Planning for the future has given way to short-term coping as anxiety spreads in Russia. Even Russia's major pollsters, including state-run VCIOM and FOM, as well as the independent Levada Center, report a clear decline in public sentiment. The Kremlin, however, insists that conditions remain stable.
DW invited its social media users to share their stories. All responses have been anonymised for safety reasons. A DW subscriber in Moscow's Pechatniki district described a recent attempt to refuel late at night, covering around 40 kilometers (24 miles) in search of stations with supply.
"If there is gas anywhere at all, there's a massive queue of 50 to 100 cars," he said. "We decided that waiting until 3 or 4 a.m. only to head straight to work was a terrible idea, so we went home to sleep. We're on half a tank for now, but by the end of the week we'll either have to hunt for fuel or stand still.
Lately, we use the car almost exclusively for trips to the dacha to see our elderly parents." "Now you have to hunt for gas at night. You don't always get lucky. Often there's no gas at all.
If there is, it's a two-to-three-hour wait," said another subscriber. Fuel shortages triggered by Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries have become a leading public grievance. Data from BenZinMap, a fuel tracking portal, show severe sales restrictions across 66 regions as of August 27, with another 16 reporting localized disruptions or sharp price increases.
Alexander Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), told news portal RBC that refining capacity has fallen by nearly a third, a view echoed by independent analysts. Government measures — including export bans, increased imports, and relaxed fuel-quality standards — have failed to close the gap. The data provided by Russia's state statistics service Rosstat show average retail gasoline prices are up 7.4% this year, outpacing overall inflation of 4.19%.
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