Dear Decision Maker,

First, an apology. You have not heard from me, or from any of us, for a few weeks. That was not because I lost interest in writing to you.

As I mentioned a while back, we were expecting a baby. Our son has arrived. He has made us very happy.

I do not usually put personal things in this letter, but this one explains the silence. He was born with a heart condition that will need surgery.

We have known for a few months. In the same stretch we moved countries, and I moved a good part of the business with me.

Between the two it has taken everything we had, and it has taken a toll on my family, including our other son, who is a toddler and did not sign up for any of this.

So I chose to put my family first. I hope you understand.

From this week we are back. There is a lot coming. A new geospatial course that I am very proud of. Two more courses in the next few months.

Some operational contracts I am glad to have won. And a few seriously capable new people on the team, whose work you will see very shortly.

And if a week comes when I cannot write, a senior member of the team will step in. The letter will land either way.

Now, the topic.

Three weekends in a row, France has put more than three hundred thousand people on the street.

• Belgium
• Italy
• Germany
• Portugal
• Spain
• Albania

Have followed, each with its own grievance and its own police count.

And in the same fortnight, Britain told every household in the country to be able to cope alone for three days.

Legacy media is covering these as separate stories. Youth protests here. A preparedness campaign there. A tanker hitting a mine somewhere far away.

They are not separate. They are one supply chain, read from the wrong end.

What the counts say

Official turnout and arrests, Europe, 9 to 31 October 2026.

Start with the numbers, because the numbers are the ground truth here and the adjectives are not.

• 17 October, France. 550,000 on the street by the Interior Ministry's count, 800,000 by the unions'. About 1,800 arrests, more than 500 police officers injured. Paris alone recorded 855 arrests, a record for the prefecture.
• 24 October, France. 410,000, including 110,000 in Paris. 1,314 arrests, 53 officers hurt.
• 31 October, France. 320,000, with 70,000 police and gendarmes deployed and at least 290 arrests by Saturday evening.
• Belgium. 30,000 to 50,000 on the 9 October strike day in Brussels. 195 arrests on 17 October across Brussels and Liège.
• Italy. 371 people detained in eight cities on 24 October, 110 of them minors. Soldiers posted in central Milan the following weekend.
• Germany. "Gen Z regelt" marched in 34 cities on Halloween. Police counted around 18,000; the organisers claim 120,000. Molotovs in Frankfurt, water cannon in Cologne and Hamburg.

Three things stand out when you lay it out like that.

First, the French turnout is falling, not rising. 550 to 410 to 320. The energy is draining out of the street and into the ballot box, where the National Rally is collecting it.

Second, the arrests are overwhelmingly young. In France, 87 per cent of the 5,000 people detained in the first fortnight of school blockades were minors, by the Justice Ministry's own count. In Italy, nearly a third of those detained on 24 October.

Third, every government's own explanation for why people are out there includes the same two words. Fuel costs.

The price that lit the fuse

Diesel at the pump, late September 2026, against the pre-war level.

The French protests did not start with students.

They started in mid-September, when diesel passed €2.40 a litre, fishermen blockaded ports and oil terminals, and a TikTok call for a yellow vest return on 17 October began to spread.

French diesel hit a record €2.41 on 22 September.

By the week of 28 September, the EU's consumption-weighted average diesel price was a record €2.24 a litre.

Before the war it was €1.59. That is a 41 per cent rise in seven months.

Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland were above €2.50. Germany €2.44. France €2.37. Italy €2.35.

In the UK, RAC's average crossed £2.00 on 2 October for the first time in history. Pre-war it was £1.42.

A 50-litre tank that cost €80 in February cost €107 in October. For a household, that is an annoyance.

For a haulier, a farmer, a fisherman or a builder, it is the margin.

France released 10 million barrels of diesel from its strategic stocks on 7 October, promising 12 to 18 cents off the pump. The first weekend of riots came ten days later.

Price relief did not calm the street. It never does, because the street is not really about the price. It is about what the price says about who is in control.

The pipe behind the pump

Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, 2026, and what the closure did to diesel.

Here is the part the protest coverage leaves out.

Europe has not refined enough diesel for its own use in twenty years. We import it. After 2023 we replaced Russian diesel with cargoes from the Middle East and India, and the big export refineries that serve Europe sit on the Gulf side of the Strait of Hormuz.

On 28 February the strait closed. Commercial transits fell from around 2,000 a month in January and February to 99 in March, and have stayed in the low hundreds since. IMF PortWatch logged two transits on 25 October, against a pre-crisis 85 a day.

What that did to the diesel market, in the IEA's words, was the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market:

• Around 20 million barrels a day of crude and products used to pass through the strait. Roughly a quarter of Europe's diesel and jet fuel came that way.
• Gulf net diesel exports were down to 390,000 barrels a day in August, about a quarter of pre-war.
• Middle East diesel flows to Europe fell to 110,000 barrels a day in September, a six-year low, from 191,000 in August.
• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both warned in August that European diesel stocks were heading for their lowest level since 2015.

The bottleneck is refining capacity, not crude. You can release crude from a strategic reserve. You cannot release a refinery.

That is why the G7 drawdown of 100 million barrels and the French 10 million barrels of diesel bought a few cents and a few weeks, not a solution.

The other pipe

Ukraine's campaign against Russian refining, January to October 2026.

Hormuz is only half of it. The other half is being flown into Russia one drone at a time.

Before this year, Russia and the Gulf between them supplied about 45 per cent of the world's seaborne diesel. Russia alone was around a tenth of global diesel supply. Both legs have been cut in the same year.

Ukraine's campaign against Russian refining is now the most consequential economic operation of the war, and the numbers are from the IEA, not from Kyiv:

• Russia has 32 major refineries and about 6.5 million barrels a day of installed capacity. By late August, only five of the 32 had not been hit.
• A Russian refinery was successfully struck on average once every three days from January to August.
• Refining runs fell to 3.6 million barrels a day in July, the lowest since 2002. S&P Global put half of Russian capacity offline by the end of August, more than twice the level of late 2025.
• Three of the six refineries that make half of Russia's diesel were shut or running at a quarter of capacity in September. Kirishi, one of the largest, was fully down. The Moscow refinery is not expected back before early 2027.
• Russian diesel output is down about 30 per cent. The Kremlin has banned producer diesel exports since 8 July, extended month by month, with petrol exports banned to January 2027 and jet fuel to the end of November.

The strikes moved from the easy targets to the hard ones. Early on, drones hit storage tanks, which burn well and are rebuilt in weeks. This year they have been going for distillation columns and the hydrotreaters that strip sulphur from diesel. Those take months to replace.

That is why diesel, specifically, is the fuel in trouble. You can patch crude throughput faster than you can rebuild a hydrotreater.

Washington noticed. In October the White House brokered a deal for Russian diesel exports to the US market, 300,000 tonnes straight away and more in November, and Kyiv paused the refinery strikes for roughly two weeks. Russian runs crept back to about 4 million barrels a day. Then on the night of 30 to 31 October, Ukrainian drones hit the Bashneft complex at Ufa and plants in Samara. The pause is over.

So Europe's two diesel suppliers are both hostage to wars Europe does not control: one to a decision in Washington about Iran, the other to a decision in Kyiv about whether the refineries are fair targets. Kyiv's answer has been consistent.

Why the next fortnight matters

The war has been in a ceasefire of sorts since the Islamabad memorandum in June, broken in July, patched since. The strait has never properly reopened.

Now the calendar turns. The US midterms are on Tuesday 3 November.

The Trump administration has briefed Gulf allies to prepare for a short, intense round of strikes on Iran as early as 4 November, with no final decision taken.

Iran says four tankers hit mines in the strait this week. VLCC freight on the Saudi to China route hit $1.33 million a day, an all-time high. War-risk cover for a Hormuz transit is running at 6 to 10 per cent of hull value.

Qatar is carrying a seven-day deal between Doha and Tehran. The IRGC says the strait does not reopen until the US blockade lifts.

So the question for anyone running a business in Europe is not "will the protests continue?" It is "what happens to the diesel if the strikes resume?"

My read:

1. Renewed US and Israeli strikes on Iran in the fortnight after 3 November: likely, moderate confidence. Every signal from Washington, Jerusalem and the Gulf says the plan exists and the window is open. A Qatari deal is the one thing that stops it.
2. If strikes resume, Hormuz transits go from single digits to zero and European diesel retests the September record within weeks: highly likely, moderate confidence. There is no slack left anywhere in the system to absorb it.
3. Russian refining runs stay below 4.5 million barrels a day through the winter: highly likely, high confidence. The damaged units are the slow ones to replace, and the strikes resumed on 31 October. The US diesel deal changes who buys Russian diesel, not how much of it exists.
4. Physical diesel rationing at European pumps this winter: unlikely, moderate confidence. Europe has domestic refining and the US is still sending cargoes. Scarcity pricing, yes. Localised shortages in freight, farming and construction: a realistic possibility.
5. A fourth consecutive weekend of French protests: likely. A fourth weekend above 300,000: a realistic possibility, low confidence. The trend is down, but one bad night of policing resets it.

Three days, in writing

How long each government now asks households to cope without help.

Which brings us to the preparedness campaigns.

The UK Cabinet Office launched "Be Ready" on 22 October:

1. three days of water
2. no-cook food
3. cash
4. medicines
5. A torch
6. A wind-up radio.

Normandy renewed France's 72-hour kit advice on 27 October. Japan is now urging the same. The Netherlands moved from 48 to 72 hours in March 2025.

The EU's Preparedness Union Strategy, the same month, set 72 hours as the floor for every member state. Sweden and Norway ask for a week. Germany asks for ten days.

Every one of those governments says the same thing: this is routine resilience, not a warning about a specific threat.

And they are telling the truth. The UK campaign was committed to in July. The EU strategy predates the war by a year. Nobody wrote "Be Ready" because of Hormuz.

But here is what they are not saying. A campaign written for storms and cyberattacks is landing in a diesel crisis, and the public has noticed.

Britain, 22 to 29 October 2026.

Only 13 per cent of British adults said they felt prepared for an emergency that cut them off from services. Within a week of the launch, Iceland reported tinned food sales up 40 per cent, one retailer reported torch sales up 284 per cent and radio sales up 160 per cent, and a specialist survival retailer reported sales up 650 per cent.

Those are retailers' own numbers, not audited, but the direction is not in doubt.

The signal is not the campaign. The signal is the response.

When a routine message produces a panic-buying weekend, the population is telling you what it already believes about the supply chain.

What I would do this week

Not a framework this time. Three questions, because the fortnight is short.

1. Where is your diesel exposure? Not your fuel bill. Your suppliers' fuel bill, your logistics partner's, the farm at the start of your food chain. Diesel reaches most businesses through the price of goods, not the pump.
2. What is your three-day plan? If a government that is not panicking thinks every household should be able to run for 72 hours without power, water, phones or shops, what is your organisation's equivalent? Most have a cyber plan. Few have a diesel plan.
3. Who is reading the strait and the refineries for you? Not the headlines. The transit counts, the war-risk premiums, the Qatari shuttle, the Russian run rates. The decision on 4 November will be visible in the Gulf before it is visible in Paris, and the next Ufa strike will be visible in the diesel crack before it is visible at the pump.

The protesters in Milan and Paris are reacting to a price. The price is reacting to a strait and a refinery. Both are reacting to decisions that have not been taken yet, in Washington and in Kyiv.

Read the chain from the right end and you get a fortnight's notice. Read it from the wrong end and you get a riot.

When did your organisation last trace a price it pays back to the chokepoint it depends on?

Information costs money. Intelligence makes money.

This week it also buys time.

Ahmed
CEO Grey Dynamics
​Where headlines end, ground truth begins