As of September 24, the gasoline crisis reached its peak in both the AR of Crimea and Sevastopol. The shortages of “AI-92” and “AI-95” gasoline are widespread. Residents have created social media groups to search for and purchase gasoline, including at speculative prices, as well as to buy fuel coupons: many gas stations are using coupons exclusively or prioritizing them.
Even the “official price” for “AI-95” at some stations is listed at 83 rubles or more, while on the online “black market,” canned gasoline is being offered for 100 rubles per liter or more. At gas stations where gasoline is available, or where it is expected to be available, significant queues of people waiting to fill up are forming.
“Premium” gasoline brands are more commonly available, but as some write on social media, “the only question is how to tell what kind of gasoline is actually being sold under the guise of the most expensive.”
The occupiers’ “glossy” propaganda about fuel shortages primarily broadcasts “official statements.” The illegal “head of the council of ministers” Yuriy Gotsanyuk stated that fuel supplies to Crimea had been reduced due to a “temporary reduction in production volumes at a number of Russian oil refineries,” demanding that the population “not create artificial demand, not purchase fuel ‘in reserve’ in canisters, and not worsen the situation.”
Sevastopol gauleiter Mikhail Razvozhaev decided to make a “vague statement” about how “those who read the federal news understand the situation with the oil refineries,” also lamenting that “fuel deliveries to the Crimean Peninsula are carried out by sea transport,” and complaining of “storms” and “restrictions on sea transport.”
Against this backdrop, the “Sevastopol press” decided to recall the “sale to private hands” of a network of “municipal gas stations,” which took place under the same Razvozhaev.
Let us remind that this network, seized by the occupiers in 2014 as Sevastopol city property, by 2021 had “dissolved” into the business empire of Crimean collaborator and “fuel baron” Sergei Beim, owner of the “TES” gas station chain. Now Beim is in a Moscow pretrial detention center, and the peninsula’s population is hotly debating the connection between the worsening gasoline crisis and the apparent attempts by rival clans to “squeeze” the “TES” gas stations into “new, loving hands.”
Sevastopol residents are also being offered the chance to “rejoice” at yet another “trial of the century,” when the “Okko” gas station in Inkerman, which has been inactive since at least 2018, is being seized from the Ukrainian corporation “Concern Galneftegaz” through a “court” for “non-payment of land rent.”
However, how this will affect the availability of gasoline in Crimean cars remains to be seen.
