On 20 October two refineries linked to Russian oil – Hungary’s MOL Danube facility and Romania’s Petrotel-Lukoil plant- went up in flames, almost simultaneously. Budapest called its refinery blaze a “technical failure” and Bucharest said “no scenario can be ruled out,” outside analysts raised their weary eyebrows.
At 1 a.m. Kyiv time on 22 October, the lights went out again. Overnight, six people were killed, twenty-nine wounded, and entire neighborhoods went dark. Five Kyiv districts suffered widespread outages, with high-rise fires and smoke from downed drones preceding the blackout. As of 21:00, rolling blackouts remain widespread.
The scale of damage in Ukraine is stark: since early 2025, Russia has destroyed around 40% of Ukraine’s gas-production facilities, while the country’s energy infrastructure now operates at only about one-third of its pre-invasion capacity.
And it’s not just the grid. Eighteen large combined-heat-and-power plants and more than 800 boiler houses have been damaged or destroyed since 2022. What remains is fragile. What was destroyed is real.
Two days earlier, on October 20, the skies over Hungary and Romania flickered with a warning. Two refineries linked to Russian oil – Hungary’s MOL Danube facility and Romania’s Petrotel-Lukoil plant – went up in flames, almost simultaneously. One fireball, one “technical failure,” one injured worker – and Europe’s energy system briefly stopped pretending. Both sites process crude tied to Russia. Hungary draws as much as 80% of its supply from the Druzhba pipeline, and Romania’s refinery is majority Russian-owned.
The timing was remarkable.
In Brussels that same day, energy ministers met and cheered a landmark agreement: “By phasing out Russian gas imports, we are strengthening our collective energy security and taking a decisive step towards true strategic independence and a clean energy transition.”
Europe still hasn’t kicked the habit. Despite the rhetoric, the numbers tell another story. EU statistics show that Russia’s share of EU natural-gas imports fell from 48% in Q1 2021 to 17% in Q1 2025. Crude-oil imports dropped from 27% in 2021 to just 3% in 2024.
And yet, Europe’s imports of Russian LNG increased in 2024 to record levels: 17.8 million tonnes—about two million more than the year before.
Nuance matters. In July 2025, the EU was still the fourth-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels: €1.3 billion worth in that single month, with Hungary alone purchasing €485 million (including €200 million in crude).
In the first quarter of 2025 alone, EU oil imports from Russia totaled €1.48 billion – down from €14 billion four years earlier, but still billions.
And what of the United States? If last year it bought $500 million worth of uranium from Russia, then in just the first eight months of this year it’s already $600 million – while Trump demands that the EU stop its purchases.
This is not independence. It’s substitution, delay, and illusion.
In Ukraine, the truth is blunt. That same weekend, hundreds of miners in the Dnipropetrovsk region were trapped after a missile strike cut off ventilation at a coal mine – 192 men stranded underground until rescuers surfaced them later that night.
Electricity here is not a luxury. It’s survival.
When Budapest called its refinery blaze a “technical failure” and Bucharest said “no scenario can be ruled out,” outside analysts raised their weary eyebrows. The Hungarian plant processes more than 40% of its inputs through the now-damaged unit. Investigators are reviewing “organized action” among possible causes.
Inside Russia, the strain on its own energy system is beginning to show through the official fog. As of noon yesterday, eleven emergency power shutdowns were reported across eight regions, each attributed – predictably – to the “fall of UAV debris.” Behind that phrase hides a pattern: attacks chipping away at infrastructure Moscow once considered untouchable.
Leaked materials from a recent Russian government meeting paint a grim picture. By late September 2025, 43.7% of the country’s refinery capacity – roughly 440,000 tons of crude per day – was offline. Of that, 80% stemmed from drone strikes on refineries, another 15% from damage to fuel-supply systems. Officials classified the shutdowns by duration: seven long-term, eleven medium-term, five short-term. The meeting itself focused on the fuel-supply crisis now spreading across 21 regions.
The revelations went far beyond routine bureaucratic reports. The average production cost per barrel of oil has climbed to $48 – a 12% increase since the start of the year. Daily extraction targets have dropped to 8.985 million barrels, while transport losses continue to rise. At the time of the meeting, eighteen oil-pumping stations in the national network were in emergency shutdown mode – a rare admission of just how brittle the system has become.
The downstream picture looks no better. In occupied Crimea, out of 427 officially registered gas stations, 198 had suspended operations as of 22 September – all citing the same reason: no fuel.
Moscow’s long-promised “pivot east” is not going as advertised. According to Chinese sources, negotiations over the Power of Siberia-2 pipeline – despite loud claims of “legally binding” progress – have stalled over key terms.
Price and volume remain unresolved. Russia’s proposed $248 per thousand cubic meters (compared with Europe’s $402) has been rejected by Beijing as inflated. The planned 50-billion-cubic-meter annual supply was deemed excessive—and China, where gas consumption has fallen by 23–28%, isn’t wrong. Beijing is holding out for $238–240 and a cut to 35 billion cubic meters, underlining who now dictates terms in the supposed “strategic partnership.”
And while Russia struggles to keep the lights on, its European clients are having fires of their own. After the twin refinery blazes—at Hungary’s Danube refinery in Százhalombatta and Romania’s Petrotel-Lukoil plant in Ploiești—rumors briefly circulated about a third fire, this time at another MOL-owned refinery in Bratislava, Slovakia, also running heavily on Russian crude.
There were, of course, “every reason to believe it’s just a coincidence.” Later updates clarified that the viral photo came from Százhalombatta, not Bratislava. No confirmed Slovak incident appeared in local news – though the timing was enough to set Brussels’ rumour mill alight.
Since January 2025, Kyiv claims to have carried out twenty-three confirmed strikes on Russian refineries, reducing as much as 15–21% of Moscow’s refining capacity in certain months.
Could the Hungarian fire have been an accident? Certainly. Could the Romanian explosion have been an industrial slip-up? Possibly. But in a war where infrastructure is weaponized, coincidence is the last refuge of comfort.
Brussels likes to talk about “resilience” and “strategic autonomy” while its pipelines still carry Russian crude and its refineries still process it. Hungary and Slovakia claim geography as their excuse. Germany claims market logic.
But when the spokesperson in Brussels congratulates the continent on weaning itself off Moscow’s energy, one wonders: where are the results? The fact remains: in 2024, the EU spent 39% more on Russian fossil-fuel imports than it allocated in aid to Ukraine.
In theory, Europe generates clean energy. In practice, it still buys fossil fuel for its own insecurity.
When Ukraine’s grid collapses, it’s the frontline – wires down, lights off, hospitals running on backup, a cold winter looming. In Europe, when the refinery next to Budapest catches fire, it’s called an “incident,” a “technical issue,” or a “deep investigation,” while the continent keeps buying fuel from the same place it claims to have left behind.
The next battle won’t be drawn on a map. It will run through electrical transformers, along pipelines, across balance sheets.