According to Torbjörn Törnqvist, the attacks in Ukraine have reduced the export of Russian oil products by a fifth. The insider group's estimate is in the same size category.
Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries have taken a significant part of Russian diesel oil off the world market. Director of the oil brokerage company Gunvor Torbjörn Törnqvist presented the estimate at a financial meeting in Houston on Monday, reports the news agency Bloomberg.
During this year, Ukraine has carried out drone attacks on fifteen Russian oil refineries, and eight of them have been badly damaged, according to a group of investigative journalism Insider's statement published on Telegram on Monday.
The Ukrainian armed forces celebrated Sunday's Russian election day with an attack on the Slavyansk refinery in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, but attacks have also been carried out considerably further to the east.
Törnqvist according to estimates, drones have destroyed about 600,000 barrels of oil refining capacity in Russia. A barrel is a unit of measurement in the oil trade and corresponds to approximately 159 liters.
Russia's daily oil production is more than 11 million barrels per day, so crude oil production has not collapsed due to the strikes in Ukraine. However, the attacks have been aimed at refineries and, apparently, especially at plants that produce diesel.
“This is significant because this immediately and directly damages the export of refined oil products,” Törnqvist said, according to Bloomberg.
“This reduces exports by a couple of hundred thousand barrels per day, so I consider it a problem for distillates.”
Bloomberg said last week that Russia has typically exported around one million barrels of diesel abroad in the past, so Törnqvist's estimate would mean that Ukraine has succeeded in depriving Russia of a fifth of its export diesel income with its drone attacks.
Insider's assessment is similar. According to the group, the strikes in Ukraine would have destroyed 17 percent of Russia's oil production capacity.
According to Bloomberg, the attacks in Ukraine have sent the prices of diesel futures to a rapid rise.
Törnqvist and a Finnish-Russian businessman Gennady Timchenko founded by Gunvor quickly became Russia's largest oil broker at the beginning of the millennium. The Wikileaks leaks revealed in 2010 that the US suspected the president Vladimir Putin to be involved in the company.
When Timchenko was put on the US sanctions list in 2014, he retreated to the background. Gunvor directed its operations outside of Russia, and today most of the crude oil it transports comes from the United States.
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