Ukraine's postal vans run cash, medicine and pensions to villages under Russian fire

On the night of June 7–8, a Russian Shahed drone struck Ukrposhta's sorting hub in Kharkiv, damaging equipment, destroying some customers' parcels, and forcing Ukraine's state postal service to reroute its entire logistics operation for the country's northeast. No one was killed — a fact the company's CEO, Ihor Smilianskyi, called the most important thing. By 4 a.m., staff were already reconfiguring routes. By evening, two daily delivery runs into Kharkiv had been organised to get surviving parcels to recipients.

Overnight, a Shahed drone struck our Ukrposhta sorting hub in Kharkiv. Thanks to the safety measures we had put in place in advance, everyone survived, and that is the most important thing.— Ihor Smilianskyi, CEO, Ukrposhta

The Kharkiv strike was not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern that has played out across Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022: Ukrposhta keeps moving, and Russia keeps hitting it. According to data the company provided to Foreign Policy, 15 Ukrposhta employees had been killed and 14 injured in the war's first months, with 480 post offices damaged and 50 destroyed. Strikes on sorting hubs in Kharkiv in June are among the most recent recorded attacks.

The same night the Kharkiv hub was hit, a Russian drone also struck the roof of Depot No. 5 belonging to Nova Poshta, Ukraine's largest private postal operator, causing a fire and a partial structural collapse, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

What makes Ukrposhta's continued operation remarkable is not just its resilience under fire, but what it is actually delivering: cash pensions, utility bill payments, food, medicine, and parcels to villages near the front line where banks, ATMs, and shops have long since closed or fled. In the southern Mykolaiv region, unarmored white and yellow Citroën vans driven by a few dozen middle-aged and older men navigate roads broken by shelling — aging asphalt giving way to dusty alleys and sandy tracks — to reach communities that have no other connection to the state.

These villages don't have banks, don't have ATMs, often don't have shops, and we provide all this. That's why it's so important.— Yehor Kosorukov, head of Ukrposhta for the Mykolaiv region

A single delivery run can take three hours to cover roughly 47 miles, through half-deserted villages and military checkpoints. The drivers are paid around $200 a month. Their vans are not armoured.

We're scared every day. But what can you do? Just cross yourself and pray.— Oleksandr Adamtchuk, 52-year-old Ukrposhta driver, Mykolaiv

We should be paid double, considering that a rocket could fall on us at any moment. Instead, salaries have been lowered since the war began, and prices are rising.— Oleksandr Adamtchuk, 52-year-old Ukrposhta driver, Mykolaiv

The danger is not only to vehicles on the road. On January 24, 2026, Russian forces struck a postal vehicle with a drone in the village of Taras Shevchenko in the Beryslav District of Kherson region. The two Ukrposhta employees — a 52-year-old woman and a 36-year-old man — were uninjured but unable to drive back through the shelling. Police evacuated them to a safer settlement, according to Zmina.

Staffing has become as serious a problem as the shelling. At Ukrposhta's main regional office in Mykolaiv, just 70 of the 330 people employed there before the war are still working, according to Kosorukov. Women and children have fled the country; men have joined the military. The post offices that remain open are largely kept running by brigades of women.

We're the only state company that operates in these villages, and people wait for us.— Valentina Matkivska, head of the post office in Novyi Buh

Novyi Buh, roughly 55 miles north of Mykolaiv, sits about 37 miles from the front line and serves as a departure point for Ukrposhta vehicles heading toward the fighting. In May, a Russian strike destroyed a building in the town centre, killing one person; the blast shattered every window in Matkivska's post office 100 metres away.

After the Kharkiv hub strike, Ukrposhta moved quickly to limit disruption. Backup facilities in another city were activated to process shipments for Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts. Long-haul trucks already en route to Kharkiv were redirected to alternative sorting centres from 3 a.m. onward. The company said it would urgently relocate equipment from other regions, deploy reserve resources, and purchase additional equipment. Customers whose parcels were destroyed will receive compensation, with notifications expected to go out after verification lists are completed.

The service's role has grown well beyond what anyone imagined before the war. Ukrposhta processed 502 metric tons of parcels sent from Ukraine to Poland in the first half of 2022 alone — up from just 34 metric tons in all of 2021 — as it helped support Ukrainians evacuating the country. Its stamps became a morale symbol: tens of thousands of people queued to buy prints featuring a Ukrainian soldier giving a Russian warship the middle finger, and a Ukrainian tractor towing a destroyed Russian tank. But it is the quieter work — the pension cash handed through a van window to an elderly woman in a shelled village, the bottle of sunflower oil sold at a subsidised price where no shop remains — that has made Ukrposhta, as Foreign Policy put it, one of the most striking illustrations of Ukraine's transformation into a wartime society.

Why it matters — Ukrposhta is often the only state institution still functioning in Ukraine's front-line villages, meaning Russian strikes on its staff and infrastructure directly cut off pensions, medicine, and food for some of the country's most vulnerable civilians.

Reported by com.ua, pravda.com.ua, telegraph.co.uk, euromaidanpress.com, zmina.info, foreignpolicy.com