The Energy Superpower Is Begging: Gasoline Is Coming from Morocco
Fuel is available at only about 28% of the country’s monitored filling stations. Kazakhstan is sending gasoline as ‘humanitarian aid,’ some of it made from Tatneft crude. Tatarstan pumps the oil and faces the risks; the empire answers with rationing.
Start with the numbers. According to the GdeBENZ service, by mid-August gasoline or diesel was available at roughly 28% of monitored filling stations in Russia; a week earlier the figure had been 41%. To be precise, this is a nationwide figure, not a regional breakdown. But reports of shortages are already spreading through the Volga region: limits of 15–30 liters per customer, bans on filling canisters, and even odd-even purchase rules in neighboring Orenburg region.
The reason is no secret: strikes on oil refineries. By June, Reuters reported, gasoline production had fallen by roughly 25% year on year. Since then more facilities have burned, and the Nizhnekamsk oil hub has come under attack twice in August. Moscow had already banned gasoline exports in April. It did not solve the problem.
‘Humanitarian aid’ for the filling station
What follows sounds like satire. Kazakhstan agreed to supply Russia with around 50,000 tonnes of gasoline, described in the documentation as ‘humanitarian aid.’ Humanitarian aid — to a state that spent two decades calling itself an energy superpower and using energy exports as geopolitical leverage. For scale, 50,000 tonnes is less than half of Russia’s daily consumption. Around 30,000 tonnes of AI-92 gasoline also arrived from Morocco, while Belarus increased its July deliveries to more than two hundred thousand tonnes. The empire is reaching out from Minsk to Rabat.
There is an additional irony reported by Reuters and The Moscow Times: part of the Kazakh ‘humanitarian’ supply is produced at the Condensate refinery, which processes crude from Tatneft. Follow the route: oil from Tatarstan goes to Kazakhstan, is turned into gasoline there, and returns to the empire as assistance. Our oil. Its war. Its hand held out for help.
What this means for Tatarstan
A republic with a century of oil expertise and two refineries watches its plants become targets, its crude become someone else’s emergency supply, and its residents prepared for limits and queues. Possessing a resource without controlling the decisions around it is a textbook feature of colonial dependence. In practice, this arrangement also means the colony burns first.
The empire’s dashboard
An independent Tatarstan would not need to ask Morocco for gasoline: its refineries would serve its citizens, and its oil would serve the country that produces it. Sovereignty means Tatneft being accountable in Kazan rather than fueling someone else’s war. Until then, remember the figure: 28%. That is what imperial power looks like on the dashboard.