Russia the energy superpower is now importing jet fuel: the hard-money cost of Ukraine's refinery strikes on Moscow's war budget

Before the war, Russia exported roughly 30,000 barrels of jet fuel a day, a quiet line in a vast energy-export ledger. This summer it became an importer instead, and not only because of sanctions. Ukraine's defence-intelligence agency says at least 70,000 tonnes of Jet A-1 aviation kerosene has since early August been delivered to St Petersburg and Vladivostok on three shadow-fleet tankers — about 11,000 tonnes from South Korea and 59,000 tonnes from Egypt. Kyiv's claim is specific: the fuel has been documented inside Russian military transports and is compatible with the MiG-29, the Su-34 and the Tu-95MS strategic bomber, among others. The energy superpower buying kerosene for its warplanes is a potent image. The question is how much hard money the inversion actually costs.

The arithmetic is bracing, and it deflates the image. Jet A-1 trades at roughly $1.08 a litre on global benchmarks, equivalent to about $171 a barrel and, at prevailing densities, a little over $1,300 a tonne. A 70,000-tonne batch therefore costs on the order of $90m — say $90m-130m once a shadow-fleet premium and third-country trading margin are added. Now set that against Russia's fossil-fuel export earnings, which the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a Finnish think-tank, put at €683m a day in July, down 12% on the month, or about €20.5bn a month; by August the daily figure had slipped further to €604m ($700m). One batch of imported kerosene is half a percent of a single month's energy revenue. Even the whole importer's programme — 172,000 tonnes of seaborne oil products in August, three times all of 2025's imports, plus gasoline sourced from Belarus and India — is probably worth a few hundred million dollars a month. As a line in the war budget, it barely registers, a rounding error beside a rent machine that still earns €600m-700m a day.

Nor should the premium Russia is paying be exaggerated. Ukrainian strikes have pushed jet-fuel prices at Russian airports up by more than 17% since early June, and in Makhachkala by 64%, to nearly $2,100 a tonne. But that is a domestic-market symptom, a transfer from airlines to refiners inside the country, not a hard-currency outflow. The drain that matters is the foreign exchange Russia has forgone, not the modest sum it now spends to keep its air force aloft.

That drain, however, is real, and it is larger than the import bill by an order of magnitude. Russia was not merely a jet-fuel exporter; it was a refined-products exporter, and Ukrainian strikes have dismantled that business. Seaborne oil-product export revenue fell 45% month on month in July to €116m a day, and loadings at Russian ports hit a record low of 4.7m tonnes, less than half the volume shipped in July 2025. Refining output has dropped to a 20-year low of about 3.5m barrels a day, with gasoline production down a quarter and diesel down two-fifths. The International Energy Agency separately reckons the strikes cut Russian crude output by 200,000 barrels a day in August. On a generous reading, the refinery campaign has stripped the budget of on the order of €2bn-3bn a month in product-export earnings — low double digits of total energy revenue, and a far more consequential subtraction than anything the import bill delivers. It is the lost export dollars, not the bought fuel, that tighten Moscow's war budget.

Is the shift durable, or will the ban lift and the importers pack up as refining recovers? The honest answer is split, and the distinction is the point. The jet-fuel import episode itself is best read as transitory. Russia has already restored slightly less than half of the capacity the strikes knocked out — plants with 40m tonnes of annual crude capacity have resumed selling fuel — and officials describe imports as a supplementary tool, not a lifeline. The temporary export bans on jet fuel and diesel are, as the name says, temporary, and will be relaxed as output normalises.

The structural change beneath them is not so easily repaired. Gazprom Neft's Moscow refinery, the capital's largest fuel supplier, will be offline into 2027 and cost roughly $1bn to put right; facilities with a combined 45m tonnes of annual crude capacity remain shuttered. Ukraine matched a record with eighteen refinery attacks in August, so capacity keeps being knocked out as it comes back. Meanwhile, each import wholesale erodes Russia's standing as a reliable supplier: traditional customers in Kazakhstan and Türkiye are already shopping elsewhere, and paying Indian and Egyptian refiners to process Russian crude and ship the product back is a permanent premium layered on top of the lost margin.

None of this refutes the headline — Russia, an energy superpower, now imports jet fuel. It reframes it. Ukraine's refinery strategy is not, in its near-term hard-money form, an attempt to bankrupt the war effort; even the most generous accounting leaves the fuel trade a small share of a still-enormous energy revenue. The campaign works more slowly and more cunningly, through the permanent conversion of a refined-product exporter into a customer that must process its own crude abroad, through margins frittered in premiums and rebuilds, and through capacity offline not for months but for years. That is a bounded but durable leak in a big tank — a constraint on cost, margin and market share rather than a solvency event. Moscow can absorb the loss. The torment is that it now has to keep absorbing it, month after month, while spending to import what it used to sell.