On Monday the United States embassy in Ulaanbaatar advised its citizens to put off non-essential travel to Mongolia, and, if they had a departure booked, to consider moving it forward. The reason was fuel: reports of a shortage reaching petrol and jet kerosene alike, with travel disruptions to follow. Two weeks after that advice, the same city expects 4,127 registered delegates to a United Nations summit.
The two events are joined by a calendar so tidy it reads as choreography. This week Ulaanbaatar began selling fuel by licence-plate number, on alternating days, with each vehicle capped at 50,000 tugriks, about $14. The regime runs to 15 August. COP17, the UN’s conference on combating desertification, opens on the 17th. And on the 15th, as the fuel rationing ends, a second plate regime begins: even and odd numbers take turns on the city’s roads until 12 September. One queue is dismantled two days before the delegates land. Another is installed so that their buses move.
The numbers underneath were published in July, mostly by other people. Stocks of AI-92, the petrol Mongolia actually drives on, fell from 71,600 tonnes to 37,000 in three weeks, 17 days of consumption, by The Insider’s count; queues at the pumps were running 5 to 6 hours before the caps arrived. The minister for industry and mineral resources, Gongoryn Damdinnyam, announced the rationing on Monday; the state news agency reported the import plan on Tuesday: more than 270,000 tonnes to arrive in August, of which 49,280 tonnes are AI-92. Over the first weekend of the month the country brought in 5,160 tonnes of it, two and a half days of consumption on the agency’s own count.
The mechanism is worth stating precisely, because it is the polite kind. Moscow’s export ban, in force since 1 August, carries an exemption for intergovernmental contracts, and Mongolia’s supplies run on exactly those contracts. The wall has a gate with Mongolia’s name on it. What moved was the price at the gate: in July Rosneft shifted from a fixed $705 a tonne to exchange-linked pricing, and the pump price rose 250 to 300 tugriks a litre. A country that imports about 95% of its fuel from Russia discovered that access and affordability are two different clauses.
Cities have dressed for summits before. Beijing took half its cars off the road in the summer of 2008 and got its Olympic sky; the exhaust waited at the city limits until September. The method is old and, in its way, honest: a host controls what the guest sees, and every host does it. Ulaanbaatar’s version carries one refinement.
Beijing was hiding its own exhaust. Ulaanbaatar is hiding somebody else’s price list.
The refinement matters because of what the guests are coming to discuss. COP17 is the summit on desertification, and Mongolia is hosting it as a country with 76.8% of its territory affected by desertification, on the government’s own count. Land that slowly stops feeding people, and a fuel stock measured in days, are the same condition in different materials: a national margin worn thin, managed by schedule. The delegates will spend two weeks discussing the first while the host manages the second, by number plate, just out of the programme’s sight.
The remedies on file are real, and almost all of them are dated. Storage for an extra 150,000 cubic metres of fuel by the end of 2026; 300,000 by August 2027; a three-month national reserve by 2028; 22 sites financed for 250,000 tonnes, with construction windows of 4 to 12 months. An Indian-built refinery is promised at 1.5 million tonnes a year, from 2028 at the earliest. The one delivery that has already happened is itself a signpost: a first consignment of Chinese aviation kerosene, reported at the Zamyn-Üüd crossing, a sentence that would have been unprintable a year ago. The rest is a serious programme, every line of it falling due after this August, and the queue is now.
So the sequence will run as designed. By the 17th the rationing will be over, the tanks refilled by an import plan sized to the occasion, the roads half-emptied by decree. Delegates will move smoothly between sessions on land degradation, hosted by a state demonstrating, in real time and with real discipline, how a thin margin is administered. The performance will hold to 12 September, with a one-day pause on 1 September, the first day of school, and then the plates go back to normal. The tanks are scheduled to be normal by 2028.
Peter Lidovsky writes on Eurasia and the politics of the spaces between empires. He contributes a weekly column to Central Asia Wire. The views expressed are his own.