“Unfortunately, there are still queues at petrol stations too.” Vladimir Putin said that to senior officials on Sunday, in remarks that Russian news agencies carried. It was an unusually candid admission, and it put the president on record that Ukrainian strikes had led to fuel rationing.
“You are well aware that problems for drivers and for businesses persist,” he said. He called for “systemic measures that match the scale of current challenges” and for cutting the effect of what he called terrorist attacks on civilian targets to a minimum. In a Kremlin-published interview the same day, he struck a milder note: “Right now we’re observing a certain shortage, but it’s not critical.”
What has been hit
Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian energy sites in recent months. The target is the oil and refined-product trade, Russia’s main export earner and the main source of money for its war.
Last week Norsi, Russia’s fourth-largest refinery and second-largest producer of petrol, suspended operations after a drone attack. It sits near Kstovo in the Nizhny Novgorod region, 450 kilometres (280 miles) east of Moscow. Ukraine’s military also said it struck the Orenburg gas processing plant in the southern Urals, which can handle 45 billion cubic metres of gas a year and lies more than 1,200km (750 miles) behind the front lines. Drones also hit two oil facilities in Kerch in Crimea and the port of Kavkaz, which brings fuel to Russian forces, along with the Slavyansk and Yaroslavl refineries. Zelenskyy said the latest raids meant “fewer resources serving Russia’s war machine”.
The order of targets, according to Indra Overland of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, runs from refineries to storage sites, pumping stations and loading ports. At refineries the aim is the fluid catalytic cracking units. They are the “hearts” of the plant, Overland said, and “difficult, expensive and time-consuming to replace”. Scaffolding and nets put up by Russia do little against a weapon like the Flamingo FP-5, a Ukrainian-made missile with a range of 3,000 kilometres and a payload above 1,000 kilogrammes.
Who feels it
Overland said the damage to the domestic economy is “growing by the day”. Most Russian regions now limit petrol and diesel sales, and some stations have shut or have queues of up to 12 hours. That slows commuters, freight, taxis and farms. It also threatens the July-August harvest in the world’s largest wheat exporter, when tractors and pumps need fuel.
Panic buying and hoarding make it worse. Because nearly every good involves fuel somewhere in its supply chain, Overland said, the shortage also pushes up inflation across food, medicines and building materials.
The military is shielded. Markku Kivinen, director of the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, said Moscow will put military logistics first and bypass consumers if it has to. The shortage “affects the legitimacy of the government but does not immediately cause weakening of the war effort,” he said.
Margarita Zavadskaya of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs saw Putin’s admission as forced, because the shortages “had become too visible to deny”. She expects the crisis to be “attritional, cumulative and politically corrosive” rather than a trigger for regime collapse. Overland added a warning for autumn: Ukraine has hit few pipelines so far, and destroying gas pipelines would hurt most when the heating season starts.
