Author: Ivan Preobrazhensky
For weeks, Ukrainian drones have been carrying out successful strikes on the Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia. Ukraine is also attacking oil refineries and storage facilities, including in the Moscow region. And what is Vladimir Putin doing? He is holding meetings "on the development of domestic aviation" and only on June 28 did he admit that Russia has a fuel problem and that a ban on diesel exports is being considered. Could this create in the population the feeling that in their "bunkers" Is he losing touch with reality, and therefore control over power?
Gasoline is as necessary as water
According to media reports, Russia urgently wants to purchase 50,000 tons of the most sought-after AI-92 gasoline from Kazakhstan. The Russian authorities are currently looking for any opportunities to satisfy the "thirst for gasoline". More and more Russian regions are introducing restrictions on the sale of automobile and, in some places, aviation fuel. Public transport is being stopped, limits are being introduced for sales to private individuals, and sales in cans are being banned. Agricultural machinery problems are emerging in agricultural regions, threatening a shortage of Russian vegetables, fruits and grain in the fall.
Over the weekend, Putin met with government officials and oil industry bosses and called for mitigation of the consequences of repeated Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries and other oil facilities. In previous meetings with government officials, he has criticized them as if it were up to them to determine how many more successful strikes Ukrainian drones, which have already disabled at least a quarter of Russian oil refining facilities, will carry out. Moscow's Kapotnya refinery, for example, has been closed for at least six months.
The oil superpower, once mockingly called the "gas station country" by Western politicians, has proven incapable of dealing with the massive attack on its oil refining sector. Now Russia depends on neighboring Belarus, where several large plants continue to operate with Russian oil, and potentially from Kazakhstan.
I do not rule out, given the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, that Russia will try to purchase fuel from the Middle East. And in this tense situation, the one who calls himself the president of this country is pretending that there is no serious crisis. Is he waiting for the population to pour out their anger and fear on the governors, who have practically limited the sale of gasoline?
Putin is silent about the situation in Crimea
Putin is also not talking much about the situation in the annexed Crimea - this – – "place of power", which is sacred to him and which he almost declared the cradle of Russian civilization. There, the situation is increasingly approaching a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe: there is almost no gasoline and it is not expected to be, basic goods are in short supply, transport is practically non-functional, including trains, and leaving the peninsula, whose land connection with Russia through occupied Melitopol and Mariupol has been cut off, is now possible only through the Crimean Bridge, where, however, giant queues of cars are forming.
And what is Putin doing? For the first time since the beginning of the crisis on the annexed peninsula, he publicly noted the problem only on June 23 and briefly demanded "to reduce to zero the consequences of the attacks of the Ukrainian army". And since he cannot magically fix the situation, as, by the way, with the "thirst for gasoline" throughout Russia, the president prefers to distance himself.
What can Putin expect?
The Russian dictator has long ceased to worry and be accountable to his fellow citizens. He simply does not want to take the negative reaction - as they say, he protects the already declining trust. Let others take the blows for now. This is not a new strategy for him - it is enough to recall how he behaved at the beginning of his reign, when the submarine "Kursk" sank.
It is not excluded that Putin is silent because he is pursuing some far-sighted foreign policy goals. For example, he may still hope that in the coming days Trump's special representative Steve Witkoff and the son-in-law of the US President Jared Kushner will come to him after all, so that negotiations to end the war in Ukraine can be resumed - on his terms. And this must be done from a position of strength.
That is probably why Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov, and later Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, recently said that the agreements allegedly reached at the Anchorage meeting between Putin and Trump are no longer valid. Meanwhile, Putin himself has remained silent, as if offering the Americans a choice between a rupture and the resumption of contacts, thereby suggesting that he can personally correct these statements later, as he has done many times before.
However, if this assumption is correct, Putin was wrong. Despite his favorite saying that things will "solve by themselves", Russia's problems will not solve themselves. Even Trump himself has noted that Ukraine is building strong defenses, and Deputy Secretary of State Jeremy Levin, for the first time since Trump began his current term, has noted that Ukraine is winning.
This poses a danger for Putin: not only the general public but also the ruling class may conclude that the Russian leader has lost control and his sense of reality. They may decide that he no longer fulfills the same functions that made his subjects previously willing to tolerate his crazy ideas – including the war on Ukraine.