The Audit That NATO Won’t Commission

I. What the Numbers Actually Show On April 28, 2026, a satellite captured black smoke rolling across Tuapse, a Black Sea port city in Russia’s Krasnodar region. The smoke came from an oil terminal that Ukrainian drones had struck four times in two weeks. Similar imagery appeared over a refinery in Perm and an airbase in Chelyabinsk — 1,050 miles from the Ukrainian front line. Robert Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s 414th drone brigade, offered a precise accounting to The Guardian in May 2026. His unit processes 12 to 15 terabytes of video daily. It maintains a verified record of every drone sortie since February 2022. The economics are straightforward: $1,000 drones destroying $100 million refineries, targeting an estimated 100 million tonnes of Russian oil exports worth $100 billion annually. Russia spends roughly 40 percent of its $530 billion budget on the military. Monthly battlefield casualties — 30,000 to 34,000 by Ukrainian count, somewhat lower by Western open-source…