Pipeline attack plunges Kazakhstan into Ukraine drama

Ukraine’s drone strike on Caspian Pipeline Consortium pumping station drags Kazakhstan into the geopolitical crossfire, raising economic and diplomatic stakes.

Around 63 million tons of oil were transported along the CPC in 2024.

Kazakhstan has worked hard to maintain neutrality amid the geopolitical turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And now this has happened.

On Monday, a drone assault apparently launched by Ukraine’s armed forces struck the Kropotkinskaya oil pumping station, a key transit hub for Kazakhstan’s oil exports via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) route.

Technicians say critical infrastructure, including transformers, a gas turbine unit, and fire suppression systems were damaged, forcing a temporary shutdown of operations.

Sources at Transneft, the Russian state-owned pipeline operator, said the incident may reduce Kazakhstan’s oil exports via CPC by up to 30 percent for a period of up to two months.

Kazakhstan's Energy Ministry, meanwhile, has downplayed concerns, stating that the drone attack has had no discernible effect on flows.

“The Tengiz-Novorossiysk main oil pipeline resumed operations on February 17 at 2:50 a.m. Moscow time in transit mode, bypassing the Kropotkinskaya oil pumping station,” the ministry said in a statement.

If the grimmer of those forecasts turns out to be accurate, it will spell serious trouble.

CPC carries more than two-thirds of the oil that Kazakhstan sends to foreign markets.

Around 63 million tons of oil were transported along the CPC in 2024. Most of the oil – about 85 percent – came from three major fields in Kazakhstan: Tengiz, Kashagan, and Karachaganak.

Olzhas Baidildinov, a member of the Kazakh Energy Ministry’s public council, has done some back-of-a-napkin calculations and concluded that Kazakhstan’s government stands to lose an estimated $600 million in revenue over this incident. The total overall bill could be closer to $2 billion, he wrote.

Baidildinov’s calculation assumes that a 30 percent reduction in oil flows could translate to a shortfall of 2.7 million tons. Assuming an average oil price of $70 per barrel, this amounts to $1.4 billion in lost market value, he said. And then there is the repair work.

There may be some motivated reasoning here, though. Baidildinov did little to hide his anti-Ukrainian sympathies.

“Dear Kazakhstani supporters of Ukraine – how about sparing some change for your native Kazakhstan?” he wrote on his Telegram channel.

Russia may likewise struggle to contain its glee at this turn of events.

A signal of what is to come was offered by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who said in remarks to journalists in Saudi Arabia, where he had just finished a round of Ukraine-related talks with his U.S. counterparts, that the Kropotkinskaya attack only confirmed Moscow’s assessment of Ukrainian irresponsibility.

“And now we have this latest stunt [from Ukraine] – essentially an attack on Kazakhstan’s energy infrastructure,” Lavrov said.

Lavrov claimed that his conversations with his U.S. colleagues had by chance touched upon the idea of introducing a moratorium on attacks against energy infrastructure.

“We explained that we have never put civilian energy systems at risk and that our targets have only been facilities directly serving the Ukrainian armed forces,” he said, indulging in some unbridled lying.

A United Nations bulletin published in September noted how Russian armed forces had over a five-month span launched nine coordinated attacks on Ukraine’s electricity system, indiscriminately damaging generation and transmission infrastructure.

“The attacks have caused additional population displacement and have disproportionately impacted groups in a situation of vulnerability, such as older persons, those with disabilities, households with lower incomes, and the internally displaced, with women particularly affected,” the bulletin noted.

To complicate matters further, the fate of CPC has very direct relevance to Western commercial interests.

As Baidildinov noted in an interview to Moscow-based business news TV station RBK, while much of the oil going through the pipeline is “from Kazakhstan,” it would not be entirely correct to call it “Kazakh oil.”

“In 2024, 85 percent of the oil pumped through CPC was from Tengiz, Karachaganak and Kashagan. It is U.S. and European companies that are pumping oil at those fields, and the oil does not, formally speaking, belong to Kazakhstan,” he said. “We at [state-owned oil and gas company] Kazmunaigaz have small stakes, but the main chunk is Western companies. And it is they that decide where to send the oil and at what price.”

Tengiz, Kazakhstan’s biggest oil field and the source of the largest share of the crude carried by CPC, is operated by U.S. oil giant Chevron, which controls a 50 percent stake in the project.

This element has prompted officials in Moscow to volunteer some bald assertions.

“The attack on the CPC [oil pumping station] is most likely Ukraine's response to Russia-US negotiations,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak told reporters.

Moscow’s public concerns over CPC have a shade of crocodile tears, however.

In 2022, CPC, which is 24 percent controlled by Transneft, was forced to suspend deliveries on at least four separate occasions over purported damage to equipment in the Russian port of Novorossiysk, where the pipeline feeds its load into waiting tankers.

CPC’s Western shareholders were at the time deprived of the opportunity to conduct their own investigations into the damage, which raised suspicions that Moscow might have been using the pipeline as leverage against Kazakhstan.

The diplomatic arithmetic this time around looks more straightforward, however.

Ukraine risks alienating Kazakhstan and casting a further unneeded element of distrust towards it into the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.