Euro fuel is cheaper than domestic fuel, should appear at gas stations

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Gasoline from Europe may appear at Russian gas stations. We will not talk about quality, but in terms of price, it is much more attractive than domestic. So much so that you can install speakers separate from other brands - "From Europe". And there will be no need to talk about additives and other miraculous properties that are supposedly saturated with premium brands of Russian gasoline. All these advantages will fade against the background of the price of foreign fuel.

This prospect was reported by Reuters, backing up its forecast with calculations: Euro fuel has become so much cheaper than domestic fuel that, taking into account the import duty of 5%, the current ruble exchange rate, excise tax and VAT, imported gasoline in the European part of the Russian Federation will cost 37 thousand rubles. per ton.

But that's not all. If the average weight of one liter of A-95 gasoline is 0.750 kg, then the price of a liter of gasoline legally brought from Europe will cost about 28 rubles.

Simply fantastic!

However, the calculations are quite realistic - this is how the price chips went: on the world fuel market, the cost of gasoline has dropped sharply, and on the Russian market, the opposite is happening.

Europe, immobilized by the pandemic, is lowering fuel prices, and in Russia, where the traffic of road trips has dropped sharply for the same reason, prices are slowly - within inflation, as the Federal Antimonopoly Service soothes - but still climb up, and besides, the owners of gas stations warned about the upcoming price increase. And not within inflation.

This discouraged everyone. In our country, of course, such a paradox has long become a bad tradition, when the population can only ask each time: "Why, when the price of oil in the world falls, then our gasoline continues to rise in price?" But this is under normal conditions, when serious protests do not reach. However, during the period of the financial and economic crisis and the pandemic, the authorities decided not to test the people's patience: on March 25, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation instructed the FAS to give a legal assessment of the justification for the increase in prices for gasoline and diesel fuel and threatened violators of antimonopoly legislation with prosecutorial inspections.

That is, in our oil-producing and gasoline-producing country, there is no point in thinking about lowering fuel prices: prosecutors already have to sweat a lot in order to at least drive the rise in fuel prices into inflationary limits. This is now sort of like a framework for price propriety.

But relatively cheap imported fuel could destroy this idyll of the kings of Russian gas stations. As the newspaper "Kommersant" warns, possible imports from Belarus will become even more dangerous for the Russian market, after the local refineries are loaded with Russian duty-free oil. Russian oil companies and the Ministry of Energy still prefer not to comment on this.

And what comments can there be if it is already clear that gasoline from Europe will simply not be allowed into our country. This will bring down the entire system, which for many years now suits the Russian government, and oil companies, and oil refiners, and owners of gas stations.

But it is possible to fight off inexpensive European gasoline by protective measures, up to an embargo. And to justify, for example, the expansion of Russian retaliatory sanctions, say, to the extension of European sanctions.

But with brotherly Belarus this will not stir up. President Alexander Lukashenko will immediately recall both the Union State and the EAEU partnership, the obligation to ensure the free movement of goods within these unions. And they will have to allow the Russians to buy Belarusian gasoline produced from Russian oil.