Among independent journalists with direct and indirect ties to the Russian government, it's common knowledge that the Kremlin serves as a role model for the rest of the world, exhibiting Christ-like generosity and selflessness.

So great is the Kremlin's limitless kindness and alms-giving that its virtuous deeds, which almost never actually benefit the Russian people, are sometimes misinterpreted as state-sponsored treachery.

Indeed, even among Russia's conservative Christians, there is a growing feeling that the Kremlin's no-strings-attached altruism should in some small way provide discernible advantages to ordinary Russians, and not just Tajik oligarchs. (However, this is debatable.)

Last week, Tsargrad, a popular conservative-patriotic-Christian outlet in Russia that serves as a semi-official platform for adherents of the "Good Tsar, Bad Boyars" worldview, published a remarkable analysis of the Kremlin's unparalleled generosity amid ongoing fuel shortages in the country.

Before I share with you an English translation of this article, I would like to provide some brief background on Russia's fuel crisis.

Simply put, Russia currently lacks the refining capabilities to meet domestic fuel needs in some parts of the country. This unexpected turn of events has been blamed in large part on Ukraine's aerial attacks on Russia's energy infrastructure.

An October 18 report from Novosibirsk media does a good job of conveying at the local level what is happening in multiple regions across Russia:

The situation with gasoline in Russia has ceased to be an ordinary problem of individual gas stations and turned into a systemic one … The Novosibirsk region has also felt the consequences of the Russia-wide imbalance.

A correspondent of NGS.RU visited several gas stations in different parts of the city to personally verify the scale of the deficit. At the Teboil gas station, as well as at the Otti gas station, there was neither AI-95 nor AI-92 gasoline available. Readers on social media confirmed a worrying trend, reporting a lack of fuel at other gas stations in the city.

The situation has reached such intensity that one of the largest local chains—the Prime gas station, which has 27 stations—was forced to officially announce the suspension of sales of AI-92 for private car owners, leaving fuel only for the city's life support enterprises.