re: GasBuddy: The spike in fuel prices is mostly due to Ukraine blowing up Russian refineries

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Why “mostly Russia, not Iran” inverts the evidence
Three pieces of evidence, taken together, dismantle the ranking.

First, the timeline. The Ukrainian refinery campaign is not new; it has been grinding on for well over a year. If it were the primary driver of the price, diesel would have climbed with the strike tempo. It did not. The diesel crack spread exploded to its historic highs specifically in the weeks after the United States and Israel went to war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz — through which something like a fifth of the world’s oil and products move — was throttled. Crude tells the same story in Trump’s own timeframe: Brent ran from around $67 in January to $117 in April after the first strikes on Iran, eased to the low $80s during the ceasefire, and climbed back toward $108 as the fighting resumed this autumn. The price is indexed to the Iran war, phase by phase. It is not indexed to Kyiv’s drones.

Second, the nature of the shock. The Hormuz disruption is a dual shock in a way the Russian strikes are not: it constrains both the crude reaching refiners downstream and the enormous volume of refined product that Gulf refineries themselves export to the world. Add the drone strike that briefly shut Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline — the very line built to bypass Hormuz — and you have the Middle East, not Russia, sitting on the pressure point. Analysts across the refining trade have reached the same verdict: record product margins reflect acute supply tightness and lost refining output, with crude prices actually moderating from their wartime peaks even as diesel held firm. Geopolitical disruption is the catalyst, and the disruption doing the heavy lifting is in the Gulf.

Third, the American price specifically. The United States does not buy Russian diesel and has not for years, so $6 at a Miami truck stop is not the sound of Russian barrels failing to arrive here — they were never coming here. What reaches the US pump is global fungibility plus a set of domestic costs Trump did not mention, including roughly $15 a barrel of renewable-fuel compliance baked straight into the price. Even the size of the Russian hit is contested: Kyiv claims it has knocked out 42.7 percent of Russian refining capacity; Reuters put the figure closer to 17 percent in the spring. When the man blaming a shortage is quoting the most generous possible number for it, that is worth noticing.

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