Tatiana stopped talking upon hearing the first bursts of machine gun fire. The last air raid alert had sounded just minutes before. One of the feared jet-powered “Geranios” (the most modern version of the Shahed drone) was approaching the capital district of Holoiivskyi.
The Ukrainian woman ran to hide. Almost at the same moment two rockets from the local defense streaked through the air trying to intercept the Russian drone. They did not succeed. Its speed surpassed them. One of the missiles exploded in the air while the device continued its course. A few seconds later, a distant detonation was heard. It had hit another neighborhood.
It was not even 10 in the morning and the 60-year-old guard had already had to overcome the same predicament twice. The first time was at 8:00 when another unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) of the same model crashed into the gas station located on the other side of the street. The gas station roof ended up in flames.
An hour later, the firefighters had already extinguished the small fire. “The explosion was heard from the subway. Just yesterday we had training. The protocol is to abandon our workplace quickly as soon as the alarm sounds and take refuge in the subway,” recounted Oleksandr Nochshevsky, an employee of a medical center adjacent to the gas station.
The conversation was also interrupted when the loudspeakers thundered again. Another alarm. Her colleagues, who had just returned to the offices, rushed out. Some could not hide their fear.
Social media filled with warnings. “Leave the gas stations and shopping centers! The drones are entering the city! Please be careful!” read the messages. Others warned about the locations where the presence of the Russian devices was detected.
“It’s pure terror,” said Oleksandr Nochshevsky before resuming his way to the subway.
Thus, amid pure alarm, Kyiv woke up this Tuesday to yet another day of the aerial offensive launched by Moscow against the Ukrainian capital in its attempt to “paralyze it”—according to the expression used by local media—with constant attacks, mainly carried out by its new jet drones, the so-called next-generation “Geran” (Geranios).
The expansion of attacks with “Geranios”
The wave of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of the day left at least one dead and nearly a dozen injured. The bombings continued this Wednesday, giving no respite to the country’s main city.
The Russian tactic has changed since early this summer, when it still used to resort to massive assaults on Kyiv using hundreds of drones and missiles spaced out over time. Now they are almost daily assaults, with a smaller number of devices but an increase in ballistic missiles and especially jet UAVs, whose speed exceeds the capabilities of the local air defense.
The escalation began in June. If Moscow then used about 350 “Geranios” jet drones across the country, that number quintupled in July to reach 1,500 and rose to 2,800 in August, according to Air Force spokesman Yuri Ihnat.
According to satellite images analyzed by experts, the central axis of Moscow’s aerial operation against Kyiv has been set on the village of Tsymbulova, in the southern Oryol region, where the Russians have built a gigantic base intended for the massive launch of the new “Geranios”.
Ukrainian media already warned in December that these facilities could accommodate up to 500 UAVs and now alert about the recent expansion of their logistics.
The bombing of the gas station in the aforementioned Holoiivskyi neighborhood was added to a similar incident in another capital district. Since the beginning of this month, Moscow has transferred to Kyiv the systematic campaign against Ukrainian gas stations that it started in spring in many other parts of the country such as Kharkiv, Kherson, or Zaporizhzhia.
Yaroslav Starovoitenko, president of the Ukrainian Oil and Gas Association, estimates that so far Russian UAVs have attacked “about 300 gas stations across the country,” which represents between 5% and 6% of all the facilities operating in its territory.
“80% of the damaged gas stations have been repaired and are operating again. Russia thought it could respond this way to our attacks on their oil and gas production centers, which have indeed caused a fuel shortage there. That is not happening here. There are no queues at the gas stations,” Starovoitenko states.
If on routes such as those heading to the city of Kharkiv, burned fuel stations had already been a common sight for months, this grim image has begun to multiply across Kyiv.
Bogdan Kukura, CEO of Ukraine’s largest oil producer and gas station network operator, Ukrnafta, explained to this newspaper that in other parts of the country they have had to allocate a special budget to equip many of their facilities with logistics that would seem almost dystopian in any Western European city: “we are strengthening the protection of the stations with anti-drone nets, shelters, and gabions [metal domes] to protect our equipment from shrapnel.” “We have also started placing gabions in Kyiv,” he added.
The Ukrnafta executive confirms that these premises, frequented by Ukrainians not only to refuel but also to enjoy the modern cafes and restaurants that had been added to the initial business, have become a priority target of Russian drones this year. Until mid-September, the company had counted “more than 130 attacks, a number higher than the combined attacks of the previous four years.”
The attacks on gas stations are part of the harrowing escalation of violence carried out by Moscow’s forces in Kyiv, which has also suffered repeated assaults on logistics facilities, warehouses, and shopping centers in recent months. An extension of the massive destruction campaign that seems to have been undertaken in the rest of the country. “Russia has doubled down with a total war scenario”, headlined the newspaper The Kyiv Independent last month.
Russia’s strategy
For Ihor Romanenko, former lieutenant general and former number two of the Ukrainian army’s General Staff, the main Russian objective is “to generate a strong psychological impact among citizens, who cannot live normally.”
The former military man acknowledges that the massive emergence of jet-powered “Geranios” constitutes “a management failure.” “Military and political commanders have not acted in time, despite the fact that the Russians began testing this type of weapon a year ago,” he adds.
During the European Strategy Yalta conference held last week, Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Serhiy Koretskyi, acknowledged “the significant destruction” caused by the intensification of Russian bombings. “The logistics industry, metallurgy, pharmaceutical companies, and the agricultural sector have been affected. It is a huge challenge and, currently, we do not have a tool to solve this problem [the new Geranios],” admitted the head of the executive.
“Russia wants to destroy the Ukrainian economy to break our resistance”, the president himself, Volodymyr Zelensky, supported him.
The intervention of both came a few days after Ukraine’s Finance Minister, Serhiy Marchenko, announced an emergency austerity plan to try to deal with the damage caused by this spiral. “We are forced to implement measures to limit spending,” he said.
His colleague in charge of the Economy department, Oleksandr Kravchenko, estimated that the losses generated by this offensive could exceed 10 billion dollars this year, an amount representing around 4.5% of its GDP, and lowered the growth forecast from 1.3% to a mere 0.5%.
The devastating effect of the Russian assault is obvious if you travel near Kyiv, along the highway leading to the northern city of Chernihiv. Here, just a few kilometers from the capital, huge stretches of warehouses of well-known companies such as Rozetka or Raben are reduced to piles of scorched metal and aluminum.
The same happens with the facilities of what was one of the main distribution centers of the Epicentr company in the capital.
From one of the few staircases that survived the fire, the 20,000 square meters that emulated the modern logistics complexes of Amazon and could accommodate up to 250,000 packages of various sizes now appear as an endless succession of scorched alloys and plastic. The huge blaze lasted more than a day and caused the four levels of the structures to melt into a compact mass of burnt scrap.
“They were two missiles. Ten fire teams came and even they could not stop the fire. Thousands of millions of hryvnias have been lost”, says Oleksandr Khimich, one of the center’s managers who witnessed the event. That same day, Russian drones and rockets also hit another complex of the same company located on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Russian drones have razed or caused serious damage to dozens of storage centers since early July. The magazine Forbes Ukraine estimated that these actions have resulted in the destruction of more than 400,000 square meters of these complexes. At the end of August, authorities said that 90% of the country’s modern storage facilities had been completely destroyed or damaged.
Without becoming a widespread situation, some capital supermarkets have been forced to display empty shelves during these weeks with signs referring to the crisis. “Dear customers: due to an enemy attack, some items are taking longer to arrive. This is not the first time. We will get through this,” read one of them. “Russia destroyed this product”, said another.
Kyiv’s response
One of the main Ukrainian chains of these establishments, Atb, announced at the end of August that it was imposing a purchase limit on some goods to avoid speculation.
The air raids in Kyiv intensified from August 27. Between that day and September 1, the capital had to face more than 60 air alerts during 52 hours. That month, shopping centers, for example, had to suspend their activities due to threats one out of every five hours.
“Every time the alarms sound, employees and customers must be evacuated. The most important thing is the lives of our customers but it is obvious that this dynamic causes great economic losses,” says Victoria Savitska, spokesperson for Epicentr.
During the first days of this month, several Russian actions destroyed hundreds of tons of medicines stored in the country’s main metropolis and the nearby city of Boryspil.
Russian rockets and drones have also stepped up the bombing of the country’s most emblematic metallurgical centers, located in Zaporizhia and Krivy Rih.
After the third missile attack on its facilities in that first city in the last 30 days, the company Metinvest, owned by magnate Rinat Akhmetov, acknowledged that these assaults pursue “the systematic destruction of Ukraine’s industry and its economic base. The damages are critical.”
But the “total war” is not one-sided. Unlike previous years, Russia is suffering the Ukrainian counterattack, which now applies the eye-for-an-eye principle. Its drones have repeatedly struck this summer the warehouses of the two main distribution companies in that country: Wildberries and Ozon. According to the Ukrainian magazine NV, up to 22 times in the case of the first company since July 18.
The bombings of facilities related to the oil industry are also causing significant damage to the point that days ago the International Energy Agency revised down Russian production to around 4 million barrels per day, a 30% decrease compared to pre-2022 levels.
The Institute for the Study of War calculated that Ukrainian UAVs have hit 26 Russian refineries since the beginning of this year.
The most immediate result has been the restrictions that Russian gas stations have to face. According to sources from that country cited by Reuters, current production only covered 70% of national requirements.
The head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Forces, Robert Madyar Brovdi, indicated on the 12th that his drones had attacked 285 tankers of the so-called Russian “ghost fleet” in July and August in the Black Sea, which has forced these vessels to suspend their movements in several regions of this maritime space.
Within this dynamic, the bilateral offensive against cargo ships and logistics destined for the export of the adversary’s agricultural products is generating a rapid escalation of grain prices worldwide—Russia and Ukraine are two key exporters of these foods globally—anticipating a possible crisis for many states dependent on this supply route.
“It will be very difficult for us. But many other countries will be in worse situations. They simply will not have food. They will have nothing to eat, even if they have money,” President Zelensky said on the 11th.
For Ukrainian analyst Mykola Beleskov, this devastating aerial struggle has only one possible end: “Russia and Ukraine are pushing each other back to the Stone Age. A war of attrition is a war that sacrifices the future.”
