For years, Russia wielded its energy capacity as a weapon against its neighbors to manipulate, coerce, and control. Ukraine’s strategic bombing campaign is now turning this energy weapon against Moscow itself.
Since the start of 2026, Ukraine has dramatically increased drone strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure. This has already sparked the country’s worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the impact spreads, it is spilling into territories Russia occupies and patronizes to project power. This is exposing a vulnerability that the Kremlin may lack the capacity to easily address.
By late August, months of Ukrainian drone strikes had reportedly left more than 70 percent of Russian gas stations without fuel. To stabilize the domestic market and offset the shortfall from refineries running at historic lows, the Kremlin has imposed export bans on a range of fuels, and has begun importing gasoline from India for the first time.
Temporary fuel rationing has been introduced in more than half of Russia’s administrative regions, with shortages even reaching the privileged population of Moscow. In recent months, lack of petrol has led to visible discontent across Russian social media, fueling multiple flareups at gas stations across the country.
The Kremlin has responded to growing signs of unrest by deploying security forces to gas stations in some regions, while also clamping down on critical online content. In one late August incident, several residents of Volgograd were detained after filming a video appeal calling on the authorities to address the lack of fuel.
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The mounting fuel crisis could destabilize some of Russia’s most restive regions. Maintaining order everywhere from the North Caucasus to the ethnic minority regions of the Far East has long been a Kremlin priority. These are the same regions Putin has mined for young men to feed into the meat grinder in Ukraine. Already economically deprived, they are now being hit particularly hard by fuel shortages.
That strain doesn’t stop at Russia’s own borders. The impact of the fuel crisis is also being felt in the occupied territories and frozen conflict zones that the Kremlin has cultivated to destabilize its neighbors and project Russian influence. Transnistria in Moldova, along with South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, all depend on Russia for energy and are now feeling the pressure.
Transnistria was the preview. When Russian energy giant Gazprom halted natural gas flows to Moldova in early 2025 to punish the country’s pro-Western government, Transnistria was also impacted, leaving the region without gas during the harsh winter months and bringing the local economy to a grinding halt. This laid bare the region’s dependency and revealed a potential opening for Moldova to pull Transnistria away from the Russian orbit.
In South Ossetia, the Kremlin has not only supplied fuel but has built delivery infrastructure, with Russian energy company Rosneft running the territory’s filling stations since 2019. When Moscow’s own supply falters, the already fragile local economy has nowhere else to turn.
In Georgia’s other Kremlin-controlled region, Abkhazia, fuel shortages during the summer period led the Georgian authorities to allow the delivery of roughly three hundred tons of petrol, the first time Tbilisi had supplied fuel to the breakaway region in more than three decades. Georgian officials framed the delivery as humanitarian outreach, though the move could just as easily be read as indirectly serving Russian interests.
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The situation in Abkhazia underlines the threat posed by mounting fuel shortages to Russian prestige and influence. Reliable information struggles to penetrate the propaganda bubble created by the Kremlin, but empty fuel pumps and cold apartments speak louder than any broadcast ever could about the reality of Russian decline.
The same pressure is hitting the Central Asian nations that Russia has traditionally viewed as firmly within its sphere of influence. In late August, Tajikistan’s energy minister said his country had roughly sixty days of fuel reserves left. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan has been forced to reduce energy exports after Ukrainian strikes damaged Caspian Pipeline Consortium infrastructure in Russia, which accounts for around 80 percent of the country’s oil exports.
Across the region, countries are now looking to reduce their reliance on Russian energy supplies. Kyrgyzstan is building its own refinery and imposed fuel rationing while waiting on imports from China and Belarus. Some are also speaking out. In July, Kazakh leader Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told Putin publicly that the Ukraine war should be brought to an end.
Many others in the region would doubtless agree. Russia’s wartime fuel crisis is giving Central Asian capitals one more reason to turn away from Moscow and diversify their foreign policies.
Putin is currently preoccupied with the invasion of Ukraine, but his imperial ambitions extend far beyond the Ukrainian front lines. Those ambitions are now running on fumes. Ukraine’s bombing campaign has left Russia struggling to maintain its credibility as the dominant force in the wider region. If the fuel crisis continues to expand in the coming months, it will further erode Russia’s ability to project power throughout Moscow’s former empire.
Ana Lejava is a Eurasia expert at Georgetown University and fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Millennium Fellowship.
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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.
The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values, and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia, and Central Asia in the East.
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Image: A satellite image of smoke rising from the Tuapse oil refinery, which sells most of its products for export, following a Ukrainian drone attacks, in Tuapse, Krasnodar Krai, Russia, April 21, 2026. (2026 Planet Labs PBC/Handout via REUTERS)