Профиль

Last week, I had the opportunity to discuss Russian recruitment and the budget in depth with Alex Gabuev on the Carnegie Politika Podcast. We covered everything from the quality of Russian data and current recruitment trends to military expenditure. Tune in! carnegieendowment.org/russia-euras...

Inside Putin’s War Recruitment MachinePodcast host Alex Gabuev is joined by Janis Kluge, leader of the Eastern Europe and Eurasia research team at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, to discuss the Russian militar...carnegieendowment.org

Attention: new original data source unlocked! Based on federal budget reports, I estimated the number of Russian troops in Ukraine, both mobilized and contract soldiers. The numbers are based on different salary top-ups that Russian troops in Ukraine receive. janiskluge.substack.com/p/the-compos...

I analyzed dozens of reports from Russian municipalities and found a lot of fascinating insights about how Russian recruitment actually works. At the core, the recruitment machine is a multilayered system of quotas, going all the way from the Kremlin down to the smallest village.

Street interviews in Moscow about the gasoline crisis. All are saying the situation has improved in the city, but prices are up and outside of Moscow it's more difficult to find gas stations that are open. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aixE...

Russians on the catastrophic situation with gasYouTube video by 1420 by Daniil Orainwww.youtube.com

Russian gasoline and diesel prices rose again last week.

There seems to be data manipulation on Gdebenz for Moscow now. Since last night, there are some strange patterns in the data. The changes are a bit too swift to be real and also the frequency of reports has increased (I would expect it to decrease as the situation improves).

There is still cash on the accounts of the Russian Finance Ministry, a few trillion rubles. They already placed a lot of bonds this year, and July will bring bigger oil revenues. When the accounts run low, they will have to issue bonds. Floaters are always possible to sell.

A more detailed look at Russian gas stations: The situation seems to be improving, and partially as a result of that (and the availability of alternative gasoline apps) the data quality has deteriorated a bit. First the chart that shows the situation the best (in my view).

Russia's Finance Ministry has announced it will stop issuing government bonds "to facilitate market stabilization". Russian financial markets have been crashing in recent months, with 10year bond rates now close to 17%. minfin.gov.ru/ru/press-cen...

Beeindruckende Statistik... Quelle: www.kyiv-dialogue.org/de/news/news...

The current situation at Russian gas stations: Improvement in Kazan and Rostov, but overall the situation hardly changed.

New service in Russia: Give your car to a valet for a few hours and he will stand in line at the gas station for you. Filling up the tank this way costs 4000 rubles ($50), plus gasoline razumeyetsya. www.evening-kazan.ru/obshhestvo/n...

The current situation at gas stations in 21 Russian cities.

Great data by Mediazona showing the share of gas stations actually selling gasoline in recent days.

In general, these charts rather make the situation look better than it is. I checked many of the "open without queue note" stations in detail, and there is often a catch. Not just volume limits (20-30 liters) or payment rules (company cards), but sometimes only diesel is available.

Situation at Russian gas stations in the last 5 days and today: Moscow and St Petersburg are prioritized. It looks like the situation is improving, but I checked several cities in detail, and I think the increasing availability of fuel has a different reason: Higher prices.

Gasoline prices in Russia 🚀🚀🚀

I was wondering why there are many gas stations without queues in Novosibirsk, and at the same time some with extremely long queues. The reason are extreme price differences, with gasoline ranging from 63 to 175 rubles per liter.

The situation at Russian gas stations in the last 6 days. Each bar shows the known gas stations in the city dataset, incl. the share of them for which there is no data or low data confidence. If fewer drivers use gdebenz, the data becomes useless (Omsk).

Today's situation at Russian gas stations, compared to the previous 3 days (where data is available).