Fuel shortage hits Russia as Ukrainian attacks on refineries

In southeast Russia, Daniil's motorboat rental business has run into trouble. Restrictions on fuel sales mean his fleet in the Rostov and Krasnodar regions is stranded, he said in a social media post: "At every gas station they tell me to get out."

Daniil's problem is that, in many cases, customers are prohibited from filling up their tanks instead of cars, to avoid stockpiling at a time when shortages are spreading across Russia as Ukraine steps up drone and missile attacks on refineries and other oil facilities.

But, drivers often cannot buy more than just 20 liters of fuel at gas stations.

"We can't fill up on gas, there's none in Krasnodar," a woman says in another video, pointing her phone camera at the price list of a Lukoil station, where every category is empty: there's no diesel and no gasoline of any octane.

"What is happening in this place?" she asks.

More than 1.000 kilometers to the northeast, in Tatarstan, another driver had the same question: “As always, the indicator is at zero and I’m panicking,” she said. “What’s going on?”

What is happening is that, in the fifth year of Russia's full occupation of Ukraine, Kiev is responding with frequent attacks on refineries.

This is part of a broader effort to restrict Russian oil exports, a key source of revenue for the Kremlin's war coffers, and to bring the consequences of the conflict, in which Russia has killed or injured tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, to citizens across Russia.

Attacks on hydrocarbon infrastructure limited Moscow's ability to benefit from months of high global prices during the US-Israeli war against Iran, where the closure of the Strait of Hormuz increased demand for oil from other regions, including Russia.

In May alone, Ukraine carried out at least 16 attacks on fuel-producing facilities in Russia, with drones hitting eight of the country's 10 largest refineries, according to Bloomberg News.

There has been no slowdown this month. The shortages in Tatarstan and a number of other regions along the Volga River are, in part, the result of early attacks on June 12 on two refineries in the city of Nizhnekamsk. One of them, the Taneco facility of oil giant Tatneft, is among the largest in Russia.

"I need fuel like it's oxygen"

“My sister Alsu called me and said: go fill up the car quickly, because they are limiting the sale of fuel. I left immediately, without even changing my clothes. I work in real estate, so I need fuel like it's oxygen,” a local woman says in a video. When she arrived at a gas station, she discovered that customers were limited to 25 liters per vehicle.

"Nice," she said sarcastically. "It's been a long time coming."

For older Russians, limited sales and long lines at gas stations may bring to mind the shortages that occasionally hit the country during the economic difficulties following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

When President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he expected to subdue Kiev within days or weeks. More than four years later, Kiev’s campaign of attacks on Russia is one of the factors that has changed the nature of the war. This development would have seemed almost unimaginable at first.

In early June, Ukrainian attacks on oil facilities near St. Petersburg overshadowed his annual investment forum in his hometown. The attacks in Tatarstan came just before Putin was to host Southeast Asian leaders in Kazan, the regional capital, for a Russia-ASEAN summit on June 18.

This week, Ukraine targeted the Russian capital. It struck Moscow's main oil refinery on June 16 and again on June 18, this time in what may have been the largest attack on the city since the Russian invasion began in 2022, with the mayor claiming 180 drones were shot down.

Video footage showed several fireballs amid clouds of black smoke over the large facility in the Kapotnya district, on the southeastern edge of Moscow, about 16 kilometers from the Kremlin. The refinery can usually process 11 million metric tons of oil a year and covers a significant part of Moscow's gasoline supply.

Russian authorities may avoid major fuel shortages in the capital. But analysts said the attacks could have the impact Kiev wants on Moscow residents, who have so far been partially shielded from the conflict because most military personnel come from poorer regions, where high salaries and lack of prospects are incentives to fight in a war that has killed half a million Russian soldiers, according to Western intelligence estimates.

“I am confident that the Moscow authorities will find a way to compensate for the [fuel] shortage, but… Muscovites can now see that a war is really taking place,” independent economic analyst Andrei Makhovsky told Current Time.

"The country that started this"

“For much of this war, the capital’s residents have been isolated from it, as the violence of war has been waged at a convenient distance, on someone else’s territory. The smoke rising over Moscow completely eliminates that distance,” wrote Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and now a senior fellow at the Lowly Institute, an Australian think tank. “The war is, in a very real sense, returning to the place that started it.”

Moreover, “it seems that this fuel crisis could turn out to be the most severe since the beginning of the war,” Makhovsky said, adding that Kiev’s attacks on oil facilities will affect the summer holiday season and the grain harvest.

“This crisis could be more severe than all the previous ones, simply because the capabilities of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have increased,” he said. “Until now, we had not seen Ukrainian forces strike Russian oil processing so hard and so systematically.”

As Moscow burns, Russia's fuel crisis spreads

"If the oil shortage continues and worsens, it could cause a crisis in the agricultural sector, which in turn could lead to a food crisis," economic analyst Maxim Blunt told the Russian REL Service.

"The shortage could also affect the aviation industry. Some airports have already imposed fuel supply restrictions. Planes are being fueled exactly for the distance planned in their flight plans, which means pilots have virtually no room for error," he said. "It could also hit the transport sector, affecting truck drivers."

Russia has reportedly banned jet fuel exports until the end of November and extended a provision that allows some refineries to sell gasoline and diesel that do not meet Euro-5 pollution standards on the domestic market.

Fuel shortages have been particularly severe in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, where Ukraine has blocked some supplies by threatening the highway connecting Russia to Crimea through Russian-controlled territory in southern Ukraine with “intermediate strikes” by drones and missiles. But shortages have hit wide swaths of Russia and sales restrictions have been imposed in many regions.

In addition to their practical effects, Kiev's attacks are part of the information war, or propaganda war, between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls these attacks "long-range sanctions" and, after the Moscow refinery was hit on June 18, called on Russian citizens to "come back to reality and put pressure on their leader."

Meanwhile, Russian officials are trying to downplay these attacks.

Putin all but ignored the attacks near St. Petersburg during the investment forum on June 3–6 and made no mention of the strikes on the Moscow refinery at all at the press conference at the ASEAN-Russia summit in Kazan.

While regional media have reported on fuel shortages and queues at filling stations, coverage of the attack on the Moscow refinery on the main state television channels was minimal on the morning of June 18 and almost disappeared from news programs later in the day.

"Everything is fine, there is [gasoline] everywhere here," a speaker said this week on a state television debate show, while prominent pro-Kremlin presenter Vladimir Solovyov called Russians who post photos and videos of shortages on social media "hysterical."

In mid-May, Moscow authorities imposed fines for publishing images showing the aftermath of Ukrainian attacks, and similar measures are in force in dozens of Russian regions as well as in occupied parts of Ukraine.

But some pro-war propagandists and bloggers are calling for even harsher punishments, while a senior executive at state broadcaster VGRTK suggested that Russians who publish material about the attacks should be tried for treason.

In one of the rare references to gasoline and oil shortages, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on June 1 that "problems" in occupied Crimea "must be resolved," but did not say how.