Russia has intensified its missile and drone strikes on economic and logistics facilities in Ukraine in recent weeks, disrupting the last 3 major steel plants and destroying about 2.1 million square metres of modern warehouse space, according to data from Ukrainian officials and businesspeople. Serhii Kurytskyi said the government could lose about 1.5 billion dollars in tax revenue as a result of the attacks.
The strikes have hit shopping centres, warehouses and distribution centres, disrupting businesses in the retail, publishing, pharmaceutical and logistics sectors and causing shortages of some goods in Kyiv stores for the first time since the early stages of the war in 2022.
Plants accounting for 90% of steel production disrupted
Ballistic missile attacks in early September disrupted the last 3 major steel plants in Ukraine’s industrial regions in the east and southeast, killing 17 workers. The steel plant in Zaporizhzhia was also hit again last Thursday, in its fourth attack in less than a month.
Oleksandr Vodoviz, an official at mining and steel company Metinvest, said the company’s plants and ArcelorMittal’s facility in Kryvyi Rih, which together had accounted for about 90% of the country’s steel production, had ceased operations entirely. He added that the scale of the damage made it difficult to determine when production could resume, warning of repercussions for jobs and tax revenue.
Ukraine effectively no longer has a steel industry, and the attackers had a thorough understanding of the plants’ technical infrastructure and specifically targeted the blast furnaces.
Damage to warehouses and transport networks
Ukrainian businessman Ruslan Shustak said about 2.1 million square metres out of the country’s 5 million square metres of modern warehouse space had been destroyed, including about 900,000 square metres in recent months alone. Ukrainian officials say that targeting storage and distribution centres is putting pressure on domestic supply chains and raising the costs of transporting and storing goods.
The attacks have also extended to railway infrastructure in western Ukraine and fuel stations. On 13 September 2026, a Russian drone hit a passenger train near the Polish border, while another railway line came under fire minutes after prominent foreign figures had crossed the border.
Funding gap and pressure on exports
Serhii Kurytskyi said the government could lose about 1.5 billion dollars in tax revenue as a result of the attacks, at a time when Kyiv is facing a new funding gap estimated at about 27 billion dollars during the current year. The government also estimates that Russian restrictions on shipping in the Black Sea are costing the Ukrainian economy losses equivalent to about 1.5% of gross domestic product.
Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotskyi said alternative export routes enabled Ukraine to export only about 40% of its usual volumes of agricultural products. Anton Dzhemyerdyiev, commercial director of agricultural company TAS Agro, said export bottlenecks had forced the company to store wheat in large bags in open fields, adding that the ports were out of operation and the Danube route was almost at a standstill because of the strikes and labour shortages.
Mutual economic attrition
Olena Bilan, chief economist at Kyiv-based investment bank Dragon Capital, said the Ukrainian economy would not grow during the current year, predicting that companies affected by attacks on warehouses would pass some of the additional costs on to consumers. She described the confrontation as an “economic war of attrition” in which Russia is targeting the Ukrainian economy, while Kyiv is seeking to influence the Russian economy through long-range strikes.
Ukraine, in turn, has been carrying out long-range drone attacks on Russian refineries, warehouses and cargo ships, aiming to reduce Moscow’s revenues and push Russian President Vladimir Putin back to the negotiating table, according to Ukrainian officials. The economic confrontation has widened since the war began in February 2022, with power stations, transport networks and industrial facilities inside Ukraine being targeted, while Kyiv has stepped up attacks on targets inside Russia over the past two years.
