Oil Refining In Russia Collapsed To Its Lowest Level Since 2009
- 1.06.2026, 15:36
After a record string of refinery strikes.
Oil refining volumes at Russian refineries fell to a 17-year low in May after a series of UAV raids that managed to hit 8 of the country's 10 largest refineries last month, The Moscow Times writes.
As Bloomberg reports citing OilX data, Russian refineries processed 4.58 million barrels of oil per day in May - 2.3% less than in April and 14.4% less than at the beginning of the year. On an annualized basis, refinery utilization fell by 13%, and relative to pre-war 2021 - by about 20% and became the lowest since October 2009.
The AFU hit oil refineries 15 times with drones in May, struck seven oil pipelines, six - ports and once hit a tanker at sea, Bloomberg calculated. The total number of attacks on refineries and oil infrastructure (30) was unprecedented since the start of the war and exceeded the previous record set in December, when 26 oil facilities, including 15 refineries, were hit.
The tactics of Ukrainian strikes have also changed: now the AFU attacks not only primary oil refining units, but also secondary units, including valuable and technically complex ones, notes Sergei Vakulenko, a researcher at the Carnegie Berlin Center. They help refineries produce more gasoline and diesel fuel, and they are much more difficult and expensive to repair, as importing foreign equipment is difficult because of Western sanctions, Vakulenko explains.
Faced with the drop in production, oil companies have sharply reduced gasoline shipments to the exchange, where fuel is bought by small and private gas stations. Thus, in May, the supply of gasoline Ai-95 decreased to 5 thousand tons per day, which is one third less than a year earlier.
With less gasoline on the market, prices are rising: in wholesale since the beginning of the year they have jumped by 26%. And in retail, gasoline prices are rising faster than inflation, says economist Kirill Rodionov. The accumulated increase in gasoline prices at gas stations since the beginning of the year reached 4.3%, while inflation was 3.2%.
The fuel market is "red-hot," states Rodionov: the supply of gasoline from oil companies on the exchange fell by 20-25% compared to last year's levels. To compensate for the deficit, Russia buys fuel in Belarus, but the volume is too small to affect the situation, Rodionov stresses: Belarusian refineries produce only 3.5 million tons of gasoline per year, of which about 2.3 million tons can be exported. Russia consumes such volume in a month.
Crimea has already faced gasoline shortage, where fuel is sold on coupons due to the AFU attacks on the highway "Novorossiya" - the key artery of the "land corridor" to the peninsula, through which the supply goes. Nevertheless, there is no noticeable fuel shortage across the country yet, Vakulenko emphasizes.
Since the end of March, gasoline exports from Russia have been banned, while jet fuel exports have also been banned since June. Apparently, the government has been targeting oil producers to accumulate fuel reserves for the summer season, Vakulenko points out. "In the last wave of attacks, there were a noticeable number of hits on storage facilities at refineries, so some of the stockpiled fuel, if there was any, was burned, and the capacity of tank farms was also reduced," the expert adds.