Ukrainian drones struck Rostov-on-Don for the second consecutive night, with OSINT channels reporting the military airbase was likely targeted again, Militarnyi reported on 18 September. The previous night's strike hit the same installation, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported the destruction of three military aircraft and three helicopters there.

Second consecutive overnight strike

The attack began around midnight, Russian news Telegram channel Astra reported. Rostov-on-Don city mayor Aleksandr Skryabin stated around 02:00 that air defenses were active and urged people to take cover indoors.

Rostov Oblast governor Yurii Slyusar claimed more than 50 drones were downed overnight over Rostov-on-Don, Taganrog, Bataysk, and five other districts. He listed damage to private houses, apartment buildings, cars, and gas pipes but made no mention of the airbase.

Ukrainian OSINT channel Supernova+ suggested the airbase was the target again. Krymsky Veter reported a fire near the airfield. However, Astra noted the published footage had not been verified by its OSINT expert, and the results of the repeat strike on the base remain unverified.

Residents told Astra they heard no air-raid sirens and did not know where shelters were located. The Moscow Times reported locals described "deafening bangs" from around 00:30.

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Drones hit Rostov-on-Don for the second straight night—OSINT monitors say the military airbase was likely the target again

Russia's Defense Ministry claimed 629 Ukrainian drones downed overnight across all regions.

Ukraine's General Staff did not mention the airbase

Ukraine's General Staff reported verified results from several earlier strikes, including a hit on Kombinat Kamensky, a solid-rocket-fuel factory in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, also in Rostov Oblast. The batch did not mention the Rostov-on-Don airbase. That does not necessarily mean the second attack did not take place—the General Staff can report strike results on the same day or days later, once damage is assessed.

Previous night: reported aircraft kills

The previous strike hit the Rostov-on-Don Central military airfield overnight on 17 September. Zelenskyy reported hits on a military transport An-12, two An-26 aircraft, and three helicopters. The SBU said a fire erupted on the aircraft parking area and secondary detonation of ammunition followed, with local residents reporting a large-scale blaze visible across the city. There is no independent verification of these figures.

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Drones hit Rostov-on-Don for the second straight night—OSINT monitors say the military airbase was likely the target again

Ukraine's General Staff had earlier reported strikes on the same airfield on 6 September. Ukrainian forces also reported destroying a Podlyot radar and two Pantsir-S1 air defense systems at the base, though no imagery was released.

Ukraine has been systematically targeting Russian military airfields and their air defenses with drones across the front, from occupied Crimea to Rostov Oblast. In August, a combined strike also hit a Rostov Oblast airfield alongside a major refinery.

Ukrainian drone strikes on the warehouses of Russia's biggest online marketplaces will cost the country's e-commerce 400 million orders and 400 billion rubles ($4.8 billion) in revenue this year, the research firm Data Insight estimates, The Moscow Times reported. It prices what the campaign has done to a whole consumer market, not only to the companies whose warehouses burned. Sellers are cutting back on the platform at the center of it, and Wildberries' payout delays are pushing some of them out.

The forecast, cut by a fifth

Data Insight lowered its growth forecast for Russian online retail by 20%, founder Fyodor Virin said. The market will now grow to 9.6 billion orders this year instead of 10 billion, and to 15 trillion rubles ($178 billion) in sales instead of 15.4 trillion.

That is exclusively the effect of the Ukrainian strikes on marketplace warehouses, Virin said, and most of the loss falls on Wildberries. The bombardment of the depots cut sales because goods were unavailable in a given city or entirely, and because delivery times grew as parcels had to travel further.

All of it lands in the second half of the year. Strikes on Wildberries warehouses began on 18 July and on Ozon's on 25 August, according to Virin. Euromaidan Press reported the first strike on an Ozon warehouse on 22 August.

About 30% of the orders that got stuck or disappeared from sale were cancelled outright, Virin estimates. The rest of the unmet demand went mostly to other online platforms and, to a lesser degree, to physical retail. Payout delays that began in mid-August have pushed some sellers to pull their stock, and Wildberries blamed the first missed round on a DDoS attack.

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What the companies lost

Damage to RWB, the company that runs Wildberries, from the loss of warehouses and infrastructure may reach 147 to 280 billion rubles ($1.7–3.3 billion), while sellers have provisionally lost 445 to 507 billion rubles ($5.3–6 billion), Data Insight's lead analyst Sergei Semko estimated. All of the marketplace's key logistics complexes have been hit, and it could lose a fifth of its network and over half its main hubs at once.

Much of what the sellers lost will not come back. On 22 July, Wildberries' founder said the warehouses were insured but that standard policies do not cover drone-strike risk, and Ozon has told sellers that losses from military action are an entrepreneurial risk neither it nor insurers will compensate.

Total losses for Ozon and its sellers are far lower, at around 100 billion rubles ($1.2 billion). Ozon has a much more branched warehouse network and rents most of its large complexes, Alfa-Bank analysts said. Its shares still fell as much as 29% in a single August session on a day when the Moscow exchange lost 2.9%.

Russian oil refineries earned more in the first half of this year than in the same period a year earlier, even as Ukrainian drone strikes kept a fifth of the country's refining capacity out of action, The Moscow Times reported. Record wholesale prices and fast-growing payments from the federal budget have more than covered what the attacks and the repairs cost. Russian consumers are covering the rest at the pump.

Where the profits come from

Russian refineries earned 938 billion rubles ($11.1 billion) in the first half of 2026, 16.2% more than a year earlier, according to the state statistics service Rosstat. Ukrainian drone strikes have put a fifth of the country's refining capacity out of action.

Two things produced that result, according to Promsvyazbank analyst Yekaterina Krylova: high wholesale prices on the SPIMEX commodity exchange, and a sharp increase in state fuel subsidies.

Wholesale prices took off in March, after the war in the Middle East began: light petroleum products have risen 37% since late February and diesel by a third, with July bringing record exchange prices of 82,600 rubles ($982) per tonne of AI-95 gasoline. Crude got cheaper for the refiners over the same stretch, as the ruble price of Urals oil peaked in spring and fell through the summer while the products made from it kept getting dearer.

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The budget pays the difference, the country pays the bill

Russia's damper mechanism compensates oil companies for selling fuel cheaply at home rather than exporting it, and the payments grow as the gap between domestic and world prices widens.

The Finance Ministry paid out close to 350 billion rubles ($4.2 billion) a month in the second quarter, and 500 billion rubles ($5.9 billion) for July and August together. Krylova expects the subsidies and the prices together to widen net margins by 45% in the third quarter, to 35,000 rubles ($416) per tonne of gasoline.

Russia's retail prices tell the other half of the story. Gasoline has risen 21.2% since January and diesel 18.4%, well above Russian inflation. Budget money lets the majors, which own both the refineries and the filling-station chains, hold their own forecourt prices near inflation. Independent chains have no such cushion: they buy at the higher wholesale prices and sell dearer, which is how Russia has been squeezing them out of the market. For drivers, the crisis has been physical as well as financial, with rationing and dry pumps spreading across dozens of regions.

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What the strikes have cost

Ukrainian drones have been hitting Russian refineries since 2024, and the campaign escalated sharply from August 2025, when strikes deep inside Russia became systematic. Russian refineries disclose none of their losses from it.

Ukraine's General Staff estimated the total damage to the Russian oil industry since August 2025 at $13.5 billion, in a count published in early July. The insurance broker Mains put direct losses to the oil and gas sector from drone strikes last year at more than 100 billion rubles ($1.2 billion), and above a trillion rubles once lost profit and indirect damage are counted.