By Ekaterina Janashia | 2026-07-27

One of the world's biggest oil exporters can no longer keep gasoline in its own pumps.

From Kaliningrad to Siberia, Russian drivers wait in miles-long queues, watch stations run dry and scramble for rationed fuel. A relentless campaign of Ukrainian drone strikes has crippled the country's refineries. The shortage now grips two-thirds of Russia's regions, reshaping how ordinary people commute, shop for food and run their businesses.

The desperation surfaces in group chats. Saint Petersburg taxi drivers trade complaints about vanishing supplies and worsening fuel quality. One driver spent half an hour one recent morning circling the city for a working pump.

"Passed five gas stations. No gasoline found. I'm already using my sense of smell to find it," another wrote on June 28.

Taxis idle, drivers quit

Russia's transportation sector is absorbing the first blow. Taxi drivers across several provinces are cutting shifts short, skipping long routes and refusing fares to congested city centers. They fear running out of gasoline mid-trip.

Sergey Privalov, a board member of the National Taxi Fleet Association, said drivers are scaling back because the shortage has erased the profit in carrying passengers.

The exodus is steep. Fleet operators report that 5% to 20% of active drivers have left the industry outright. Dmitry Nazarov, who runs the F1rst fleet of more than 2,000 cars, put the outflow near the top of that range, at about 20%. The booking service Maxim has logged a steady decline in drivers on the road.

Yandex Taxi has asked regional authorities and gas station networks to lift fuel limits for its drivers. A company representative said Yandex sees no systemic price spike or driver flight yet. Even so, the company acknowledged that rationing forces drivers to burn hours in station lines instead of carrying passengers.

The slowdown is denting consumer spending. Spending on taxis, car-sharing and rentals fell 3% in the last week of June, according to the Sber Index. Spending on everything else climbed 7.9% over the same stretch. The shortage is dragging down transport even as other prices rise.

Supply chains fracture

The crisis has jumped from passengers to freight, straining the networks that stock city shelves. Food producers are warning grocery chains to brace for late deliveries.

A major food manufacturer in the Ulyanovsk region told Saint Petersburg retailers that regional authorities had sharply restricted gasoline and diesel sales for cargo trucks.

"Due to force majeure, vehicles carrying our products may be delayed in transit," the producer wrote.

Alexander Myshinsky, who heads the Real group and its Saint Petersburg supermarket chain, said out-of-town suppliers are struggling to keep schedules. Orders still arrive slightly late, though existing stockpiles are masking the gaps for now.

Trucking companies are warning clients that freight rates will climb at least 10% in the coming weeks. Carriers are turning down long-haul contracts because they cannot count on diesel at highway stops. Many now stay within a 100-to-150-kilometer radius (62 to 93 miles), splintering the national supply chain into isolated pockets.

Kremlin scrambles to respond

The root cause is the scale of the damage. Boris Aronstein, an independent oil and gas analyst, called it "the most severe crisis in recent years." Coordinated drone waves keep hitting refineries before crews can repair the last round of destruction, he said. Gasoline production has dropped roughly 25% from last year's average, opening a daily deficit the country cannot close.

Some regions have hit bottom. In Russian-controlled Crimea, authorities declared a state of emergency and banned civilian gasoline sales altogether. The ban gutted the peninsula's tourism season and sparked public unrest. Social media channels show furious drivers brawling at empty stations, while residents rely on crowdsourced maps to find working pumps.

The Kremlin has turned to emergency fixes. It is buying fuel from neighboring Belarus and Kazakhstan, a striking reversal for an energy giant. Officials have also rewritten environmental rules to let stations sell lower-grade Euro-3 gasoline under Euro-5 labels.

Economic analyst Maksim Blant warned that the scarcity could spread far beyond the pumps.

"The gasoline crisis could become a trigger that could cause the whole economy to go down," he said.

The empty pumps are changing how Russians see the war's cost at home. As the government cuts its economic growth forecasts and battles a widening budget deficit, the daily hunt for fuel is a blunt reminder that the conflict has reached Russian streets.