Pills for cartels: how the pharmaceutical market in Ukraine is being sold to gas station owners

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When top government officials start talking in chorus about “cheapness” and “caring for grandmothers in the villages,” it’s time to hold on to your wallets. In Ukraine, an unprecedented in its cynicism scheme for the redistribution of a multibillion-dollar market is unfolding before our eyes.

A scheme where the government-parliamentary triumvirate of Svyrydenko-Lyashko-Radutsky acts as architects, and the beneficiaries are large fuel networks that have long proven their ability to engage in cartel collusion.

What they are trying to sell us under the beautiful guise of “deregulation and accessibility” is actually an act of conscious necroeconomics. The state is paralyzing the system of training professional pharmacists with its own hands in order to open gas stations with their cashiers on an artificially cleared field. And this is not reform, it is an ordinary raider’s seizure of a strategic industry that threatens national security.

ACT I. OPERATION “150 POINTS”

Any market capture begins with the destruction of existing institutions. To justify the admission to the drug market of people without specialized education (gas station workers), it was necessary to create an artificial shortage of certified specialists. This mission was brilliantly accomplished. The introduction of a rigid threshold of 150 NMT points for admission to the specialty I8 “Pharmacy” is a decision that directly contradicts the realities of wartime.

The state requires applicants to have perfect knowledge of history or mathematics, ignoring the fact that the school was formed under shelling, in shelters and without light. Expecting perfect scores in such conditions is far from reality. The quality of a graduate is controlled by strict professional exams of the Unified State Examinations Commission: STEP-1 and STEP-2. These exams are the real filter of competence. Instead, the National Vocational Training Center has become a mechanism for eliminating recruitment:

– In 2022 (the beginning of the great war), the drop in enrollment was 27%.
– In 2024 (the introduction of 150 points), enrollment fell by 69%.
– In 2025, only 163 students enrolled in a master’s degree after school in the entire country.

Who will work in pharmacies, in production, in quality control in 5 years? Without students, there will be no specialists, and without specialists, the actual production of medicines and innovations will stop. The consequences of this inaction are the closure of scientific institutions, the outflow of young people abroad, and the loss of competitiveness of Ukrainian pharma.

The government gave the answer to the question “who will work?” very quickly. A cashier at a gas station will work, who will simultaneously punch you a hot dog and diesel.

ACT II. THE ECONOMY OF THE ABSURD

The initiative of First Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko to “reduce prices for medicines through their sale at gas stations” is office populism of the highest order. I wonder what exactly Ms. Svyrydenko read to students at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE)? Because there is no microeconomic logic in her statements. An attempt to pass off the expansion of sales channels as a tool for reducing prices demonstrates an absolute detachment from the realities of the consumer market. The problem is that the government is introducing medicines into a channel whose economy is built not on social accessibility, but on expensive convenience retail.

Any first-year student knows: gas stations in Ukraine are premium retail. In global fuel retail, the margin on fuel is thin, and the main profit is generated by the internal non-fuel segment. Data from the global association NACS show that in 2024, food service provided 27.7% of sales inside gas stations, but generated as much as 38.6% of gross profit. The profitability of this business has long moved inside the premises. The gas station customer pays for the location, the absence of queues, and 24/7 service. Expecting that a site where a regular bottle of water costs one and a half to two times more than in a supermarket will suddenly become a driver of deflation for medicines is a marketing oxymoron.

Fuel networks enter the pharmaceutical sector not to operate within the logic of a cheap social service (the markups on related goods there are at least 30–40%). They enter there for new traffic and extra profits. It is very likely that the author of the initiative has not visited a gas station as an ordinary customer for a long time, because a company car with a driver quickly erases the understanding of the value of the “household basket.”

ACT III. CARTEL RECURRENCE

It is particularly worrying that the government is voluntarily giving this new socially sensitive market to a sector that already has an official history of competition and concentration problems.

In 2019, the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU) held WOG, OKKO, and SOCAR responsible for anticompetitive concerted actions in setting retail prices for A-95 gasoline and diesel. The total amount of fines exceeded 77 million hryvnias. Against this background, the market continues to rapidly concentrate: the top 10 gas station chains already provide 54% of fuel sales in the country. OKKO receives permits to acquire competitors, UPG expands to over 300 stations. You are opening the pharmaceutical market for business, some of whose players already have a proven antimonopoly history.

In March 2026, Svyrydenko publicly stated the need to stabilize the fuel market, demanded a “minimum markup” from Ukrnafta and increased control by the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine and the State Service for the Protection of Consumer Rights in order to avoid price manipulation. That is, the government itself officially admits that fuel networks are prone to manipulation and require supervision. But if this risk is so obvious for diesel, then what logic is the Cabinet of Ministers guided by, giving these same companies the right to sell medicines – a product where the buyer is in the weakest and most dependent negotiating position? In the fuel market, the government imitates the fight against their monopoly, and in the pharmaceutical market, it personally lays the red carpet for them.

ACT IV. LIES ABOUT THE “VILLAGE”

The economic absurdity of this idea required medical cover. Viktor Lyashko and the head of the relevant Verkhovna Rada committee, Mykhailo Radutsky, instead of standing up for patients, actually played the role of lobbyists for the fuel giants.

They know perfectly well that selling medicines is a tough temperature regime that cannot be controlled in a vending machine on the highway in the July heat. This is pharmaceutical care that a cashier will not provide. Implementing these standards in non-specialized retail requires huge investments that the business will transfer to the buyer.

The argument about “caring for grandmothers in the villages” does not stand up to scrutiny by facts at all. The main consumers of goods at gas stations are car owners whose income is higher than the average. For them, the difference in price is not an incentive to buy – it is simply satisfying an impulsive need on the road. And for socially vulnerable groups, a bright gas station is the last resort for shopping.

Moreover, the state already had a pharmaceutical answer to the problem of territorial accessibility. From July 1, 2025, all licensed pharmacies were to join the “Affordable Medicines” program, and the routes of mobile pharmacies covered more than 1,000 settlements. If after this the government still chooses gas stations as a “solution”, this means only one thing: it is not about accessibility. It is about transferring retail circulation to the right people.

ACT V. RESOLUTION No. 1802

The other side of this package of decisions looks especially cynical. On the same December 26, 2025, the government opened the doors to gas stations with Resolution No. 1803, and with a parallel Resolution No. 1802, it forced classic pharmacies in the premises of state and municipal hospitals into the “only the three lowest prices” regime.

That is, for a classic hospital pharmacy, where a professional pharmacist works, it is an artificial narrowing of the assortment and financial pressure. And for a large fuel retailer, it is a green light for the entire over-the-counter market. This is a redistribution of the market: the pharmaceutical infrastructure is being cut, the fuel infrastructure is being expanded.

Conclusions

The real work of regulating the pharmaceutical market is difficult. It involves controlling distributors’ margins, simplifying registration, and combating the monopoly of large pharmacy chains. But why break the bank on complex reforms when you can simply give another high-margin market to the fuel cartels and call it “caring for people”?

And guess who will pay for it? The business will inevitably pass on all these costs to the buyer. As a result, we will not get a discount, but a “pharmacy corner” with a very limited assortment and price tags that will be consistently higher than the market average by the same 30-40%.
Fuel giants, which have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to engage in cartel collusion in the gasoline and diesel market, will now also profit with impunity from the health of Ukrainians.

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