Russia has approved a temporary ban on the export of gasoline, a representative for the country’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak told local media on Tuesday.
Beginning May 1, Russia will impose a six-month ban on gasoline exports to allow the country to “offset the booming demand for petroleum products,” the official told Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin in an internal letter in January, publication RBC reported.
Fuel shortages have been reported nationwide in Russia, which is one of the world’s biggest producers of oil and gas. Wholesale fuel prices have soared across the country, and Ukraine has ramped up attacks on Russian oil hubs and refineries this year. Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Foreign Ministry for comment by email.
Moscow depends on its oil exports and energy industry, which make up some 30 percent of the country’s budget revenues, and are crucial for the funding of the war in Ukraine. Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of oil, accounting for more than 12 percent of global crude oil production, according to Statista.
The energy industry is considered a crucial lifeline for Putin’s economy, which has been hit hard by Western sanctions imposed in response to the invasion on Ukraine. When U.S. President Joe Biden announced a ban on Russian oil imports in March 2022, weeks into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he said the move would target the Russian economy’s “main artery.”
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Novak said in his letter that the measures “are needed to help stabilize domestic prices.”
RBC said that the temporary export ban will not apply to Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan—members of the Eurasian Economic Union—as well as Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The deputy prime minister’s representative also relayed the same information to Russia’s state-run news agency Interfax.
Russia previously issued a temporary ban on the export of gasoline and diesel in response to a worsening fuel shortage. In September, Mishustin signed a government decree that said the energy ministry would also prevent unauthorized “gray” exports of motor fuels.
A spate of Ukrainian drone attacks in January targeted Russian oil and gas infrastructure.
On January 18, Ukraine launched a drone attack on a St. Petersburg oil terminal, about 620 miles from the Ukrainian border.
Another Ukrainian drone attack near the city of St. Petersburg on January 21 struck a major gas export terminal—a Novatek PJSC gas-condensate plant in the port Ust-Luga—causing a huge fire, and halting fuel supplies. Ust-Luga is Russia’s largest Baltic port, and Ukraine’s Security Service claimed responsibility for that attack, the Kyiv Post newspaper reported.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.