20% of Russian refining capacity is offline. Moscow is buying gasoline from India by sea.

The number that matters is roughly one in five. Out of the refining capacity Russia runs at home, somewhere around 20 percent is now offline after a months-long Ukrainian drone campaign against its oil facilities ²¹⁰. To plug the hole, Russia — a country that built its post-2022 leverage on energy exports — began loading gasoline onto ships in Indian ports and steaming it back across the same trade routes it normally sends crude the other way ²⁶⁷⁸.

The reversal is the story. Russia has been India's largest seaborne crude customer since the invasion of Ukraine, a relationship that let Moscow reroute oil around European sanctions and let Indian refiners run cheap, sanctioned barrels at healthy margins. Now the same refiners are being asked to send the finished product home, at a markup ²⁴⁸. At least one cargo had already sailed for Russian buyers by early July, with more shipments understood to be in train, and Russia's State Duma was moving a subsidy framework to bridge the gap between Indian market prices and the cost of shipping the fuel back ²⁴⁵⁸.

Major Russian oil companies, including Rosneft, Gazprom Neft and Lukoil, approached Indian refiners for supplies after the strikes crippled domestic output ²⁴. One industry caution hangs over the deal: Indian refiners may not have surplus gasoline to spare ². That caveat suggests the early shipments are triage, not a structural fix.

Ukraine's drones have been chewing through Russian refineries for months, and the production data show it. Gasoline output fell to roughly 850,000 barrels per day, down about 17 percent from 1.03 million bpd in 2025 ³. The fuel gap now stretches across Russia's eleven time zones: rationing, long queues at filling stations, and record petrol price increases have all been reported, including scenes of cars queued at Lukoil stations in Moscow in late June ⁴⁶⁹.

President Vladimir Putin addressed the crisis on state television in early July, publicly acknowledging that fuel shortages had caused queues at petrol stations and difficulty finding the right grade of petrol. He insisted the problems were "not critical" and only "temporary" ⁹. The phrasing matters less than the fact that he was on television talking about queues at all.

The reporting on this story is unusually lumpy, and a careful reader should know it. Different outlets describe the damage to Russian refining in terms that don't reconcile cleanly. Some reports say "a significant portion" of capacity has been lost ²⁶; one outlet frames the drop in refining output at roughly 25 percent ¹¹; another, dated July 23, 2026, puts the share of refining capacity knocked offline as high as 40 percent ¹⁰. The HeyDay News Desk is not picking a winner — we are flagging that the figure you hear depends on which outlet you read and when.

The same caveat applies to the human-scale details circulating in social media and secondary coverage: specific import tonnages, regional breakdowns, named black-market prices, the date of a Crimean sales ban. None of those details appear in the web sources for this piece, so they are not asserted here as fact.

What is new is not just that Russia is short of fuel. It is that Russia is short of fuel in the same year it has been the indispensable crude supplier to India's refiners. The trade has flipped from one-way to round-trip. Indian refiners buy discounted Russian crude, process it, and now sell the finished gasoline back to the country the crude came from. The economics of the sanctions regime, designed to choke Russian revenues, have produced a circular trade that quietly enriches the middlemen.

Refineries are not interchangeable with oil fields. The specialized equipment that keeps distillation units, hydrocrackers and catalytic reformers running is expensive, largely sourced from Western OEMs, and difficult to replace under sanctions. Each unit Ukraine knocks out stays out longer than the next, because spare parts are scarcer than crude. That is the structural dividend of a drone campaign aimed at the right kind of target.

It also explains why an Indian cargo — even a heavily subsidized one — does not close the gap on its own. Russian gasoline production is running below what the domestic market needs, and the import bridge is being assembled from whichever neighbor or partner can spare a barrel. The political price is paid in dependence on the very buyers Moscow once treated as customers.

Three threads will decide whether this is a rough summer or a turning point. First, the Duma subsidy: if the price gap between Indian gasoline landed in Russian ports and domestic wholesale is closed by the state budget, that is a fiscal cost the Kremlin has chosen to absorb rather than pass to consumers at the pump. Second, the volume question — whether Indian refiners can spare tens of thousands of tons a month without disrupting their own export contracts to Southeast Asia and Africa. Third, the queue question. Putin called the situation temporary. Whether it stays temporary depends on whether Ukrainian drones keep finding new targets and whether Russia's spare-parts problem finds a workaround before the autumn cold sets in.