Russia buys gasoline from India after export ban and refinery attacks

The tankers arrived without a buyer. One carried Indian gasoline into Murmansk on August 5, supplied by Nayara Energy, a refinery nearly half owned by Russia's own Rosneft, and its cargo still had not sold more than a week later, NV/Ukrainska Pravda reported on August 17.

In July, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak extended Russia's gasoline export ban through the end of 2026 and barred diesel exports until "as the market recovers," Reuters reported on July 25. The diesel prohibition began July 8, which The Moscow Times attributed outright that day to Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries that caused shortages and pump-price spikes.

So the state bans gasoline exports to protect its own pumps, then watches foreign gasoline sail into its ports from a plant it partly owns. The world's largest crude exporter by landmass is shopping for petrol.

The stake is political. Vladimir Putin needs cheap, available fuel for a population already absorbing war costs, because pump queues are the one form of protest that requires no organizing. Novak's ministry must balance domestic supply against the hard-currency earnings that fund the war budget. Rosneft and Lukoil, the two giants who own most of the refining system, want their plants whole but cannot say so loudly while the state asks them to hold retail prices.

Ukraine's General Staff wants exactly what is happening: it claimed this month, per the Kyiv Post on July 4, that systematic strikes have disabled roughly 43 percent of Russia's projected refining capacity. Each side is pursuing a rational goal, and the goals cannot all be met.

The last comfortable assumption

On August 21, drones struck the Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez refinery in Perm Krai, more than 1,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border and one of Russia's ten largest refineries, EnergyNewsBeat reported that day. Days earlier, strikes hit the Ufa hub in Bashkortostan, three refineries deep inside the Urals. When the range reached Perm, western Siberia stopped being safe.

The Times of India

Refineries are miles of exposed pipes and distillation towers, not armored divisions, and they take months to repair even when spares arrive. Since August 2025 there have been over a hundred recorded strikes on Russian refineries and fuel infrastructure, counted on the Caspian Policy Center strike map of July 29. That center also reported Russian refineries processing about 3.91 million barrels of crude per day in early July, roughly 1.4 million barrels below normal yearly levels.

Bloomberg, cited by the Institute for the Study of War on August 4, reported this month that refining rates had fallen to their lowest since May 2002, forcing Russia to push near-record volumes of unrefined crude abroad instead. Each repair window has shortened as strike tempo increased, and the pattern matters more than any single figure.

The repair window shortens

September 2023 offers Russia's own comparison. Facing then-record domestic gasoline prices, the government slapped a temporary export ban on diesel and gasoline, prices cooled within weeks, and the ban lapsed. That episode proved the tool works when every refinery is running and the problem is arbitrage: traders shipping product abroad for a better price. This time the shortage comes from destroyed capacity rather than exported surplus, so the same lever produces nothing to ration.

A ban on exports can only reallocate what exists; it cannot conjure gasoline out of a wrecked distillation column. The counterexample runs the other way too. Soviet-style administrative allocation kept pumps open through worse crises than this, which is why the Kremlin still believes control beats markets here.

So Moscow reached past its borders. An industry source told Interfax, carried by Meduza on August 12, that Russia plans to import around 400,000 tons of gasoline per month from partner countries. Belarus tripled its rail shipments of fuel into Russia during June, InsPenet reported on July 2. Mongolia says it secured emergency supply commitments under existing intergovernmental carve-outs that exempt them from the ban, The Moscow Times wrote on August 11.

And the bitterest loop runs through the Indian Ocean: Russian crude flows to India at record volumes, about 2.7 million barrels per day in June, more than half of India's imports, gets refined at Nayara and Reliance plants, and returns as gasoline, Meduza reported on August 12. Russia has effectively outsourced its refining margin, paying Indian refiners a fee to do what its own bombed towers once did.

Paying in queues

Russian drivers pay in queues and rationing, with shortages reported across at least ten regions in August, Chas Pravdy wrote on August 17, and pump prices rising in 77 of the country's regions in the latest weekly tally, worst in annexed Crimea, RIA Anketa counted on August 22. Russian refiners pay twice, once in damaged assets and again because export-ban economics trap them selling domestically at administered prices. Indian refiners profit on both legs of the round trip. European consumers pay indirectly, because Russian diesel that once crossed the Baltic now must be replaced from Gulf and Asian pools, tightening winter margins everywhere else.

The consequence lands on the war budget itself. Crude exports earn less per barrel than refined products, and the gap between them is where Russia's export duties live. Every week refineries run at reduced rates, the state converts high-value product revenue into low-value crude revenue and pays the difference in foregone taxes.

Meanwhile air defense interceptors, the scarce resource defending those refineries, are the same interceptors shielding cities and bases.

Kyiv has found a weapon that makes Russia spend its defense budget against hundred-thousand-dollar airframes, and the exchange rate favors Ukraine on every single engagement.

Continued strikes on remaining intact refineries would confirm the read, followed by new import tenders and further carve-outs to the export ban, plus another month of rising regional pump prices despite controls. What breaks it. A ceasefire or strike pause long enough for major units like Ryazan or Ufa to return to full rates, after which export restrictions would lift quickly and Indian cargoes would stop, proving the crisis was capacity all along rather than something durable.

At the nozzle, a state built on hydrocarbon rents is discovering that rents require refineries, and refineries require skies it does not fully control. The man filling a Lada in Omsk this month is paying the repair bill on a tower in Perm he will never see.