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.

Explore further

Why Russia is importing gasoline made from its own oil

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.