By the end of August 2026, according to Reuters and NV.ua, all three main Lukoil refineries in the European part of Russia had ceased normal operations. The strike on the Kstovo facility was the final link in the chain of shutdowns of the refining assets of the country's second-largest oil conglomerate.
Status of the Three Flagship Plants
NORSI in Kstovo (Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, capacity ~17 million tonnes) was shut down on August 26 following a repeat strike on the AVT-6 unit. The Perm refinery "Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez" (~13 million tonnes) halted refining after a drone raid in late August. The Volgograd refinery "Lukoil-Volgozhneftepererabotka" (~14.8 million tonnes) failed to recover from a series of attacks on the primary distillation units (ELOU-AVT-5).
Total Damage to the Sector
More than 44 million tonnes of annual refining capacity within a single company's structure has been taken out of service — over 15% of all Russian oil refining. This has forced a reduction in crude oil extraction in Western Siberia and the Volga region due to the overfilling of Transneft's storage tank farms and the need to shut in wells.
Contradictory Data
Accounts of the scale of the damage are inconsistent. The main text and a number of sources report a complete shutdown of all three plants. However, the outlet Korrespondent (source ID 4) describes the consequences of the strikes as the loss of "a third of the capacity" of one of Lukoil's largest refineries, indicating partial rather than complete incapacitation. The exact volumes of lost capacity and the actual utilization rates of production lines at each facility as of August 27, 2026, have not been independently verified.
