“Fill up quickly and move on,” Mayor Ihor Terekhov tells drivers in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Two petrol stations there were hit by Russian drones on Monday, wounding two people, local officials said. Last week an attack on a station outside Kryvyi Rih killed three.
Russia’s drone and missile campaign against civilian filling stations began in earnest in April, mostly in front-line regions, and the strikes are growing more frequent. Oleksandr Sirenko, an analyst at the Ukrainian energy think-tank Nafto Rynok, says at least 246 stations across Ukraine have been hit so far. The Centre for Information Resilience, an open-source investigation non-profit, verified 114 Russian strikes on stations in July alone, up from 66 the month before.
Fuel shortages on the Russian side
The campaign comes while Russia itself has been through two waves of severe fuel shortages, caused by Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries. Shortages have appeared in almost every region. The popular Russian newspaper Izvestia reported last week that petrol could be bought at only 28% of the country’s filling stations.
Ukraine is less exposed. It does not depend on large refineries and fuel depots, bringing in fuel by road in tanker trucks instead. Its market is also crowded with stations, so a driver can usually go elsewhere. “You curse and drive on to another petrol station,” Sirenko says. “OK, you travel for 10km more than you bargained for, but that’s not such a big problem.”
A report by the National Bank of Ukraine found that 4% of the country’s filling stations have been damaged or destroyed, with little effect on the market. Higher sales in regions farther from the front line or the Russian border have made up for the lost stations. Sirenko says the war between the US and Iran is doing more to local fuel prices.
Roads without pumps
Still, parts of the country feel it. Early on the attacks used smaller, remote-controlled drones, Sirenko says. Russia then moved to larger Iranian-made Shahed drones, which cost an estimated $20,000 to $50,000 each. “One petrol station took five Shahed hits,” he says. “These Shaheds cost more than the petrol station.”
No working station remains on some key roads, including the one linking Kharkiv and Dnipro. Every station around Opishnya, a large village in Poltava region, has been destroyed. “You can see our enemy’s strategy. They want to deprive us of fuel,” says village chief Mykola Riznyk, who adds that local authorities have started keeping small stocks of fuel in different spots. In Ukrainian-held parts of Kherson region, almost half the stations have stopped working, and deputy regional administration head Oleksandr Tolokonnikov says the rest are attacked “almost every day.” In Trostyanets, a town of almost 20,000 near the north-eastern border, tanker trucks dispense fuel and keep moving to avoid being hit.
Police in the Dnipropetrovsk region have told motorists to leave stations, and abandon their vehicles if necessary, when air raid alerts sound. “You can fix your car, but you won’t get your life back,” one force says.
Station operators have adapted. Oleksandr Melnychuk of the BRSM Nafta chain says customers no longer browse the shelves. The company has lost eight stations and is rebuilding two more. It is putting up concrete shelters and anti-drone nets at its forecourts and has cut working hours and staffing at some sites.
