Ukraine's long-range drone campaign has entered a new phase, shifting from attacks on Russia's military infrastructure to systematic strikes on the commercial ports, grain terminals and oil export facilities that underpin both Moscow's wartime economy and Kazakhstan's energy exports.

Russia has countered by targeting Ukraine’s six commercial ports of which Odesa is the key transport asset that accounts for two thirds of Ukraine’s seaborne exports by volume and half by value.

Both Ukraine’s and Russia’s ports have already been brought to standstills that will hurt export revenues and has already caused Ferrexpo, a leading Ukrainian metallurgical plant, to shut down production as its warehouses are full to bursting. Russian exports of oil are likely to be impacted as well, although it has several alternative export channels to ease the pressure.

Attacks are escalating as part of the unfolding brutal tit-for-tat missile war and have simultaneously disrupted Russia's two most important Black Sea export businesses: agricultural exports and crude oil shipments.

On July 30, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) again suspended tanker loadings at its marine terminal near Novorossiysk after Ukrainian drones struck two oil tankers waiting to load crude. Hours earlier, Ukrainian analyst Kyrylo Shevchenko reported that Russian attacks on Ukrainian ports and Ukraine's own strikes on Russian grain terminals had left both sides' Black Sea trade under increasing pressure.

Kyiv is widening its economic warfare strategy beyond refineries to target the logistics network that moves Russia's most valuable exports. As IntelliNews reported, Ukraine's strategy of attacking Russia’s oil refineries has settled into a routine of damage, repair and restart that make for spectacular headlines, but after having reduced the throughput by an estimated 45%, according to the Financial Times, has seen the fuel crisis abate in the last weeks as Russia imports petrol from friendly states such as Belarus, Kazakhstan and India. As oil analyst Sergey Vakulenko put it in a recent paper: Russia oil refinery sector is battered but not broken.

Vakhtang Partsvania argued in a comment for Riddle Russia that Bankova, Ukraine’s presidential administration, has become dissatisfied with its previous strategy of hitting oil refineries is working terminals, such as the week-long attacks on Primorsk and Ust-Luga, which temporarily reduce traffic, but the damage can be quickly repaired and the port soon goes back to work, as tank farms are designed to lose individual tanks rather than whole facilities, and loadings usually resume once pipeline and rail links survive, says Partsvania.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has refined its strategy, using new and more accurate long-range “sanctions”, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has taken to calling them: Ukraine has been aiming at the more sophisticated and difficult to replace equipment in the refineries that is starting to put them out of action completely. For example, the Moscow refinery was hit in May and will not come back online until the start of next year, Reuters reports.

Economic costs mount

With its limited access to the sea, the Russian counteroffensive is hurting Ukraine more than the pain Ukraine is inflicting on Russia. Every day that Greater Odesa's ports remain idle costs an estimated $70mn in delayed exports, according to Shevchenko. In June alone the three ports handled $2.1bn of exports out of Ukraine's total monthly exports of $3.5bn.

During the first half of 2026, 34mn tonnes of cargo—roughly two-thirds of Ukraine's total exports of 50.7mn tonnes—passed through Greater Odesa, which also handles around 60% of Ukraine's cross-border cargo traffic. Russian attacks have already eliminated roughly one-third of Ukraine's Black Sea grain export capacity. That comes at a time where the Ministry of Finance (MinFin) already says there is a $20bn hole in the budget thanks to inflated defence costs.

Still, the pain to Russia is also significant, at a time when its economy has slowed sharply and the budget deficit is swelling alarmingly. Three of the country's largest Black Sea grain terminals—NZT and KSK in Novorossiysk and ZTKT at Taman, together capable of handling more than 20mn tonnes annually—have restricted truck deliveries following repeated Ukrainian drone attacks. According to Shevchenko, operations at Taman have effectively stopped, while shipping through the Sea of Azov has largely frozen.

The impact is now starting to show up in the export statistics. Russian wheat exports in July fell to just 1.5mn tonnes, their lowest monthly level since 2017 and roughly one-third below the same month last year. The decline threatens between $10bn and $15bn of annual grain trade if disruptions continue. Moscow is exploring alternative export routes through the Baltic and Caspian Seas, but Shevchenko says there is so far little evidence that those corridors are absorbing the lost Black Sea volumes.

CPC in the firing line

The innocent bystander in this slugfest is Kazakhstan which sends 80% of its oil to international markets via the CPC pipeline and the Russian port of Novorossiysk.

The CPC said drones struck the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker Nissos Sifnos, which was loading Tengiz crude from the consortium's Single Point Mooring-3 at the weekend. The attack ignited a fire near the vessel's cargo manifolds before being extinguished by the crew with assistance from three CPC support vessels.

A second tanker, the Isle of Man-flagged Marathi, was attacked around six nautical miles from the terminal while approaching to load. CPC said neither vessel suffered casualties or oil spills and both remained afloat, but loading operations were suspended once again while inspections continue.

The consortium made an unusually pointed political statement, noting that the attacks had occurred despite repeated appeals from Astana and other international shareholders—including approaches made through the US State Department—calling for international energy infrastructure not to be targeted.

The terminal occupies a unique position in Eurasian energy markets. Although located on Russia's Black Sea coast, the 1,511km CPC pipeline primarily exports crude from western Kazakhstan. Its shareholders include Transneft, KazMunayGas, and subsidiaries of Chevron (NYSE: CVX), ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM), Lukoil and a Rosneft-Shell joint venture. Every disruption therefore affects Kazakhstan's export revenues as much as Russia's, highlighting the increasingly international economic consequences of the conflict.

Taken together, the Black Sea has become one of the war's principal economic battlefields on a par with the twin closure of the global chokepoints of Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab at the end of the Red Sea.

For much of the conflict, Ukraine focused on breaking Russia's naval blockade and reopening its own export corridor from Odesa. Russia, meanwhile, repeatedly attacked Ukrainian port infrastructure in an effort to choke Kyiv's agricultural and metal exports and the Ukrainian economy is already beginning to shut down as a result. Ukraine continues to lose export revenue every day its ports are disrupted, while Russia's own grain terminals, oil export infrastructure and shipping are increasingly exposed to Zelenskiy’s long-range “sanctions” after the formal EU and US sanctions have delivered little to pressure Putin into talks.

Despite Russia’s clear advantage in the drones vs missiles arms race and Kyiv’s nearly exhausted supply of PAC-3 interceptor missiles, neither side appears capable of protecting its commercial maritime infrastructure completely. Both now face the same difficult choice: absorb the economic cost of interrupted trade or reroute exports through longer, more expensive overland and alternative maritime corridors.

The result is that the economic war in the Black Sea is becoming increasingly symmetrical. At the same time Ukraine’s missile development programme is also rapidly closing the gap with Russia as new classes of long-range and more powerful missiles appear such as the famed Flamingo cruise missile, which is already in service, and the F-9, Ukraine’s first true cruise missile, that is expected to appear at the end of this year.

What began as an attempt to blockade Ukraine's exports has evolved into a contest in which ports, grain terminals, oil tankers and shipping lanes on both sides of the sea have become legitimate military targets, raising the cost of trade for Moscow and Kyiv alike.