Oil supplies to Hungary have been halted again after the Friendship oil pipeline on the Russian-Belarusian border was attacked for the third time, Péter Szijjártó wrote on Friday. According to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, this is “another attack on our country’s energy security” and “an attempt to drag us into war.” This is also a point of view on the Russian-Ukrainian war, but these are not the main goals of the Ukrainians, but they want to cut off Russia from its revenues.

When the Russians changed tactics from late May and launched massive attacks – sometimes with hundreds of drones and missiles – against Ukraine’s critical – and sometimes civilian – infrastructure, Kiev had to take action. Volodymyr Zelensky has been arguing for years that tougher sanctions are needed against Moscow to effectively cut off the money taps that finance the war. Despite Western punitive measures so far, Russia has been able to continue the war, in some cases evading sanctions.

At the beginning of the summer, the Ukrainians took matters into their own hands and began to hit the Russians where it hurts their budget and the population the most: they began to attack oil refineries so that the Russians could not process the extracted oil. This was primarily an effective way to hit the Russian domestic market, with strikes using missiles and drones hitting a total of ten oil refineries, including the crucial ones in Ryazan, Novokuybyshevsk, Saratov, and Volgograd, which are of paramount importance for Russian supplies. According to the Moscow Times, in August, the Ukrainians temporarily shut down 13 percent of their oil processing, which caused fuel shortages in many regions.