The country that exports oil to half the world suddenly doesn't have enough petrol for its own drivers. The director of Rosneft, Russia's largest oil company, Igor Sechin, wrote a letter to Putin in which he describes the damage as „unprecedented.“ And when the head of an oil giant is panicking on paper, things are probably worse than the television says.

The cause is the Ukrainian drone campaign that has been striking Russian refineries for months. In May alone, 16 drone strikes hit 8 of the 10 largest Russian plants. Analysts estimate that over 25 percent of Russia's total oil-refining capacity has been knocked out. The result is visible at the pumps: in Irkutsk, 4,800 kilometres from Ukraine, drivers wait 18 hours to fill up, and in the Krasnodar region at least a third of petrol stations have closed.

Sechin is demanding drastic measures - to scrap the mandatory sale of fuel through the exchange, to allow the weaker „Euro-3“ petrol, even to import foreign fuel. Picture the absurdity: Russia, one of the greatest oil powers in the world, importing petrol from India and banning the export of its own. Putin officially acknowledged the problem but called the Ukrainian attacks „non-critical“ - a phrasing that sounds more like a message to the public than an assessment of the situation.

This story is more interesting than it looks at first glance. For a long time the picture was that the war was being fought only on Ukrainian territory, far from Russian daily life. But when a person waits 18 hours for a tank of fuel, the war stops being news from the front and becomes a hole in one's own day. No power is so great that it cannot feel the war at home - the only question is how long it will take before that becomes too much to be called „non-critical.“