The fire is still burning and maybe growing three days after Kyiv’s drones hit. Smoke is visible for kilometers. Filling station queues are epic. Kremlin-loyal media sees nothing to report.

Oct. 8, 2025

Kamikaze drones hit and set ablaze a major fuel storage site in the Russian-occupied Crimea peninsula in one of Ukraine’s most punishing air attacks against energy infrastructure of the entire war, torching tens of thousands of liters of diesel and gasoline in the fuel-starved region. But for Kremlin-controlled media, it’s been a nothing burger story not worth attention, and fuel shortages and empty filling stations are only temporary, officials say.

On the night of Oct. 6, Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) operators from sites likely in Ukraine’s Odesa region launched a reported 40-aircraft attack using robot planes carrying explosives, jamming equipment, or spoofing electronics targeting the Feodosia Marine Oil Terminal, on the Crimean east coast.

The facility is the Crimea region’s biggest oil storage and transshipment hub, with Russian land, naval, and air forces probably the most important customers. The Feodosia fuel tank farm is also the primary wholesale storage site for sales of diesel and gasoline to Crimea’s civilian economy.

Iconic photo published by the pro-Ukraine blogger Denys Kazansky of a queue of drivers and their automobiles waiting for rationed fuel at a fuel station, with the burning Feodosia fuel tank farm burning in the background. Thanks to an increasingly effective Ukrainian bombardment campaign of Russian oil processing capacity across Russia, Crimean occupation authorities have struggled in recent weeks to deliver drivers and businesses reliable supplies of fuel for their cars and trucks.

Ukrainian news reports, confirmed partially by sightings reported by civilians living in the Feodosia region, suggest the backbone of the complex and successful AFU air raid was 10-20 dinosaur-named Suchomimus (Ukrainian: Сухомімус) drones, a domestically developed pusher-propeller aircraft carrying a 50-100-kilogram (110-220-pound) warhead optimized to penetrate energy infrastructure targets and set them afire.

Russian social media video and comment, followed by Ukrainian official statements, confirmed at least three unimpeded hits between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on at least one fuel storage reservoir. Social media recorded two orange fireballs with secondary explosions. Fires appeared to spread quickly, and by evening, the blaze was visible from space to satellites operated by NASA-run FIRMS world fire watch network.

Parallel attacks carried out by less-powerful Liutyi (Ukrainian Лютий = Fierce) drones hit targets elsewhere in Crimea, including air defense sites near the Saky and Kacha military airfields, and a flight of small, jamming-resistant Rubaka (Ukrainian: “Рубака”) drones probably escorted the main strike package as spoofers, the Crimea Wind news platform reported.

The Feodosia strike was part of a larger wave of drone attacks conducted by Ukrainian forces against Russia overnight Oct. 6-7, involving an estimated 250-300 Ukrainian aircraft launched towards 14 Russian regions along with Russia-occupied Crimea. It was the second-most massive one-night Ukrainian drone assault of the entire war, following a May 2025 wave of raids numbering a reported 524 aircraft.

An AFU statement issued Monday took credit for the attack and claimed that the raid against Feodosia had been successful.

Major Russian media acknowledged the Ukrainian attack in general but stayed practically silent about the hits scored and fires burning at Feodosia. A report by Russian news agency TASS on the strikes across Russia claimed Russian air defense forces shot down more than 180 Ukrainian drones nationwide, and, in a sidebar, informed Russian news consumers that the fires burning in Feodosia were “man-made” – a standard Russian journalistic term for an accident caused by human error rather than military activity

Russian social media image re-published on Monday by the Ukrainian information platform Krymsky Veter showing a fire burning at the Feodosia fuel tank farm.

Kremlin-appointed Crimea Governor Sergei Aksyonov, in a Telegram statement, acknowledged a fire at the Feodosia tank farm “had broken out” but said the blaze was caused not by Ukrainian drones impacting targets successfully, but by falling debris from Ukrainian drones destroyed by local air defenses. Firefighters were on the scene, and authorities have the situation fully under control, he said.

Local authorities evacuated 70,000 Feodosia residents from their homes, according to officials, “as a precaution,” the independent Russian news agency Astra reported on Monday.

Non-state-controlled media in Crimea, and independent news platforms in Ukraine reporting on Feodosia, over the next 48 hours, offered a less placid picture. NASA satellite overflights pinpointed the fire, still burning, at approximately 45°04’09”N 35°23’36”E, near the terminal’s eastern storage area, on Wednesday.

At least four fuel tanks appeared 12 hours after the attack to have been actively burning, and fires seemed to cover about 2.5 square kilometers (1 square mile) of the facility. Limited imagery published by FIRMS/NASA three days after the attack seemed to show the fire had doubled in size.

Local social media widely confirmed the fire appeared to be spreading, and video and still images of Feodosia and the skies above it showed a black smoke cloud originating at the fuel tank farm location and billowing north with prevailing sea winds, for at least 20 kilometers (12 miles). Spot reports from residents in villages 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Feodosia said they could see the smoke from there.

A Kyiv Post check of major Moscow-based media found no reference to the expanding fire and local authorities’ failure to control it in Feodosia from the time of the attack through Wednesday afternoon when this article was published.

RIA Novosti Krym, a top local news source in Crimea, on Wednesday led its news stories with a report on changes planned to public transport and an approaching cold front. The popular pro-Moscow Novosti Krym, a Sevastopol platform, covered filling-station fuel shortages, mixing those reports with news on new holiday resort construction, ongoing road repairs, improved rail service to Moscow, and flu vaccinations for children.

The semi-independent Kafa news, on Tuesday, reported the fact of fires at the fuel base “caused by something.” The blaze was getting smaller, Kafa claimed, in a report conflicting with other sources, including NASA satellite overflights.

Ukraine, in late July, kicked off a drone bombardment campaign targeting oil refineries, fuel storage sites, and oil and fuel pipelines with the stated objectives of reducing Russian oil processing capacity, and oil export earnings. By early October, about 38-40% of all oil processing capacity in the Russian Federation had been taken offline by Ukrainian drone strikes, energy industry reports say.

Supply chain shortages have rippled through the Russian fuel supply network, confronting motorists with kilometers-long fuel station queues across central and eastern Russia. The worst-hit territory has been Russia-occupied Crimea, where fuel stations were closed and out of fuel for days in late September, and in the past week, gasoline and diesel have been tightly rationed at 20 liters maximum per vehicle.

A 2024 drone strike hitting the Feodosia fuel tank farm, set on fire and destroyed about one-third of the facility’s total 34 reservoir capacity. Based on the number of reservoirs shown to be currently still on fire per NASA/FIRMS data, at least another one-quarter to one-third of the storage site’s capacity probably went up in smoke in the past 72 hours, a Kyiv Post review of overflight data found.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/61675