Moscow Attempts to Pin Kazakhstan Drone Incident on Ukraine

A Russian Orlan-10 reconnaissance drone was spotted near an oil pipeline facility in Kazakhstan.

The Russian propaganda outlet MASH shared a photo of the drone, falsely suggesting it belonged to the Ukrainian Defense Forces.

The drone was found near a facility of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a joint Russian-Kazakh enterprise operating the pipeline of the same name.

To obscure its origin, Russian media spread disinformation, attempting to pass it off as a French SAGEM Crecerelle UAV.

However, this drone, which had a completely different aerodynamic design, was decommissioned and not transferred to the Ukrainian Defense Forces. For the record, the Crecerelle UAV was put into service back in 1994.

The characteristic shape of the hull, fuselage elements and the drone’s camera unequivocally confirm that it was the Orlan-10 drone that went down in Kazakhstan.

It is likely that in this way Russia is creating the basis for an international provocation.

Attack on the Kropotkinskaya oil pumping station

The Russian media probably took this step to support speculation after the attack on the Kropotkinskaya oil pumping station on February 17.

However, according to the Kazakh side, the shutdown of the station did not affect the transportation of Kazakh oil.

The facility in Krasnodar Krai was attacked by seven drones with high-explosive warheads, which attacked with a significant time interval. As a result of the attack, the station completely stopped working.

Kropotkinskaya is a 16.5-hectare oil pumping station with a tank farm of 140 thousand cubic meters. The facility was commissioned in 2002.

The oil pumping station is part of an international trunk pipeline that transports oil from large fields in Western Kazakhstan and Russian offshore Caspian to the Novorossiysk sea terminal.

The 1,511-kilometer-long pipeline starts at the Tengiz field, passes through the Atyrau region of Kazakhstan, then four regions of the Russian Federation – the Astrakhan region, the Republic of Kalmykia, Stavropol and Krasnodar Krai.

The pipeline leads to the Black Sea coast, where oil is loaded onto tankers and exported to other countries at the sea terminal near Novorossiysk.

The system is the main export route for Kazakh oil. It accounts for more than 80% of the volumes pumped through the pipeline from Kazakhstan. It is known that in 2024, the CPC had transported 63.01 million tons of oil through the system.