On 12 August 2026, Ukraine targeted Russia's main Black Sea naval base and oil terminal at Novorossiysk overnight. Fires broke out at the port's oil and fleet facilities, two of Russia's largest grain terminals stopped work, and debris damaged homes across the city, according to Ukrainian monitoring channels and local Russian authorities. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the operation hours later.

Kyiv calls it a "unique operation" on the fleet's last big base

Zelenskyy said Ukraine's Defense Forces hit the Novorossiysk naval base overnight on 12 August. The port city is situated more than 350 kilometers from the front line on Russia's eastern Black Sea coast. The Ukrainian president described the assault as a unique operation against the last main outpost of Russia's Black Sea Fleet.

"Our Palianytsia jet drones, Neptune missiles, and naval uncrewed systems precisely struck the designated targets," he said, adding that hits were confirmed on air-defense positions, piers, and seaport infrastructure.

Fires at the Sheskharis oil terminal and the naval harbor

Ukrainian drones hit the oil terminal and the naval base, the Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. Its analysis of NASA satellite fire data placed blazes at the Sheskharis complex, where crude loads onto tankers, and near the naval base and fuel-storage tanks.

Sheskharis is the endpoint of Transneft's main pipelines and a key export point for Russian crude on the Black Sea. Novorossiysk ships 600,000 to 700,000 barrels of oil a day.

The Ukrainian monitoring channel Krymsky Veter said fires broke out near the Sheskharis pier and the military harbor where Black Sea Fleet ships and submarines dock. Russia moved vessels to Novorossiysk after Ukrainian strikes pushed the fleet out of occupied Crimea.

Two grain terminals stop at the world's top wheat exporter

Novorossiysk's two largest grain-handling terminals halted work after the strikes, Reuters reported, citing four industry sources. The world's top wheat seller, Russia sends most of its exports out through Black Sea ports.

The Novorossiysk grain terminal, which can move 8.5 million tons a year, halted work as owner Demetra Holding assessed the damage. NKHP, a terminal handling 7.1 million tons a year, also stopped, its main owner OZK said, adding that no one was hurt. The Ukrainian monitoring Telegram channel Exilenova+ described NKHP, Russia's largest deepwater grain terminal, as one of the sites hit.

The strikes extend Ukraine's effort to deny Russia the grain and oil revenue that funds the war, a mirror of Russia's own summer campaign against Ukraine's ports: as Moscow strikes Odesa's terminals to choke Ukrainian exports, Kyiv works to shut Russia's own.

Russia says its own drone debris damaged homes and killed two

Krasnodar Krai Governor Veniamin Kondratyev claimed several hundred drones attacked the region overnight and that falling debris struck 21 residential buildings and four enterprises in Novorossiysk. He claimed two people were killed, including an eight-year-old child, and 13 wounded across the krai, with about 90 residents moved to temporary shelters.

Novorossiysk Mayor Andrei Kravchenko claimed debris hit six residential buildings, a commercial building, and a construction site, and that there were casualties.

The Russian news Telegram channel Astra reported that a café burned on Sukhumskoye Shosse, across the road from the entrance to the Novorossiysk naval base. Astra also found that a strike damaged School No. 15 near the fleet's ship berths.

Part of a widening summer campaign

The strike fits a broader Ukrainian effort this summer to carry the war onto Russian soil and drain the Kremlin's ability to fight. A day earlier, Ukrainian drones set a Wildberries logistics complex ablaze near Voronezh and hit an oil refinery in Orsk. Overnight on 10 August, drones struck a petrochemical plant in Tobolsk and a refinery in Tatarstan.

Ukrainian drone strikes have forced Russia to import gasoline—shipping cargoes from as far as Morocco to an Arctic port—and to pay for the damage twice over. Moscow now subsidizes both the refineries the drones keep setting on fire and the foreign fuel replacing what those refineries can no longer produce.

Russia caps fuel prices at home below what refiners could earn abroad, and the budget pays them the difference—so they keep supplying the domestic market rather than exporting everything. The payments, together with related reimbursements, reached 1.221 trillion rubles ($15 billion) from April through July, Finance Ministry data show—close to the full annual budget of Moscow Oblast, the region ringing the capital.

Those monthly payments have roughly halved since spring, to about 190 billion rubles ($2.4 billion) in July, as lower oil prices narrowed the gap the subsidy fills.

Russia cannot keep its refineries running

Russian crude processing fell to 3.6 million barrels a day in July, its lowest since 2002 and roughly a third below the seasonal norm. Ukraine has hit at least 24 of Russia’s 34 largest refineries in some 50 strikes.

Fuel shortages and rationing now affect 50 million people—about a third of Russia’s population—according to a Financial Times analysis. Russia runs the world’s third-largest oil-refining industry, so the lost output has tightened diesel and gasoline supply beyond its borders. With less capacity to refine at home, Russia has had to export more raw crude and less high-value fuel.

With its refineries down, Moscow is now paying a second subsidy—this time to the importers bringing gasoline in. Gasoline is arriving by rail from Belarus and Kazakhstan and by sea from India and, in mid-July, Morocco: a cargo loaded at the port of Tangier and discharged at Murmansk, on the Arctic coast.

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Ukraine has already named the import route as a target. In early July, presidential sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk called Russia’s new reliance on imported fuel a fresh vulnerability and said Kyiv had raised a response with the European Commission—though the EU’s next sanctions package, now in preparation, is so far built mainly around other measures.

A country that ships crude out of the Arctic is now shipping gasoline in through it.

Ukraine's drones widened their assault on Russia's sanctions-dodging shadow fleet overnight on 17 July, hitting 12 more vessels in the Black Sea, according to Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi. The same night, drones struck occupied Kerch and Berdiansk, and satellites logged fires at Crimea's main rail hub as the campaign to cut the peninsula off from Russia pressed on.

Twelve more ships in a single night

Brovdi said his operators hit nine dry-cargo ships, one tanker, one gas carrier, and one tug in the Black Sea. The strikes ran under the codename MoLoChKa, a Ukrainian term for dairy products.

He put the 6–17 July total at 159 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet across both seas. Of those, 117 were hit in the Sea of Azov and 42 in the Black Sea.

Brovdi vowed the operation would run without end. Moscow will fall, he wrote, promising Ukraine would "feed and rebuild" Crimea once the peninsula is retaken.

A day earlier, the Security Service of Ukraine's Mamai sea drones struck two shadow-fleet crude tankers in the same waters. The wider drive has already pushed the fight out of the Azov shallows and into the open Black Sea. 

Isolation of Crimea continues

While the ships burned at sea, drones hit occupied Crimea from about 21:40 until morning, the monitoring Telegram channel Krymsky Veter reported. Residents heard explosions in at least Kerch, Simferopol, Feodosia, and Yevpatoria.

By morning, OSINT channels recorded a cluster of fires at Kerch's railway station, near the Crimean Bridge, and NASA FIRMS satellite data confirmed a blaze in the area, the monitoring channel Exilenova+ said. Early reports pointed to burning warehouses, rail wagons on the tracks, and possibly the Kerch oil depot and the Kerchenska electrical substation, though none of that was confirmed.

Monitoring channels also logged a fire near Shchebetivka, by the Koktebel substation, after drones reportedly struck a pumping station and the 110/35/6 kV facility there.

Crimea's supply lines under strain

The Kerch rail yard has grown critically overloaded as Ukrainian strikes hammer the peninsula's rail network. Two days earlier, occupation authorities in the northern city of Dzhankoi restricted mobile service to 16 hours a day amid power disruptions.

In occupied Berdiansk, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukrainian strike drones hit energy infrastructure, sparking a fire, Exilenova+ said in a separate overnight report, sharing a video of the resulting fire.

The sea and rail strikes fit a longer effort to sever Crimea by cutting the fuel, transport, and energy links that sustain the occupation. 

Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) struck two sanctioned Russian oil tankers with naval drones in the Black Sea, the SBU said. The vessels belong to the shadow fleet Moscow uses to sell crude around Western sanctions, and Russian aircraft tried and failed to stop the attack.

Two tankers, one sanctions-busting job

The SBU, working with the Navy, hit the ocean-going tankers Louise 1 and Banda — both under Ukrainian sanctions — with Mamai naval drones. 

Louise 1 had moved Russian crude through the G7 and EU embargo, loading at Baltic and Black Sea ports with its transponder switched off. In 2026 alone, it carried nearly 3 million tons of Russian Urals crude, the SBU said.

Banda had run Russian crude out of four ports: Ust-Luga, Kerch, Novorossiysk, and Nakhodka.

As the drones closed in, Russian aircraft fired machine guns and dropped bombs at them, without success, the SBU said. 

The service calls each shadow-fleet tanker a legitimate target and a working part of Russia's war machine. Every strike, it says, cuts the oil money paying for the invasion.

A week earlier, the SBU's Sea Baby drone hit the sanctioned tanker Blue in Ukraine's waters off occupied Yalta. Ukraine has spent 2026 turning cheap drones into kinetic sanctions on Russia's tanker fleet. Sea Baby drones have wrecked shadow-fleet tankers across the Black Sea since late 2025.

The air campaign running alongside it

The naval strikes run in parallel with an aerial-drone campaign by the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS). On 16 July, SBS operators struck 11 more shadow-fleet vessels — five oil tankers, a gas carrier, three dry-cargo ships, and two tugs.

That brought the 6–16 July total to 147 vessels: 117 in the Sea of Azov and 30 in the Black Sea.

"The goal: paralysis of the logistics of oil, fuel, and cargo that bypasses sanctions," commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi wrote. 

Ukraine's aerial attack drones opened a new front against Russia's sanctions-dodging shadow fleet, striking 20 vessels in the Black Sea in a single night, the Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) reported. The raid launched the Black Sea phase of a campaign that had until now played out in the Sea of Azov, and it pushed the 10-day tally well past a hundred ships.

The Black Sea cluster opens

Overnight on 15 July, SBS operators struck 17 oil tankers, two gas carriers, and one tug in Black Sea waters. Six drone units ran the raid together: the 9th "Kairos" Battalion of the 414th "Magyar's Birds" Brigade, the 1st Separate Center, the 20th "K-2" Brigade, the 412th "Nemesis" Brigade, the 427th "Rarog" Brigade, and the 413th "Raid" Regiment.

The two gas carriers fell to Nemesis and Raid operators. The 1st Separate Center took the tug.

The timing was deliberate. SBS commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi wrote that the Black Sea cluster of operation MoLoChKa ("Dairy") opened on 15 July, the Day of Ukrainian Statehood. He framed the night as a scoreline: 20 to nil.

136 ships in 10 days

The Black Sea haul adds to a running total that has climbed fast. From 6 to 15 July, Ukraine's drones struck 136 vessels of Russia's shadow fleet across both seas.

Of those, 116 went down in the Sea of Azov between 6 and 14 July, as an earlier daily count tracked. The 20 Black Sea kills on 15 July carried the campaign west into deeper, wider water.

Bigger tankers, a different aim point

The Black Sea vessels seen in the SBS video are ocean-going ships, far larger than the flat-bottomed river couriers Ukraine has been burning along the Azov feeder route. The footage from the FP-1 or FP-2 attack drones shows the operators aiming mostly for the deck structures rather than the bridges, with follow-up drones filming the fires that spread after the first strikes.

The operation's stated goal is steady disruption of Russian logistics and the money behind them. Disabling tankers, cargo ships, and support vessels complicates oil exports and limits Russia's ability to fuel its troops and the occupation force in Crimea.