Back to the USSR, Russian Wait in Gas Lines — and Fume

After four years focusing on battle lines, President Vladimir Putin now faces a possibly greater political threat: gasoline lines. The front lines in Ukraine have been stalled for a year. This summer, though, Russia’s social media fills with cellphone videos of drivers waiting for hours to buy gasoline for their cars.With car owners accounting for 40 percent of Russia’s 143 million people, this deepening shortage cuts deeply into Mr. Putin’s middle-class backing. To ease shortages, Russia has banned exports of gasoline and relaxed environmental standards.In this petrostate, though, gasoline shortages only sharpen. Yesterday, one of the nation’s largest retailers, Tatneft, limited sales at its 800 gasoline stations to five gallons and cash only. A new survey indicates that gasoline rationing now is in effect in about a quarter of Russia’s 89 regions.The reasons are as clear as the pillar of black smoke that yesterday rose high into the air 15 miles southeast of the Kremlin. Timed as a curtain raiser for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with President Trump in France yesterday, Ukrainian drones buzz-bombed the main refinery at Moscow, Russia’s political and press capital.In case the world press might miss the images, Mr. Zelensky posted on X a video of the refinery in flames. “The Moscow region felt the reach of Ukraine’s long-range capabilities,” Mr. Zelensky posted from the Group of Seven meeting in the French Alps. “Russia must be forced to end its war against our people. And Ukraine’s long-range weapons are one of the important components of such pressure.”At the meeting Mr. Trump seemed to tilt toward Ukraine. He told reporters: “Look, Russia should make a deal.” Believing that an Iranian-American peace deal will soon restore oil flows to the Strait of Hormuz, he promised to return his focus to a Russia-Ukraine peace deal. To pressure Russia, he intimated that he would restore sanctions on Russian oil exports: “Soon we will be able to do that.”So far this year, Ukraine has bombed 16 of Russia’s largest refineries. This bombing campaign has cut Russian exports of refined products to a 20-year low. In anticipation of oil exports resuming through the Persian Gulf, world oil prices have fallen 20 percent over the last two weeks, to $80 a barrel today.“The tide is turning for Ukraine,” the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, posted yesterday from the summit in France. “The situation in 2026 is very different from 2025. Ukraine is bravely holding the frontline. Russia’s fatigue is openly showing.”The impact of Ukrainian drones on Russian daily life can be seen in the long gasoline lines on all approach highways to Moscow. Once on the Moscow Automobile Ring Road, an eight-lane highway around the city, drivers pass the heavily damaged refinery. Before the bombing, it provided about a third of the gasoline and half the asphalt for Moscow and the surrounding region.To protect Russia’s politically crucial mega city, authorities in recent weeks dispatched helicopters to place anti-aircraft systems atop flat-roofed skyscrapers. Yesterday, though, cell phone cameras captured videos of Ukrainian drones noisily scraping across the summer sky, moving slowly like airborne lawnmowers, unaffected by the occasional crackle of automatic weapons fire.A state TV executive, Margarita Simonyan, an outspoken defender of Mr. Putin, complained recently on air that Ukrainian drones are forcing her own children to sleep in hallways of their Moscow apartment. To calm the public, a leading state TV host, Vladimir Solovyov, demands that people who film and post Ukrainian drone strikes be convicted of treason and thrown in jail.Recently, a new sense of insecurity has spread at Russia’s two key cities — Moscow and St. Petersburg. First, Mr. Putin radically reshaped Moscow’s annual May 9 victory parade into a hurried affair stripped of tanks and rockets. Then last week, authorities announced the suspensions of the annual Navy Day flotilla parade at St. Petersburg in July and the International Aviation and Space Show at Moscow in August. The Russian Air Force fears that concentration of billions of dollars worth of Russian aircraft would be too tempting for Ukrainian drone commanders.For good reason. Last week, on the occasion of a new holiday, Unmanned Systems Forces Day, Mr. Zelensky posted on X that this new branch of Ukraine’s military has inflicted $40 billion of damage in its first year. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, chimed in too. He posted on Facebook that last month Ukrainian drone units hit nearly 180,000 Russian military targets, marking a 13 percent increase over April.Increasingly accurate and deadly, Ukrainian drones are changing the region’s power map. Last month, Belarus’ self-declared president, Alexander Lukashenko, threatened to attack Ukraine. In response, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Major Robert Brovdi, said that he had drawn up a list of 500 targets to hit in Belarus, a Russian satellite state.Yesterday, state news agency BelTA posted an apology from Mr. Lukashenko. “If Volodymyr Alexandrovich was offended, I apologize to him for those words. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly, considering that he is still at war,” he said, addressing Ukraine’s president. “Belarus is very vulnerable militarily if Ukraine starts attacking us the same way it attacks Russia.”With Ukraine focused on Russia, military strategists see great political value in cutting gasoline supplies. A Ukrainian armed forces major, Andriy Tkachuk, recently told a reporter: “It’s fun to watch the gasoline lines, how we’re squeezing the maximum out of our strikes on refineries.”For now, Russians are diverted by jokes. Mr. Putin is teaching a new generation of Russians an old Soviet mainstay: waiting in line. But there are signs that Russia’s new generation may snap. Last week, Krasnodar Territory’s governor, Veniamin Kondratyev, airily dismissed reports of gasoline shortages as “artificial hype,” prompting subscribers to the satirical local Telegram channel Tupodar Krasnodar to respond with angry and crude comments.

Back to the USSR, Russian Wait in Gas Lines — and Fume

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