Ukraine has shifted its long-range drone campaign against Russia’s energy industry from broad attacks on refineries to more targeted strikes on critical components that are hard to replace, according to Financial Times (FT) on Thursday. Ukrainian military planners, drone operators, and energy specialists told the FT that Kyiv’s goal is no longer simply to start fires at refineries or destroy storage tanks, but to keep plants offline for longer and make each strike more costly for Moscow.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. “The strategy was meticulously targeted and co-ordinated,” one Ukrainian deep-strike unit member told the FT. Ukrainian officials said intelligence provided by the US and France had helped map Russian air-defense deployments and identify routes that allowed drones to evade them and reach targets deep inside Russia. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defense minister and chair of the Center for Defense Strategies, said US and French intelligence had improved target selection, helping Ukraine’s deep-strike drone teams “learn where to hit.” He said Ukrainian planners had built a detailed map of Russia’s energy grid, allowing them to identify critical nodes where disruption can shut down larger parts of the system, and target equipment that is hardest to replace. French President Emmanuel Macron boasted in January that France became the main intelligence provider for Kyiv, replacing Washington, though he did not elaborate on the claim at the time.