The overnight report reads like battlefield housekeeping — Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces commander reported strikes on a MiG-29 and Ka-52 at Millerovo air base, two air-surveillance radars in Rostov Oblast and radar assets in occupied Crimea. [1] It is better read as an export-margin note. Saturday's Samara refinery fire showed the campaign's target; the radar hunt is what keeps it cheap.

The economics compound through a simple loop. Every radar killed raises the cost of covering the next refinery, so strikes continue, and Russian crude processing has fallen to levels unseen since 2005 — an average of 3.91 million barrels per day in early July, more than 1.4 million below the prior year, with 24 of 34 large refineries hit across roughly 50 attacks. [2] Moscow has answered by inverting its own export book: gasoline exports banned in April, jet fuel in June, diesel since July 8 — now extended to producers refining their own crude — while importing fuel from India and Belarus and shopping for about 400,000 tonnes of gasoline a month abroad. [2]

The margin story lands on everyone else. European diesel cracks surged above $60 per barrel after the ban, a record, and U.S. diesel futures posted their largest one-day gain in four years; June seaborne diesel shipments had already sunk to roughly 426,000 barrels per day, the weakest since 2017, leaving Turkey and Brazil to absorb half the remaining cargoes. [2][3] Whoever still ships product earns like a utility; Russia forfeited the seat to ration at home.

Blind the radars, burn the stills, keep the diesel. That is the trade, and it is compounding.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco