On the streets of Moscow, disgruntled drivers wait patiently for gasoline in an extended line of automobiles and vans amid an acute nationwide scarcity. Many have spent your complete day, they inform NCS, driving round looking for gas — extraordinary within the capital of one of many world’s largest vitality producers and surprising in a metropolis that has lengthy been stored insulated from the consequences of the Ukraine war.
But now, for the primary time in a battle that is in its fifth 12 months, the stark actuality of what the Kremlin nonetheless insists on calling a “special military operation” has grow to be not possible for strange Russians to comfortably ignore.
In the previous month, Ukraine’s unprecedented drone campaign has been extraordinary in scale and influence.
On a single evening final week, Russia reported intercepting 660 drones throughout 12 areas — one of many largest Ukrainian assaults since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
The targets, removed from random, are rigorously chosen: refineries, oil terminals, naval vessels, weapons vegetation deep inside Russian territory. It is a marketing campaign designed to bleed the Russian warfare economic system, elevating the financial and political prices to the Kremlin of additional prosecuting its warfare.
And it is working.
Across Russia, unbiased media shops have been documenting rising strains of autos ready at gas stations as shortages kick in — scenes the authorities would favor to disguise. In Crimea, annexed from Ukraine in 2014, gas gross sales have been suspended because the peninsula was positioned below a state of emergency.
Even for the Kremlin, which frequently performs down painful setbacks, the stark actuality has grow to be exhausting to sidestep.
Russian President Vladimir Putin chaired an emergency assembly on the weekend and disclosed that nationwide gasoline reserves have been drawn down to uncomfortable ranges.
“You are well aware that problems for drivers and for businesses persist,” Putin instructed assembled senior officers, acknowledging what authorities have been taking part in down for weeks.
“Unfortunately, there are still queues at gas stations, too,” he added.
There have been different indications that the Kremlin is feeling some stress. Putin revealed {that a} full ban on diesel exports is into account — after his personal deputy prime minister had instructed reporters that no such ban was obligatory. The Russian chief confirmed {that a} activity power is now at work on gas points.
Putin additionally warned that agriculture is in danger and mentioned Russia should “reduce to a minimum the impact of terrorist attacks on our civilian targets and infrastructure” — a rigorously worded reversal for a frontrunner who has dismissed Ukrainian drone strikes as irrelevant.
There is no small irony in the truth that, for years, the systematic destruction of Ukrainian vitality infrastructure — energy stations, substations, heating vegetation — has been considered one of Russia’s most deliberate wartime methods, designed to break civilian morale by making strange life insufferable. Ukraine now seems to have turned that logic round, and Russians are starting to really feel the pointed finish of that technique themselves.
It is fueling hope, although, amongst Moscow’s Western critics.
At the Group of Seven summit in France earlier this month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was unequivocal. “The tide is turning for Ukraine,” she asserted. “The situation in 2026 is very different from 2025. Russia’s fatigue is openly showing. That’s the time to double down on our support.”
Western officers say the Ukrainian marketing campaign has choked Russian gas provides and army deliveries, stalling Moscow’s efforts on the battlefield.
In a current report, the Council on Foreign Relations famous {that a} scaling up of drone operations contributed immediately to Ukraine retaking 78 sq. miles of territory in February and reversing a development of Russian positive aspects that had characterised the battlefield all through 2025.
Even the tone of US President Donald Trump seems to have shifted.
At the G7 summit, he instructed reporters that Russia “should make a deal.” Days later, again in Washington and talking from the Oval Office, he referred to as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “courageous” and somebody who is “doing pretty well” within the warfare — notably hotter phrases from a president who spent a lot of final 12 months publicly pressuring Kyiv to negotiate from a place of weak point.
Zelensky, for his half, has been specific about what he believes his drone marketing campaign can obtain. With the suitable help, Ukraine can “quickly create conditions in which Russia will be forced to choose peace,” he mentioned.
But it might be a mistake to conclude that Russia’s present issues will power the Kremlin to yield, a minimum of not but and possibly not quickly.
Putin over the many years has constructed a comparatively brittle picture as an uncompromising chief — a undeniable fact that makes capitulation, retreat and even compromise in Ukraine extremely unlikely and troublesome for him to pull off.
With nicely over one million lifeless and injured in Putin’s invasion, in accordance to the very best Western estimates, and sovereignty claims staked on 4 Ukrainian areas he nonetheless doesn’t absolutely management, any settlement that can not be portrayed in Moscow as a decisive victory runs the danger of scary critical inner political tensions.
The hawks in Putin’s circle are nonetheless telling him that Ukraine’s complete Donbas area can and needs to be taken. That argument doesn’t disappear simply because Russian refineries are on hearth.
And whereas the nation’s present gas scarcity is painfully actual, it shouldn’t be mistaken for a white flag.