Ukraine's patrol police plans to expand its network of so-called "phantom" cars, unmarked vehicles fitted with automatic speed cameras, the head of the patrol police, Oleksiy Biloshytskyi, said on the television channel My-Ukraina.
Biloshytskyi said the plans include increasing the number of phantom vehicles. He said that once the fleet grows, police will decide which areas need the vehicles most, but that Lviv region and Dnipropetrovsk region would certainly be among them. He added that Kyiv region would probably also get more phantom cars, though details would be announced later.
Kyiv and the surrounding region relaunched phantom patrols on August 31. On their first day back, the cars recorded 810 traffic violations.
The figures are similar to those from the program's original launch. When phantom cars first went on Ukraine's roads in 2022, four vehicles recorded 990 violations on their first day of operation.
Three phantom cars currently operate in Kyiv and the region.
How the phantom cars work
The vehicles look almost identical to ordinary cars but are equipped with modern automatic speed-detection systems. They can measure the speed of other vehicles whether the phantom car is moving or parked, and they record violations from traffic travelling in both directions, oncoming and same-direction.
Once a car is caught speeding, the system reads its license plate, checks it against a database and forwards the case to an automatic processing system that issues an administrative violation notice on its own. Most cases are handled without the offending vehicle ever being stopped.
A program interrupted by the war
Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs first announced the phantom car program in March 2021. The first phantom vehicles appeared on Kyiv's roads on January 25, 2022. They were pulled from service about a month later, in February 2022, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and did not return to the roads until August 31, 2026, the last day of summer.
Debate over the speeding threshold
In 2025, members of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, proposed lowering the threshold at which drivers avoid fines for speeding to 10 km/h. Under current rules, drivers are not fined at all if they exceed the speed limit by less than 20 km/h, which in practice means the "real" speed limit in built-up areas is 70 km/h, on top of the standard 50 km/h limit.
Speeding was the cause of 55% of road deaths in Ukraine in 2024, accounting for 1,770 of the 3,202 people killed on the country's roads that year.
Biloshytskyi said further details on reinforcing patrols in Kyiv region would be announced at a later date.
