Ukrainian drones have choked Kazakhstan’s main oil route through Russia. Romania is most exposed, and Astana is now hedging each bet it has.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev picked his moment. On July 25, seated beside Vladimir Putin at a forum in the Siberian city of Omsk, Kazakhstan’s president urged his host to freeze the war in Ukraine and revive the Istanbul 2.0 talks abandoned in 2022. The war’s purpose, he said, was hard to grasp, even for Kazakhstan. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, rejected the idea the following day, though he called Kazakhstan Russia’s closest ally.
Previously, Ukrainian drones had hit four tankers in four days. Between July 17 and 20 each was struck while loading Kazakh crude at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) terminal near Novorossiysk, on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Ship owners then refused to sail in, and on July 21 Kazakhstan stopped pumping. The pipeline moves about 80 per cent of the country’s oil exports and more than one per cent of world supply. Its energy ministry called the reduction that followed a “controlled adjustment”.
By July 23 output at Tengiz, Kazakhstan’s largest field, had more than halved to about 406,000 barrels a day, from a July average of 925,000; national production fell by roughly a fifth. The pipeline’s shareholders shared the loss. Russia owns 31 per cent of the CPC, Kazakhstan’s KazMunayGas 20.75 per cent, and the American majors Chevron and ExxonMobil a further 22.5 per cent between them. Chevron, which operates Tengiz, had said on July 19 that its exports were unaffected.
Kazakhstan has been here before. A naval drone disabled one of the terminal’s deep-water moorings in November last year; in January drones hit two more tankers, the Matilda and the Delta Harmony, while a fire and a power cut idled Tengiz for days. Erlan Akkenzhanov, Kazakhstan’s energy minister, noted then that the ships were ordinary traders, not part of Russia’s sanctioned ‘shadow fleet’. By February, Europe had gone without some 3.8 million tonnes of Kazakh oil.
Trouble in Romania
Adrian Negrescu, a Romanian economic consultant, was one of the first to sound the alarm in Bucharest. On July 22 he warned that the country faced a major fuel crisis and urged parliament to declare an energy state of emergency. About 63 per cent of Romania’s crude imports come from Kazakhstan, close to half of all the crude its refineries process. Petromidia, the largest of them, is itself majority-owned by KazMunayGas. Ilie Bolojan, the prime minister, sounded calmer two days later, promising no shortage within a fortnight, though Rompetrol expected Petromidia’s output to drop by 10 to 15 per cent in August. The price of standard petrol has crept up over the past week, reaching 9.08 lei (around 1.75 euros) per litre on July 28. Diesel is closing in on a psychologically critical 10 lei per litre.
Eleanor Budds of S&P Global had seen the risk coming. In July 2025, as the European Union prepared to ban fuels refined from Russian crude, she warned that leaning too hard on any single supplier would leave the continent exposed to price spikes and shortages. The ban took effect in January. By the summer war in the Middle East had made Gulf barrels unreliable, and refiners from Trieste to Constanța had turned to Kazakhstan to fill the gap. Italy’s Adriatic port, the largest single buyer of CPC crude, feeds plants in Austria, Czechia, and Germany. Rompetrol carries Petromidia’s fuel on into Bulgaria, Moldova and Serbia. Türkiye had switched to CPC Blend only months earlier, dropping Russian Urals as sanctions bit.
Kazakh Energy Minister Erlan Akkenzhanov had been blunt about the options. In May he told reporters there was no real alternative to the CPC for the bulk of the country’s oil, and the substitutes bear him out. Tankers from the port of Aktau cross the Caspian to Azerbaijan and feed the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which carried 1.3 million tonnes of Kazakh crude in 2025 and might reach 1.6 million this year; a separate line runs east to China. Asylbek Dzhakiyev, who chairs the country’s oil and gas association, expects the northern route to stay constrained for five to 10 years. Romania, for now, is left buying from Azerbaijan, Norway and Libya.
Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry has condemned the drone strikes and urged Ukraine to stop hitting the CPC. In June the country joined Pax Silica, an American-led pact on semiconductors, critical minerals and energy, the first in the Central Asia region to sign up. At Omsk on July 25 Tokayev praised Putin’s “diplomatic flexibility” before asking him to end the war. By the weekend Tengiz was still running at less than half its usual rate, and Astana was still calling the cut a technological measure. Romania, more than most, will be hoping it is also a temporary measure.
Photo: Dreamstime.