Pump fiction. Queues and empty tanks in thousands of Russian gas station reviews as Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries drain fuel supply

In European Russia, the surge in reviews is clearly visible immediately after the June 18 drone strike on the refinery in Kapotnya, a district in Moscow’s southeast.

In other regions, comments about queues and fuel shortages began to appear with a delay, roughly after June 25. The lag is most noticeable in St. Petersburg.

In all, users posted 45,400 reviews between June 18 and July 7. Queues are mentioned in 5,300 comments, and the lack of gasoline in 6,500.

The sharpest rise came in Moscow: before the strike on Kapotnya, users left an average of 84 comments a day about gas stations; afterwards, a whopping 430. This does not mean the capital’s fuel problems are the most acute—Moscow is simply home to a great many people.

In the Irkutsk region, where journalists report the fuel situation is critical, the number of reviews grew three and a half times, from 25 to 88 a day, and every fifth comment mentioned the lack of fuel or traffic jams at the entrance to a gas station.

How the crisis unfolded

Ukrainian drones have been methodically striking Russian refineries this year, but especially painful hits arrived since mid-May.

On May 15, the Ryazan refinery, one of the largest in the country, caught fire after an overnight attack in which, according to the regional governor, drones also hit two apartment buildings, killing three people and injuring 12. A “black rain” fell over the city afterwards.

Two days later, on the night of May 17, Moscow and its suburbs came under what was then the most massive air attack of the war: three people were killed, more than ten injured, and the Moscow refinery in Kapotnya was damaged.

The Gazprom Neft-owned plant suspended operations for several days, Reuters reported. On May 21, drones struck the Syzran refinery in the Samara region, killing two people; the Rosneft-owned plant halted work after damage to a primary crude distillation unit that accounts for more than 70% of its capacity.

The strikes intensified in June. Drones attacked the Ilsky refinery in the Krasnodar region on June 2, at least the 16th strike on the plant since the start of the war, according to Astra. The Kuibyshev refinery in Samara was hit on June 10. Tatneft’s TANECO plant in Nizhnekamsk suspended operations after an attack on June 12.

The Moscow refinery was hit again on June 16 and 18; the latter strike came during the largest drone attack on the capital since the start of the war, with Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reporting some 180 drones downed “on approach” to the city. On June 28, a refinery in Slavyansk-on-Kuban in the Krasnodar region caught fire, leaving one person dead.

On July 6, drones reached the Omsk refinery in Siberia, the largest plant, and the one farthest from the front line, the Ukrainian drones have managed to hit. A unit accounting for 38% of the refinery’s capacity was damaged, and the next day Reuters sources said the plant, which processed some 22 million tonnes of crude in 2024, had stopped processing oil altogether.

The shortages that followed spread across the country: fuel restrictions have reached 56 of Russia’s regions, typically capping the amount of gasoline sold per car and banning sales into gas cans.

The authorities' response has ranged from quiet regulatory fixes to censorship. Some refineries were permitted to sell gasoline and diesel that in effect meets the outdated Euro-3 standard under the guise of Euro-5, Kommersant reported. The Federal Antimonopoly Service banned listings for fuel on the marketplaces Avito, Ozon and Wildberries, citing the fight against “speculative resale”, while at least five group chats in the state-enforced Max messenger where residents discussed where to find gasoline were blocked. In one of them, users resorted to code words, agreeing to call AI-92 gasoline “gold”, the premium AI-95 “platinum”, and gasoline in general “water”.

Russia has also turned to imports: it began buying fuel from India, asked to purchase 50,000 tonnes of gasoline from Kazakhstan, and is set to import at least 200,000 barrels of jet fuel from Japan through trading intermediaries.

On July 8, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak announced at a meeting with Vladimir Putin that diesel exports had been banned.

Vladimir Putin himself, speaking on June 29, called the fuel deficit “not critical” and described the strikes on energy infrastructure as fodder for an “information campaign” designed to sow self-doubt in Russians.