In Ukraine, gas shortages further complicate daily life

Though Russian cruise missiles knocked out electric power and disrupted water last week, Lviv turned on the fountain in front of the opera house, cafes were busy, and people took advantage of good weather to stroll downtown, shop at an open market and ride skateboards around the Taras Shevchenko monument.But Russian attacks on several fuel depots and Ukraine’s only fully functioning refinery, in Kremenchuk, have aggravated chronic inefficiencies and vulnerabilities in the country’s petroleum industry that existed before President Vladimir Putin launched the war.“Ukraine was more dependent on imported petroleum products than it was on imported gas,” said Edward C. Svyrydenko said Ukrainian petroleum companies were setting up new supply routes from Poland and Romania that could ease shortages.At a gas station on the outskirts of Lviv, a 56-year-old truck driver named Grigoriy who spoke on the condition his last name be withheld to protect relatives in Russian-occupied territory near Kherson, inched his tractor trailer up to the pumps as the attendant told him the station’s supply was about to run out.Grigoriy was running low, too, having just dumped a load of firewood. About 40 other cars and trucks waited in a double line behind him.Grigoriy said he saw one of the Russian attacks that contributed to the gas shortage: an airstrike in early March on a fuel depot less than a mile from his home in Zhytomyr that sent clouds of smoke billowing into the sky.“It was scary,” he said through a translator.Hundreds of videos expose the horrors of war in UkraineNow, almost as soon as he leaves one gas station, he’s looking for the next, juggling fuel cards issued by different petroleum companies that allow customers to buy fuel in advance at a set price.