Ukrainian drones succeeded last weekend in penetrating Russian air defenses and hit the Moscow Oil Refinery. The ensuing fire knocked out half of production at the plant, the source of one third of gasoline sold in Moscow and most aviation fuel sold to the city’s five international airports.

In the summer of 1941, Germany’s Luftwaffe repeatedly sought to bomb this refinery, the main source of gasoline and diesel for the embattled capital. With German lines 10 miles west of Moscow, some Soviet tank drivers gassed up at the refinery — and then drove straight to the front. To fool Nazi navigators and bombardiers, 2,000 Soviet workers built a plywood replica of the plant — about two miles short of the  flight path to the real plant.

Each time the fake plant was hit, workers burned oil-soaked rags in barrels. This time, the column of thick black smoke rising over the Moscow River was real. On Sunday evening, when President Putin took off for a state visit to Mongolia, he could have looked out a window of his jet to see what all Moscow was seeing, one of Russia’s most modern refineries was in flames.

The attack on Moscow’s refinery is part of a Ukrainian summer bombing campaign that has hit 21 Russian oil refineries and major depots over the last three months. As a result of the campaign, Russia last month imposed a 6-month ban on gasoline exports. Last week, Russia’s Federal Statistics Service, or Rosstat, stopped releasing data on the production of oil products.

Ukraine’s campaign against Russian oil facilities has received little attention in the Western press. Last spring, Biden Administration officials asked their Ukrainian counterparts to stop hitting Russia’s oil export facilities. The Administration worried about a runup in American gasoline prices during the summer driving season, just weeks before the presidential vote.  

Starting in  June, Ukraine shifted  targets to the refineries and oil depots that feed Russia’s military operations in Ukraine. In America, gas prices drifted down over the summer. International attention moved elsewhere. Due to lopsided news coverage, air attacks on Russia largely slip below the news radar.  In Ukraine, an open society, Russian bombings are well-chronicled by the local and foreign press.

In contrast, in Russia, where the state controls the press, news of successful  Ukrainian drone bombings filter out through dash cam videos posted online and then images from satellites. On Monday, the New York Times dealt with the Moscow refinery bombing with two sentences in the middle of a story on page 8. The headline read: “Explosions Rock Kharkiv After Russia Reports a Wave of Drone Attacks.”

Typically, governors of Russian regions limit their information to reporting the number of drones shot down. Occasionally, they  report fires caused by falling drones. On Sunday, for example Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that air defense had shot down 158 Ukrainian drones, including 11 over Moscow. The official report failed to mention the drones that got through. 

“The inability of Russia’s air and missile defense systems to protect against relatively crude long-range one-way drone attacks is surprising,” a University of Oslo missile technology research fellow Fabian Hoffmann posted Monday on X.  “Moscow is protected by a ring of 22 S-300/S-400 air defense sites, most of which should cover the refinery. Additionally, there are at least 9 recently redeployed Pantsir S1/S2 systems that should have been able to protect against this type of drone attack.”

In the fall of 1941, the Luftwaffe targeted the Moscow Refinery as a key to Germany’s attempt to capture the Soviet capital. Today, Ukraine’s goal is more psychological. Although modern, Moscow’s  Gazprom-owned refinery ranks only 11th in production among Russia’s 25 largest refineries. Given Russia’s pipeline network, a gasoline shortage in Moscow is an inconvenience that can be easily covered by imports from other regions.

Russia’s energy minister, Sergei Tsivilev, yesterday told Russia’s state news agency Tass that the fire at the Moscow refinery will not affect consumers as it is possible to quickly ship oil products from one refinery to another.

However, a pillar of black smoke rising for two days 10 miles from the Kremlin is a graphic reminder of the war’s reality to the 13 million inhabitants of greater Moscow. “We must push the war back to where it came from, into Russia,” President Zelensky said Sunday in his nightly address. “And not just in the border areas. The terrorist state must feel what war truly is.”

In the most spectacular attack of the summer, Ukrainian drones set off a fire last month at Proletarsk, a war rear area town in Rostov region. The inferno raged for 16 days, drew in more than 500 firefighters and destroyed about half of the reservoir tanks in the 74-tank depot. For most people in Moscow, Proletarsk is flyover territory, a little known town on the way to nowhere. 

On land, Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region also has a big psychological impact for Russians. The site of the world’s biggest tank battle, Kursk is revered among Russians as holy ground where the war with Nazi Germany turned decisively in their favor. 

The devastating attack on the Moscow Refinery highlights the fast progress Ukraine has made in drone design and production. Only 16 months ago, Ukrainians were excited when a drone hit the roof of a Kremlin building. In retrospect, that drone carried the punch of a large firecracker. And it may have been fired locally by anti-Putin partisans.

By contrast, last weekend’s swarm attack shows that Ukraine is mass-producing a new generation of drones that can fly well over 400 miles. That is the air distance to Moscow from northeastern Ukraine. Last week, Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed drone strikes on the Zenit oil depot in Russia’s Kirov region, about 900 miles northeast of Ukraine.

On August 6, an explosion and a fire seriously damaged the Transneft oil refinery in Usinsk in the Komi Republic, about 1,200 miles northeast of Ukraine. Last week a huge fire broke out at the Gazprom Neft refinery in Omsk, the largest in Russia. Omsk is 2,000 miles east of Ukraine, but only 75 road miles north of Kazakhstan.There is no indication that Ukraine is launching drones from  neighboring countries, such as Kazakhstan, Finland, Norway, or the three Baltic nations. 

In two weeks, Mr. Zelensky will meet President Biden at New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. The Ukrainian leader is expected to lobby his American counterpart for permission to use American long-range missiles to hit military targets deep inside Russia. On a parallel track, Mr. Zelensky is developing his own long-range missiles, rockets that would be free of foreign constraints.