Ukraine’s drone campaign has forced Russia to start rationing its own gasoline, and the squeeze has split the country in two. Where the drones reach the refineries, regions ration what fuel remains; where they cannot, officials stockpile in anticipation of a shortage that has not yet arrived. On 6 and 7 July, both ends of the country showed it at once.

In Nizhny Novgorod—the Volga region that hosts NORSI, Lukoil’s largest refinery—the regional operational headquarters moved to hand out gasoline by appointment, Governor Gleb Nikitin said on Telegram.

It approved a QR-code pilot for filling stations, kept a 40-liter cap already taking effect at Lukoil stations, and floated selling fuel on alternating days by the first digit of the license plate—plates starting with an even number one day, odd the next—announcing the measures in the same breath as reassurance that deliveries had “normalized” and risen 29 percent since the end of the previous week.

Rationing spreads past 60 regions

The machinery is borrowed. Occupied Sevastopol began issuing weekly personal QR codes for 20 liters at a time in June, its Kremlin-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram. Oryol was the first region to float plate-number sales, up to 50 liters, its Governor Andrey Klychkov said in a VKontakte broadcast reported by Meduza.

NORSI went offline in early July after a drone strike, and mandatory or ad hoc fuel limits now apply to two-thirds of Russia’s regions, the Moscow Times counted. Putin has conceded the strikes are causing problems, acknowledging “a certain shortage” of fuel in a Kremlin-published interview, The Insider reported.

On Russia’s border with Finland, the wait itself became the story. In Petrozavodsk, the Karelian capital, photographer Igor Podgorny queued five hours overnight for 30 liters of gasoline—the wait alone, he noted, was enough to have driven to St. Petersburg, Stolitsa na Onego reported. Lukoil stations across the city had run dry; only one small chain was still filling canisters, and not always.

Nine time zones and 6,300 kilometers east, on the Pacific, Kamchatka has lost no refinery and lies far beyond drone range—yet it is preparing anyway, local outlet Kam24 reported. Officials there logged a 30-day fuel reserve on 7 July and said two towns that had run short the week before had been stabilized.

A tanker was steaming toward Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with about 1,000 tons of AI-92 gasoline and 2,000 tons of diesel, a second vessel loading behind it. Jet fuel is secured until 13 August. Independent stations are already raising prices; the region’s main supplier is holding steady, and the governor ordered regulators to keep it that way.

Between the frontiers, drivers wait hours in line; black-market gasoline in Irkutsk climbed toward 350 rubles ($4.53) a liter at the peak of that region’s shortage. For most of the war, the roughly one in five Russians tied to military pay or war production stayed insulated while everyone else absorbed inflation and service cuts—fuel does not sort that way.

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The energy superpower now rations fuel by QR code lottery

Fuel crisis reaches the fields

The strain reaches the fields, too, as PLN Pskov reported. In Pskov Oblast, on the Estonian and Latvian border, growers have lost working hours to fuel queues in the middle of harvest, with diesel near 80 rubles ($1.03) a liter and summer sales to visitors down by around half. Panic-buying has driven demand up 20–30%, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak has said.

A country that sells oil to the world is now administering its own gasoline—by QR code and by license plate. In Nizhny Novgorod, the machinery went up the same day its governor said the shortage was easing.