Capital gains. Moscow has Russia’s most available fuel as shortages climb elsewhere

More than 85% of Moscow’s gas stations sold fuel at least once over the preceding 24 hours, from July 13 to 14. Across Russia as a whole, only around two thirds of stations were active over the same period.

The three banks launched their tracking services against the backdrop of the crisis: each now shows users the stations where its customers have recently paid at the pump—in effect, a crowdsourced map of where fuel can still be found.

The services have appeared just as the authorities move to shut down informal channels serving the same purpose: the Federal Antimonopoly Service has banned fuel listings on the marketplaces Avito, Ozon and Wildberries, while at least five group chats in the state-enforced Max messenger, where residents swapped tips on where to fill up, have been blocked, prompting users in one of them to adopt code words for different grades of gas.

The regions with the fewest recorded transactions are Chechnya and Dagestan, though this is likely down to incomplete data rather than empty tanks alone: drivers there more often pay in cash or use cards issued by other banks. Chukotka and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug also sit near the bottom of the table, but both have very few gas stations to begin with.

Among the larger regions, annexed Crimea stands out, as the situation on the peninsula remains especially dire. Open fuel sales to the public there have been effectively halted since June 21, with only emergency services, the police, public transport and municipal workers permitted to refuel, and on June 26 the authorities in both Crimea and Sevastopol declared a state of emergency. The Kirov and Tambov regions and Yakutia fare little better: in each of them, nearly every second gas station recorded no sales at all over the 24-hour period.

Moscow's relative plenty is all the more striking given that the crisis arrived on its doorstep first. The Moscow refinery in Kapotnya, in the city’s southeast, was struck on June 16 and 18—the latter during the largest drone attack on the capital since the start of the war—and, as Mediazona reported earlier, reviews of the city’s petrol stations on mapping services surged fivefold in the days that followed, from an average of 84 a day to 430, many of them complaining of queues and empty pumps.

Ukrainian drones have been methodically striking Russian refineries all year, with the most damaging hits arriving since mid-May: the Ryazan refinery on May 15, Syzran on May 21, Tatneft’s TANECO plant in Nizhnekamsk on June 12. On July 6 the drones reached the Omsk refinery in Siberia, the country’s largest, and the farthest from the front line to be hit, which, according to Reuters sources, stopped processing crude altogether the following day.

The shortages that followed have spread across the country: fuel restrictions have reached at least 56 of Russia’s regions, typically capping the amount of gas sold per car at around 30 litres and banning sales into gas cans. Russia has turned to imports from Kazakhstan, India and Japan, and on July 8 Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak announced a ban on diesel exports. Vladimir Putin, for his part, has insisted the deficit is “not critical”, dismissing coverage of the strikes as an attempt to sow self-doubt among Russians.