Five hours into a queue at a filling station in the Siberian town of Ust-Ordynsky, tempers had worn thin. Then a black Audi Q7 drove past dozens of waiting cars and stopped at the pumps. Motorists started shouting, phones came out to film, and a police officer drew his pistol to settle the crowd. The scene was recorded on Saturday night.
It is one small picture of a larger problem. Russia, still one of the world’s biggest oil producers, is short of fuel almost everywhere, and the shortage traces back to Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against its oil infrastructure, now in a war that has run for more than four years.
A third of refining capacity damaged
Repeated hits on some of Russia’s largest refineries in recent months have damaged roughly a third of the country’s refining capacity. Gasoline output has dropped by about 25% year on year. Filling stations are struggling to keep up during the summer holidays and the agricultural harvest.
On Monday, Ukrainian drones struck the Omsk refinery in western Siberia, about 1,800 miles (2,900km) from Kyiv. It appeared to be Ukraine’s deepest strike yet on Russian energy infrastructure. Omsk, Russia’s largest refinery, had to halt operations temporarily, and a big petrol station chain in the city stopped selling gasoline to private customers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “Siberia, too, is now within reach.”
The shortages began in Russian-occupied Crimea in May. Since then they have reached nearly the whole country, with only two regions reportedly spared. Officials admitted last week that they were looking at fuel imports from Belarus, Kazakhstan and India, which is a strange position for a nation that normally exports refined products. They are also weighing temporarily looser fuel-quality standards so that companies can make lower-grade gasoline and diesel.
Daily life under rationing
“I could never have imagined we would be rationing fuel,” said Anastasiya, who works for a logistics company in Irkutsk, one of the Siberian cities hit hardest. She asked that her surname be withheld for security reasons. Several of her company’s lorries have sat stranded outside the eastern city of Chita for five days because the drivers could not find fuel. “It’s like the stories I heard about the Soviet Union, when people had to queue for food,” she said.
Taxi drivers are staying home more. Industry representatives told the business daily Kommersant that journeys have fallen by about 20%, since ride-hailing drivers are wary of longer trips in case they cannot refuel afterward. In southern Russia, which is among the worst-hit areas along with eastern Siberia, Cossack patrols have been deployed at petrol stations in Black Sea resorts to keep order in peak tourist season. Some drivers cross into Kazakhstan or China to fill up, a habit dubbed “fuel tourism.”
Moscow has not escaped. After a Ukrainian drone strike in June disrupted one of the capital’s largest refineries, many petrol stations there closed temporarily. One Muscovite estimated the wait for petrol at between one and two hours.
The Kremlin’s position
Polling by the independent Levada Center put Putin’s approval rating at 74% in June, down five percentage points and its lowest in four years. The share of Russians who think the country is heading in the right direction fell from 61% in May to 52%.
Political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov, based in Moscow, said “mass fatigue with the war is turning into mass irritation.” He did not expect it to turn into street protest, though. “There is certainly shock, but the lack of any real means of influencing the situation, and the risks associated with trying to do so, make protests unlikely,” he said.
Putin has acknowledged “a certain deficit” of fuel, “but not a critical one.” State television has told viewers to endure. RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said on Rossiya 1: “I call on everyone to stay calm. Yes, it’s hard. Very hard … But we’ll get through this too.”
Analysts say how long the crisis lasts depends largely on whether Ukraine can keep up the strikes.
