1. What the Lab measures
The Lab measures AI-95+ gasoline: production against the 2024 norm, station availability, and the balance after the state's own priority claims. Not "refining", not "crude runs", not "gasoline". Those three are reported far more often and mean progressively less for the question asked here.
- Crude runs measure the crude distillation unit. A plant can run it at full rate with the reformer dead and produce naphtha, AI-92, diesel and fuel oil; a satellite sees a hot column. Crude distillation is the simplest unit, largely made at home, and is repaired first; the units that make high octane stay down longest and depend on parts that are no longer on the shelf. So the refining total recovers faster than AI-95+ output, and a reader of the total sees a recovery that the grade people need does not show.
- "Gasoline" in 2026 is not the 2024 grade split. Class 3 was permitted in July and class 2 at the pump from 1 September 2026; the old proportions inside the total no longer hold.
- AI-95 and above is where the shortage is sharpest and where it hits private motorists. It is the grade most often not for sale while the spreadsheet shows a modest shortfall.
The Lab therefore tracks the component and publishes its assumptions where no figure exists, rather than inferring the component from an average share that no longer applies.
2. The rule on sources
No source available on this subject can be made to overstate Russian damage. Every one of them is biased toward less damage and faster repair, or is a balance whose every manipulable input pushes the same way. So each source is used only on the side its bias allows.
- A statement against the speaker's interest is evidence: an export ban, a fuel-class relaxation, a governor's rationing order, an exchange admitting non-execution, a deputy prime minister conceding a deficit.
- A statement in the speaker's interest is a one-sided bound with a declared sign, never an estimate: a restoration claim from state media is a ceiling on restoration; an outside estimate of crude runs is a ceiling on runs; a Reuters count of plants disrupted is a floor on damage.
- Independent agreement is not triangulation when the estimators share a data spine. The outside crude-runs estimates (EA Analytics, Novi Labs, IEA, and CREA before them) are all balances, runs equal production minus exports minus stock change, built on the same tanker tracking (Kpler, Vortexa) and the same handful of secondary-source production estimates. EA Analytics adds a satellite layer, radar on tank levels and daily flaring; that is the one genuinely different input. Hidden exports, crude parked in Transneft pipe or on waiting tankers, and a managed production figure all overstate runs. Nothing in the method understates them. Hence: ceiling.
- A published figure is not ready to use until the last year of official decisions has been checked for which ones changed its definition and which changed how it is calculated. Examples in section 4.
- A symmetrical range around a centre leaves the centre in place. Where the distortion has a direction, the Lab's ranges have one too.
- Every number is traced to its first source and that source's limits are stated beside it, not in a footnote. Kpler's own warning that tanker tracking is the best available picture, not a census, is the standard; the failure is what happens after the warning is dropped.
3. How each source is used
| Source | Direction of bias | Used as |
|---|---|---|
| Russian state media, officials, company statements on repairs and supply | less damage, faster repair | ceiling on restoration; never a repair time |
| Reuters, industry-source reporting on outages | lags, needs two confirmations, conservative | floor on damage; dates of strikes and restarts where confirmed; evidence tier B in the strike log |
| Outside crude-runs estimates (EA Analytics, Novi, IEA) | balance methods, shared spine, all manipulations push up | ceiling on crude runs; used one-sidedly in the crude gate (section 6), never for the high-octane chain |
| Satellite thermal and radar imagery | sees hot or cold, not rate; blind to secondary units and partial operation | confirms a plant is down; cannot confirm what it makes |
| SPIMEX exchange trades and prices | policy instruments (section 4) | not a supply series |
| SPIMEX executed deliveries and the non-execution rate | against interest | the Lab's own variable, AI-95 by plant, with the lie already subtracted |
| Pump-side observation (station availability, queues, rationing orders, regional bans) | against interest | the panel's primary observable; the gate-1 anchor |
| Strike log (OSINT, governors, Reuters) | mixed, tiered | strike rate and damaging share; unit attribution stated as OSINT-grade where it is |
4. Decrees that changed what the numbers mean
The pattern is constant: leave the headline rule in place, change the small print on compliance, and mislead anyone who reads only the headline. The fuel-market cases the Lab has to account for:
Exchange sales. The share of gasoline that must be sold on the exchange was 10% from 2013, raised to 13% in September 2023 and 15% in October 2023, cut to 10% in July 2026, the first cut ever. Resolution No. 1003 of 10 August 2026 then "clarified" compliance: up to 8 points can be met by confirmed off-exchange deliveries to farms, Russian Railways, builders or anyone collecting the fuel themselves. Only 2% must still be sold freely on the exchange. The headline still reads 10%.
Exchange execution. From May to August 2026 the oil companies failed to execute 59% of exchange gasoline contracts; about 20% ended in default or cancellation (Kommersant, 3 September 2026). The Russian Fuel Union had written to the deputy prime minister that buyers could not collect what they had bought. The exchange's own version, 8 September: 48% executed, 20% postponed by agreement, 17% "in delivery". A trade on SPIMEX this summer was a promise, not a tonne. This is why the Lab uses executed deliveries and the non-execution rate, and does not use traded volume: a 59% non-execution rate is a statement against interest, published inside Russia, and a direct measure of the gap between what the companies say they have and what they can physically ship. It is the Lab's variable, AI-95 by plant, with the lie already subtracted.
Prices. The exchange price is held near a state reference price by the damper subsidy, paid to the large companies only while the price stays inside the allowed gap; the gap for gasoline was widened from 10 to 20%, and the wholesale-price test was suspended until 1 May 2026. Independent chains, with no refinery and no damper, are held by the antimonopoly service: warnings, dominance cases, turnover fines. Since June 2026 there is no single market price: the exchange shows one AI-95 price, official statistics another, and independent stations pay a third. The only price with information in it is the street price, and there is no respectable public series for it, which is why the Lab dropped its street-premium check.
Fuel class. Class 3 permitted in July 2026, class 2 at the pump from 1 September 2026, billed as stabilising supply. The Lab treats it as what it is: the formula giving way, and a quiet tax paid later in engine repairs.
Publication. Refinery-level production and crude runs were withdrawn from public release in 2025; prices still appear weekly and by grade, so the record looks intact. Production now leaks from the closed CDU TEK bulletins or is reverse-engineered from the extraction tax, whose coefficients the state sets. The Lab reads a blackout as a message: a series stops when hiding it costs less than showing it, which puts the true value below anything the last printed point would support.
Each of these is a dated admission that the line has moved, not proof that the state is in control. What matters is not how many support measures are announced but how often the rule has had to be rewritten.
5. Buffers
A stockpile, a reshuffle inside the system or an official delay keeps the published number from showing damage for a while; it does not undo it. In earlier crunches stocks at refineries, depots and stations were drawn down to hide how much capacity had been hit. In the third wave there is much less of that slack: commercial gasoline stocks fell from 1.7 to 1.5 Mt between late June and late July 2026, and the strike-to-queue lag compressed from two weeks to three days in August. A calm pump is a statement about how much buffer is left, not about the system. The Lab's storage-buffer card is therefore off by default and exists only for a reader who believes a buffer remains somewhere.
6. The 2026 setting and the gates
2026 is not 2024. In 2024 and most of 2025 the plants hit were near the border and mid-sized, the spare-part kits were on the shelf, the payloads smaller and the crews less practised. The third wave from May 2026 hit the largest plants repeatedly, the kits for high-octane units are gone, and plants take longer to come back. So 2024-25 repair experience enters the Lab only as a historical upper bound on repair speed; a mean of published successful repairs in 2024-25 is not an estimate of present capacity.
The Lab tests itself twice, with tolerances stated in advance:
- Gate 1: the reconstruction of today against pump-side observation (AI-95 and AI-92 station availability, the rationing step).
- Gate 2: the strike assumptions replayed from 1 May 2026 against the observed trajectory of primary capacity, using the outside crude-runs series one-sidedly (the model may run below the series, not above it) and only for the crude unit. Nothing in that series touches the high-octane chain.
The claim that a high share of damage falls on the high-octane chain is an inference from product-side evidence, the AI-95 shortage running ahead of AI-92 and the plants that reported waiting for imported equipment, not an observation from strike reports; the mechanism chart carries its own falsifier.
7. What this page is not
It is not a claim that Russian data are useless. Against-interest statements from inside Russia are the strongest evidence this Lab has. It is a claim that respectability is not accuracy, and that in a war of attrition the state spends real effort on exactly the figures outsiders use.