As Ukraine hits Russia’s refineries, Russia targets Ukraine’s petrol pumps
BBC Homepage
Skip to content
Accessibility Help
Your account
Home
News
… (rest of the navigation menu)
BBC News
Menu
Home
Climate
World
UK
Business
Tech
Science
Entertainment & Arts
Health
In Pictures
More
BBC Verify
Newsbeat
… (rest of the menu)
As Ukraine hits Russia’s refineries, Russia targets Ukraine’s petrol pumps
Image source: Getty Images
Image caption:
Russia has hit more than 200 Ukrainian petrol stations since April, according to a think tank.
By Vitaly Shevchenko, Chief Analyst, BBC Monitoring
Published 4 hours ago
"Fill up quickly and move on," Mayor Ihor Terekhov warns drivers in Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkiv.
Two petrol stations in the city in Ukraine’s north-east were hit by Russian drones on Monday, which local officials say wounded two people. In another attack on a petrol station outside the city of Kryvyi Rih last week, three people were killed.
Russia’s campaign of targeting civilian filling stations with drones and missiles began in earnest in April, primarily in regions on the front line, and the attacks are steadily growing more frequent.
At the same time, Russia has endured two waves of severe fuel shortages across the country as a result of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries.
In total, Russia has hit at least 246 filling stations across Ukraine so far, says Oleksandr Sirenko, an analyst with Ukrainian energy think-tank Nafto Rynok ("Oil Market").
In July alone, the Centre for Information Resilience, an open-source investigation non-profit group, verified 114 Russian strikes on filling stations, compared with 66 the month before.
Given the threat, police have issued special guidance urging motorists to leave petrol stations and, if necessary, to abandon their vehicles whenever air raid alerts sound.
"You can fix your car, but you won’t get your life back," says one police force in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
The damage is highly disruptive and puts civilians at considerable risk. According to Sirenko, initially the attacks were being carried out with smaller, remote-controlled drones, but then Russia started using bigger, more expensive and more destructive Iranian-made Shahed drones. One Shahed drone is estimated to cost between $20,000 (£14,500) and $50,000 (£36,000).
"One petrol station took five Shahed hits," Sirenko tells the BBC. "These Shaheds cost more than the petrol station."
Image source: DSNS
Image caption:
Local people have been warned not to linger at filling stations
Some key roads have no functioning petrol stations left, such as the road linking the two major cities of Kharkiv and Dnipro. All the petrol stations have been destroyed around Opishnya, a large village in neighbouring Poltava region.
"You can see our enemy’s strategy. They want to deprive us of fuel," says village chief Mykola Riznyk. In a video on Facebook, he says local authorities have begun stocking up on fuel, keeping small amounts of it in different locations.
In Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, local resident and driver Kateryna Stokolya says petrol stations everywhere are becoming far stricter about not working during air alerts.
"Now everyone’s making allowances for that, and it’s not a problem," she tells the BBC. "Security comes first. If you can’t fill up now, you’ll fill up later. There are no queues or panic buying."
Stokolya believes that, in carrying out attacks of this nature, Russia’s intended goal is "terrorising the public so we force the government to capitulate or accept agreements that do not favour Ukraine".
In Ukrainian-controlled areas of the partly occupied Kherson region, almost half the petrol stations have stopped working. The others get attacked by Russian drones "almost every day," says local resident Maria Kolesnyk.
