Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak chaired the 67th Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allied producers on 2 August, and met seven OPEC+ states separately the same day1. The JMMC is the body that reviews whether member states are holding to their agreed output quotas. His other logged engagements across the window run the same way: Turkey's energy minister on 23 July, a Russia-Saudi anniversary reception on 24 July.
What the government's own news feed does not carry, across 14 July to 2 August, is a single item on diesel, fuel exports or refining. Novak ordered a study into cutting the diesel export quota on 15 July, after the producer-binding export ban he announced in early July. No decision from that study has been published on the channel where both earlier steps were announced.
A ministerial diary is a weak signal read alone and a useful one read against the file it omits. Novak's window was spent on the volume of crude Russia is permitted to sell to other countries, an argument conducted with allies and worth real revenue. The unanswered question is the domestic one: how much refined fuel stays inside a country whose refineries are being struck and whose occupied south is queueing for petrol. The first question has a committee and a chairman. The second, so far, has a study nobody has published.
