Ukraine strikes Russian and Crimean oil sites targeting critical infrastructure

There are thousands of workers, technicians, and their families in the oil facilities across Russia and Crimea who face the immediate threat of injury, displacement, and the collapse of their livelihoods. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols exist to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and to protect civilian objects from direct attack. Is this distinction being maintained, or is the infrastructure of war being conflated with the infrastructure of life?

When I arrived at Solferino, I did not see a battlefield; I saw a failure of organization. I saw men dying not because they were shot, but because no one had thought to bring water, bandages, or order to the chaos. Today, we face a different kind of chaos, one that is not born of neglect but of calculation. The strikes on oil sites are not accidents of war; they are deliberate acts of economic warfare. To assess this through the lens of humanitarian law, we must first strip away the strategic rhetoric and look at the human anatomy of the conflict. Who is in the blast radius? Who is dependent on the fuel that is now burning? And what rules are supposed to shield them?

The applicable rule is clear. Article 48 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions requires parties to a conflict to distinguish at all times between the civilian population and combatants, and between civilian objects and military objectives. Attacks may only be directed against military objectives. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives. An oil refinery is a complex entity. It can be a military objective if it makes an effective contribution to military action and its destruction offers a definite military advantage. However, the principle of proportionality dictates that even if a target is military, the attack must not cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

Here lies the friction. The stakes cited are military logistics and fuel supplies. This is a valid military consideration. But the cost is not abstract. It is measured in the health of the workers who cannot evacuate, in the environmental contamination that will poison the soil and water for years, and in the energy shortages that will freeze homes and halt hospitals in the surrounding regions. When we target the energy grid, we do not just target the army; we target the warmth of the civilian home. We target the power that keeps the ventilators running in the local clinic. The line between military necessity and civilian suffering is not a wall; it is a thin membrane, and it is currently tearing.

I do not trust human goodness to prevent this. I trust institutions. And the institution of International Humanitarian Law is currently under severe stress. The violation is not necessarily in the targeting itself, if the sites are indeed used for military logistics, but in the failure to mitigate the collateral damage. Are the workers warned? Are there evacuation protocols? Is there a mechanism to ensure that the environmental fallout does not become a secondary weapon against the civilian population? If the answer is no, then the rule is being violated not by the strike, but by the lack of preparation and care for those who remain.

We must also consider the principle of impartiality. The suffering caused by these strikes does not respect borders. The smoke drifts. The economic shockwaves ripple. The humanitarian response must be blind to the flag. If a Russian worker is injured in a Ukrainian strike, he is a patient. If a Ukrainian civilian suffers from the resulting energy crisis, he is a victim. The emblem on the armband must mean something in both directions. It must mean that the wounded are treated, regardless of who dropped the bomb or who owns the refinery.

The institutional gap here is profound. We have conventions that speak of proportionality, but we lack a real-time mechanism to audit that proportionality before the bomb falls. We rely on post-hoc investigations, which are often politicized and delayed. By the time the report is published, the oil has burned, the workers are displaced, and the cold has set in. This is the failure of our system. We have the rules, but we do not have the enforcement. We have the conventions, but we do not have the capacity to prevent the suffering they were designed to limit.

What is needed is not just a condemnation of the strike, but a rigorous accounting of the human cost. How many were injured? How many are now without heating? How many medical facilities are affected by the power loss? These are not questions for historians. They are questions for the present. Until we can answer them with precision, we are merely managing the symptoms of a disease we have failed to cure. The rules exist. The institutions exist. But they are hollow if they do not translate into immediate, tangible protection for the people on the ground. Pity is not a programme. A system that counts the wounded and ensures their care, regardless of the side they are on, is a programme. We must build that system, or we are no better than the men who died in the sun at Solferino, waiting for help that never came.