Sept 11 (Reuters) - Russia attacked two Kyiv petrol stations with jet-powered drones early on Friday, killing two people in an escalation of strikes that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said were becoming "increasingly terrorist in nature."
Ukraine also carried out drone attacks on Russia, killing two people in the Tula region overnight and one on Friday in the Kursk region, local officials said.
With fighting on the front line largely stalled more than 4-1/2 years into the war in Ukraine, Moscow and
Kyiv have increasingly struck logistics and other economic targets in recent weeks to try to damage the other's war effort.
Russia has for two weeks been carrying out almost constant attacks with faster jet-powered drones that have killed a number of Kyiv residents and disrupted daily life in the capital. The attacks were paused while U.S. peace negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Kyiv at the weekend, but then resumed.
"Russia's escalation with jet-powered 'shaheds' is gradually becoming increasingly terrorist in nature," Zelenskiy said on X.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war, triggered by Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
ATTACKS ON PETROL STATIONS
The two people killed in Kyiv were at one of the two petrol stations that was attacked, officials said, one of them by a double-tap strike.
Friday's strikes followed what appeared to be the first attack on a Kyiv petrol station a day earlier. In recent months, Russia hit some 300 petrol stations, mainly in or near Ukraine's frontline regions.
"There is no military objective behind such strikes. This is terror of the civilian population," said Bohdan Kukura, CEO of Ukrainian oil company Ukrnafta.
A further 12 people, including a 12-year-old boy, were injured in Kyiv on Friday, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. An attack on a Kyiv residential block injured eight people overnight.
Zelenskiy said Russia had hit a building used by Ukraine's largest mobile operator Kyivstar in Kyiv, and there were strikes in eight other Ukrainian regions. Kyivstar's network continued to operate, the company said.
A woman was killed in the Kyiv region surrounding the capital, the regional governor said.
ESCALATING STRIKES
Ukraine, in turn, has attacked Russia's largest online retailers and oil refineries, often deep inside the country, as well as energy and fuel logistics in regions of its own territory occupied by Russian forces.
Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces had hit an enterprise and an oil industry facility in the Saratov and Volgograd regions. He also reported strikes on unnamed targets in other regions and the Black Sea.
Dmitry Milyayev, the governor of Russia's Tula region, said two people had been killed and three injured in Ukrainian drone attacks overnight. A 37-year-old man had been killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in the Kursk region, its governor said.
Russian e-commerce company Ozon said a drone attack had caused a fire at its logistics hub in the central Volga River city of Saratov.
Over two dozen warehouses owned by Ozon and fellow online retailer Wildberries have been hit in recent attacks which Kyiv casts as part of a campaign against economic infrastructure underpinning Russia's war in Ukraine.
Ukraine's military said it had hit a Russian oil refinery in Saratov.
Two people were injured in a missile attack that hit two residential buildings and damaged an industrial facility in Volgograd, which is south of Saratov and also located on the Volga River, local authorities said, without giving details of the industrial facility.
The Volgograd oil refinery run by energy company Lukoil is located on the outskirts of the city.
The governor of Russia's Perm region in the Ural Mountains said two industrial facilities had been attacked by drones.
(Reporting by Gleb Garanich in Kyiv, Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo, Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Michael Perry and Timothy Heritage)
