Vladimir Putin’s war has come to his favorite vacation resort in explosive fashion.
Sochi, a Black Sea city, is known for its beach resort, which before the war was crawling with domestic tourists. It was a favorite of the Kremlin dictator, who frequented the city before his “special military operation” kicked off in February 2022.
Now, he appears to have deserted it as drones whizz overhead. Indeed, the whole Black Sea coast has been battered by a Ukrainian counter-offensive.
It has been targeted because of its strategic importance, as it hosts vital oil processing and export hubs. This means the formerly pristine waters are laden with fuel, and the beaches, once packed with tourists, look sparse.
Dmitry Bogdanov, chair of AMOS, a hoteliers’ association, said numbers are down almost 11 percent year on year.
Putin was a regular visitor to the region before the war, visiting 24 times in 2021. But according to the Kremlin, he visited only twice in 2024 and twice in 2025. He has a Soviet-era official summer residence in Sochi and a palace in Gelendzhik, around 100 miles north as the crow flies.
However, he hasn’t appeared publicly in Sochi since October and appears to prefer his Lake Valdai bolthole in northern Russia.
A tourist boat captain in Arkhipo-Osipovka told the Financial Times that air raid sirens sound nonstop. Arkhipo-Osipovka, near Putin’s Gelendzhik palace, was the site of a deadly Ukrainian strike earlier this month. Seven people were killed, and 40 were injured when a drone hurtled into a cliff and onto the beach. Russia accused Ukraine of “a deliberate strike on civilians.”
But Kyiv generally denies this charge, with officials saying that oil refineries and terminals are the intended targets.
The Tuapse oil refinery, a major processing and export facility owned by Rosneft, is around 30 miles south of the resort town.
Attacks here continue. On Tuesday morning, grain ships were attacked at Tuapse and at the nearby port at Novorossiysk, one of the largest ports in the Black Sea basin.
Increased drone activity has forced officials in Novorossiysk to suspend some operations.
But despite the bombing campaign along Russia’s Black Sea coast, some hardy tourists remain. “Drones are flying all over the country,” a guesthouse owner in Kabardinka, near Novorossiysk, told the FT. “But people are so tired of living through this f---ing nightmare that they just don’t care anymore. They simply want a change of scenery.”
One of Putin’s most prominent foes has warned that the relentless drone attacks are pushing Russia’s oil industry towards “breaking point.”
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 63, the self-exiled former oligarch who was once Russia’s richest man before he fell foul of Putin, addressed questions from Western analysts about whether Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refineries is working.
“I ran Russia’s largest oil company and my answer is yes,” Khodorkovsky wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
His warning comes as lengthy lines have returned to gas stations in Moscow, as the country struggles to produce enough fuel to meet domestic demand. Meanwhile, major fuel suppliers have reimposed limits on gasoline purchases, undermining assurances from the president and other Kremlin officials that the country’s fuel crisis was easing.
