What Kommersant, RBC, Vedomosti, Interfax and Forbes Russia report — selected and summarized in English every morning, for readers who don't read Russian. Analysis-grade sourcing, no wire rehash. Data context in the Russia Terminal. Regional wires: Central Asia · Caucasus.
Drone strikes on refineries pushed Russia into a second summer fuel crisis, the central bank's own researchers put sustainable growth at the bottom of the official range, and August wheat exports are heading for their weakest month since 2010.
Fifty-eight of Russia's 89 regions held strict limits on petrol sales as of 15 August and another 18 saw local shortages or price rises, according to the BenZinMap tracker cited by Forbes Russia. At least nine oil facilities were hit in the first half of August, including Slavneft-Yaroslavnefteorgsintez, Taneko, Bashneft-Ufaneftekhim and the Ust-Luga condensate complex; Forbes puts their combined throughput at roughly 145 million tonnes a year, or 54 percent of the 266.5 million tonnes of primary refining Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak cited for 2025. Idle capacity stands at 0.35 million tonnes a day, about 39 percent of normal capability, Sergei Selin of the Siala agency told Forbes, and the government has extended the full petrol export ban to 31 January 2027 while permitting Euro-2 to Euro-4 grades until 1 July 2027.
Imports are not closing the gap. Belarus shipped about 212,000 tonnes of petrol in July, 13 percent more than in June, with January–July volumes up 25-fold year on year to almost 665,000 tonnes, independent analyst Kirill Kuchinsky told Forbes Russia; the first 68,000 tonnes from India's Nayara Energy, in which Rosneft holds 49.13 percent, were unloaded at Vitino in the Murmansk region. Total imports from all sources do not exceed 400,000 tonnes a month, or about 12 percent of summer consumption of some 3.3 million tonnes. Rosstat recorded average AI-95 at 78.21 rubles a litre (about 0.92 US dollars at 85.16 rubles per dollar) in the week to 10 August, down 0.6 percent, but June output of petroleum products was 21.7 percent below a year earlier and any further outage feeds straight through to availability.
Source: Forbes Russia, 19 Aug 2026
Two research papers published by the Bank of Russia place inflation-neutral GDP growth at 1.5 to 2 percent for 2026–2029 and at 1.3 percent in an inertial scenario running to 2035, against the regulator's official range of 1.5 to 2.5 percent, Kommersant reports. The median estimate of potential output growth in the first quarter came to 1.8 percent year on year, 0.4 percentage points below a year earlier, with the output gap at about minus 0.5 percent of potential GDP — little slack left before extra demand turns into inflation rather than volume. In the inertial decomposition capital adds 0.63 percentage points and labour subtracts 0.13, which strengthens the central bank's case that looser policy alone cannot lift growth toward the 3 percent the government targets.
Source: Kommersant, 19 Aug 2026
Customs authorities assessed an additional 35.2 billion rubles (about 413 million US dollars) on companies after audits in the first half of 2026, up 25 percent from 28.1 billion rubles a year earlier, according to Federal Customs Service data seen by Vedomosti. Collection lags the assessments: the federal budget received 72.2 percent of the total against 79.4 percent in the first half of 2025, while the average assessment per audit at logistics firm Optimalog more than doubled from 360,000 to 800,000 rubles. Criminal cases for evasion of customs payments reached 134 in the first quarter, more than in any quarter of 2025, and the finance ministry has proposed extending the customs control period from three to five years where an audit has been successfully appealed — a direct compliance cost for importers.
Source: Vedomosti, 19 Aug 2026
Rusagrotrans cut its forecast for Russian wheat exports in August to 1.8 million tonnes from 3.1 million, citing current restrictions on shipments from Black Sea ports. The revised figure is 2.5 times below the volume exported in August 2025 and the lowest for the month since 2010, when 1.6 million tonnes left the country after a drought cut the grain harvest to 60.9 million tonnes. A shortfall of this size in the opening month of the marketing season tightens the supply available to import-dependent buyers and puts a floor under global wheat prices.
Source: Interfax, 19 Aug 2026
Non-state organisations had paid 383.69 billion rubles (about 4.5 billion US dollars) into the federal budget as voluntary contributions by 14 August, 59.8 percent of all gratuitous receipts, according to Electronic Budget data cited by Kommersant. That is 1.5 times the 251.3 billion rubles booked for the whole of 2025 and 2.5 times the 173.4 billion rubles recorded by early August last year, and it already exceeds the roughly 300 billion rubles the authorities expected for the full year. Part of the flow comes from exit deals: since October 2024 foreign sellers of Russian assets pay 35 percent of market value into the budget, with the minimum discount on such transactions raised from 50 to 60 percent.
Source: Kommersant, 18 Aug 2026