Alyona Sadovnikova first experienced gasoline shortages in mid-June, when she pulled into a station and was told it was only serving customers who had ration coupons.
“I was horrified: Are we in the Soviet Union now where you had to get coupons to buy sausage?” she said in a telephone interview.
Just a few days later, Ms. Sadovnikova found herself waiting 18 hours to fill up in the city of Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, almost 3,000 miles from the Ukrainian border.
As Ukraine escalates its attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, including some deep into Russian territory, refineries across the country have been forced to shut down for lengthy repairs.
That has caused the kinds of gas shortages that many Russian citizens have not seen in their lifetimes. They originally started in Russia-occupied Crimea in May and have since spread to mainland Russia and even Siberia.
The situation is so serious that Russian officials said this week that they were in talks to explore importing oil from other countries, a startling admission for the world’s third-largest oil producer.
The long gas lines are one of the most vivid and tangible examples of how the war with Ukraine is affecting daily life in Russia, and a challenge for President Vladimir V. Putin, who has gone to great lengths to tamp down any opposition to the war. Frustrations have run so deep that fistfights have broken out among exasperated motorists waiting for hours in line.
“Gasoline shortages are no longer merely an economic issue — it’s a test for the government’s ability to manage an acute crisis which strikes at the heart of day-to-day normalcy,” Ilya Grashchenkov, a Moscow-based political analyst, said in a research note.
Only two Russian regions, the sparsely populated Chukotka in the Far East and Kalmykia in the south, have not seen fuel shortages or restrictions on sales, according to a tally compiled by several Russian independent media outlets. Long lines at the pump have become a common sight, and crowdsourced websites have popped up to track supply at individual stations. Up to 20 percent of the nation’s taxi drivers are choosing to stay at home because of the long lines at the pump, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported.
The densely populated regions around the Russian capital appeared to be the most vulnerable to shortages. The Moscow Oil Refinery and a major refinery in Tatarstan, about 600 miles to the east of the capital, which account for 10 percent of Russia’s total gasoline capacity, have both reportedly shut down after Ukrainian attacks.
On Wednesday afternoon, dozens of motorists clogged the busy highway from Moscow to St. Petersburg, forming a line to one of the few stations that still had gas.
The sight is completely unfamiliar to Russians who grew up in a country of booming oil production.
An older generation that “saw empty shelves at grocery stores” during the fall of the Soviet Union is mentally more prepared, said Boris Nadezhdin, a 63-year-old opposition politician. “But for people in their 20s and 30s, this is a complete shock.”
Even though the government had subsidized oil companies to keep gas affordable, prices have been rising. The average price per liter in the last week of June was $0.93, up 1.6 percent compared with the week before, according to Russia’s Statistics Agency.
At independent gas stations in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, prices have gone up from about 70 rubles ($0.90) per liter to up to 100 rubles ($1.30), said one customer, Said-Hasan, a 42-year-old man who asked that his last name be withheld for security reasons. Gas stations owned by state-owned Rosneft have kept the prices low, but they attract long lines. Said-Hasan said he took a short drive to the neighboring Ingushetia region earlier this week to get cheaper gas, even though he could not get more than 30 liters because of rationing.
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Smaller, independent gas stations in the south have been standing empty, marked with traffic cones and “Out of gas” signs, according to Alexander, a 33-year-old professional driver, who travels extensively around the Krasnodar and the Rostov regions. He also requested his last name be withheld.
At least one-third of the gas stations in Krasnodar, Russia’s third-largest region, have been shut, Evgeny Pergun, the deputy governor there, told the local legislature on Wednesday.
Some Russians have resorted to comic relief to cope. In one viral post, a Russian blogger imagined that users of a popular taxi-hailing app would soon be able to pick a horse among ride options.
Shortages appear to be particularly dire in eastern Siberia and the Far East.
Lines in the Irkutsk region have been so long that the authorities promised to install portable toilets along highways to serve the motorists. Igor Kobzev, the local governor, declared a state of high alert — one notch away from the state of emergency — on Sunday.
Together with her husband and their 18-month-old baby, Ms. Sadovnikova, the woman from Irkutsk, who works in social media, joined the line at one station at 11 p.m. last Friday. She did not get gas until 5 p.m. the next day. They used the station’s lavatories and shop for toilets and snacks. Other people in the line were supportive and shared food and toys with her son, she said.
“The whole thing was nerve-wrecking and exhausting,” Ms. Sadovnikova, 26, said, adding that she had to spend the following day sleeping because of the stress. “We’re trying to save the gas and hoping there’ll be more supplies by the time we run out again.”
Ms. Sadovnikova said she found it annoying that officials across the country have been accusing Russians of panic-buying while all independent gas stations in her city had shut down.
Speaking at a conference on Wednesday, Russia’s energy ministry, Alexander Novak, insisted that the country was merely dealing with “shortages at selected gas stations” that “quickly get fixed.”
Market data, however, paints a different picture.
By mid-June, Ukrainian drone strikes had knocked out about a third of Russia’s oil refining capacity — or some 2.2 million barrels per day — according to Ronald P. Smith, founding partner at the Texas-based Emerging Markets Oil and Gas Consulting Partners. Other analysts pointed to a smaller decrease of about 25 percent.
“Plugging that hole will likely require several large plants to get their gasoline production back up and running,” Mr. Smith said in emailed remarks. “How long it takes to fix it, in reality, depends on what was hit to begin with,” he said.
In addition to exploring the possibility of importing oil, the Russian government is also considering whether to allow the production and sale of a lower-quality gas with a higher sulfur content, which was banned in Russia in 2013, the Kommersant newspaper reported on Monday, citing a government draft.
Russian authorities tend not to publicize the extent of the damage or the inconvenience to Russian consumers.
Mr. Putin, who typically avoids commenting on bad news, broke the silence on Sunday when he admitted in an interview with state TV that Russia was seeing “a certain deficit” of fuel “but not a critical one.” The Ukrainian attacks sought to “drive a wedge in Russian society and force Russia to halt, even for a brief moment, the advance of our troops on the front line,” he said, after calling an ad hoc meeting on the fuel crisis.
Many Russians genuinely blame the government more broadly for the country’s woes, but seem to exempt Mr. Putin himself.
Mr. Nadezhdin, the opposition figure, said he feels that will change. He said he was increasingly seeing Russians “waking to the idea that it is exactly Putin who brought us to this with his policies.”
If Russians kept seeing Mr. Putin on TV delivering upbeat remarks about economic growth while they are lining up to get gas, he said, “Suspicions will arise.”
Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.
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