Russia is in the third wave of a fuel crisis that began in May, as Ukrainian drones keep hitting its refineries and Moscow hoards diesel just as the rest of the world runs short.
Drones damaged eight Russian refineries in the first three weeks of September, some of them more than once, and regional authorities are now having to steer petrol to filling stations "in manual mode", Forbes Russia reported on September 24. There were 12 strikes on refineries between September 1 and 23, after a record 29 in August, 17 in July and 14 in June, according to Sergei Selin, director of market analysis at the Russian consultancy Seala AI.
Russia is normally one of the world's biggest diesel exporters, with a surplus of more than 30mn tonnes a year, and its absence, on top of the disruption in the Gulf, has sent diesel prices to records from Iowa to Paris. That has left US President Donald Trump, heading into November's midterm elections, pressing Kyiv to stop hitting Russian refineries while his own administration debates a ban on US diesel exports. Europe, which buys more than half its diesel from the US, would take the heaviest blow.
Half the refining capacity idle
Seala AI estimated that as of September 24 about 477,000 tonnes a day of primary refining capacity was idle for unplanned repairs, roughly 53% of Russia's standard capacity, before counting mothballed units brought back into service and plants running above their design limits. That is below the peak of the first wave, 575,000 tonnes a day in mid-July. In barrels, about 3.5mn b/d of Russia's 6.6mn b/d of primary distillation capacity is offline, against typical pre-crisis throughput of 5.5mn b/d, the Russian Oil & Gas Monitor said, citing the consultancy.
The refinery damage ledger compiled by IntelliNews, which tracks every plant hit since the campaign began, counts 27 refineries struck in 201 dated attacks. Plants reported halted or cut in September account for about 108.5mn tonnes a year of capacity, about 33% of Russia's 327mn tonnes a year of nameplate capacity, rising to about 159.2mn tonnes a year (49%) if earlier halts at Tuapse, Salavat, Perm, Orsk and Tyumen still hold. Only four large refineries - Achinsk, Angarsk, Komsomolsk and Khabarovsk - have not been hit. Russian officials put the damage far lower: Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said in early September that about 10% of refining capacity was under repair, and President Vladimir Putin gave a similar figure at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on September 3.
Rosneft has taken the worst of the September strikes. Its Ryazan refinery, with capacity of 17.1mn tonnes a year, was hit on September 6, Saratov (7mn tonnes) on September 8 and 11, Syzran (8.5mn tonnes) on September 15 and Kuibyshev (7mn tonnes) on September 22. Sibur's Nizhnekamskneftekhim and the Slavyansk ECO refinery were struck on September 13, Slavneft-YANOS in Yaroslavl on September 17 and Gazprom Neft's Moscow refinery on September 20. The plants attacked this month have combined capacity of 95.6mn tonnes a year, about 36% of the 266.5mn tonnes of crude Russia processed in 2024, the last year for which an official figure was published, Forbes Russia calculated.
Daniil Tyun, head of DA-Consulting, cautioned that adding up nameplate capacity overstates the loss, because a drone strike usually damages one or more units while the rest of the plant keeps running. Companies do not disclose which units have been hit, so analysts read the damage from indirect signs. Fuel from the Moscow refinery, which processed about 11.6mn tonnes of crude in 2024 and turned out 2.9mn tonnes of petrol and 3.2mn tonnes of diesel, vanished from the St Petersburg exchange from September 21 to 23 after the strike.
Two fuel markets
Moscow itself should avoid a physical shortage, Tyun said, because the capital has first call on supplies and can draw on refineries in the Urals and Siberia and on imports from Belarus, as it did when the Moscow plant stopped in June.
"Today I would already talk about two different Russian fuel markets," Tyun told the magazine. "In Moscow and a number of the largest cities, thanks to the redistribution of supplies, the situation outwardly remains relatively stable. But in some remote regions the physical availability of fuel is worse and its cost is significantly higher."
At a meeting on the fuel market chaired by Novak on September 21, officials named Tyva, Khakassia, Yakutia, the Novosibirsk region and the Krasnoyarsk territory as problem areas. A week earlier St Petersburg and the Leningrad region had topped the list, and deliveries to Yekaterinburg and the Chelyabinsk, Arkhangelsk, Tver, Belgorod, Perm and Krasnodar regions had to be organised by hand, with the energy ministry identifying gaps, oil companies finding extra volumes and Russian Railways moving them. The Kaluga and Zabaikalsky regions have since reimposed caps on petrol sales, and jet fuel is rationed at 26 airports.
Pump prices keep climbing. AI-95 petrol cost RUB80.78 ($0.96) a litre in the week to September 14, up 21% since the end of December, according to Rosstat. Exchange prices have gone the other way: AI-92 fell 3.6% on the St Petersburg exchange between September 1 and 23 to RUB69,887 ($828) a tonne, because traders and independent filling stations have stopped buying new contracts when they cannot be sure the fuel will be shipped, Tyun said.
Diesel stays at home
Moscow banned diesel exports by refiners from July 8, after earlier restricting sales by traders and small plants, and decided on September 15 to extend that ban to the end of October rather than let it lapse on September 30, the business daily Vedomosti reported. A wider ban on petrol exports, and on diesel exports by non-producers, runs to January 31, 2027. Exemptions for intergovernmental deals let Russia more than double diesel deliveries to Central Asia and Mongolia in August, but little else is leaving the country.
Farmers and the army both need the diesel Russia is keeping at home. Demand peaks through the harvest and autumn sowing, and fuel shortages were already hitting agriculture at the start of the harvest in July, while military demand has grown with every year of the war. Refiners also have to build up winter-grade diesel stocks, and the Russian Fuel Union, which speaks for independent retailers, lobbied Novak in August to keep the ban because diesel bought on the exchange was not being delivered.
Before the drone campaign Russia refined about 81.6mn tonnes of diesel a year against domestic demand of about 51mn tonnes, and seaborne diesel and gasoil loadings averaged about 817,000 b/d in 2025. Its diesel shipments fell to 504,600 tonnes in August from 743,000 tonnes in July. Together with the loss of Middle Eastern product exports behind the disrupted Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's key chokepoints, that has left between 2mn and 3mn b/d of diesel missing from world markets and sent diesel cracks to a record, on S&P Global data.
Trump's diesel problem
The shortage has reached American pumps. Average US retail diesel hit a record $6.528 a gallon on September 21, according to the American Automobile Association, against $3.76 in late February, just before the US and Israel attacked Iran. Trump said on September 22 that he had encouraged officials to consider curbing diesel exports, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright told oil executives in calls that evening to prepare for possible restrictions, Bloomberg* reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The administration is divided. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins backs a ban and Republican senators Chuck Grassley and Dan Sullivan have pushed for one, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is cool on the idea. Wright said on September 23 that "nobody wants a full blanket ban or zero exports of diesel" and that officials were working with refiners on a "simpler, voluntary, cooperative" way to get more diesel into the US market. A White House official called a Politico report that the administration was drafting a 90-day ban "fake news".
Trump has leaned on Kyiv as well. He urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on September 15 to stop hitting Russian diesel production, and before they met at the UN General Assembly on September 22 called Ukraine's strikes "a serious hit on the Russians" and "a serious hit on the price of diesel". Zelenskiy refused to stop on his own.
"President Trump asked me not to respond on Russian diesel refineries, oil. We don't want this game, and I suggest neither side plays it. Putin attacks us, we respond," Zelenskiy said after the meeting, according to a translation of his remarks by economist Tymofiy Mylovanov.
He offered instead a reciprocal energy truce, halting strikes on refineries if Russia stops attacking Ukraine's power grid, the target of its campaign to freeze Ukraine into submission. Washington agreed to carry the offer to Moscow, but the Kremlin has rejected it, and a truce Trump announced on September 13 never took hold. Putin has already warned that Kyiv opened a Pandora's box by hitting Russia's economy.
Europe is most exposed
A US ban would push the pain on to America's customers. The US exported an average 1.4mn b/d of distillates, mostly diesel, between March and June, about 5% of global demand of 28mn b/d, economist Robin Brooks wrote in "Will There Be an Export Ban on Diesel?" on September 24. Latin America would be "absolutely hammered", he wrote, and the Netherlands, Europe's energy logistics hub, and the UK would also be hit. Mexico, which depends on US imports for more than 40% of its diesel, is already on alert.
"In fact, there's a chance a diesel export ban could tip Europe into recession, which could then spill back to the US," Brooks wrote.
The EU imports more than half its diesel from the US, and those imports have risen to replace barrels lost to the war in the Middle East, Politico* reported on September 24. Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate in France's presidential election, warned that a US ban would have "incalculable" consequences for French people, and French President Emmanuel Macron said he had pressed Trump not to go ahead. Governments are already spending to shield drivers: Hungary has brought in targeted diesel compensation, Slovakia has capped fuel margins, and Europe faces a jet fuel deficit of 510,000 b/d in the fourth quarter.
A ban could backfire in the US too. With exports blocked, US storage tanks would fill within weeks and refiners would have to cut runs by about 2mn b/d, reducing gasoline output by about 650,000 b/d even if they maximised petrol yields, Morgan Stanley analysts including Martijn Rats wrote in a note on September 23, Bloomberg* reported. US diesel would get cheaper and fuel abroad dearer, with Europe "the most exposed", the bank said. Brooks expects no ban unless diesel prices "spike a lot further".
China is the one large supplier with room to add barrels. Beijing loosened fuel export restrictions in June, and Chinese fuel exports have risen to their highest level in more than three years as refinery runs recover, Capital Economics said in a note on September 24, though it listed reimposing export restrictions among the ways Beijing could cut its own crude imports if prices keep rising. Brooks doubts China would bail out Washington before the midterms: "China won't be helping the US."
The squeeze has been building for more than a year. Ukraine began to escalate its refinery attacks in the autumn of 2025, and by May drones had knocked out 25-30% of Russia's downstream capacity, forcing Moscow to turn to Belarus and India for petrol. A second wave in August brought rationing back to Moscow and saw oil companies default on 60% of exchange contracts. The third has arrived with the harvest still under way, winter stocks to build and every other big diesel exporter already stretched.
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