Oil Refineries Get the Headlines but Ukraine's Airfield Strikes May Hurt Russia More

The SBU said its drones struck the Saky military airfield near Novofedorivka overnight on July 1

AFU

Hey friends.

Oil refineries get the press, and I understand why. They burn beautifully, they throw up a smoke column you can see from orbit, and they hit Russia in the wallet, which is why refinery strikes have been one of the biggest stories of 2026.

But on July 1, Ukraine hit something a lot less telegenic at the Saky air base in occupied Crimea:

Hangars.

Ukraine’s Security Service says its drones scored five confirmed hits on hangars at Saky, with two of them reportedly holding Su-30 and Su-30SM fighters, and a fire breaking out afterward in the hangar where the SBU says a Su-30SM was parked. This is Ukraine going after Russia’s ability to generate airpower off the peninsula at all, which is worth a great deal more than the sticker price on any one jet.

2021 Google Earth imagery of Saky shows what appear to be Su-30SM Flanker fighters and Su-24M/MR Fencer strike aircraft parked on the apron. The two light-colored aircraft have the broad Flanker planform, while the darker aircraft appear consistent with Su-24-family strike/reconnaissance jets. The image is not sharp enough to identify individual variants or confirm serials, but the aircraft mix matches what has long been associated with Russian naval aviation at Saky.

What Ukraine says happened

Keep your battle damage assessment in pencil for now, because the picture is still developing, but the target set alone tells you the intent.

The SBU said its drones struck the Saky military airfield near Novofedorivka overnight on July 1, going after the airfield’s infrastructure and specifically the hangars where combat aircraft are stored.

The service confirmed five drone hits on those hangars, said preliminary information put Su-30 and Su-30SM fighters inside two of them, and pointed to a fire in the Su-30SM hangar as its evidence the strike landed where it was aimed.

It pegged each aircraft at somewhere between $30 million and $50 million depending on how it’s kitted out. Russia, as of this writing, has said nothing, and independent satellite confirmation was still pending when I sat down to write this, so if you’re following along on an OSINT dashboard, that’s the thing to watch for over the next few days.

This one came as part of a 40-day parallel pressure campaign Zelensky approved in late June, an “influence operation” aimed at forcing Moscow toward ending the war, and a lot of that campaign has been long-range strikes on exactly this kind of target.

Why Saky, of all places

Saky, also called the Novofedorivka airbase, is one of Russia’s main military aviation sites in Crimea, long tied to naval aviation and used to help run strikes against Ukraine.

It also has history; the kind that rhymes.

Back in August 2022, satellite imagery from Planet Labs showed serious damage after a string of explosions tore through Saky, with craters, burned-out airframes, and at least eight warplanes visibly wrecked in the pictures while Russia insisted it had lost no aircraft at all.

That was one of the first moments the whole world watched occupied Crimea stop being a safe rear area. Four years later Ukraine is teaching the same lesson with better tools, and this time the message isn’t just that the tarmac isn’t safe, it’s that the hangars aren’t either.

A jet is a demanding, needy machine, and a hangar is where the neediness gets serviced.

Engines get inspected, avionics get tested, weapons get loaded, and all of it depends on mechanics, spare parts, ground support gear, fuel lines, test equipment, and technicians with a dry place to work. Punch holes in the hangars and you’re potentially hitting the tools, the spares, the loaders, the maintenance records, and the badly underpaid people who keep the whole thing flyable.

Airpower is the sortie, the full cycle where an aircraft takes off, reaches the fight, drops its weapons, comes home, gets refueled and rearmed and patched up by an exhausted crew, and then flies again by morning.

Ukraine is trying to jam that cycle at every step, and you don’t need to blow up the jet to do it, you just need to make the base slower and worse at turning parked aircraft into missions over Ukrainian trenches.

Ukraine’s strike campaign against Russian airfields is airpower denial by cheaper means. Every burned Su-30, damaged Su-34, cratered apron, wrecked hangar, hit fuel site, destroyed ammo dump, or damaged maintenance area attacks the same cycle: fuel the jet, arm the jet, fix the jet, launch the jet, recover the jet, and do it again tomorrow.

Russia’s glide-bomb campaign depends on that cycle. So Ukraine is going after the machinery behind the bombing, from Saky and Belbek in occupied Crimea to Morozovsk, Marinovka, Engels, and the deep-strike targets of Operation Spiders Web. The point is that repeated strikes force Russia to disperse aircraft, harden shelters, move bases farther from the front, spend air defense on runway protection, fly longer routes, and generate fewer sorties with more friction.

Damage the maintenance area and repairs stall, hit the ground support gear and a perfectly good fighter sits idle, crater the fuel and munitions flow and the tempo drops, and knock down the air defense around the field and the next strike comes easier than the last.

A jet that can’t fly today is, for today, exactly as useful to Russia as no jet at all.

There’s a US Air Force concept that fits what Ukraine is doing here: parallel operations.

The idea is simple enough. Sequential attacks hit one target set, wait, assess, then move to the next.

Parallel attacks hit many parts of the enemy system at once, not because every target is equally dangerous, but because the system shock is cumulative.

Airfields, refineries, fuel depots, radar sites, air-defense batteries, rail nodes, hangars, ammunition storage, and maintenance areas all belong to the same war machine. Hit them together and the enemy has less time to adapt, reroute, repair, disperse, and lie convincingly about how everything is fine.

That was the logic behind US-led air campaigns in Iraqi Freedom and Epic Fury, where coalition planners attacked command, air defense, airfields, communications, logistics, and fielded forces in parallel until the system struggled to function coherently.

Iran survived this because of the decentralized nature of its command and control. It’s debatable whether the Ayatollahs have any control over the military at all, even on a good day.

But for Ukraine, it’s not doing this with the mass of the US Air Force, obviously. It is doing it with drones, sabotage, missiles, special operations, and a national talent for making Russia discover new maintenance problems at sunrise.

The aim is to make the whole Russian system react everywhere, all at once, until aircraft are harder to launch, fuel is harder to move, air defenses are tied down, commanders are guessing, and every sortie takes more time, risk, and friction than it did the day before.

Russia’s shelter problem is getting expensive, just like their oil problem

Most modern air forces tuck their frontline jets into hardened aircraft shelters, which are reinforced concrete garages built to eat a near miss, backed up with blast walls, dispersal, camouflage, decoys, and active air defense.

The USAF has been doing this for ages, which is why it was such a shock to lose an E-3 Sentry at PSAB when Iran targeted the airfield. Obviously, some wing commander needs to get fired.

But Russia spent decades leaning instead on the sheer size of its territory, parking aircraft in the open or in soft, unprotected hangars and trusting distance to keep them safe.

All you need to do is look at historic satellite footage of Russian airbases to see the sheer volume of naked aircraft parked directly on the ramp.

Ukraine has spent the last year detonating the distance assumption.

The Spiders Web operation in June 2025 sent drones smuggled deep inside Russia against strategic bomber bases, with Ukraine claiming hits on dozens of aircraft including at Belaya, more than 4,000 kilometers from the border, and since then Ukraine has reached airfields like Shagol near Chelyabinsk, roughly 1,700 kilometers out.

Russia responded by pouring concrete and building proper shelters at some bases, which sounds like the fix until you follow the logic all the way down. Analysts at Defense Express note that Ukraine’s newer drones are already chipping away at the protective value of those shelters, which leaves Moscow with two bad choices:

Pull the aircraft farther back and you buy safety at the cost of longer flights, more fuel burned, and more wear on the airframes, or keep them forward where they’re useful and accept that a hardened roof buys you delay rather than immunity.

A shelter isn’t a force field, it’s a speed bump, and sometimes it’s just a more expensive place for a drone to start a fire.

None of this is abstract, and here’s where it touches actual Ukrainian lives. Russian airpower is the delivery system for the glide bombs that pound Ukrainian positions, the cheap dumb bombs fitted with pop-out wings and guidance kits that a jet can toss from 40 kilometers away and still flatten a strongpoint.

Ukrainian air defense has pushed Russian aircraft back in a lot of sectors, but the glide bomb remains one of the most punishing things Russia does near the line.

So, every airframe damaged, every hangar knocked out of service, every maintenance cycle interrupted, and every sortie delayed translates into less pressure somewhere along that front.

Not zero pressure, but less. And in a war being decided at the margins, if a hangar fire at Saky means a handful of Russian jets sit grounded for a day or a week, that’s some Ukrainian platoon getting one fewer glide bomb dropped on its afternoon, which is not trivial to the people in that treeline.

The Saky strike slots neatly into the bigger squeeze I wrote about recently, the campaign turning Crimea from Russia’s prize into its logistical cauldron. Ukraine has been methodically working the peninsula’s bridges, fuel depots, power grid, ferries, rail nodes, radars, air defenses, and ships, and the airfields belong in that same target folder.

Crimea used to be Russia’s forward platform in the Black Sea, projecting ships and missiles and aircraft outward, and Ukraine is slowly inverting the whole thing into a garrison under constant surveillance that has to spend its energy defending itself before it can throw a punch.

What to watch for in the imagery

Since a lot of you run your own OSINT, here’s a quick checklist for when the overhead shots of Saky finally drop, and it’s worth resisting the urge to just count burned airplanes.

Look for scorching on and around the hangar structures, roof damage or outright collapse, fresh debris fields and fire-suppressant residue, and aircraft that have suddenly been towed well away from the hangars.

Watch for new barriers, netting, or camouflage going up, for emergency repair crews swarming the apron, and for a change in how Russia parks its jets afterward.

That last one is the tell, because the real question is whether the hangar itself became unusable and whether Russia quietly rearranges its whole operation in response.

Air forces tell on themselves when they suddenly start moving the furniture. And I’ll post the satellite images as soon as I have them in my hands (on Substack Notes).

Refineries will keep grabbing the headlines because they’re easy to picture, hit the refinery, watch the smoke, feel the fuel get scarce, done.

Airfield infrastructure is harder to see and every bit as decisive, because jets fight from bases that need fuel and hangars and mechanics and loaders and shelters and radars and a predictable morning routine, and Ukraine is deliberately wrecking the routine... especially in Crimea, and increasingly in parallel.

Russia can adapt, sure. It can move aircraft, build more concrete, push its aviation farther back, and bleed off air defense to guard the runways.

All of that is possible, and all of it costs Russia time, money, range, fuel, and attention it would rather spend killing Ukrainians.

Ukraine was never going to erase the Russian air force on the ground. The plan is quieter and meaner than that, which is to make every single sortie harder to generate than the one before it.

Oil refineries burn on camera. Airfields bleed in the schedule.

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