At least 30 Russian regions have run short of fuel. This is not the first crisis of its kind since Ukrainian drones began systematically hitting refineries, but it is the first to reach Moscow. Gazprom Neft and Tatneft have restricted sales in the capital itself - the place where until now the war was something you watched on television.

Queues in the south, waiting lists at the garages

In the Krasnodar region queues are forming at petrol stations. Igor Zakharchenko, an estate agent from Sochi, says the city looks like it did before the Olympics, with one difference - "there is no petrol in Sochi". Oleg Grigorenko, editor of the independent portal 7x, explains the problem has long stopped being personal uncertainty about whether you can get out of town: taxi firms, couriers and construction all report falling orders, because the entire supply chain hangs on fuel.

Nikolai Korshenevsky, an economist who left Russia over his opposition to the war, describes the second phase: "Cars will not start and need repairs. The waiting lists at garages are months long, even in Moscow." When fuel is bad or missing, the mechanics pay a bill that never shows up in the oil statistics.

The number that tells the story

Russian oil production has fallen from 11.5 million barrels a day in 2019 to under nine million now. Korshenevsky warns that if the trend continues it will drop to eight million - which in his view means a full economic crisis.

Vyacheslav Shiryaev, an economic analyst in exile, says imports are not a realistic option: you do not import 200,000 tonnes of fuel a day into a country under this level of isolation. And Igor Lipsits points out that the damaged refineries remain vulnerable to further strikes, so the authorities are already rationing - fuel goes first to the services that have to keep running.

Lipsits goes a step further with his comparison: fuel distribution is becoming a closed system, and the car a luxury. That is a sentence from the late 1980s, not from 2026.

What this forecast is worth

Shiryaev estimates that intensified Ukrainian strikes could end the war in a few weeks, by paralysing the railways and industry. With deadlines like that it is worth being cautious. This war has been running since 2022 and has seen plenty of predictions of a swift turn, from both sides, and the front line has stayed roughly where it was.

Something has changed, though. Until now Ukrainian strikes were a story about Russia's military industry; now they are a story about whether a Moscow commuter gets to work. The war that ran somewhere far away for years has finally started to be felt in people's own households - and that is the point at which any regime starts counting more seriously.