Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned airlines, insurers, and other aviation stakeholders on 1 September that Russian airspace is becoming increasingly dangerous as Ukrainian drones operate deeper inside the country.

The warning comes as Ukraine has increasingly carried out long-range drone strikes deep inside Russia, targeting military, energy, industrial, and other infrastructure. Russian authorities have repeatedly reported temporary airport closures and flight disruptions during drone attacks as part of air defense measures.

“We want to warn every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer, and everyone who still uses Russia’s key airports: Russian airspace is becoming completely unsafe,” Zelenskyy said.

“Russian airspace will effectively be closing”

Zelenskyy said Ukraine does not intend to threaten civilian aviation or civilian aircraft, but warned that the growing presence of drones over Russia means airlines must account for the risks.

“We in Ukraine do not want innocent lives to be lost. That is why we are warning our partners: the safe days in Russia’s skies are over,” he said.

Zelenskyy accused Russian authorities of failing to properly inform airlines about the risks, saying they have not adequately communicated the growing danger posed by drones in Russian airspace.

“Although the Russian authorities are not properly informing people about this, Russian airspace will effectively be closing,” Zelenskyy said, arguing that Russia’s war against Ukraine is making its own airspace unsafe.

Zelenskyy warned that the growing scale of Ukrainian drone operations over Russia will have to be factored into aviation risks. “There will simply be drones in Russia’s skies on a scale that has to be taken into account,” he said.

He called on foreign ambassadors in Ukraine and Russia to relay the warning to their governments, and said Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry and other institutions would provide international organizations with information about the risks to Russian airspace.

“Drone-infested skies are no place for civilian aviation,” Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine closed its skies in 2022. Russia has kept flying

The warning highlights a stark difference between the two countries. Ukraine has kept its airspace closed to civilian aviation since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. 

The risk is familiar to Ukraine. Russian forces have repeatedly attacked Ukrainian airports and aviation infrastructure during the full-scale invasion, making the continued operation of civilian aviation impossible.

Russia is also responsible for the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over occupied eastern Ukraine, which killed all 298 people aboard, showing the danger Russia’s military activities can pose to civilian aviation. 

Russia, meanwhile, has continued operating major airports and regular passenger flights despite Ukrainian drones increasingly reaching deep into its territory. EASA has warned that Russian air defenses responding to Ukrainian drone and missile attacks could pose risks to civilian aircraft, including through misidentification, particularly around major airports.

Russian airports increasingly disrupted by Ukrainian drones

Russian authorities have repeatedly restricted or suspended flights at Moscow and other airports during Ukrainian drone attacks. The disruptions have generally come as Russia activates air defenses against drones targeting military, energy, industrial, and logistics infrastructure.

Russia has also moved toward broader restrictions on civilian aviation. In June, Russia imposed new restrictions on light aircraft around Moscow and neighboring regions, while regular passenger and charter flights remained exempt.

The result is a growing disruption to Russian aviation even as Moscow continues to keep its main passenger airspace open: Ukrainian drones are not being used to target civilian aircraft, but their increasing presence is making normal aviation operations more difficult and forcing Russia to restrict or suspend flights during attacks.

Russian authorities reported damage and a fire at Ust-Luga port during an overnight drone attack on 1 September. One drone crossed Latvian and Estonian airspace, prompting NATO to scramble Turkish F-16s.

The attack hit a major outlet for Russian energy exports. Reuters reported that Ust-Luga loads about 700,000 barrels of crude a day and exported 32.9 million metric tons of oil products in 2025. Its terminals also serve shadow-fleet tankers used to bypass sanctions.

Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko said emergency crews were working in Ust-Luga’s port zone while the damage was being assessed. He later claimed Russian air defenses downed 52 drones over Leningrad Oblast and reported no casualties.

Drozdenko did not identify the damaged facility or specify the scale of the fire.

Militarnyi published an image attributed to the Exilenova+ monitoring channel showing a blaze near the port. The image’s time and precise location have not been independently verified.

There was no immediate information on whether the attack disrupted port operations. Ukraine had not claimed responsibility at the time of publication.

The regional warnings coincided with a broader drone attack on western Russia that included Ust-Luga, although authorities did not specifically link the drones approaching or entering NATO airspace to the port strike.

Baltic states issue warnings as NATO fighters scramble, while Finland restricts traffic

Estonia warned residents in eight counties and scrambled Turkish fighter jets serving in NATO’s Baltic Air Defense Mission, which protects the skies of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Estonian Air Force Commander Brigadier General Riivo Valge said around a dozen drones had moved near the country’s border. One briefly entered southeastern Estonia, while another approached Narva before turning back into Russia. The fighters did not open fire, and the warnings were lifted by about 5:30 a.m.

Latvia issued two warnings overnight, first in the Ludza municipality and then in the Alūksne municipality. Latvia’s Armed Forces said a drone crossed Latvian airspace and continued into Estonia, where NATO fighters searched for it. The Latvian alerts ended at around 4:20 a.m.

Finland’s Armed Forces introduced temporary air and sea restrictions over the eastern Gulf of Finland at 3:37 a.m.

The military lifted both restrictions shortly after 6 a.m., saying no drones had strayed into Finland.

Repeated strikes on Ust-Luga

Ust-Luga lies around 110 kilometers west of St. Petersburg and some 900 kilometers from Ukraine. It is the endpoint of the Baltic Pipeline System-II, which carries Russian crude to the port for export. The area hosts facilities operated by Russian gas producer NOVATEK and fertilizer maker EuroChem.

Ukraine began its series of 2026 attacks on Ust-Luga overnight on 24–25 March. The Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s counterintelligence agency, and the military’s elite Special Operations Forces confirmed that they had struck NOVATEK’s gas-condensate complex, which processes liquid hydrocarbons into fuels.

Further attacks followed in late March. They set fuel-storage tanks ablaze, damaged a pier and pumping equipment, and temporarily halted port operations, according to Russian Telegram channel Astra.

On 7 April, Ukraine’s General Staff, the military’s senior command, confirmed another strike on Ust-Luga’s oil terminal, saying three oil storage tanks were destroyed. Another attack on 14 August again caused damage and a fire, Drozdenko reported at the time.

A Russian drone hit a fire truck driving to a call in the village of Kushuhum outside Zaporizhzhia on 1 September, injuring four rescuers, the head of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ivan Fedorov, reported. The crew was on its way to a house fire that Russian shelling had started. The strike came hours after a countrywide Russian air assault overnight.

A drone hit the crew before they reached the fire

Fedorov said a Russian drone struck the State Emergency Service vehicle in Kushuhum as it drove to put out a fire. The truck took damage, and the crew was hurt. He said the men were under the supervision of medics.

The Main Directorate of the State Emergency Service in Zaporizhzhia Oblast confirmed the attack, and added that all four injured firefighters had been taken to hospital with injuries of differing severity. The directorate specified what the crew had been sent to: a fire in a detached house in the suburb, started by Russian shelling.

Over the past 24 hours, Russian attacks on Zaporizhzhia city and district killed two people and injured eight, Fedorov said. Russian forces carried out strikes on 57 settlements across the region.

The night before: a countrywide strike

Overnight into 1 September, Russia attacked with ballistic and cruise missiles, anti-radar missiles, Banderol munitions, and 218 Shahed-type strike drones, about a third of them jet-powered, Ukraine's Air Force reported. By preliminary data, air defenses downed or suppressed 199 targets. Odesa and Kyiv oblasts were the main directions of the strike.

Russia killed 12 people across Ukraine, among them a citizen of India, and injured dozens, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. Russia killed four people and injured 13 and damaged a five-story residential building, and 50 people were evacuated. Nearly 350 rescuers worked in Kyiv and the surrounding oblast alone.

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In Kyiv, a ballistic strike on Ukrzaliznytsia railway facilities killed seven people, six of them railway workers, and one more employee remains hospitalized. The capital's overall toll for the night stood at eight killed.

In Odesa Oblast, Russian drones, guided bombs, and missiles injured seven civilian men, four of whom went to hospital, and struck the Orlivka ferry crossing on the border with Romania again, the regional prosecutor's office found. 

Ukraine has documented Russia striking the people who respond

As of May, Ukraine has documented 11,000 Russian first-person-view drone attacks on civilians, among them repeat strikes on the same spot once medics and firefighters arrive. Ukraine's UN envoy has built part of the case for expelling Russia from the Security Council on that practice.

Rescue workers in Zaporizhzhia have been caught that way before. After a strike on a Poltava Oblast gas site, Russia hit the crews who came to the fire. Firefighters in Chernihiv Oblast went to hospital mid-rescue. In Kryvyi Rih in August, a second Russian attack reached rescue workers thirty minutes after a drone strike on a shopping center, and a repeat strike killed a 20-year-old volunteer paramedic in Kyiv the same month.

Ukraine’s Defense Forces struck three Russian military and energy targets overnight on 29-30 August, including a major oil refinery in Leningrad Oblast, a site used to store and launch attack drones in Rostov Oblast, and an airfield in Krasnodar Krai, Ukraine’s General Staff said.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted energy and military infrastructure inside Russia as part of an effort to disrupt the resources supporting Moscow’s war effort. Russia’s military relies heavily on fuel and other petroleum products produced at major refineries, while oil exports provide revenue that helps fund the war. 

The General Staff said the strikes caused fires at all three sites. The extent of the damage is still being assessed.

Ukraine strikes one of Russia’s largest oil refineries

In Kirishi, Leningrad Oblast, Ukrainian forces struck the Kirishi oil refinery, also known as KINEF, Russia’s 2nd largest oil refinery.

The refinery has an annual processing capacity of about 20 million metric tons of crude oil and produces motor fuels, aviation fuel, diesel and other petroleum products, according to the General Staff. It also supplies fuel for Russia’s military.

KINEF has been targeted repeatedly since Russia launched its full-scale invasion. The latest strike is at least the sixth reported Ukrainian attack on the refinery.

Russian authorities acknowledged damage in Kirishi following the overnight attack, according to Russian OSINT outlet ASTRA. Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko claimed several residential buildings were damaged, with windows blown out in some apartments, while a fire broke out in the city’s industrial zone. He said the industrial fire and fires from drone debris had been extinguished.

ASTRA reported that videos from residents showed a large fire at what appeared to be the KINEF refinery. ASTRA also geolocated footage of an explosion at the upper floors of an apartment building in Kirishi, where residents reported hearing air defense activity. The footage has not been independently verified.

Drone launch site struck in Rostov Oblast

Ukrainian forces also struck a site in Millerovo, Rostov Oblast, used to store, prepare and launch attack drones.

The General Staff said a fire was reported at the facility following the strike.

Millerovo has been repeatedly used by Russian forces as a base for launching attacks against Ukraine. Striking drone infrastructure can disrupt the storage, preparation and deployment of the weapons used in Russia’s ongoing aerial campaign.

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Fire reported at Yeysk airfield

A Ukrainian strike also hit Yeysk airfield in Russia’s Krasnodar Krai, according to the General Staff.

A fire was reported at the site after the strike. The General Staff did not provide details on which facilities or equipment at the airfield were damaged.

The three strikes were part of a broader Ukrainian campaign against Russian military infrastructure and the energy facilities supporting Russia’s war effort.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that its air defenses intercepted or destroyed 494 fixed-wing drones overnight across Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory. It said the drones were detected over Leningrad, Bryansk, Belgorod, Kaluga, Kursk, Tver, Smolensk, Oryol, Pskov, Tula, Novgorod and Rostov oblasts, as well as Krasnodar Krai, Moscow, occupied Crimea and the Azov and Black seas.

The General Staff said operations against key Russian targets are continuing, while the extent of the damage from the overnight strikes is still being determined.

A Russian strike on southern Odesa Oblast killed one person overnight and set grain trucks on fire. Five trucks loaded with grain were destroyed and three more damaged, with one person killed and three injured, the head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration, Oleh Kiper, said.

The strike hit the Izmail district, home to Ukraine's largest Danube port. The port became a maritime lifeline after Russia's 2022 Black Sea blockade, carrying the overflow whenever the sea lanes are constrained, National Security Journal reported. The attack is part of a campaign against the food supply.

Ukraine is one of the world's largest suppliers of wheat, maize, and sunflower, so the strikes register far beyond its borders, in the import-dependent countries that buy its grain.

Fire destroyed eight trucks

The attack set eight cargo trucks and dry grass nearby alight, the press service of the State Emergency Service in Odesa Oblast reported. Rescuers have since put out the fires.

"Unfortunately, a person was killed in the attack, and three more were injured," the service said.

The strike hit transport infrastructure

Russia struck the Izmail district overnight on 29 August, damaging transport infrastructure, the Izmail District State Administration reported. The district sits on the Danube close to the Romanian border.

"There are casualties. Sadly, a person has been killed. The injured have been given the necessary help. Representatives of the security structures and medical workers are working at the scene," the administration said.

The Danube corridor is a standing target

The strike fits a pattern. Russia hit Izmail's port infrastructure on 13 August, cutting power in parts of the city, and struck it again days later, damaging a Togo-flagged civilian vessel. The attacks come during Ukraine's peak wheat harvest, expected at around 60 million metric tons this year, close to the 2025 crop. Farmers need the export revenue now to finance next year's sowing, and storage is filling as grain goes unshipped.

Russia's Defense Ministry has described its Izmail strikes as hitting berthing terminals for military cargo and depots for Western-supplied weapons. The trucks burned in this strike were carrying grain.

Ukraine's new defense minister wears his war on his wrist. Yevhenii Khmara's bracelet carries, on each of its chains, the engraved name of a comrade who did not come back from the war, The National Interest reported.

Khmara took over the Defense Ministry on 19 August, replacing Mykhailo Fedorov, whose July dismissal set off nationwide protests. He came to the job from the SBU, Ukraine's Security Service, which he had led for seven months when Ukraine's campaign against Russian oil refining reached its widest scale.

He did not volunteer the story

Khmara did not explain the bracelet until a reporter asked him about it over dinner in Kyiv this month. The names now travel with him into the meetings where decisions about Ukraine's defense are made.

He ran the SBU during the oil campaign

Alpha, the SBU's special operations unit, is a tiny share of Ukraine's armed forces, yet the service's own accounting credits it with an outsized share of the damage inflicted on Russia, up to 20 percent of all enemy infantry losses.

More telling is what happened to Russian oil during his seven months in charge of the service. Ukraine's General Staff now estimates that nearly 43 percent of Russia's refining capacity has been knocked out. To a large extent, this is the result of the campaign Khmara helped oversee.

Khmara also developed a doctrine of ruthless cost asymmetry: strike operations designed to cost roughly 2 percent of the economic damage they inflict, targeting not individual facilities but critical nodes within the system.

Khmara insisted that part of the staff of the previous minister stayed

Earlier, Khmara has proposed that the core of the former Defense Ministry team remain in their positions. In particular, this concerns specialists responsible for procurement reform.

Mstyslav Banik, who served as a deputy to Fedorov, confirmed that he was staying on under the newly appointed defense minister. He led a central part of the ministry's modernization and is responsible for implementing the defense procurement reform.

Desperately short of missiles for its roughly 10 Patriot air defense batteries, Ukraine has just a few options as colder weather looms—and the Russians prepare to fire even more hard-to-intercept Iskander ballistic missiles at Ukrainian cities and power plants.

The Iskander is a unique threat, and Ukraine is uniquely vulnerable. The Patriot is one of just a few systems that stands any chance of hitting an incoming Iskander as the Russian missile barrels in at six or seven times the speed of sound. And the Patriot is, or was, the most plentiful anti-ballistic interceptor. It usually takes two or three of them to bring down one Iskander.

Then came Iran. Coalition forces fired an average of 225 interceptors a day during the first four days of the war against Lockheed Martin's production rate of 1.7 a day, the Foreign Policy Research Institute calculated—a 132-to-one gap between use and manufacture. Lockheed built 620 Patriots in all of 2025. And every Patriot the Americans fire at an Iranian missile is a Patriot Ukraine won't be able to fire at a Russian missile.

Ukrainian batteries have so few missiles that air defenders can do little more than watch as the 3.8-ton Iskanders and other heavy Russian missiles barrel in. "This is a really heartbreaking sight when you have equipment but you're not able to intercept any missile," Dmytro, the chief engineer of Ukraine's Patriot fleet, told CNN. "Ballistic missiles are flying over your head and you are not able to do anything with it, and behind you, there are civilians." He first ran out of interceptors in December 2025.

Across the 39-day campaign, CSIS estimates 1,060 to 1,430 Patriots were expended—more than half the US prewar inventory. At Lockheed's rate, replacing them takes three years.

And a Patriot cannot be conjured. A single PAC-3 MSE takes about 24 months to build, its solid rocket motor 30. In January the Pentagon signed a seven-year deal for Lockheed to reach 2,000 Patriots a year—by 2030, by which point the Russo-Ukrainian war will be eight years old. Far too late to save Ukraine from the coming hard winter.

The Ukrainian air force has two other batteries that can intercept ballistic missiles, both French-Italian SAMP/Ts, and they are short of missiles too. France agreed in November to send eight next-generation SAMP/Ts over two years—a schedule, not a stockpile.

Winter looms

The interceptor crisis will only worsen as winter looms and the supply of electricity for residential heating once again becomes a matter of life and death for millions of Ukrainians. Iskanders "could hit all significant non-nuclear electricity generation," Jakub Janovsky, a Czech military analyst, explained to Euromaidan Press. The Kremlin has cut production of several other missile types—including, as Euromaidan Press reported this month, the Kinzhal—to pour more into the Iskander.

"I wanted to secure 300 missiles for the Patriot systems as part of the winter package. The request from our Air Force is for 360," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists on 23 August, in remarks posted to X. "But when only 600 are produced a year, 360 is not easy to obtain." He has asked Washington for 5% or 10% of the US stockpile, and says Ukraine will pay. By his own account it holds about 1%.

What are Ukraine's non-Patriot options?

Its own ballistic interceptor

Frantic for air defenses, Ukraine is developing its own. In May, Kyiv munitions-maker Fire Point unveiled Freya, a pan-European anti-ballistic project built around the FP-7.x—a 7.25-m composite interceptor derived from the company's FP-7 surface-to-surface missile. Cued by European radars and guided in the final moments by an infrared seeker from Germany's Diehl Defence, it is meant to cost around $700,000 a shot against a Patriot's $3.8 million.

Fire Point had run at least five tests by the end of July, and co-founder Denys Shtilerman told the Financial Times mass production could begin as early as this month. But the first attempt at intercepting an actual ballistic target is planned for around July 2027—a winter away, and then some. Infrared guidance is also reckoned less reliable than radar, since spoofing can mislead the seeker.

Sanctions on the Iskander supply chain

Sanctions may seem attractive, and there is a narrow chokepoint. Ammonium perchlorate makes up 45% to 52% of the Iskander's solid fuel, and Russia has exactly one plant that makes it—the state-owned ANOSIT—according to the Economic Security Council of Ukraine.

That plant depends on imported sodium chlorate, a chemical Russia lost the ability to make when the USSR collapsed. Russia bought more than $40 million of it in 2024 and the first half of 2025, 61% from China and most of the rest from the Farg'onaazot chemical plant in Uzbekistan. The largest Russian importer, Pioneer Trade, sells on to firms that supply the Iskander's designer, its cluster-warhead maker, and the Votkinsk plant that builds the missile.

But Russia gets around sanctions by buying through third parties. And while the European Union already restricts the export of sodium chlorate to Russia, neither Farg'onaazot nor any of the Russian importers moving it is under blocking sanctions. Even where the bans hold, they just "make things more costly and less convenient," Janovsky told Euromaidan Press. "They can't stop things from happening if the other side really wants to do something."

Deep strikes against the Iskander supply chain

Ukraine has already tried this one. The main Iskander factory is in Votkinsk, 1,400 km from the border, and on the night of 20–21 February Ukrainian Flamingo cruise missiles hit it. Zelenskyy said every missile launched reached the plant. Satellite imagery confirmed damage to a workshop where Iskanders and Oreshniks are assembled; local officials reported two shops damaged and 11 people injured.

Iskander production rose anyway. So the question is not whether Ukraine can reach Votkinsk—it can, and did—but whether it can launch enough munitions at once to inflict damage that lasts. "Ukraine can try a massive saturation strike with hundreds of drones and dozens of cruise missiles to overwhelm local defenses and wreck enough of the factory complex to at least temporarily disable the production," Janovsky said. That might take essentially the entire Ukrainian deep strike force—and if it failed, Russian industry would get a months-long reprieve.

Kill the launchers before they shoot

This is the hardest one. Russian crews keep their Iskander launchers 140 to 150 km behind the front line, beyond the reach of Ukraine's HIMARS, and move them to firing positions along forest roads—sometimes for five hours—to stay out of satellite view. Once in position, a launcher needs about 16 minutes to send its first missile and four for the second, then it leaves. Twenty minutes, in the open, somewhere in a forest, a hundred and fifty kilometers away.

Ukraine is trying anyway. On 23 August, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces had struck an Iskander launcher near the border, and described a dedicated program to hunt the launch sites. Euromaidan Press could not independently verify the strike. He was explicit about why the program exists. "When our anti-ballistic missile stocks are at a minimum, there is another tactic," he said. "It is more difficult, and we developed it."

All options but one arrive after the cold

Unable to shoot down all the Iskanders, Ukraine may have no choice but try everything all at once: sanction the suppliers, attack the supply chain, hunt the launchers, and scurry to deploy homemade interceptors. All while continuing to beg for every available Patriot.

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Ukraine may have just lost its first Swedish assault boat—to a Russian jet drone

Russia flies its missile raids on Ukraine from Engels-2. Ukraine keeps reaching the strategic bombers there. Soldiers of the Security Service's Alpha unit have struck a Tu-95MS missile carrier at the Russian airbase, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote.

The Tu-95 is part of Russia's nuclear triad, a Soviet-era strategic bomber Russia has used to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine since 2022. Ukraine has spent the war whittling down the fleet. On 1 June 2025, Operation Spiderweb smuggled explosive drones deep inside Russia on trucks and hit 41 strategic bombers along with other bombers in a single day.

The satellite image shows the damage

The first image of the bomber has appeared on social media. A satellite photo published on Friday, 28 August, by OSINT analysts Exilenova+ shows the aircraft suffered critical damage in the strike.

The bomber lost about a third of its right wing to the drone hit. Other damage is hard to judge in the image due to low resolution.

The Russian Engels-2 air base is home to Tu-95MS and Tu-160 strategic bombers, which regularly launch Kh-101 cruise missiles at Ukraine. The base also houses ammunition and fuel storage facilities, equipment, and aircraft maintenance infrastructure.

Strikes targeting Russian bombers and the airfield’s infrastructure are critically important. They are aimed at degrading the aggressor country’s military capabilities.

A second Engels-2 bomber in weeks

This is not the first Tu-95 Ukraine has reached at the base recently. Ukrainian drones struck Engels-2 in early July, ArmyInform reported, destroying a different Tu-95 whose tail section was torn off and thrown dozens of meters by the blast.

Analyst Oleksandr Kovalenko of Information Resistance said Russia has up to 12 flyable Tu-95MS left after Operation Spiderweb, in varying states of readiness, and that the one hit overnight belonged to the serviceable group.

Ukrainian drones attacked two Ozon logistics centers overnight on 27 August, one in Ufa and one in Orenburg Oblast, Russia's second-largest online store said. Staff were evacuated at both sites, and preliminary information indicated no casualties. Video published by Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ shows a drone reaching the Bashkortostan warehouse and exploding.

The strike on camera

Exilenova+ reported in the morning that an Ozon warehouse was burning after impacts in Blagoveshchensk, a town north of Ufa. The Bashkortostan capital lies roughly 1,300 kilometers from the war zone in Ukraine. Around midday the channel published eyewitness video of what it called the moment of a drone attack on the site, and said the warehouse had not caught fire. The footage shows a drone reaching the site and detonating there.

Earlier, the channel reported that residents of Sterlitamak, Bashkortostan's second-largest city, about 120 kilometers from Ufa, had written about explosions, with nothing then known about impacts. Astra later placed smoke over what it said was probably the Bashkir Soda Company works there.

Ozon said the Orenburg site—about 1,200 kilometers from the war zone—has resumed work. The one it placed in Ufa sustained what it called minor damage but remains closed, because the grounds need a thorough inspection. It is not accepting deliveries.

Russian news Telegram channel Astra identified the damaged facility from the eyewitness footage as Ozon's UFA_RFC fulfillment center in Blagoveshchensk. When it opened in late 2024 it was billed as the largest Ozon logistics complex in Russia's Volga federal district, with a total area of 93,000 square meters.

Smoke over the Ufa refineries

Astra also traced smoke in eyewitness footage to the Bashneft-Ufaneftekhim refinery in Ufa. The plant is one of Rosneft's leading refineries and a dual-use site: it supplies specialized fuel to Russia's armed forces and petrochemical feedstock for defense-grade materials. It burned after a strike on 1 August.

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Ukrainian drones hit warehouse belonging to Russian online retailer Ozon for the first time

What officials said, and didn't

Bashkortostan's authorities did not report the attack. Orenburg Oblast governor Yevgeny Solntsev mentioned drone danger in his region but gave no account of consequences. Ufa closed its airport.

Russia's Defense Ministry claimed air defenses destroyed 267 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones overnight across Russian regions, Bashkortostan among them.

The campaign so far

Ukraine's warehouse campaign began with Wildberries, Russia's largest online marketplace, which lost eight warehouses and roughly 860,000 square meters of storage in July alone. It reached Ozon for the first time on 22 August at Chapayevsk in Samara Oblast, where more than 500 employees evacuated and people were hurt. Four more Ozon hubs were hit across southern Russia two nights later.

Ukrainian drones struck the Wildberries logistics hub in the Russian town of Kotovsk for the second time in six weeks, Ukrainian monitoring channel Exilenova+ reported. A fire took hold across most of the 108,000-square-meter complex, and by late morning, the regional governor said the warehouse was destroyed. Wildberries, Russia's biggest online store, had restarted the site after a July strike. The facility is located in Tambov Oblast, about 420 km from the war zone in Ukraine.

The second fire at the same hub

Exilenova+ reported the strike at 01:24, saying Ukraine's Defense Forces had hit the site again and that a fire was burning. Later, the channel continued to share photos and videos from Kotovsk. The Russian news Telegram channel Astra reported that local residents described the warehouse as attacked and alight. Witnesses counted at least 10 explosions in 40 minutes. Wildberries said a drone attack damaged its logistics facility in the oblast and started a fire, and that the site had stopped accepting new deliveries.

What the governor said, and what changed by morning

Tambov Oblast governor Yevgeny Pervyshov confirmed the attack and put the burning area at more than 100,000 square meters. He claimed air defenses and mobile fire groups of a regional volunteer reserve unit destroyed 16 drones. He initially reported one Wildberries employee hurt, with concussion from a blast wave, and said a downed Ukrainian drone set a house on fire in a dacha settlement.

By 11:17, Pervyshov's account had changed. Fire had destroyed the warehouse completely, and two people were injured, he said. Three strike drones had reached the building, the official stated. He closed by again urging men in the oblast to join the defense of its skies. Earlier, Kotovsk's mayor asked residents not to leave their homes for two days, citing the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning from the burning warehouse.

Russia's Defense Ministry separately claimed it destroyed 426 drones overnight across the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces hit 16 targets in Russia over the past day, naming oil facilities — "the Russian oil wallet that finances the war" — along with airfields, a missile unit, a military plant, and Russian logistics. War has to return to where it came from, he said.

Almost no storage left in central Russia

The Kotovsk hub opened in 2025 as one of Wildberries' key logistics sites for central Russia, built to hold up to 54 million items at full capacity. Drones first hit it overnight on 18 July, when seven warehouse staff died and, by the governor's count, 25 more were hurt. The company suspended operations then, too.

By the end of July, the retailer had already lost more than a million square meters of warehouse space, Exile+ calculated, which leaves it physically almost no free capacity in the center of the country.

From one marketplace to the next

Ukrainian drones destroyed eight Wildberries warehouses in July alone, roughly 860,000 square meters or about 15.4% of the company's storage. The campaign widened to Ozon, Russia's second-largest online store, with its biggest Russian complex hit in Orenburg on 23 August, and three southern hubs struck the next night.

Fire has destroyed the Kherson apartment of Mariano García Calatayud, the Spanish volunteer, who was abducted by Russian forces during the occupation of the city in 2022. His partner, Tetiana Marina, told ZMINA she received two videos from neighbors that morning, the first showing her apartment alight and the second showing the fire spreading through the building.

Calatayud is one case in a system of civilian captivity that Russia does not acknowledge. Ukraine's ombudsman estimates Russia holds up to 20,000 Ukrainian civilians, with confirmed identities for only a fraction. Russia has never charged Calatayud with a crime, never allowed him a lawyer or contact with his family, and for more than three and a half years has declined to confirm it holds him at all.

The building stands at the start of Yevropeiska Street, formerly Suvorova, roughly 500 to 700 meters from the Dnipro, Marina said. Police have recorded the damage. She does not know what caused the fire and suspects a Russian drone.

The videos showed the fire spreading

"In the first, I saw clearly that only my apartment was engulfed. In the second, I saw that all the apartments in the video had burned," Marina said.

She is still trying to reach a neighbor, Iryna, who had been sleeping in a bomb shelter because of the shelling.

• "I still do not know what happened, but everything burned. It does look like a drone," she said.

A moral debt brought him to Ukraine

Calatayud ran the road construction department at Valencia city hall before retiring. He moved to Ukraine in 2014, collected humanitarian aid from several countries and delivered it to Marinka and Krasnohorivka in Donetsk Oblast, and worked with orphanages.

Marina explained his reason to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Under Franco, many children of repressed Spaniards were sent to Ukraine, to Odesa. His mother's family was among the repressed.

"That is why he went to Ukraine in 2014, to, as he put it, repay a debt to Ukraine," she said.

When Russian forces took Kherson, he stayed. He could have left for Spain, but did not.

Russia stopped acknowledging him

On 19 March 2022, Calatayud attended a pro-Ukrainian rally. Two men in balaclavas seized him at his own entrance, handcuffed him, put him in a dark blue minibus, and drove him to the occupation administration, Marina said.

He was held in Simferopol pre-trial detention center No. 2. According to other civilian hostages, he was beaten and subjected to electric shocks while in detention. They also described inhumane conditions and a lack of proper medical care. He suffered a heart attack in custody.

In December 2023, Russia reported Calatayud's transfer to Kherson Oblast, the Media Initiative for Human Rights reported. Spain proposed exchanging him for a Russian prisoner of war, and Russia refused. The Red Cross is searching for him in penal colonies, including in Siberia.

Russian military bloggers listed him in a database of foreign fighters, claiming he had joined Kherson's territorial defense. He never carried a weapon in the city, his wife said.

Ukrainian strikes on Ozon’s warehouses sent the listed retailer’s shares down 29.09% from Friday’s close at Monday’s low, RBC’s market report said. The Moscow Exchange shifted Ozon’s main trading session to a 30-minute auction, while other trading modes remained open, exchange rules show.

Unlike privately held Wildberries, Ozon’s listing made investors’ response to the disruption immediately visible. The sell-off came before Ozon had calculated the physical damage, which the company said it would assess later in its statement on Chapayevsk.

Since 22 August, Ozon has reported disruption at six facilities: warehouses in Chapayevsk and Orenburg, three facilities in southern Russia, and another warehouse in Krasnodar.

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Russia was simultaneously attacking Ukraine’s retail and logistics infrastructure. Russian strikes burned two Epicentr hypermarkets in Odesa on Monday morning and caused fires at food warehouses in the city, regional authorities said.

Two days earlier, President Vladimir Putin had said Kyiv should “expect a response targeting your most sensitive economic sectors” in comments published by state journalist Pavel Zarubin.

Ozon falls farther than the market

The MOEX index fell about 2.9% on 24 August. Ozon’s 29.09% decline went far beyond the broader sell-off, indicating that investors were reacting to company-specific risk rather than merely following the Russian market.

That risk had appeared before Ozon’s warehouses were struck. Its shares fell 2.3% on 22 July over concerns that the retailer might become a target. Six days later, VTB Bank fell 2.5%, with analysts attributing part of the decline to uncertainty surrounding its Wildberries partnership.

Wildberries, Ozon, and their smaller rivals sell goods and services worth the equivalent of 8.5% of Russia’s GDP and employ 4 million people—more than 5% of the country’s workforce.

The August attacks turned that risk into operational disruption. Ozon reported fires at its Makhachkala facility and Krasnodar warehouse. In Chapayevsk, the company evacuated more than 500 workers, suspended operations, and redirected shipments. The following day, it evacuated more than 300 workers and closed its Orenburg warehouse.

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Rerouting allowed Ozon to keep orders moving by transferring the workload to facilities that remained open. That is the business risk investors were pricing: a distributed warehouse network can absorb an isolated closure, while repeated attacks progressively reduce the capacity available to absorb the next one.

Each strike leaves fewer warehouses

Ukraine’s campaign against Wildberries shows how warehouse losses accumulate across a retail network. By the end of July, Verstka counted eight affected warehouses covering 860,000 square meters, or 15.4% of the company’s total warehouse space.

By mid-August, ISW counted seven of its ten largest hubs knocked out. The two estimates measure different things, but both show disruption spreading through the network.

A distributed warehouse system can absorb an isolated closure by moving shipments through other hubs. As more sites are lost, fewer alternatives are available to carry out that work. The economic effect, therefore, depends not only on the value of the buildings or goods destroyed, but on how much spare capacity remains after each strike.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine illustrate the same logistical resilience. Two strikes destroyed warehouse buildings at Aurora’s distribution center, CEO Taras Panasenko said, but the retailer kept its stores open. Ozon similarly redirected shipments after closing warehouses in Russia.

Continued sales do not mean that the strikes had no economic effect. They show that retailers can absorb individual losses by relying on the rest of their networks. Repeated attacks gradually consume that protection, and Ozon’s public listing allowed investors to price the risk before the company could calculate the damage.

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.

Ukraine has struck a Russian Iskander launcher near its border as part of a dedicated operation against nearby ballistic-missile launch positions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists, according to Ukrinform. 

President says Ukraine hit an Iskander launcher

President Zelenskyy described the strike as a success but said the sensitivity of the operation prevented him from providing many details.

“We struck an Iskander launcher near our borders,” he said. “I am grateful to our warriors who are carrying this out. This is our operation to hunt their systems positioned nearby.”

The president, however, didn't disclose where the launcher was located or what weapon Ukrainian forces used to hit it.

Zelenskyy said strikes on launchers are one way Ukraine is trying to counter Russian ballistic attacks when anti-ballistic interceptor stocks are limited.

“When our anti-ballistic missile stocks are at a minimum, there is another tactic. It is more difficult, and we developed it,” he said. “It is hunting their nearby positions from which ballistic missiles are launched.”

He described the effort as a separate program and operation. Euromaidan Press could not independently verify the reported strike.

Ukraine has already targeted Russian ballistic missile infrastructure in several operations this year. In April, Ukrainian drone forces reported strikes on two bases linked to Iskander systems in occupied Crimea.

On 30 May, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said they destroyed an Iskander system at a launch position near Taganrog in Russia’s Rostov Oblast.

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SpaceX rejected Ukraine’s request to use Starlink inside Russia

The launcher strike comes as Ukraine is also looking for better ways to operate long-range drones against military targets in Russia. Zelenskyy said SpaceX ultimately refused to let Ukraine use Starlink inside Russia because of escalation concerns.

Kyiv had wanted Starlink to work over Russian territory for defense operations, including drone strikes on Russian ballistic-missile launchers near the border. The Defense Ministry asked him in the first half of 2026 to raise the issue with US President Donald Trump, Zelenskyy said. Zelenskyy said Trump relayed that decision to him at a later meeting. Ukraine continues discussing the issue with the US side.

Ukraine and European partners are separately developing the FREYJA anti-ballistic system, with Kyiv seeking a prototype capable of demonstrating practical results by mid-2027. The project is intended to combine Ukrainian missile technology with European radars, sensors, and command systems.

Ukrainian forces struck production facilities at the Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery in Russia’s Samara Oblast overnight on 22 August, sparking a fire at the Rosneft-owned plant, Ukraine’s General Staff said. The extent of the damage remains under assessment.

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted Russia’s oil refineries to restrict military fuel supplies and reduce the energy revenues supporting Moscow’s war. The latest strike came as gasoline rationing returned to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and Rosneft capped nationwide purchases. Militarnyi described the plant as one of Russia’s 10 largest refineries.

The Rosneft-owned refinery can process about 8.8 million metric tons of crude annually and produces more than 20 petroleum products, including aviation fuel and diesel, Ukraine’s General Staff said.

Fire Point said FP-1 long-range drones were used to strike the refinery.

The same overnight wave also hit an Ozon logistics center in Chapayevsk, where people were injured, and work was halted, Reuters reported, citing the company.

Neither the damage to the refinery nor any interruption to production has been independently confirmed.

Ukraine keeps pressure on Russian fuel supplies

The strike came one day after Ukraine confirmed hitting Lukoil’s Perm refinery, approximately 1,530 kilometers from Ukraine’s northern border. That attack also caused a fire, according to the General Staff.

At least four Russian refineries went offline during August amid continuing Ukrainian attacks.

By mid-August, filling stations in at least 12 Russian regions were experiencing hours-long lines. Some areas had reintroduced purchase limits or rationing based on license-plate numbers, according to the same report.

Gasoline limits had also been reinstated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, while Rosneft had capped sales at 30 liters per vehicle across its nationwide filling-station network. Diesel purchases remained unrestricted.

Ukraine struck one of Russia's largest oil refineries deep in the Urals and a military airfield overnight in a long-range attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on 21 August. The Ukrainian Army's General Staff confirmed the refinery and airfield hits, while Zelenskyy said the same night also reached the Black Sea and brought fresh damage from earlier strikes on a Russian warplane and a drone-launch site.

Fire at a major Lukoil refinery in Perm

Zelenskyy said the overnight drones hit the Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez refinery — known as PNOS — in Perm, where the General Staff recorded a fire on the plant's grounds. The target sits more than 1,500 km from Ukraine's northern border, in a region near the Ural Mountains.

The refinery is one of Russia's largest, able to process more than 13 million tons of crude a year, with more than half its output sold abroad until recently. It supplies fuel to both Russia's economy and its army.

Ukrainian Telegram channels Supernova+ and Exilenova+ shared footage of explosions and a rising plume, with locals reporting a series of blasts at the site. Russia's Perm Krai authorities claimed they repelled the attack and downed 16 drones.

Kyiv has repeatedly hit the plant through the year. After a strike at the end of July, it had been running well below capacity.

Airfield, Black Sea, and other targets the same night

The General Staff said the same night's drones also struck the Marinovka military airfield in Volgograd Oblast, located in Russia's Volga region, with the damage still being assessed, while Zelenskyy added that Ukraine achieved unspecified results in the Black Sea. The military also reported hitting a drone storage and launch site near Donetsk, a materiel warehouse in occupied Crimea, two command posts in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, and six relay stations in Crimea used to steer Russia's Geran and Gerbera attack drones.

Zelenskyy also confirmed damage from earlier strikes: a Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber hit at the Akhtubinsk airfield, about 600 km from the front line, and a drone store and launch site struck at Primorsko-Akhtarsk, roughly 180 km away. The strike extends a run of deep hits this month, from the TANECO refinery in Tatarstan and a Black Sea oil terminal to three refineries hit in one night and an Omsk refinery struck 2,500 km away in Siberia.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy allowed preparations for an AI-guided drone campaign against Moscow-area airports, The Atlantic reported on 20 August, citing two anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the proposal.

The reported plan sought to keep civilian flights grounded long enough to pressure Russia’s elite. Had it proceeded, it would have moved Ukraine toward large-scale autonomous strikes, raising questions under the laws of war about attacks without human confirmation. The Atlantic's disclosure follows months of reported Ukrainian attacks that repeatedly forced Moscow-area airport closures and sent increasingly large drone swarms toward the capital.

How the drone operation would have worked

Code-named M&Ms, the operation called for as many as 1,000 drones to fly toward Moscow-area airports each night and overwhelm Russian air defenses, one source said.

Onboard cameras would compare live views with preloaded maps and target images. They would also allow the drones to strike without pilot confirmation and to navigate without a remote-control link that is vulnerable to Russian electronic jamming, the sources said.

One source said prolonged airport closures were intended to pressure Kremlin-linked elites and push Vladimir Putin toward negotiations.

The plan was presented to Zelenskyy during the winter of 2025–26, The Atlantic reported. Preparations stopped after Zelenskyy dismissed Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, whom The Atlantic described as the operation’s mastermind, in July, both sources said. One source said another team could revive the project within about three months.

Both sources said Zelenskyy allowed preparations despite concerns that a drone could hit a civilian airliner. Planners proposed warning airlines, according to one source.

A Zelenskyy spokesperson declined to comment. Another unnamed presidential office official called the report “total nonsense,” saying Ukraine lacked long-range weapons reliable enough to strike the airports without posing undue risks to civilians.

Previous Ukrainian strikes on Moscow

The alleged M&Ms operation never launched, but other reported Ukrainian drone attacks repeatedly disrupted Moscow’s airports.

From 5 to 7 May 2026, restrictions imposed amid reported Ukrainian drone attacks delayed more than 450 flights at Moscow airports. Limits at Vnukovo remained in place for nearly 18 hours, EP reported, citing the independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo.

Earlier this week, Russian authorities claimed that 620 drones flew toward Moscow in one night, EP reported. The Atlantic placed Russia’s nationwide interception claim for that night at 791 drones. Ukraine’s military did not claim the attack.