Ukraine widens deep strikes to Russian warehousing

Ukraine has expanded its long-range strike campaign to include warehouses belonging to the Russian retail giant Wildberries, an additional target set being prosecuted alongside its continued campaign against Russia’s oil system, according to a Western official.

Asked about the recent wave of air attacks and Ukraine’s ability to strike back, a Western official said Ukrainian deep strikes were becoming more effective “both in terms of range, volume, and expanded target sets,” pointing to “the strikes on the Wildberries warehouses over the past couple of weeks.”

The official said Russia’s own difficulty in defending against these strikes was striking. It was “notable, given the relative paucity in air defence,” the official said, qualifying that as relative to “the number of sites that they now have to defend.” The effect, the official added, was political as much as military: “This is starting to bring the war home to the average Russian.”

The campaign against the retailer has run through much of July. Wildberries facilities were first struck on 18 July in Elektrostal, outside Moscow, and in Tambov Oblast, with the Moscow Times reporting eight workers killed in the weekend attacks and Russian industry experts putting the cost of restoring the damaged facilities at up to 35.8 billion rubles, around $457 million. Further strikes followed on logistics hubs in Krasnodar and other southern regions, then on warehouses in and around St Petersburg and in Simferopol in occupied Crimea.

The Kyiv Independent reported that seven warehouses had been hit within a week, with the Russian outlet Kommersant estimating that roughly 10% of the company’s logistics hubs had been damaged by 23 July. NPR reported at least nine workers killed across the strikes, several of them migrant workers from Central Asia, with small Russian businesses describing heavy losses of stock held in the destroyed facilities.

On the reasoning behind the shift to warehousing, a Western official pointed to Ukraine’s stated justification. “Wildberries has a role in the supply chain and military industrial complex, and that’s the logic behind their attacks,” the official said, while noting the strikes also carried “a sort of big PR impact.” As “a sort of big systemic company in the Russian market,” the official added, Wildberries “probably has an outsized economic impact too.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the strikes targeted logistics centres involved in supplying the Russian army with drone components and navigation equipment, and framed them as a response to Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, an apparent reference to strikes on facilities belonging to the Ukrainian postal and logistics company Nova Poshta in Odesa and Mykolaiv, according to the Moscow Times.

Wildberries is Russia’s largest online retailer, founded in 2004 and often compared to Amazon, accounting for close to half of Russia’s online retail market according to estimates cited by the Kyiv Independent. The company operates a network of more than 200 warehouses and logistics centres across Russia, and its founder, Tatyana Kim, has been ranked Russia’s wealthiest woman. Kim has said the company’s insurance policies did not cover drone strikes, and that goods were being redistributed across remaining warehouses to keep deliveries running, according to reporting by Forbes and NBC News.

The official was careful to stress the move did not come at the expense of the existing campaign. “It’s not either or, so it’s not binary,” the official said. “The targeting of the oil system continues. It’s just this is an additional target set which has been prosecuted at the same time.”

Ukraine’s long-range campaign inside Russia has grown steadily in reach and tempo since 2023, with oil refineries, fuel depots, airfields and defence plants prominent among the targets.