According to The Insider, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on September 28 that restricts public access to detailed information about Russia’s fuel and energy complex.
The ban covers information about buyers and sellers of energy resources, export prices, carriers and insurers, vessels, supply routes, terminals and the timing of export operations.
The list also includes information on the name and quantity of exported goods, average export prices, settlements under contracts, container numbers, and details of transport documents. Data on loading, transshipment, and destination points, names of seaports, and the coordinates of warehouses and sites where export cargoes are accumulated have been closed.
The decree prohibits the dissemination of this information, including through the media and the internet. An exception has been made for companies that disclose information about their own activities themselves; government agencies will be able to receive restricted data within the limits of their authority, and it may be transferred to other persons, in particular by agreement with the data holder.
Separately, aggregated customs statistics on exports of goods by individual Russian companies also fell under the restrictions. Some oil statistics were no longer disclosed by the authorities after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine: in April 2022, the Central Dispatch Department of the Fuel and Energy Complex stopped publishing a number of data, and in June of the same year it closed another array of information, including on the primary processing of crude oil and the production of major petroleum products at Russian refineries and gas processing plants.
In May 2026, the government had already removed from the exchange website the requirement to publish information on planned volumes of gasoline and diesel sales and their changes; now this data is transferred to the Federal Antimonopoly Service and the Federal Tax Service, and upon a reasoned request it may be received by the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Finance, and the Bank of Russia. Now Putin has separately classified data on the volumes of processing and production of goods by Russian oil refineries as restricted-access information, and the government has been instructed within ten days to determine the EAEU CN VED codes and the Russian product classifier and establish rules for automated processing of this data.
The decree explains the new measures as a need to take “urgent measures” in response to the actions of the United States and foreign states and international organizations that joined them. The document came into force on the day it was signed.
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