To stay calm in the queue Lyubov is stroking her pet dog Agatha.<\/p>\n
How does Lyubov view the fuel crisis?<\/p>\n
“Everyone says there is a difficult situation in the country,” Lyubov tells me. “Everyone connects this to that situation.”<\/p>\n
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 there were no drone attacks on Russian oil refineries – or on any facilities inside Russia. These strikes haven’t forced the Kremlin to U-turn. It’s continuing what it still calls the “special military operation”, Russia’s war on Ukraine.<\/p>\n
To ease the crisis, Russia has begun importing petrol.<\/p>\n
That is extraordinary for a country widely recognised as an energy superpower and one of the world’s leading exporters of crude oil.<\/p>\n
To reduce the fuel shortage the government has also temporarily authorised the production and sale of lower-grade petrol, like Euro 2, which is faster to produce. Euro 2 contains up to 50 times more sulphur than modern Euro 5 and was banned in Russia in 2013.<\/p>\n
It comes with a warning.<\/p>\n
“For modern cars,” wrote the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, “regular use of lower-grade petrol can increase the pressure on the fuel injector, spark plugs, oxygen sensors, the catalytic converter and soot filter. Euro 2 won’t kill an engine on one re-fuelling. But it sharply reduces the margin of safety.”<\/p>\n
It’s not just the targeting of oil facilities which have brought the war home to Russians. <\/p>\n
Ukrainian strikes on distribution centres of Wildberries, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon, are causing disruption to shoppers and economic pain for sellers.<\/p>\n
This week President Vladimir Putin conceded that attacks on industrial facilities and infrastructure “do inflict damage; this is obvious. We understand this, we see it.”<\/p>\n
But the Kremlin leader played down the problems.<\/p>\n
“There are no critical consequences from such attacks. There have not been and cannot be.”<\/p>\n
In other words, no need for panic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To stay calm in the queue Lyubov is stroking her pet dog Agatha. How does Lyubov view the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":745189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-745188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/745189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}