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Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

On July 6, Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s largest oil refinery, in the Siberian city of Omsk, some 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine. Until that night, the Omsk facility was one of only two of the country’s top ten refineries Ukraine had not yet hit. Ukraine’s General Staff called it the last of the country’s 11 largest gasoline producers to fall. The same week, Ukrainian drone units struck 21 vessels near occupied Crimea, including 19 sanctioned tankers from Russia’s shadow fleet hauling gasoline to the peninsula. The effect of Ukraine’s escalated attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure is already visible. Gas lines and fuel rationing have spread across nearly all of Russia’s 83 regions. Yet shortages at the pump are only the beginning. The fuel crunch is now moving into Russia’s farm fields, where the harvest is underway, and from there to Russian dinner tables. Russia’s response to the crisis has been telling: restrict supply, offer half-measures to address the crisis and continue massive fuel subsidies rather than allow prices to rise. That’s a combustible national situation that could endanger Putin’s murderous four-year war against Ukraine as well as his iron grip on power.

Refineries and Tankers

The Omsk refinery processes more than 22 million tons of crude oil a year, roughly 10 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity. Ukraine’s drones hit the refinery’s primary crude-processing unit, which Ukrainian special forces described as its most vital component. Reuters later reported the damaged unit accounts for roughly 38 percent of the refinery’s total production capacity. By Tuesday, the refinery had suspended petrol and diesel sales on Russia’s main commodities exchange entirely. Omsk supplies more than half of the motor fuel used in Siberia. Omsk was not the only target that night. Ukrainian intelligence units struck another of Russia’s five largest refineries, roughly 700 kilometers from the border, along with a fuel terminal on the Baltic Sea and a petroleum storage facility in occupied Crimea. Ukraine has hit Russian refineries at least 194 times in the first half of 2026 alone, reaching a record monthly pace in May. At sea, the campaign has been brutal for Russia as well. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces opened an operation on the night of July 6, hitting 12 tankers hauling gasoline toward occupied Crimea over the first two nights. Nine more tankers followed on July 8, bringing the three-day total to 21 vessels struck: 19 sanctioned shadow-fleet tankers, a cargo ship and a ferry. Commander Robert “Madyar” Brovdi identified several of the tankers by name, noting each was sanctioned, roughly 140 meters long, and built between 2006 and 2012.

In a June 26 letter to the International Maritime Organization, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Oleksii Kuleba argued the shadow fleet is “critical to the generation of budget revenues for the Russian Federation.” Industry estimates put the global shadow fleet at more than 1,500 tankers; Ukraine has struck roughly a dozen sanctioned vessels by name since the current campaign began. Occupied Crimea depends on these deliveries because the bridge connecting it to Russia was severely damaged in 2025 and remains closed to heavy vehicles. Russian-installed authorities in Crimea had already introduced fuel rationing in late May, before this latest round of strikes began.

[...]

Warning One: The harvest is being hit

Diesel and gasoline are different products with different supply pictures. Before the war, Russian refineries produced roughly twice as much diesel as the country consumed domestically, a surplus that has been shrinking since 2022 as export markets in the European Union closed, Moscow Times opinion writer Dmitry Nekrasov has noted. Gasoline production, by contrast, barely covered domestic demand even before the war. Arkady Zlochevsky, president of the Russian Grain Union, said the worst fuel shortages are already hitting small and medium-sized farms, which account for the bulk of Russia’s grain production. A Bloomberg survey of eight farmers across several regions found only two had enough fuel to complete the harvest; three had already paid for fuel that had not been delivered; and the remaining three had enough for roughly two weeks before needing to buy again at current prices. One farmer in Russia’s Volga region said growers who didn’t stock up before prices surged will now pay any price, “because nobody will leave the crop in the field.” He said the added cost could push farmers to shift acreage away from winter crops and toward spring planting in 2027. Altai Krai, Siberia’s largest agricultural producer and Russia’s single largest buckwheat-growing region, illustrates how sharply costs have moved. Fuel expenses for the region’s farmers have risen roughly 2.5-fold over the past year, compounded by rising fertilizer costs—after the Strait of Hormuz disruption drove up global fertilizer prices. A regional lawmaker warned the combination could produce what she called a “food catastrophe.” The head of a regional agricultural industry group told a local outlet that, at current fuel prices, harvesting grain is becoming unprofitable, and that some farmers may find it cheaper to leave crops standing in the field than pay to bring them in. One farmer in the region’s Rebrikha district said fertilizer was simply unavailable to buy this year. Altai has since introduced formal rationing, requiring drivers to present vehicle registration to buy fuel.

[...]

What Comes Next

This intensified phase of Ukraine’s campaign against Russian oil infrastructure is only weeks old. Russia’s daily refined oil output fell by up to 700,000 barrels, a 13 percent decline, in April and May alone, and losses deepened further after Ukraine struck two more major refineries in mid-June. In that short span, as discussed above, shortages have spread to nearly all of Russia’s regions. The government has turned to subsidies, export bans and lower fuel quality standards. And a harvest that Russia’s own Grain Union president says depends on farms without adequate diesel reserves is already behind schedule. Nowhere has the strain shown more plainly than in occupied Crimea. The Russian-controlled government there has declared a state of emergency, banned fuel sales outright, and has seen empty shelves and purchase limits on basic goods. But what happens if and when more of Russia’s refining capacity goes offline, and fuel cannot reliably reach every region that needs it? Nekrasov takes the measured view: shortages are likely to worsen each summer through 2027, ease each autumn, and remain unlikely to seriously affect economic activity outside the regions closest to the front. But even that restrained assessment comes with a warning. The Kremlin’s tools are narrowing: lower fuel standards and imports from neighboring countries cannot fully offset a continuing decline in refining capacity. Subsidies that keep prices low are already so costly they constrain the budget rather than relieve it.

S. Baum at Erin In The Morning:

[This piece is being published in partnership with The Nation.] The Supreme Court upheld anti-trans athlete laws in the recent Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ decisions, declaring that Title IX, the bedrock of gender-based protections in public schools, does not extend to transgender student athletes. On its surface, the rulings are narrower than the decision many activists and scholars had feared. They target school sports in Idaho and West Virginia but sidestep broader questions about trans rights under the 14th Amendment, questions probably best left unanswered by a right-wing bench. But the consequences of the rulings will go beyond those two states and beyond sports. The court’s decisions are part of a global campaign to legislate, litigate, and segregate trans people out of public life. This was made clear during oral arguments back in January; attorneys and justices alike scrutinized the bodies of trans girls, debating the size and shape of their organs, muscles, and bones. Yet the banality of the scene—procedural buzzwords, shuffling papers, cordial back-and-forths couched with honorifics—almost obfuscated the violence of it all.

Alan Hurst, then Idaho’s solicitor general, said transgender girls posed “a real threat” to safety and fairness in women’s athletics. “We cite Your Honors to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report that says 600 women have lost 890 medals in 29 different sports,” he said, arguing that (presumed) cisgender women are losing en masse to transgender ones and that trans women and girls don’t belong in women’s spaces. The United Nations official in question is Reem Alsalem—the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She filed an amicus brief with the court supporting trans-exclusionary laws. This comes after years of pushing reports at the United Nations that painted trans women as a danger to their peers. The court’s final opinion echoed the language in her brief.

Hurst’s comment about Alsalem’s work has a few problems. Among them: The numbers are not particularly meaningful or accurate. But facts have never stopped Alsalem. Through her writings to the United Nations, she has become a leading mouthpiece for far-right propaganda and misinformation about trans people, propelling untruths into policy and law and declaring war, in her words, on the concept of “gender equality” itself.

The medals statistic cited by Hurst has been repeatedly debunked. In April 2025, a segment from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver broke down the dubious methodology behind it, and reporting from Erin in the Morning further found the list of trans medal winners on which it is based contains numerous errors and misleading practices—such as the inclusion of women like Imane Khelif, who is not trans, and counting “sports” like poker and competitive video gaming. Erin in the Morning’s investigations also found the anonymous website that developed the stat emerged from an online forum of anti-trans extremists who had been banned from other social media platforms due to hate speech. Nevertheless, Alsalem cited the medals statistic again in her September 2025 amicus brief with the Supreme Court. In that brief, she argues that transgender girls should not be awarded the same protections as cisgender girls. Instead, she proposes that all sports have a strictly defined women’s category and an “open” category, which would require grouping transgender and intersex girls with men—and she wants this separation codified in law.

The document makes clear that Alsalem’s recommendations were “neither sought nor given by the United Nations.” And the reports she writes for the United Nations are technically informational, not authoritative; they do not represent the views of the United Nations. This distinction is often lost on the countless lawmakers, media outlets, and laypersons who see her work on UN letterhead or her posts from a UN X account and understandably assume that they are consuming information from a credible source. Coming with the apparent imprimatur of the United Nations, Alsalem’s work is providing the veneer of legitimacy to anti-trans disinformation. The elevation of her work before the Supreme Court shows both the effectiveness of her project and how it undermines the rights of the very group she is duty-bound to protect: women and girls. Alsalem proudly calls herself a “normal non-deranged woman from the UN.” (It was her longtime bio on X.) This is already controversial. For starters, as many of her critics emphasize, this makes it sound like she is employed by or represents the views of the United Nations. She does not. Alsalem was appointed in 2021 the Human Rights Council. All rapporteurs are non-salaried human rights consultants, each with their own thematic or geographic specialty. Alsalem has conducted critical research on topics like femicide and women facing genocide in Gaza.

But 15 months into her first term, Alsalem began to use her association with the United Nations to try to block the expansion of trans rights. In 2022, she sent a formal letter to government officials opposing a Scottish bill facilitating trans people’s ability to obtain accurate legal identification Since then, Alsalem has repeatedly bolstered attacks on gender equality across the globe, including through her UN-commissioned reports—one of which was a 2024 treatise on women in sports, which appears to be what pushed the warped statistic about medals into the mainstream.

In June 2025, Alsalem took the stage at the UN headquarters in Geneva, a sprawling art deco structure, to present her report on Sex-Based Violence Against Women and Girls: New Frontiers and Emerging Issues. By the time Alsalem stepped up to the dais, hundreds of human rights and medical groups had already denounced what they characterized as an abuse of her position. One statement, whose signatories include Planned Parenthood Global and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA), accused Alsalem of “manipulating data” and “undermining” long-held policy reforms. Another statement co-signed by Amnesty International says her report “misuses legal, scientific, and testimonial evidence, ignoring established methodologies for interpreting human rights.” “Sex is as binary as it gets,” Alsalem told the assembly. This, according to the World Health Organization, UN Women, most if not all other rapporteurs, and essentially every other part of the United Nations, is false. Her report derides the concept of “gender identity,” which she falsely describes as “the feeling that some individuals have of not identifying with the sex observed at birth.” (Broadly speaking, that is called being transgender; “gender identity” is something all people have, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender.) Alsalem argues against the idea of “gender equality” altogether. She wants to replace it with the term “equality between men and women.” Enshrining this binary into international law would strip transgender and intersex people from gender-based protections, which Alsalem says should be replaced by the term “sex-based protections.” The Trump administration has followed suit. This is a talking point from the global “anti-gender” movement, which opposes the idea of gender itself. Human Rights Watch has called it a “global conspiracy myth,” and its roots go back to the 1980s when the Catholic Church feared that a gay and feminist movement was undermining the traditional family. This fantasy of a global gender cabal underlies the Supreme Court’s anti-trans ruling in BPJ and Hecox, as well as in Skrmetti, the 2025 decision that limited trans youth’s access to health care.

[...] Her sourcing sometimes traces back to far-right and anti-trans outlets and tabloids like Reduxx, The New York Post, and The Daily Mail or known anti-trans groups like Women’s Declaration International and the LGB Alliance. In one such case, she asserted that presumed-cis women were leaving women’s sports en masse over trans athletes. The citation linked back to an article from an anti-trans group about a recreational swimming pond with trans-inclusive policies. The juxtaposition of her reports and the anti-trans media circuit creates a feedback loop, where far-right newsrooms and groups publish anti-trans propaganda, receive validation from Alsalem, and then spit it back out as if the source were the United Nations itself. Well-known extremist groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, have been in lockstep with Alsalem. She hosted the ADF, an evangelical legal advocacy group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQ hate organization, on the official UN streaming platform for a discussion on the “issue” of trans athletes. And on X, she’s posted that gender-affirming care has “mutilated” and “dechilded” a generation, comparing it to the mass murder of children in Gaza.

[...] Alsalem denounces anyone who calls her an “extremist,” but she advocates for laws that are even more restrictive than the ones in the most right-wing US states. In a 2025 report on “sex-based” violence, she calls for “all actors” to ban youth even from “social transitioning”—apparently meaning that she wants the government to prohibit children from being addressed by their preferred pronouns and name. She also seems to imply that those assigned female at birth cannot “meaningfully consent” to transitioning. On the other hand, she often describes trans women as sexual predators attempting to insinuate themselves into lesbian spaces and women’s facilities.