July 12, 2026

It's All Fine


It's All Fine

Vladimir Putin had these assurance to offer at a recent government meeting about the comprehensive national exam:

“It's completely obvious that the enemy is trying to damage our economy, but the main thing, the most important thing, is that they're trying to create a nervous atmosphere in society. We understand, you and I, that this task is simply impossible. Russia's energy system has an enormous safety margin — one of the highest in the world."

But here are some facts worth considering (from a recent YouTube video by the journalist Dmitry Kolezov):

“Five Russian regions have now introduced gasoline rationing by odd and even license plate numbers — one day the even-numbered cars fill up, the next day the odd-numbered ones, and so on. In the Lipetsk region, the governor accused major gas station chains of lying, since they've started closing at night, forcing people to spend the night in line outside shuttered stations. In regions bordering Kazakhstan, Russians had been driving across the border to fill up with their neighbors — but Kazakhstan has now set up 59 police checkpoints to stop that.

"The most dire gasoline situation remains in Crimea, where it's now practically impossible to deliver fuel or other goods. The last time Vladimir Putin commented on the situation, he said Crimea would be supplied with fuel both by land and by sea. At the time, experts were unanimous in warning that, if gasoline and diesel were shipped to Crimea by tanker, the Ukrainian Armed Forces would burn those tankers. And you can guess what happened next.

"Over the past four days, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have already struck nineteen tankers in the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait. The transponders — the devices that show a vessel's position — had been switched off on the tankers, but apparently the ships were still identified from satellite imagery. There have been a number of publications in Western media lately suggesting that Ukraine's armed forces are getting faster and more precise intelligence from the Americans, which is helping them strike refineries — and presumably tankers — with such accuracy. It's possible the U.S. helped with this kind of real-time data this time as well.

"Either way, according to Ukrainian reports, nearly 20 tankers have now been damaged. All of them were reportedly under sanctions, part of Russia's so-called shadow fleet. That fleet as a whole is estimated at several hundred vessels, so there are still plenty of tankers left — though Russia clearly now has fewer options for shipping its oil abroad. So it tried using some of those tankers to move gasoline instead, again failing to account for what the Ukrainian Armed Forces are capable of. It's a remarkable kind of recklessness. But Putin did say to bring gasoline in by sea — so by sea it went."

Watch the full video

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