The New York Times reports:

Alyona Sadovnikova first experienced gasoline shortages in mid-June, when she pulled into a station and was told it was only serving customers who had ration coupons.

“I was horrified: Are we in the Soviet Union now where you had to get coupons to buy sausage?” she said in a telephone interview.
Just a few days later, Ms. Sadovnikova found herself waiting 18 hours to fill up in the city of Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, almost 3,000 miles from the Ukrainian border.

As Ukraine escalates its attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, including some deep into Russian territory, refineries across the country have been forced to shut down for lengthy repairs.

That has caused the kinds of gas shortages that many Russian citizens have not seen in their lifetimes. They originally started in Russia-occupied Crimea in May and have since spread to mainland Russia and even Siberia.

The situation is so serious that Russian officials said this week that they were in talks to explore importing oil from other countries, a startling 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 gasoline sales to individuals.

The long gas lines are one of the most vivid and tangible examples of how the war with Ukraine is affecting daily life in Russia, and a challenge for President Vladimir V. Putin, who has gone to great lengths to tamp down any opposition to the war. Frustrations have run so deep that fistfights have broken out among exasperated motorists waiting for hours in line.

“Gasoline shortages are no longer merely an economic issue — it’s a test for the government’s ability to manage an acute crisis which strikes at the heart of day-to-day normalcy,” Ilya Grashchenkov, a Moscow-based political analyst, said in a research note.

Only two Russian regions, the sparsely populated Chukotka in the Far East and Kalmykia in the south, have not seen fuel shortages or restrictions on sales, according to a tally compiled by several Russian independent media outlets. Long lines at the pump have become a common sight, and crowdsourced websites have popped up to track supply at individual stations. Up to 20 percent of the nation’s taxi drivers are choosing to stay at home because of the long lines at the pump, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.

The densely populated regions around the Russian capital appeared to be the most vulnerable to shortages. The Moscow Oil Refinery and a major refinery in Tatarstan, about 600 miles to the east of the capital, which account for 10 percent of Russia’s total gasoline capacity, have both reportedly shut down after Ukrainian attacks. [Continue reading…]