Alyona joined the line for petrol at 11pm. She didn’t get served until 5pm the next day
Natalia Vasilyeva
Istanbul: Alyona Sadovnikova first experienced the gas shortage in Russia in mid-June when she walked into a station and was told that the station only served customers with ration card coupons.
“I was horrified: Are we in the Soviet Union where you now have to buy coupons to buy sausages?” he said.
Just a few days later, Sadovnikova found herself waiting 18 hours for refueling in the eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk, almost 5,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Refineries across the country have been forced to close for lengthy repairs as Ukraine steps up its attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, including some deep within Russian territory.
This caused fuel shortages like many Russian citizens had never seen in their lifetimes. The attacks began in Russian-occupied Crimea in May and have since spread to the Russian mainland and even Siberia.
The situation is so serious that Russian officials announced last week that they were in talks to import oil from other countries; This was a surprising admission for the world’s third-largest oil producer. On Friday, authorities in the Black Sea city of Novorossiysk, home to Russia’s largest oil export terminal, said they were suspending fuel sales to individuals.
The long lines are one of the most vivid and concrete examples of how the war with Ukraine affects daily life in Russia and a challenge for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has gone to great lengths to suppress any opposition to the war. Anger grew so deep that fist fights broke out between fed-up drivers who had been waiting in line for hours.
“Gasoline shortages are no longer just an economic problem; it is a test of the government’s ability to manage the acute crisis that strikes at the heart of daily normality,” Moscow-based political analyst Ilya Grashchenkov said in a research note.
Long queues at the pump became a common sight, and crowdsourcing websites were opened to track supply at individual stations. Russian newspaper reported that nearly 20 percent of taxi drivers in the country prefer to stay at home Kommersant reported.
Densely populated areas around Russia’s capital appeared to be most vulnerable to famines. It was reported that the Moscow Oil Refinery, which constitutes 10 percent of Russia’s total fuel capacity, and a large refinery in Tatarstan, approximately 1000 kilometers east of the capital, were closed after the Ukrainian attacks.
On Wednesday afternoon last week, dozens of drivers arrived from Moscow to St. They lined up at one of the few stations that still had gasoline, clogging the busy highway to St. Petersburg.
This landscape is completely foreign to Russians who grew up in a country where oil production is rapidly increasing.
Opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin, 63, said the older generation, who “saw empty shelves in supermarkets” during the collapse of the Soviet Union, was more mentally prepared. “But for people in their 20s and 30s, it’s a complete shock.”
Although the government has subsidized oil companies to keep fuel affordable, prices are rising. Service stations owned by state-owned Rosneft have kept prices low, but they attract long queues.
Said-Hasan, 42, one of the customers in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and who wanted his surname to be kept secret for security reasons, said that he made a short trip to the neighboring Ingushetia region last week to buy cheaper fuel, although he could not buy more than 30 liters due to the ration card.
Alexander, a 33-year-old professional driver who travels extensively in the Krasnodar and Rostov regions, said smaller, independent stations in the south stood empty, marked by traffic cones. He also requested that his last name be kept secret.
At least a third of the stations in Krasnodar, Russia’s third most populous region, have been closed, said the region’s deputy governor, Evgeny Pergun.
Some Russians have resorted to comic relief to cope with this situation. In a viral post, a Russian blogger imagined that users of the popular taxi-hailing app would soon be able to choose a horse from their ride options.
Famines appear to have been particularly severe in Eastern Siberia and the Far East.
Queues in the Irkutsk region were so long that authorities promised to install portable toilets on highways to serve motorists. Local governor Igor Kobzev declared a state of high alert on Sunday, one step away from emergency.
Sadovnikova, along with her husband and 18-month-old baby, joined the queue at a station at 23:00 last Friday. He was not served until 17:00 the next day. They used the station’s restrooms and stores for restrooms and snacks. She said others in line were also supportive and shared food and toys with her son.
“Everything was frustrating and tiring,” Sadovnikova, 26, said. “We’re trying to save on gas and hope to have more supplies before we run out of gas again.”
Sadovnikova said she found it frustrating that authorities across the country were accusing Russians of panic buying while all independent stations in her city were closing.
Speaking at a conference on Wednesday, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak emphasized that the country was only dealing with “deficiencies at selected gas stations” and that they would be “quickly eliminated.”
But market data paints a different picture.
By mid-June, drone attacks in Ukraine had disabled about a third of Russia’s oil refining capacity (or about 2.2 million barrels per day), said Ronald Smith, co-founder of Texas-based Emerging Markets Oil and Gas Consulting Partners. Other analysts pointed to a smaller decline of about 25 percent.
“Closing this hole will likely require several large facilities to get gasoline production back up and running,” Smith said. “How long it takes to fix really depends on what was hit to begin with.”
Russian authorities tend not to announce the extent of damage or inconvenience to Russian consumers.
Putin, who usually refrains from commenting on bad news, broke his silence in an interview with state television on June 28, admitting that Russia sees “a certain fuel deficit” but “there is no critical shortage.”
After calling a special meeting on the fuel crisis, he said the Ukrainian attacks were aimed at “creating a rift in Russian society and forcing Russia to halt, even for a brief moment, the advance of our troops on the front line.”
Many Russians blame the government more generally for the country’s woes, but Putin appears to exempt himself.
Opposition figure Nadezhdin said he thought this would change. He said he sees Russians increasingly “waking up to the idea that it was exactly Putin who brought us to this point with his policies.”
If Russians continue to see Putin making optimistic statements about economic growth on television while lining up to buy fuel, “Doubts will grow,” he said.
This article was first published on: New York Times.
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