Not long after Ukraine bombed another Russian oil depot, Vladimir Putin invited a favourite journalist into his office. Certain uncomfortable matters needed to be addressed. Outside the Kremlin, and across the country, snake-like queues had begun to form outside petrol stations. Fights erupted. Trapped inside their cars, citizens were ranting on social media.

The Russian president had retreated from view following Ukraine’s June 18 drone strike on Moscow, which climaxed in the lid of an oil storage tank at the capital’s largest refinery exploding high into the air, borne aloft on a cloud of black smoke. On June 28, he re-emerged for the interview. Ukraine’s long-range strikes on energy infrastructure were “of course, creating problems”, he told Rossiya-1’s correspondent Pavel Zarubin. “That is obvious.”

It is not nothing for Putin to personally admit a setback in his war. Others have been ignored. But allowing his underlings to take the heat, in this case, must have struck the Kremlin as more perilous than taking control.

With the painful part over, the president slipped into a comfortable mould – that of the slightly bored chief executive who has the answer to every problem and projects an air of faint annoyance at having to explain himself at all. The fuel crisis, he stressed, was “not critical”. Shortages would be resolved swiftly. Russia, of course, must produce more air-defence systems and deploy them, as far as the front line allowed, outside energy infrastructure. Repairs would also have to be “completed more quickly”. But on the whole, “everything is operating steadily and with a substantial margin of resilience”, Putin said. The West was exaggerating the crisis to divide Russians and force Moscow to suspend its invasion of Ukraine. “We won’t give them that chance,” he scoffed.

So far, so familiar. During the course of his career, Putin has perfected the art of projecting competence. Sometimes, he bamboozles audiences with facts and statistics. At other times, he referees complex, televised cabinet meetings. The underlying message tends to get through: whatever you may personally think of the stony-faced former KGB officer, he is more across the detail than you could ever hope to be, and matters can be safely left in his hands. Nor are his performances entirely a bluff. His reign – at least, pre-war – rested on a balance between two sectors of Russian society. The first is the “siloviki”, of course, who fill the FSB and other security agencies and suffocate any form of dissent. But also a cadre of bankers and technocrats who built the Russian economy, prepared it to weather the shock of Western sanctions, and generally laid the foundations for most citizens to enjoy quiet, non-political lives.

The trouble arises when Putin cannot use either of those tools to bring a crisis back under control. In the week since Putin’s unflustered response, Kyiv has struck the country’s fourth-largest refinery, the port in St Petersburg and a lubricant factory in Ufa, 800 miles from the front line. Only two of Russia’s 83 regions have avoided fuel shortages. Propaganda cannot make petrol flow. Nor can Moscow’s technocrats magically plug a 20 per cent gap in supply. Even in the Siberian province of Irkutsk, frustrated citizens have begun to question the implicit bargain – security, in exchange for submission – that the population has made with Putin. “I’m sure half the queue wasn’t interested in politics,” one woman, wearing bright red lipstick, moans in a TikTok video. “But now politics has come to our home.”

Credit: @AnastasMinchev / X @Exilenova+ / Telegram

The crisis is nowhere near terminal. Putin bounced back from spikes in public anxiety after the mobilisation drive in 2022 and, two years later, the Ukrainian invasion of the border province of Kursk. But it comes at a bad time. War fatigue has risen steadily since the turn of the year, with polls by the Kremlin-controlled VTsIOM agency showing a decline in Putin’s approval rating – from 75 per cent in December to 66 per cent in early May. Partly that is down to the rising imbalance between Putin’s two poles of government. Faced with a lack of progress on the battlefield, he has empowered the siloviki: citizens face new restrictions on their use of the internet, while the FSB has seized ball-bearing factories and other private enterprises – some owned by former MPs – on spurious grounds.

Meanwhile, the technocrats are struggling to manage the costs of the war. Any hope that Donald Trump would force Ukraine to hand over the Donbas, and therefore bring the conflict to an end, has faded. Some believe the time has come to speak out. “I don’t believe there is anyone in this country whose primary concern is anything but an end to military hostilities as soon as possible,” said German Gref, the influential former economy minister and chairman of Sberbank, last week. Economic growth can no longer shield the population from the burden of Moscow’s rouble-swallowing war machine. GDP growth has slumped to 0.4 per cent. Prices are rising at the supermarket.

Add to that a nightly fireworks show at any one of Russia’s oil refineries, and it is no surprise that the latest VSTiOM poll, covering June 22-28, shows the steepest drop in Putin’s approval rating since the start of the war, at 3.5 points. (The figure remains higher than in May, when pollsters began to visit respondents at their homes.) “Those who want to fight on to victory cannot see how that would happen,” said Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London. “Equally, those who want the war to end cannot see that happening either.”

In North Korea, China or Iran, a similar mood would not cause much alarm. Freedoms dwindle within their borders. Instead of a carefully – and violently – cultivated basis of popular support, Putin’s allies rely on bloodlines, the Communist revolution and claims of a divine mandate for their legitimacy. But Russia holds “elections”. In September, voters will decide who they want to represent them in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. Tallies will be subject to the usual manipulation. The Kremlin has become more repressive since Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader subsequently murdered in prison, embarrassed the regime with his 2011 “Anyone but United Russia” (UR) campaign. In the run-up to this year’s vote, sources inside Putin’s political vehicle have expressed concern that war fatigue could similarly embarrass them at the polls.

The Kremlin appears to be taking note. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the National Security Council, is not on the ticket. “He’s clearly pro-war. And people are tired of war,” one source told Meduza, an exiled Russian media outlet. Plans for UR to run a slate of 100 war veterans have been watered down. Most tellingly of all, Putin has allowed his face to appear on election posters (“Being for Putin is the bare minimum,” runs the campaign slogan). The president’s personal popularity far exceeds that of his party – and for 20 years, he has not felt the need to lend the shine (or the menace) of his personal brand to help it over the line.

War has forced that formal alliance. It will also test the bureaucratic system that exists to deliver Putin his desired result, said Julian Waller, a Russia expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, a Washington-based think tank. Governors receive targets for the United Russia vote share, which are “carefully calculated” by the Kremlin to match the perceived friendliness of their populations. Some votes will be faked. But reaching the expected tally also requires pushing people into voting booths and employing the right staff to count them. “If elites are demoralised and they don’t want to do all this stuff, and bureaucracies are just going to phone it in, you might get numbers you’re not expecting,” Mr Waller noted. That then requires fraud on a riskier scale.

The Kremlin has attempted to reverse the slide in Putin’s personal ratings. At the start of the year, he rarely appeared in public. Rumours arose that he feared assassination and had taken refuge in an underground bunker. In response, Putin took his 88-year-old former German teacher to dinner. He arrived in jeans, gave her a bouquet of flowers, and discussed recipes for sauerkraut. But his administration has been forced since then to adopt more costly forms of reputation management.

Since the fuel crisis began, the government has paid subsidies – set at around 30 roubles (29p) per litre – to keep prices low at the pump. These strain the treasury each day they continue, warned Pyotr Mironenko, a co-founder of The Bell newsletter run by exiled Russian journalists. Already, the so-called “damper” payments have absorbed around one-third of the roughly $15bn (£11bn) windfall Russia earned from the oil price surge caused by the war in Iran. “Either the regime ends these payments and risks public unrest, or they continue them and risk a major backfire in the economy,” said Mr Mironenko. “It’s choosing between two bad decisions.”

It might not matter if there was an end in sight. But Ukraine’s strikes have hit sophisticated parts of the refining chain (crackers, for example, which turn tar into fuel) that require foreign parts to repair. Since the turn of the year, Kyiv has increased its long-range strikes by an extraordinary 1,150 per cent, according to Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. Trucks can no longer supply occupied Crimea without running a gauntlet of Hornet drones. The peninsula has suspended fuel sales entirely. Kyiv is also striking Russian energy infrastructure faster than it can be repaired, according to Sergey Vakulenko, the former Gazprom oil executive. Russia – a “gas station with a country attached”, as Senator John McCain once called it – has begun to import fuel from India. Bastardised, long-banned forms of petrol will also soon re-enter the market, helping Moscow bridge the gap until full supplies can be resumed.

Credit: @ZelenskyyUa/X

When faced with a difficult, intransigent problem, Putin’s first instinct is to muddle through. Even with all the pressures he faces, that option will still appeal to him, said Mr Greene. But the status quo might eventually come with sufficient costs that the Russian president is tempted to gamble – either through an escalation of the war, or the pursuit of a peace deal with Kyiv. “Does he actually think that [at some point] he needs to make a more structural shift in the way he’s governing the country, in order to make these problems more manageable?” said Mr Greene. “He has some political leeway, I think. What he may struggle to do is keep doing the same thing indefinitely without making some kind of change in the way he runs the system.”

A fork in the road could arrive post-election. Various plans have been drawn up to “saturate” the army with troops, one source close to the presidential administration told Farida Rustamova, a well-connected chronicler of the Russian elite. However, there were only “rumours” of an October mobilisation. It would never be called “mobilisation”, a separate source at a state-run recruitment firm told Ms Rustamova, adding that preparations for a troop surge had been under way for months.

Where will the money come from? Russia is already on track to overspend by $28bn (£21bn) on its military budget for this year, according to a letter from the finance minister leaked to the Financial Times. Officials are preparing legislation that would allow them to seize $40bn (£30bn) of pensions savings held in privately managed funds. Gennady Zyuganov, the long-standing leader of the Communist Party, went further still. Putin should “mobilise” the $1.7tn (£1.3tn) stored in his citizens’ bank accounts to help win the war. “That money isn’t being invested in production or anything else – not even in victory,” the 82-year-old said. “This problem can be solved quickly. If I were the president, I’d do it with a single decree. In wartime, he has the right to do so – he is the supreme commander in chief.”

Some hope Putin will resist the urge to follow in Stalin’s footsteps – and instead, de-escalate the war. Gently, high-profile defence figures have suggested a pause. Alexei Chadayev, a former Kremlin employee turned drone impresario, called the war the “best thing” that ever happened to Russia in a recent post on Telegram. But, he added: “I’m in favour of taking a pause and really ‘focusing’, preparing for the inevitable next round.” The post was deliberately published, according to Ms Rustamova, around the same time as a similarly dove-ish article by an employee of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, which is also linked to the Kremlin.

Their message has apparently yet to land. In his interview last Sunday night, Putin bombarded Mr Zarubin with dense, highly technical and factually dubious updates from the front line. Moscow’s forces had only 149 buildings left to liberate out of 11,000 in the Ukrainian town of Krasny-Liman, he boasted. The 6th Division of the South Group of Forces had captured a single street in a separate advance. The Ukrainian drone attacks had made “no impact whatsoever” on the front line, the president added. “That is the key thing.” As he spoke, Putin sometimes turned to the camera and squinted, as if reading his lines from a teleprompter. How long he can stick to this script remains to be seen.