The Domestic Russian Energy Crisis: Impact, Opinion, and Political Consequence

Energy Infrastructure Under Fire

Since 2023, Ukraine has increasingly targeted Russian energy infrastructure using drones and missiles, aiming not only to disrupt the Kremlin’s war economy but also to inflict domestic consequences. Attacks on oil refineries, pumping stations, pipelines, rail links, and even power terminals have progressively hollowed out Russia’s refining capacity and domestic fuel supply.

As of late August 2025, strikes have taken roughly 17 per cent of Russia’s refining capacity offline, amounting to about 1.1 million barrels per day. This has particularly affected facilities such as those operated by Lukoil and Rosneft, as well as the Druzhba pipeline and terminals like Ust-Luga. The result is a severe fuel crisis across regions, especially in the Far East, southern Russia and Crimea. Retailers report shortages of gasoline, long queues, fuel rationing, and surging prices. The cost of A-95 petrol has risen by over half since January.

In response, Moscow has imposed export bans (extraordinary for a country whose principal export is oil), attempted price stabilisation, and redirected loading capacity from Ust-Luga to other ports such as Novorossiisk and Primorsk. Despite these measures, disruption remains widespread and persistent.

The Sharp Effect on Quality of Life

Although priority is given to industrial and military sectors, ensuring they remain relatively insulated, ordinary civilians in many regions are experiencing the brunt of the shortages. Reports describe people unable to fill their cars with fuel, forced to ration or even turn to the black market. Social media has filled with jokes, memes, and bitter commentary that express both frustration and helplessness. Seasonal factors, such as travel during the harvest and the summer tourism period, have only amplified the crisis. Analysts warn of the possibility of an extension into the winter months, which could mean rationing and deeper shortages at a time of heightened demand.

Public Sentiment and Political Pressure

Open dissent in Russia remains tightly suppressed, and reliable polling on recent crises is scarce. Nevertheless some signals are discernible. Public frustration is evident in online commentary and local reports of resentment over rationing and reduced mobility. Yet broader polling in recent years suggests that support for President Putin and for the war itself remains surprisingly resilient, with surveys showing that optimism about the future increased after the invasion, even in regions previously less aligned with the Kremlin.

That resilience, however, should not obscure the sensitivity of energy-related grievances. Russians have historically shown readiness to protest when fuel shortages or price spikes directly affect their lives. The present hardship is unlikely to spark mass demonstrations under conditions of repression, but it nevertheless generates simmering discontent.

Could Crisis Fuel Political Change?

It is premature to conclude that these strikes are placing decisive political pressure on the Kremlin to end the war. The present shortages are severe but uneven, concentrated in particular regions rather than across the country as a whole. State-controlled media continues to frame the crisis as the product of Western sanctions and Ukrainian terrorism, rather than of government failure, and many citizens internalise this message. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s surveillance and policing infrastructure continues to deter the transformation of frustration into overt political opposition.

Nevertheless the strikes function much like targeted sanctions, but with more direct and visible consequences inside Russia. By inflicting domestic scarcity, they erode the legitimacy of official assurances that the war remains distant from ordinary life. The risk for the Kremlin is that if these hardships persist into the winter or spread to major cities, regional elites and business figures may voice concern, and pockets of public dissent could intensify.

Historical parallels: energy scarcity and political stability in the late Soviet era

The late Soviet economy grew increasingly dependent upon oil and gas revenues. By the 1980s, hydrocarbons accounted for more than half of export earnings, creating a structural vulnerability in which swings in global prices translated directly into fiscal stress at home. That dependence is well attested in contemporary and retrospective analyses of Soviet trade and revenue composition. 

When oil prices collapsed in 1985–86, the effect was swift and corrosive. Hard-currency inflows fell, import capacity shrank, and the state’s cross-subsidy machine for food and basic goods faltered. Histories of the period identify the oil shock as a key amplifier of existing inefficiencies, helping to push the command economy into a severe shortage regime by the turn of the decade. 

Energy labour unrest followed. Beginning in July 1989, coal miners across Siberia and the Donbas launched the largest strike wave in Soviet history. Their grievances were concrete—goods shortages, prices, safety and housing—but the strategic leverage came from the sector’s centrality to power generation and rail transport. Contemporary reporting recorded the rapid spread from Kuzbass to Ukraine and the mounting political edge of demands; by early 1991, strike leaders were openly calling for Gorbachev’s resignation while mass rallies in Moscow endorsed the miners. The strikes both reflected and accelerated the erosion of central authority. 

By the autumn and winter of 1991, scarcity had become systemic. Official rationing of energy inputs forced power stations and industry to operate with reduced allocations; fuel stocks at plants fell well below required levels. News accounts from October and December describe a dark, cold winter of rolling shortfalls and a widening fuel crisis that reached transport, food logistics and even civil aviation. Such conditions were not the sole cause of political collapse, but they hardened public despair and undercut the practical authority of the centre at the very moment it needed compliance most. 

These episodes suggest three lessons for assessing today’s Russia under pressure from Ukrainian strikes. First, energy hardship is politically salient in a way abstract macroeconomic indicators are not; when pumps run dry or trains stop, discontent acquires a constituency. The miners’ leverage in 1989–91 flowed from precisely this nexus of energy and everyday life. 

Second, shocks compound existing weaknesses. In the late Soviet case, the oil-price collapse interacted with structural inefficiency to produce cascading shortages; in contemporary Russia, targeted damage to refining and logistics interacts with wartime budget priorities, inflation and regional disparities. The mechanism differs, but the compounding logic is alike. 

Third, narrative control can delay but not erase material facts. The USSR’s information apparatus could not keep queues from forming or power from failing; similarly, modern propaganda may frame scarcity as external sabotage, yet the lived experience of shortage has its own politics, especially if winter amplifies the effect or it spreads to major urban centres. The late Soviet record shows that when energy scarcity intersects with organised labour, regional elites or urban mobilisation, pressure on the centre becomes harder to manage. 

Taken together, the Soviet precedent does not guarantee a decisive political turn in Russia today; repression and atomised society lower the odds of overt mobilisation. It does, however, indicate the channels through which sustained energy disruptions translate into political risk: the visibility of hardship, the strategic leverage of energy workers and nodes, and the cumulative corrosion of state credibility when promises of normality no longer match reality.

Conclusion

Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on energy infrastructure have inflicted tangible harm upon Russia’s domestic supply of fuel, disrupting everyday life for ordinary citizens. While these hardships create visible frustration, they have not yet coalesced into organised political opposition. The Kremlin remains shielded by its control of information, its ability to repress dissent, and the still limited geographical scope of the crisis.

Yet the strikes do steadily increase the costs of war for Russia. Should shortages worsen or expand, the potential for greater political unease will grow. The effectiveness of Ukraine’s campaign lies not in bringing immediate upheaval but in gradually corroding the perception of stability within Russia, thereby weakening the foundations of domestic support upon which the war effort depends.