These are surprising military targets to say the least. On the night of Monday October 21 to Tuesday October 22, Russian authorities claimed that three distilleries and an industrial ethanol facility were targeted and severely damaged by Ukrainian drone attacks. Explosions and fires reportedly broke out in several of them, in what appears to be the largest attack on Russian alcohol production lines since the start of the war.
In this operation against these four sites located in the regions of Tula, Tambov and Voronezh, relatively far from the front, the operating mode corresponds perfectly to that of the Ukrainian army: drone attacks far from the border, in order to import the war onto Russian soil and affect the enemy’s production lines.
It is above all the nature of the targeted infrastructures which is surprising here. Is the Ukrainian army seeking to disorient and destabilize Russia by depriving its population of alcohol? If this option seems tempting, the answer actually seems quite different. Indeed, alcohol factories represent a strategic target of choice for Ukraine, perhaps as much as military installations or fuel depots, while having the advantage of being much less well defended.
“Military sites”
Because if the four sites targeted do indeed produce alcohol, nothing says that it was intended for consumption. On TelegramAndrii Kovalenko, head of the center for combating disinformation of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, gave some possible explanations. He said the distilleries attacked Tuesday were used to produce explosives and fuel for Russia’s war effort, two other common uses of ethanol. “These are all military sites, even if they are disguised as something else,” he said, as reported by Ukrainian media UN.
The Zernoprodukt distillery in the Tula region, belonging to the Rosspirtprom group and affected by the Ukrainian attacks, is thus one of the largest in the country, which claims to produce up to 100,000 liters of ethanol every day. The Biokhim factory, also targeted, claims on its website to be one of the oldest Russian manufacturers of “products of strategic importance for the state”. It says in particular that it is the supplier to more than 500 companies in the country, whether in research, perfumery, the pharmaceutical sector… and the military sector.