Alexander Novak

Novak's 8 July decree banning all Russian diesel exports, the first to bind producers as well as traders, was due to lapse on 31 July. Instead, on 25 July, the minister who has run Russia's energy brief for over a decade chose to drop the fixed Deadline himself, tying any future lifting to a market signal he left unspecified and undated.

A week earlier he had gone further, ordering the Federal Antimonopoly Service to study cutting the mandatory diesel exchange-sale quota to 10%, a second domestic lever layered on top of the export ban rather than a step toward easing it.

Novak confirmed on 1 May that Russia would stop Kazakh crude transiting the northern Druzhba branch to Germany, a route Berlin had used as a legal workaround after cutting Russian-origin supply. Moscow controls the pipeline and can block third-party transit without breaching sanctions rules itself.

The decision followed Ukraine's deep-strike campaign against Druzhba's pumping stations, tying an ostensibly technical transit decision to the wider conflict. For Novak it doubled as leverage: removing a workaround supply option tightened dependence on alternatives he does not control either.

At the St Petersburg forum on 4 June, Novak made Moscow's first public admission that drone strikes were reducing Russian oil output, naming the Yaroslavl refinery, hit in May, as his example.

Within a month the admission looked understated: by 28 June it was Putin, not Novak, who had to concede publicly that petrol stations faced queues, after strikes on the Kapotnya and Tyumen refineries pushed rationing into fifteen-plus regions. Novak's usual role as the government's energy messenger had, for once, been overtaken by the scale of the shortage.