Ukrainian drone strikes kill 8 at Russian warehouses used for drones

Ukrainian drone strikes hit two Wildberries warehouses in Russia, killing eight people and injuring at least 62, as fires also broke out at oil depots in the Moscow and Volgograd regions. Russian officials said seven people died at the company’s warehouse in Kotovsk, in Tambov oblast, and one person was killed at another Wildberries site in Elektrostal, in the Moscow region.

The dead were warehouse workers, according to regional authorities, in what CNN described as the deadliest Ukrainian attack inside Russia in two years. BBC News put the injury total at 62, with 25 wounded in Tambov and 37 in Elektrostal, while other reporting said more than 60 people were injured overall.

The strikes landed on facilities belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace, in a sharp escalation of Ukraine’s campaign against targets deep in Russian territory. Kyiv said the warehouses supplied components used to make drones and navigation equipment, a claim that points to a deliberate effort to disrupt the logistics chain behind Russia’s drone operations rather than only hit symbolic commercial targets.

That matters because Russia has relied heavily on drones to strike Ukrainian cities, energy sites and military positions. If warehouses and transport hubs tied to drone-related components are being repeatedly hit, Moscow may face higher costs and more delays in sustaining the tempo of those attacks. The risk, however, is that each step deeper into Russia expands the geography of the war and raises the civilian toll on both sides.

The overnight attacks also set off a fire at an oil depot in Russia’s Moscow region, Reuters reported, while other coverage described a separate blaze at an oil depot in Volgograd region. The combination of warehouse strikes and fuel infrastructure fires widened the impact well beyond the two retail sites and underscored how Ukrainian drones are now reaching across multiple layers of Russia’s wartime economy.

The financial damage could be large. Ukrainian and Russian reporting said Wildberries sellers estimated losses at tens of billions of roubles after the attacks, and sellers were also affected by a compensation policy change under which Wildberries would not cover goods destroyed in its warehouses. For Russia’s biggest e-commerce platform, the destruction added a commercial shock to the human cost, with night-shift workers among the dead and major logistics hubs knocked offline.