An Oil Empire Is Cracking

In five weeks, Russia went from isolated fuel shortages to nationwide rationing. By early July, only one of the country's eighty-nine regions had escaped restrictions entirely. Six had run completely dry, and in the Zabaikalsky region, in Russia's Far East, there are stretches of highway with no working gas station for more than a thousand kilometers. This is not coincidence or a string of local accidents. It is the result of a systematic campaign: long-range drones and missiles of Ukraine's own design, built and scaled up domestically despite the war and limited resources, methodically taking out the country's oil infrastructure. For the first time in the war, the consequences are being felt in every region of Russia.

Officials are rationing fuel by hand: odd-even days, paper waiting lists, sales by QR code. Police and armed pro-Russian militias keep order at the pumps. Nowhere is it worse than in annexed Crimea, where civilian gasoline sales have been suspended entirely — fuel is now reserved for the state, while resellers charge several times the pump price. On the peninsula, people are queuing not just for gas but to leave: thousands of cars back up at the bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia, and twice as many vehicles are trying to get off the peninsula as are trying to get on. A state that annexed Crimea to control it can no longer control the line at its own gas station.

The cause is clear, and it strikes two targets at once. First, the refineries: in six months, drones have hit forty-four of them, the farthest in Omsk, some 2,500 kilometers from the border. Crude processing has fallen to its lowest level in two decades; at any given moment, somewhere between a third and forty percent of capacity sits offline while repair crews hunt for sanctioned parts through workarounds. Moscow's own flagship refinery, which supplies roughly forty percent of the capital's fuel, may not restart before next year. The strikes aren't one-off — the same plants get hit again and again, so repairs never finish before the next attack lands.