Ukraine Drones Strike Wildberries Hubs Again as Russia Reels
- Jul 22
- 3 min read
Ukraine drone strikes hit Wildberries warehouses deep inside Russia again overnight, striking logistics hubs in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk in the second week of a sustained campaign against the e-commerce giant often described as Russia’s Amazon. The latest attacks, confirmed Wednesday by Russian regional officials who reported injuries and fires at both sites, mark a dramatic expansion of Kyiv’s deep-strike strategy — one now aimed squarely at the commercial infrastructure Ukraine says keeps the Russian army supplied.
The campaign opened with devastating effect earlier this month. Overnight into Saturday, July 18, Ukrainian long-range drones destroyed two massive Wildberries facilities — one in Kotovsk, in the Tambov region roughly 360 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and the company’s largest logistics center, a sprawling complex of more than 360,000 square meters in Elektrostal, about 50 kilometers east of Moscow. At least eight people were killed and more than 60 wounded, making it the deadliest Ukrainian strike inside Russia in over two years.
The Elektrostal fire burned for days. Video showed a wall of flame consuming the warehouse as firefighting helicopters cycled overhead, and Russian emergency services acknowledged they struggled to contain a blaze of that scale. Analysts estimate the destroyed inventory and infrastructure represent losses running into the hundreds of millions of dollars for a company that is one of Russia’s largest employers.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been explicit about why Wildberries is on the target list. The facilities struck, he said, were "warehouses used to supply war materiel: navigation equipment, components for drone production, and other supplies for the Russian army." In Kyiv’s telling, Russia’s biggest online retailer has become a logistics arm of the Russian military — its warehouse network, trucking capacity and distribution algorithms repurposed to move drone parts and equipment toward the front.
Wildberries denies serving the military, and Moscow has denounced the strikes as terrorism against civilian commerce. But independent reporting has documented military-adjacent goods moving through Russian e-commerce channels throughout the war, and Ukrainian intelligence has long argued that the line between civilian logistics and military supply inside Russia effectively disappeared as the Kremlin militarized its economy.
The strategy behind the strikes is attritional and economic. Unable to match Russia soldier for soldier, Ukraine has spent 2026 systematically extending the war into Russia’s interior with domestically produced long-range drones — hitting refineries, rail junctions, and now retail logistics. Each strike forces Russia to disperse air defenses across thousands of kilometers of territory, raises insurance and operating costs across its economy, and brings the war home to Russian civilians in ways the Kremlin cannot fully censor.
The choice of Wildberries adds a psychological dimension. The company delivers to virtually every Russian town and city; its purple pickup points are as ubiquitous in Russia as Amazon lockers in America. Watching its flagship warehouse burn on social media punctures the Kremlin’s narrative that the war is distant and managed — a message aimed as much at Russian public opinion as at military logistics.
Russia has responded with fury and escalation of its own, intensifying missile and drone barrages against Ukrainian cities and vowing retaliation against what it calls terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure. Air defense units have been visibly redeployed around Moscow-region logistics parks, and Russian companies are reportedly scrambling to decentralize warehousing — an expensive adaptation that itself advances Ukraine’s economic-pressure goals.
The strikes come at a delicate moment in the wider war. Ukraine is navigating internal political turbulence after President Zelenskyy dismissed his top general amid protests, while Russia faces mounting economic strain from oil market chaos tied to the US-Iran conflict. Both capitals are maneuvering for position ahead of any renewed diplomatic push, and each is trying to demonstrate it can escalate on its own terms.
Military analysts see the Wildberries campaign as proof of how far Ukraine’s indigenous drone program has come. Strikes at 360 kilometers and beyond, penetrating some of the most heavily defended airspace in Russia, executed in waves across multiple regions on consecutive nights, reflect production volumes and targeting sophistication that did not exist even a year ago. Ukraine now openly discusses a doctrine of making the Russian rear as unsafe as the front.
For Russia’s economy, the implications compound. Wildberries is a pillar of domestic consumption employing hundreds of thousands of people, and repeated strikes on its network disrupt commerce far beyond any military supply chain. Rising logistics costs, wartime insurance premiums, and the visible destruction of commercial assets all feed an inflation problem Russian authorities are already struggling to contain.
What comes next appears to be more of the same. Ukrainian officials have signaled the deep-strike campaign will continue through the summer, and the second week of Wildberries attacks suggests target lists are expanding rather than shrinking. With drones now reaching hundreds of kilometers into Russia on a near-nightly basis, the war’s economic front is widening — and Russia’s biggest retailer has found itself on the front line.
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