Putin admitted problems with gasoline in Russia

Vladimir Putin held a meeting on providing fuel to the domestic market with the heads of oil and gas companies and members of the government and admitted that consumers do not have enough gasoline. According to him, the authorities have begun to use reserves.

Putin repeated the main points from the report of Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak at the beginning of the week: that large refineries are working at maximum capacity, the timing of ongoing repairs has been reduced, and planned work has been postponed. The government has also banned the export of gasoline and jet fuel and is considering a similar ban for diesel.

However, drivers in dozens of Russian regions are complaining about fuel shortages and kilometer-long queues at gas stations. As journalists from the Bereg cooperative have seen , the shortage has reached Moscow: some gas stations are closed, others have long lines, and not all types of gasoline are available everywhere.

According to the forecasts of the Ministry of Energy, in July it will be possible to produce more basic types of fuel than in June. According to a Bloomberg source, in the first half of June, Russia produced an average of 835 thousand barrels of gasoline per day - 15% less than a year earlier. In metric tons, this is about 98.5 thousand tons per day. According to the Ministry of Energy, which Putin cited, the available gasoline reserves amount to 1.7 million tons - 4% less than last year.

After the meeting, Putin told Vesti correspondent Pavel Zarubin that the fuel shortage was “not critical,” and in order to overcome it, refineries need to be repaired faster, the production of air defense systems to cover them must be increased, and gasoline imports must be established. “Everything works stably and with a large margin of safety,” he added.

Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries have reached such a level that the Russian oil industry has virtually no margin of safety, wrote Sergei Vakulenko, a former Gazprom Neft strategist and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Berlin Center for the Study of Russia and Eurasia, in mid-June. If the shortage worsens, a logical but highly unpopular step would be to remove the damper mechanism that holds down retail fuel prices, the analyst reasoned. But while Putin at the meeting mentioned “the need to maintain economically justified fuel prices” while increasing supply.

Putin also promised that fuel supplies to Crimea would be increased “both by land and by sea.” At the beginning of the month, The Bell examined how the fuel shortage in Crimea differs from the shortage on Russian territory, and why there are no reliable routes for supplying fuel to the peninsula, either on land or at sea.