Since May 1, Telegram has seen 6,600 posts and 39,700 comments about gasoline shortages, closed filling stations, queues, and fuel purchase limits. Novaya-Europe reported this, citing calculations based on data from the Vox-Harbor project.
The first noticeable spikes in discussion came on May 6, 12, and 22. After attacks in April and May on oil refineries, including facilities in the Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, and Perm regions, media outlets began reporting a growing shortage. By May 22, independent gas station chains, which account for about 40% of fuel sales in Russia, were finding it difficult to buy gasoline.
A new surge in publications began on May 29, when the authorities in annexed Crimea limited sales of AI-95 gasoline to 20 liters per day. The largest wave of discussion started on June 18, after the biggest overnight drone attack on Moscow since the start of the war. From that day on, the messenger platform averaged about 350 unique posts per day.
By the number of messages about shortages and closed gas stations, Crimea led by a wide margin. It was followed by Moscow, the “DPR,” Krasnodar region, and the Rostov and Moscow regions. East of the Urals, the issue was discussed most actively in Zabaykalsky Krai, Irkutsk region, and Tuva. Because fuel from Siberia was being redirected to western Russia, Siberian regions themselves also faced shortages.
The article says restrictions on gasoline sales were announced in at least 26 regions, while shortages were officially acknowledged in eight more. Users most often wrote about the absence of the required fuel grade and stations that were not operating. Queues were mentioned nearly 10,000 times, and purchase limits about 14,000 times.
In annexed Crimea, users actively discussed fuel resales after June 21: in one ad from that date, the effective price per liter was nearly 250 rubles, while later the same account offered fuel at 330 rubles per liter, and overall prices reached 380 rubles. In Mariupol, users reported sales at 150 rubles per liter; in Melitopol, AI-92 was offered at 200; in Rostov region, AI-95 was sold at 145 rubles.
Vox-Harbor collected 235,000 messages from 45,000 Telegram groups and chats between May 1 and June 24. After removing exact and semantic duplicates, the researchers were left with 6,630 unique posts; comments were not cleaned in the same way. The final dataset contained 122,427 comments, and regional and topical classification was carried out by the project using the LLM Claude Haiku 4.5.