Ukraine strikes Wildberries warehouses, bringing war closer to Moscow

Ukrainian drones hit a Wildberries logistics complex in Elektrostal, just east of Moscow, killing seven warehouse workers and injuring more than 60 people. The warehouse fire and the smoke rising from the Moscow-region depot made the strike visible far beyond the front line, at a site tied to daily shopping and delivery routines across Russia.

The attack landed in the middle of Kyiv’s effort to deepen the war inside Russia. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in July that Ukraine created a new long-range impact command within its armed forces to intensify strikes on Russian territory, after the campaign against Russian energy and logistics had already forced Moscow to ban some fuel exports. On July 20, Russia said Ukraine launched about 400 drones at the Moscow region, leaving two people wounded and setting buildings on fire.

Wildberries is Russia’s largest online retailer and is often described as Russia’s version of Amazon, which gives its warehouses an outsized symbolic and commercial role. The Kremlin said Ukrainian attacks on Wildberries warehouses had hurt the company, and Tatyana Kim, the company’s head and co-founder, later said logistics centres in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk were evacuated after another strike. That second attack injured several people, underscoring how quickly the campaign has spread from energy infrastructure to distribution hubs that keep consumer goods moving.

The July 18 wave of strikes showed the scale of the shift. Russian officials said the day’s attacks killed seven warehouse workers and wounded more than 60 people, while later accounts put the death toll at nine and the number wounded at more than 80 across the wider wave. Al Jazeera reported that the logistics centres in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk were evacuated days after workers were killed in the earlier attack, and one earlier strike at a Wildberries warehouse in Saint Petersburg also left a worker dead.

By targeting warehouses rather than only fuel depots and military sites, Ukraine is taking the war into places ordinary Russians recognize from their own consumer lives. The pattern of strikes on logistics hubs, oil infrastructure and tanker networks suggests a widening campaign aimed at pressure points in commerce as much as in warfighting, with Moscow’s suburbs and supply chains now in the line of fire.