Ukrainian drones struck an oil depot in the Cossack village of Poltavskaya in Russia's Krasnodar Krai overnight on 16 June, setting off a fire. Russian regional authorities again attributed the blaze to falling debris from intercepted drones — the explanation they have offered after earlier strikes.
The depot is not a refinery.It takes in fuel from regional plants, including Lukoil facilities, and feeds it to filling stations across Krasnodar Krai. Those are the same networks that started running dry in early June, when Krasnodar followed Crimea into gasoline shortage.
A depot feeding a region already short
The operational headquarters said no one was hurt, that 32 personnel and seven units of equipment were fighting the fire, and that a local road had been closed. Poltavskaya sits about 80 km west of the regional capital and roughly 385 km from the front line.
By 11 June, gasoline shortages had spread to at least 25 Russian oblasts and six occupied Ukrainian ones, with rationing reaching Moscow and St. Petersburg. Ukrainian drones hit Russian refineries 16 times in May, the highest monthly total of the war.
"A full-fledged fuel crisis is beginning to form in Russia," Finam strategist Yaroslav Kabakov wrote in a note cited by Moscow Times on 15 June. The shock, he said, now comes "from the supply side" — not from seasonal demand or market speculation.
Subsidies, then weaker fuel
Moscow has tried to spend its way through. Oil companies took in 700 billion rubles ($9.5 billion) in subsidies across April and May. The Energy Ministry stood up a task force on 8 June. In June, the government let refiners cut quality, permitting Euro-3 gasoline in place of Euro-5.
Neither the subsidies nor the lower-grade fuel rebuilds a refinery a drone has hit, and the strikes have not stopped. Krasnodar Krai governor Veniamin Kondratyev called the shortage "artificial hype." Residents mocked him under his own Telegram post. The depot that burned at Poltavskaya was one of the places that fuel was supposed to pass through on its way to the pumps.
A second Krasnodar target the night before
Poltavskaya was the second oil facility hit in Krasnodar Krai in two nights. Drones struck the Kavkaz port in the Temryuk district overnight on 14–15 June, the Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi reported.
A fire broke out at the port's oil terminal, confirmed by NASA's FIRMS satellite system. The Kavkaz depot helps supply fuel to occupied Crimea and parts of the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Donetsk oblasts.
Those are the regions where Russia has been hauling gasoline to the front in the trunks of civilian cars.
A separate blow to crude exports
Ukraine has also gone after the export end of the chain. On 14 June, the Special Operations Forces said they had sabotaged the Palkino pumping station in Yaroslavl Oblast, working with the Russian partisan group Chornaya Iskra (Black Spark).
The station feeds the Surgut–Polotsk pipeline that moves Siberian crude toward the Baltic export terminal at Primorsk. Inside Russia, the group wrote, "the Hunger Games for gasoline are starting."
A Planet Labs satellite image published by Radio Liberty, dated 15 June, showed a fire at the station.
