Russia is scrambling to reroute oil flows after a fresh wave of attacks knocked out key Baltic export infrastructure—just as maritime risks are already piling up elsewhere.
According to Reuters, citing Interfax, pipeline operator Transneft is attempting to redirect crude volumes away from ports hit by Ukrainian drone strikes, including Primorsk and Ust-Luga—two of Russia’s most critical export hubs.
Reuters calculations suggest as much as 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity is currently offline, factoring in port outages, pipeline issues, and tanker-related disruptions.
That’s a logistics problem first—and a supply problem second.
Primorsk alone handles more than 1 million barrels per day of Urals crude, while Ust-Luga moved nearly 33 million tons of oil products last year. Losing both, even temporarily, creates an immediate bottleneck that can’t be solved overnight.
Transneft CEO Nikolai Tokarev acknowledged as much, noting that redirecting these volumes on short notice is difficult given the scale involved.
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Russia does have alternatives. Flows can be shifted toward Black Sea ports or via inland routes, for example. But it isn’t a perfect solution, as there are limits. Infrastructure capacity is finite, and the Black Sea is hardly a safe fallback, with tanker attacks escalating in recent weeks.
That leaves Russia to manage constraints on multiple fronts: reduced port capacity in the Baltic, growing risks to tankers in the Black Sea, and ongoing complications tied to sanctions and shipping access.
Even if production holds, getting crude from wellhead to buyer is becoming more complicated, more expensive, and increasingly uncertain.
In conjunction with the war in the Middle East and de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz and subsequent oil/LNG production outages, the Russian disruption adds a fresh element into already sky-high oil prices.
Brent crude was trading above $106 in morning trade on Thursday.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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