incident, that Kyiv targeted the Bashneft refineries in Ufa even as Ukraine struggled to restore electricity after overnight Russian strikes on its own energy grid.
What happened in Ufa
The clearest account of the morning comes from open-source evidence assembled by the Russian outlet ASTRA and summarised by ISW. A fire broke out at the L-35 catalytic reforming unit of the Bashneft-Novoil refinery, ASTRA concluded from OSINT analysis of eyewitness photographs, and geolocated footage published on October 31 shows smoke rising from the refinery, ISW reported. Residents reported several explosions on Saturday morning, a column of smoke over the industrial zone and internet disruptions after an overnight drone alert, the Kyiv Independent reported, citing ASTRA. The L-35 is not a storage tank or a pipeline spur: it is a processing unit that produces reformate, a high-octane gasoline component, and hydrogen that the refinery needs to make finished motor fuels — a distinction that shapes what this strike can and cannot do, as the section below explains.
The Ufa attack did not happen in isolation. On the same night of October 30–31, Ukrainian forces also struck the Kamensky rocket-fuel plant in Rostov Oblast, covered separately by Signal Post News, and launched drones toward Moscow that temporarily suspended operations at Sheremetyevo Airport, ISW reported. Russia, for its part, launched 134 drones overnight on October 30–31 and a further 168 drones and loitering munitions during October 31 against Ukraine, according to ISW's accounting, and Russian strikes on Ukraine's grid left about 200,000 households in the Dnipro region without power, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, as reported by Bloomberg.
One refinery or two?
How many plants were hit is genuinely unsettled, and the honest answer at publication time is that it is claimed, not confirmed. Ukraine's Strategic Communications Center reported on October 31 that Ukrainian forces struck both Bashneft-Novoil and Bashneft-Ufaneftekhim, two refineries with a combined annual processing capacity of 24 million tons of crude oil, ISW reported, citing StratCom. Residents also claimed two plants were hit, and the Telegram channel Exilenova+ reported fires at two of the three Ufa refineries. Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, stated that an unspecified Ufa refinery suspended operations after the strikes, ISW reported. Against that, there is no independent confirmation of a shutdown, of a second-plant fire, or of the scale of damage at either site. Russian officials have not confirmed any damage at all, and Rosneft did not immediately respond to Bloomberg's request for comment. Readers should hold the two-refinery account as a Ukrainian and eyewitness claim until satellite imagery or an official Russian response settles it.
Why the L-35 matters
A catalytic reforming unit takes low-octane naphtha from crude distillation and, over a catalyst at high temperature, rearranges its molecules into reformate — the high-octane blending component that modern gasoline grades depend on — while producing hydrogen as a by-product that the rest of the refinery uses to strip sulfur from diesel and other fuels. Damage to a reformer therefore reaches beyond one product: it can constrain gasoline blending and hydrotreating at the same time, and reformers are among the more complex secondary units in a refinery. Bashneft-Novoil produces Euro-6 gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and industrial oils. The wider complex matters at national scale: Rosneft-owned Bashneft operates three adjacent refineries in Ufa's northern industrial zone — Bashneft-Novoil, Bashneft-Ufaneftekhim and Bashneft-UNPZ — with a combined crude capacity of about 23.5 million tons a year, roughly 470,000 barrels per day, one of the largest refining complexes in Russia.
There is also a precedent, and it is specific. Ukraine's General Staff said it hit this same L-35 unit in August 2025 — meaning the unit Kyiv says burned on Saturday is one Ukrainian planners have targeted before, whether because it was repaired and returned to service or because it remains a known bottleneck. A fire was also reported in Ufa's refinery zone on September 21, 2026, in the September strike on the same complex; Saturday's attack is a new, separate strike, not a re-report of that incident. The International Energy Agency's figures frame the repair question: severe damage to complex secondary units such as catalytic reformers can take on average six to eight months to repair. That is a general IEA estimate for this class of equipment, not a confirmed timeline for the L-35, whose actual condition remains unverified.
Why this matters
The Ufa strike matters less for one unit's fire than for what a second consecutive day of attacks announces. On Friday, October 30, Ukraine struck the Novokuibyshevsk refinery in Samara region — the first confirmed refinery strike since October 15, ending a pause of roughly two weeks. Ufa, a day later and some 1,200 kilometres from the border, converts that single strike into a resumed campaign: two refineries regions hit on consecutive days, plus a missile-fuel plant in Rostov Oblast the same night. By the IEA's accounting, a Russian refinery was hit on average once every three days during the first eight months of 2026; the October pause was the anomaly, and it now appears to be over.
The second pressure point is fuel supply, and unusually, a senior Russian official priced it in public. Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Friday that there had been an overnight attack on three oil refineries and one gas-chemical complex, and warned the strikes could reduce supply volumes under the diesel deal with the United States, under which Russia shipped about 510,000 tons of diesel in October. If refinery outages begin to bite into exportable diesel, the campaign stops being only a Russian domestic problem and becomes a variable in a trade arrangement Washington has an interest in. The third pressure point is political, and it sits in Washington: the strikes resume days before the US midterm elections, in the middle of an argument about fuel prices that the next section lays out.
Context and background: the two-week pause
The pause that ended this weekend was itself a story. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 29 that Ukraine's military had paused refinery strikes after weeks of pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has blamed the strikes for high fuel prices. Energy experts mostly attribute the high prices to the US–Iran war instead, and European allies had advised Kyiv to wait until after the US midterms before resuming. Zelenskyy, asked about the pause, framed it as restraint rather than obedience: "Our guys tried to be a little more careful during these days. But they do not have an order" not to hit refineries. Read against that quote, the Friday and Saturday strikes look like a signal sent in both directions — to Moscow, that the campaign's reach still extends to Bashkortostan, and to Washington, that Kyiv's restraint was tactical and self-imposed, with a limit.
Who benefits, who loses
The two governments describe the same campaign in opposite terms, and both descriptions are on the record. Kyiv frames refinery strikes as striking the industry that funds and fuels Russia's war — refineries convert crude into both export revenue and the diesel and jet fuel an army runs on. The Kremlin frames Ukraine's long-range strikes as an obstacle to talks: ISW noted Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's October 30 framing of such strikes in those terms. Critics of the campaign, including voices in Washington, argue the strikes push up fuel prices and risk escalation; critics of the pause argued it surrendered leverage while Russia continued striking Ukraine's power grid nightly — as it did again this weekend, leaving some 200,000 Dnipro-region households without power. The costs are also concrete on the Russian side: Samara's governor said two men were killed in Friday's Novokuibyshevsk strike. No casualties from the Ufa strike had been reported by any source at publication time.
What happens next
Four questions will decide what this weekend actually changed. First, damage assessment: satellite imagery and thermal-anomaly data over the coming days should show whether the L-35 fire was a surface blaze or a disabling hit, and whether a second Ufa refinery burned at all — the point on which Ukrainian claims and Russian silence currently diverge. Second, the shutdown question: Kovalenko's claim that a Ufa refinery suspended operations will either be confirmed by observable output and official statements or fade unproven. Third, tempo: if strikes continue through the coming week at anything like the year's earlier rhythm — a refinery hit every three days on average, per the IEA — the two-week pause will read in retrospect as a negotiating gesture rather than a policy change. Fourth, the parallel war on the grid: Russia's nightly strikes on Ukrainian electricity continue regardless, and each side is now openly pricing the other's energy system into its strategy for the winter.
Related coverage: Ukraine Hits Novokuybyshevsk Refinery, Ending Its Refinery Pause and Defying Trump · Ukraine Says Neptune Missiles and Drones Hit Russia's Kamensky Rocket Fuel Plant, Damaging Four Workshops · Ukraine says it struck Bashneft refinery in Ufa, 1,300 km from the border
Sources
- Institute for the Study of War — Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, October 31, 2026 — the L-35 fire at Bashneft-Novoil identified from ASTRA's OSINT analysis, the geolocated footage of smoke over the refinery, StratCom's two-refinery claim, Kovalenko's suspension claim, and the same-night strikes on Kamensky and toward Moscow and Russia's drone launch figures.
- The Kyiv Independent via EuropeSays — "Russia's Ufa refinery ablaze after reported drone strike as Ukraine resumes oil attacks" — residents' reports of explosions, the smoke column and internet disruptions after the overnight drone alert, via ASTRA.
- Bloomberg via The Edge Markets — "Ukraine strikes Bashneft refineries as Russia attacks power grid" — the targeting of the Ufa refineries as Ukraine restored power after Russian grid strikes, Rosneft's lack of immediate comment, and the 200,000 Dnipro households left without power, per Zelenskyy.
- Ukrainska Pravda and ASTRA reporting (October 31, 2026) — ASTRA's identification of the L-35 unit from eyewitness photographs and Exilenova+ reports of fires at two of the three Ufa refineries.