‘The Kremlin Cannot Stop It’: Inside Russia’s Spreading Fuel Crisis

A fuel crisis is spreading across Russia, and one of the sharpest explanations of why has come from a man with unusual standing to give it: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once ran the country’s largest oil producer before falling out with the Kremlin. In a widely shared thread on July 6, he argued that Ukraine’s drone campaign has exposed a weakness the Russian state no longer knows how to fix.

The reporting bears him out. By early July, almost all of Russia’s 83 regions faced gasoline shortages or rationing, with production running an estimated 20 percent below domestic demand and analysts putting roughly a third of refining capacity offline.

Who is Mikhail Khodorkovsky?

Once Russia’s richest man, Khodorkovsky built the oil giant Yukos in the 1990s and, by 2003, was worth an estimated $15 billion. After funding opposition to Vladimir Putin, he was arrested that October on fraud and tax-evasion charges widely seen as political, convicted, and held for just over a decade in Siberian prisons — named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Putin pardoned him in December 2013; he has lived in exile, mostly in London, as a leading Kremlin critic since. The Samara refineries now burning were once his to run.

The strikes

Ukrainian long-range drones have hit nearly every major refinery in European Russia, sparing only the small “teapot” plants near the North Caucasus. The one big refinery untouched in 2026, Rosneft’s Angarsk plant, survives largely on distance — some 4,450 km from Ukrainian-held territory. Even Gazprom’s Omsk refinery, the country’s largest and roughly 2,445 km from the front, was struck on July 6.

Moscow has not been spared. The capital’s only refinery — which supplied about 40 percent of the region’s fuel — was hit repeatedly and has now stopped completely; repairs are expected to take at least three months. Khodorkovsky said he had assumed the plant would be shielded by air defense: “turned out even that wasn’t the case.”

Why refineries, not oil wells?

Russia’s crude output is enormous and hard to stop — but crude isn’t what goes in a fuel tank. Refineries are the chokepoint that turns oil into gasoline and diesel: a smaller set of fixed, hard-to-repair targets. Hitting them barely dents Russia’s export earnings, yet it strangles the domestic fuel supply — which is why the shortages bite at home while the oil keeps flowing abroad.

Not a shortage of fuel, but of decisions

Khodorkovsky’s central claim is that the crisis is not, at root, about lost barrels. Output is down “by roughly a quarter,” he wrote — “hundreds of thousands of tons” a month that Russia could, in principle, buy abroad. The failure is in moving it: the pipelines, rail tankers and reserves a country of eleven time zones needs to reroute fuel no longer have the people or the coordination to do it. Shortages have surfaced in Chita and Irkutsk, thousands of kilometers from any front line.

The Kremlin’s three options

1. Free prices — let fuel spike to about $5 a liter until supply rebalances in three to five months. Politically intolerable for the regime.
2. Administrative reroute — order companies to move fuel between regions by rail; requires coordination and expertise Khodorkovsky says the state has lost.
3. Lower the standard (chosen) — cut fuel quality to Euro-2 and below, keeping pumps flowing at the cost of modern engines.

Life at the pump

The squeeze is visible on the ground. Stations ration 20–30 liters per car and bar filling jerry cans; a black market has sprung up in scalped fuel and paid places in day-long queues. In Irkutsk, the mayor had portable toilets brought to the lines. The world’s third-largest oil exporter is now importing gasoline — by ship from India, by pipeline from Belarus and Kazakhstan, by rail from China.

The diesel cliff

The worse danger may be seasonal. “Today the crisis is about gasoline,” Khodorkovsky noted; “the harvest runs on diesel.” With Ukraine’s president authorizing a 40-day strike campaign and fuel already rationed at the front, analysts see the trend turning against Moscow. “In this race between the repairers and the attackers the balance is shifting,” said Sergey Vakulenko, a 25-year veteran of the Russian oil industry now at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

Where things stand

None of this has ended the war or the strikes, and Russia has absorbed shocks before. But Khodorkovsky’s warning is pointed: “No Ukrainian drones have done as much damage to the Russian economy as Russia’s own government.” The drones, in his telling, exposed the weakness; the state’s instinct to tighten control is what spreads it. Whether that holds through the harvest is the question the coming months will answer.