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Ukrainian drone attacks on energy infrastructure are intensifying fuel shortages in Russia, triggering a rare admission from President Vladimir Putin of the gravity of the situation.
In unusually candid public remarks to a meeting of senior officials on Sunday, Putin explicitly acknowledged that Ukrainian strikes had led to fuel rationing.
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“You are well aware that problems for drivers and for businesses persist,” he said, according to Russian news agencies. “Unfortunately, there are still queues at petrol stations too.”
“We have to reduce to a minimum the impact of terrorist attacks on our civilian targets and infrastructure,” he said, adding that the situation required “systemic measures that match the scale of current challenges”.
Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian energy facilities in recent months, hitting Russia’s crude oil and refined products sales, its main source of export income and the main source of funding for its war efforts.
Norsi, Russia’s fourth-largest oil refinery and the second-largest producer of petrol, suspended operations last week following a Ukrainian drone attack. The facility is located near Kstovo in the Nizhny Novgorod region, 450 kilometres (280 miles) east of Moscow.
Ukraine’s military said it also struck Russia’s Orenburg gas processing plant, which has a capacity of 45 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year. It is located in the southern Urals near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan, more than 1,200km (750 miles) beyond the front lines in Ukraine
Last week, Ukraine also used long-range drones to hit two oil facilities in Kerch in Crimea and the port of Kavkaz, used to bring fuel to the Russian front lines.
Long-range drones also hit the Slavyansk and the Yaroslavl oil refineries, about 300 and 700 kilometres (190 and 435 miles) from the front line, respectively. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in the aftermath of the attack on Sunday that this meant “fewer resources serving Russia’s war machine”.
“We continue our operations that weaken Russia’s ability to wage this war,” he wrote on X.
(Al Jazeera)What impact are Ukraine’s attacks having?
Ukraine has been targeting Russia’s oil refineries, oil storage sites, oil and gas pumping stations and oil loading ports with strikes in that order of priority, according to Indra Overland, who heads the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)’s Center for Energy Research and is Associate Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
“At the refineries, the Ukrainians especially target the fluid catalytic cracking units. These are the ‘hearts’ of the refineries and are difficult, expensive and time-consuming to replace,” Overland told Al Jazeera.
“Russia has attempted to cover some of them with scaffolding and nets, but these are ineffective against Ukraine’s most powerful home-grown weapons such as the FP-5.”
The Flamingo FP-5 is a long-range missile, which can travel 3,000 kilometres (1,860 miles) and carry a payload of more than 1,000 kilogrammes (2,200lbs). It was developed by Ukrainian defence manufacturer Fire Point.
Ukraine is specifically targeting Russia’s geographically vast energy infrastructure and especially “the system’s connective tissue”, Margarita Zavadskaya, senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA), told Al Jazeera.
Ukraine’s campaign has exposed how thinly protected and overstretched this critical infrastructure has become in the world’s largest country by landmass, Zavadskaya said.
It is hard to say how much impact the resulting fuel crisis will have on Russia politically, however.
It is “unlikely to produce regime collapse or mass revolutionary dynamics,” according to Zavadskaya. “The impact is mostly attritional, cumulative and politically corrosive rather than immediately destabilising.”
How badly has Russia been hit economically?
Overland, at NUPI, said the impact of Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s domestic economy has been “growing by the day”.
“The majority of Russia’s regions have introduced limits on the sale of petrol and diesel, and some gas stations have shut down or have queues that can take up to 12 hours to get through,” he said. “This, in turn, disrupts the movement of people getting to work, transportation of goods, taxis and agriculture.”
Fuel shortages in Russia – the world’s largest wheat exporter – are also expected to disrupt the critical July-August harvest season, Overland added, when fuel is needed to run tractors, water pumps and other machinery on farms, as well as transport produce to market.
The fuel crisis is also triggering “panic buying and hoarding that exacerbate the situation”, the analyst said. “It also presses up inflation throughout the economy because the supply of almost all goods – including food, medicines, building materials – involves the use of fuel.”
Russia’s military sector has not been affected as much, as it remains the top priority. Markku Kivinen, director of the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, Finland, said Russia must prioritise military logistics and, if necessary, will bypass the needs of consumers to keep up the war in Ukraine.
“This affects the legitimacy of the government but does not immediately cause weakening of the war effort,” Kivinen said.
Why did Putin admit to fuel shortages?
On Sunday, Russia’s president admitted that Ukrainian attacks on infrastructure facilities “create problems”. “Right now we’re observing a certain shortage, but it’s not critical,” Putin said in a Kremlin-published interview.
“We will certainly ensure the security of both the country and our citizens, as well as the inviolability of Russia’s borders,” he added.
Zavadskaya, at FIIA, said the Russian president was forced to admit the fuel shortages “because they had become too visible to deny”.
“A complete denial would have looked implausible and would have incurred even higher reputation costs of the crisis,” the analyst said. “But the admission followed a familiar Putin pattern, especially visible before and during major crises: The president remains in control, while lower-level officials and managers become responsible for failures.”
Kivinen, at the University of Helsinki, said Putin may have decided to admit the impact of Ukrainian strikes in order to “link this escalation with his war narrative”.
“He can legitimise his own escalation steps by referring to the growing risks to Russian infrastructure,” the analyst told Al Jazeera.
What happens next?
Recent events may fuel public discontent in Russia.
“Repeated attacks undermine the implicit fiscal-security bargain: Citizens pay taxes, accept repression, and tolerate war in exchange for order and basic state protection,” Zavadskaya said. “When refineries burn, fuel becomes scarce, and authorities improvise, the population sees that the state cannot fully provide what it claims to monopolise: security, stability and provision.”
According to Overland, at NUPI, handling the energy crisis may be about to get even harder for Putin. “An interesting question is why Ukraine does not strike more pipelines, as these are thousands of kilometres long and impossible to protect,” he said.
“The reason may be that they are relatively cheap and easy to repair, but it is also possible that Ukraine is saving this for a later stage. Destruction of natural gas pipelines will have a greater impact at the start of the heating season in the autumn.”
