Air-raid alerts covered a record share of working hours at shopping centers across Ukraine in August. Sirens ran for 21.8 percent of the hours malls were open, the Ukrainian Council of Shopping Centers reported.

For more than a fifth of the hours malls were open to serve customers, sirens instead sent staff and shoppers to shelters. The share has more than doubled in a year. The climb is related to Russia's escalating air campaign: Moscow ran a seven-day barrage of ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones against Kyiv into early September, the kind of assault that keeps sirens running through the business day.

Every tracked measure rose

The council considers four figures: the number of alerts, the number during mall working hours, the total alert duration, and the duration during working hours. All four climbed from July to August, it says.

Five regions bear the worst of it

The five regions with the most daytime alert time, between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m., barely changed over the month, the council says. Donetsk Oblast led at 82.0 percent, followed by Sumy at 76.4, Zaporizhzhia at 71.4, Kharkiv at 60.3, and Chernihiv at 40.1.

The sharpest monthly jump fell in Kyiv and Kyiv Oblast.

Faster drones drive the sirens

Russia has switched to jet-powered drones that fly more than three times faster than the propeller Shaheds Ukraine spent three years learning to shoot down. The faster a drone reaches a city, the less time defenders have to catch it.

That is what fills the sirens. Alerts sound earlier and stay on longer, which is the shared council measure.

Ukraine races to answer them

Ukraine has four interceptor systems in field testing, built to take down jet drones, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said on 30 August. The country now wants to bring them to standard and build them in the thousands.

Until that layer works, every jet-drone raid costs Ukraine a long air alert that empties a shopping center.

Downtime piles up over years

Since the full-scale war began, the average Ukrainian mall has lost 166.8 working days to air-raid alerts, according to the report. August 2026 alone accounted for 6.4 of them.

That is more than eight working months of shuttered trading floors, and it is still climbing.

Independent businesses selling through M.Video, Russia’s largest electronics chain, waited months to receive customer payments for goods already sold. One seller received it only after filing a formal demand that usually precedes a lawsuit, according to a Vedomosti report.

The sellers are independent businesses using M.Video’s website as their storefront. Under M.Video’s seller contract, a customer buys from the independent business while M.Video collects the payment as the seller’s agent.

The business pays M.Video a commission for listing the product and handling payment and delivery. Until M.Video transfers the proceeds, the seller has already handed over the product but has not received the money from the sale.

Some sellers turn to legal demands

Sellers said payments for goods sold in May and June were still missing in August. One sent M.Video a formal demand on 13 August, giving the company five days to pay and waiving interest. The money arrived on 18 August.

Another business said its demand went unanswered, while its assigned manager stopped responding. It continued shipping orders until mid-July because M.Video had promised to transfer payment for its May sales.

Similar complaints had already surfaced two months earlier. M.Video told ABN that transfers were regular, but rapid growth sometimes required additional checks before funds could be released. The same report cited a business that had waited 24 working days after approving its sales statement; its previous transfer had also arrived late.

Independent sellers are taking a larger role in M.Video’s business. M.Video’s annual results show that products from these sellers accounted for one in every ten orders in 2025. According to its half-year marketplace update, turnover from these businesses quadrupled year-on-year as M.Video expanded beyond electronics. The number of products listed grew nearly sixfold.

The shift follows heavy losses in M.Video’s store-based business. M.Video’s annual results show that it lost about 64 billion rubles (about $770 million)—nearly one-fifth of its annual revenue. The chain closed hundreds of underperforming stores and opened only 11.