I don’t understand. How can Russia ship MORE oil, when the Russian oil refineries are in shambles after being bombed? Or is this Putin math?
Can someone explain or give me many links that explain?
The simple fact is that Russian oil production hasn’t actually been impacted the way Kiev is posturing. Rather than “Putin math,” the idea that production is in shambles is “Kiev math.”
This numbers in the article are a third of the numbers from production last year. They are importing gas and there are queues in the capital for motorists.
Pinprick attacks on refineries don’t actually have a big impact. They get a lot of media, but they don’t actually cause major disruptions for more than a few days. If you look at the size of oil refineries you’ll quickly realize that a single drone isn’t going to do much to them. This sort of propaganda is aimed at people who have no clue how this stuff actually works, and just look at pictures of smoke and think Russian oil production has completely stalled while in reality it’s largely unaffected.
There are in fact petrol shortages, especially in southern Russia and the prices have spiked also, so it’s not completely “unaffected”
The only place where there appear to be any actual shortages is Crimea where delivering fuel was always been a logistics problem. These stories about Ukrainian drones affecting Russian oil production have been running for over a year now, but when you look at the actual production numbers it’s very clear there is zero visible effect. The whole context for this thread is a Bloomberg article saying that Russia is shipping out oil at record pace now.
Very very temporarily they ramped up production and it is already in decline. They started this year producing and exporting less than the last five year.
I can tell why you didn’t want to link to the whole site because it completely undermines your narrative of cherry picked short term data which is not indicative of long term trends. Meanwhile, Russian oil revenue has shot up significantly thanks to the global oil shortages, and it represents a smaller percentage of economy as well. So, what we’re actually seeing is that there isn’t any significant shift compared to previous years, while revenue has shot up. https://energyandcleanair.org/may-2026-monthly-analysis-of-russian-fossil-fuel-exports-and-sanctions/
I’m telling you my first hand experience in central Russia. There are clearly fuel shortages today, with multiple gas stations I went through having no fuel, or having exuberant prices. I think it’s short term also partly because of the media coverage and people buying fuel in advance. In Crimea there were reports of a kilometre queues of people waiting at gas stations to refuel. And they had to introduce quotas of 30 liter per person maximum
Right, you’re talking about panic buying, but that’s not an indication of actual structural problem. And yeah given the bad media coverage close to election, I can’t imagine that’s gonna get addressed quickly.
