Ukrainian drones struck a logistics complex belonging to Russian online retailer Ozon in Orenburg on 23 August, the second Ozon warehouse hit in two days, monitoring Telegram channels reported. The site sits about 1,200 km from the war zone, near Russia's border with Kazakhstan. Hours earlier, a large fire tore through a separate warehouse outside St. Petersburg, roughly 900 km north of Ukraine, though local authorities declared no drone or missile threat.

Drones hit Russia's biggest Ozon warehouse

Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ published video of the strike moment, after which a fire took hold on the site. Independent Russian outlet Astra analyzed eyewitness footage showing an emergency vehicle racing toward the depot. The complex spans more than 200,000 m² and was designed to hold over 31 million items, ranking among Ozon's biggest in Russia.

The warehouse stands inside the city's special economic zone, a tax-favored industrial park on the eastern edge of European Russia. The first phase opened in August 2024, and a second building followed in 2025.

Orenburg mayor Albert Yumadilov claimed several drones were downed over the special economic zone and that debris fell on the Ozon complex, starting a fire that crews quickly put out with no one hurt. 

Ozon confirmed the strike, saying it evacuated more than 300 workers, pulled its goods from the marketplace and stopped taking new deliveries while the site sat idle. 

A second fire near St. Petersburg, with no air-raid alert

Overnight, a large blaze hit a warehouse in the Kolpino area south of St. Petersburg. Astra established that the warehouse stood about 350 m from an Ozon site, and witnesses said they heard no drones or air defense. Ukrainian Telegram channel Exile+ identified the burning facility as a storage warehouse run by Logistera.

Part of a widening campaign on Russian marketplace logistics

The Orenburg hit followed the first-ever Ozon strike a day earlier, at a warehouse in Chapaevsk, Samara Oblast. Before turning to Ozon, Ukrainian drones had struck more than 10 warehouses belonging to the larger Russian marketplace Wildberries. Such marketplace hubs move not only consumer goods but dual-use items like electronics and drone components that can reach Russia's military.

Since mid-July, Ukrainian drones have burned their way through the warehouses of Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon, and how much of it is gone has become a question with too many answers.

Estimates in circulation range from a fifth of the company’s network to well over half, and they clash because each counts something different.

Only by sorting out what each figure measures can you see what the campaign has actually done—and what it has done is heavier, where it counts, than the modest numbers suggest.

Ukraine has concentrated its drones on a couple of dozen hubs that move most of the goods, while the hundreds of small depots that pad the total remain mostly untouched.

Wildberries is no marginal target. Nearly half of everything Russians buy online runs through it, a marketplace as woven into daily life there as Amazon is in the West. And Kyiv is not burning it for the sneakers.

Estonian military intelligence reports that Wildberries, though not a military firm, supplies the Russian armed forces with kit bought straight off the platform—body armor and drone parts—a case Ukraine makes too. Wildberries denies it.

Yet once the strikes began, the company pulled its “SVO” tag, the label that had gathered those goods in one place, while the goods stayed on sale under other categories; it also barred warehouse workers from carrying camera phones.

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Count the hubs, and the damage jumps

The clash comes down to the word “network.” Most of Wildberries’ floor space is scattered across small sorting points that would hardly be missed if one burned. Set the damage against all of it, and the loss—about a fifth—looks minor.

But the parcels move through these two dozen hubs that hold more than half the company’s space, and those are the ones Ukraine has hit: more than a third are damaged, and by another count, well over half are out of action. It is the same campaign counted in two ways, and only the second shows its aim.

The gap between a building’s size and its damage is easy to miss, and the biggest hub shows how. Koledino, outside Moscow, covers more than 200,000 square meters, and that number keeps getting logged as a loss.

It shouldn’t be. When a drone came down there on 28 July, the fire took a neighboring warehouse—a separate operator that stocks shelves for chains like Lenta and Auchan—while the Wildberries hub kept working.

Damage reaches beyond the warehouses

The Wildberries strikes are one arm of a declared campaign. On 25 June, Zelenskyy announced a 40-day operation to pressure Russia to end the war.

The warehouse strikes began on 18 July near Moscow and have since spread across a dozen regions, reaching as far as Yekaterinburg in the Urals.

The cost runs beyond floor space. At least eight people have been killed in the strikes so far—warehouse staff and residents caught near the hubs when the drones came down. And the pressure is pushing the company outward: Wildberries is scouting for storage in Kazakhstan, hunting warehouse space beyond the reach of Ukrainian drones.

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The fires have become a line in Russia’s budget. The Kremlin is weighing state loans to keep Wildberries upright—at a point when the federal deficit had, halfway through 2026, already outrun the shortfall the Treasury set aside for the entire year.

Oil and gas revenue, the Kremlin’s main source of war funding, keeps falling short. Russia appears unwilling to let a company this central fail. Paying to save it, hub by burned hub, is the bill Ukraine is now handing Moscow.

Russia destroyed a Bosch warehouse in Ukraine overnight into 5 August, the German manufacturer said. The strike wiped out its stock of household goods and industrial technology. No Bosch employee or worker for its logistics partner was injured.

The strike was part of Russia's intensified attacks on the warehouses and distribution centers that supply Ukraine. Destroying these facilities eliminates stored goods and disrupts the delivery of food, parcels, equipment, and other essential products. Recent attacks have hit both Ukrainian companies and international brands operating in the country.

Bosch said the warehouse premises belonged to its logistics partner. The company's preliminary assessment found that all Bosch products stored there had been destroyed. It did not disclose the location.

Bosch and its logistics partner are now assessing the damage. They are also seeking ways to maintain operations and meet commitments to customers and business partners.

Russia launches anti-ship missiles on stocks

The Bosch loss came during the same overnight barrage that devastated warehouses and production sites across Kyiv and the surrounding region. Russian strikes destroyed facilities used by Rozetka, Nova Poshta, and Epicentr. The three companies distribute parcels, household goods, and construction supplies across Ukraine.

That attack killed 17 people and wounded 44. Ukraine intercepted none of the 24 ballistic missiles or four anti-ship missiles Russia launched, according to Ukrainian officials.

Ukraine is looking for ways to protect its businesses

The same night, a strike burned down the central Ukraine warehouse of German automotive-products maker Liqui Moly. All employees escaped injury, and the company said it would continue operating.

Two nights earlier, a Russian drone attack outside Dnipro set food warehouses ablaze. On 1 August, another Russian drone hit a Rozetka warehouse where 270 people were working, killing one employee.

The campaign comes as Russia launches more missiles than Ukraine can reliably stop. Moscow fired 376 missiles in July, including 126 ballistic weapons, Euromaidan Press previously reported.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov said Russia had intensified attacks on warehouses and production sites. He warned businesses to disperse their stocks. Russia can sustain about 100 ballistic-missile launches a month and locate commercial targets using cheap local informants, he said.

Russia has the ballistic missiles to keep hitting Ukraine every month at the current pace. Russia can launch about 100 ballistic missiles at Ukraine each month, technology specialist and presidential adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov said on 5 August.

The estimate sets the scale of a threat that Ukraine's air defenses cannot fully answer.

The current density is higher because Russia wants a demonstrative reaction and is attacking partly from reserves, but going forward, the attacks will run at around 100 ballistic missiles a month, Beskrestnov said.

Against a weapon that only the Patriot reliably stops, and with Ukraine short of Patriot interceptors, roughly 100 ballistic missiles a month is a sustained lethal pressure the country will have to endure.

The target is Ukraine's warehouses

Beskrestnov said Russia has intensified strikes on a specific set of civilian targets. Moscow has stepped up attacks on various warehouses and production sites, including those for food products, construction materials, and retail, and this trend will continue for now.

The pattern matches recent strikes. Russia has hit the warehouses of the retailer Rozetka, killing a worker, and food storage across the country, part of a campaign against the civilian logistics that keep daily life supplied, which has forced businesses to decentralize storage and reroute deliveries.

Russia finds the targets with cheap informants

The chilling part is how easily Russia locates these warehouses. It takes little effort because warehouse data is completely open and requires no satellites or intelligence channels, Beskrestnov said.

"A person is hired, a traitor for a few thousand hryvnia, who watches what happens at the warehouse, the movement of trucks, the volume. Then this information reaches Russia, and a decision is made about a strike," he explained.

He said his own house was targeted the same way in April, when he had just returned from a work trip and was wounded in the strike.

His advice to businesses

Beskrestnov urged businesses to adapt. He advised entrepreneurs to diversify storage, avoid concentrating large quantities of goods and vehicles in one place, and, where possible, seek subleased small warehouse spaces.

Spreading stock across many small sites makes each one a poorer target, not worth a ballistic missile, and denies the local informants an easy, high-value warehouse to point Russia toward. It is a war-economy adaptation forced on Ukrainian business by a bombing campaign that now reaches the supply chain itself, as Beskrestnov suggested.