“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.”
