Ukraine's Drone Campaign Hits Russia's Amazon, Wildberries, Nine Times in a Week, Killing at Least Nine

Two Wars of Attrition, Fought With the Same Drones

Since Ukrainian drones first hit Wildberries warehouses in Kotovsk and Elektrostal last weekend, the strikes have hit at least nine of the company's logistics centers across Russia and occupied Crimea, according to CBC News. The latest wave struck facilities in St. Petersburg and Tver overnight July 24, with fires reported at the Utkin Zavod logistics park in Novosaratovka and a separate site in the Shushary district, according to the Kyiv Independent.

Wildberries is Russia's largest online retailer, often described as the country's Amazon, and by some estimates accounts for half of all e-commerce sales in the country, according to CBC. Founder Tatyana Kim has confirmed the strikes publicly.

The scale of the damage

The targeted warehouses cover roughly 552,000 square meters, about one-tenth of Wildberries' total warehouse capacity, based on calculations by the Russian business newspaper Kommersant and reported by the Guardian. Data Insight, a Moscow-based research firm, estimates losses at 170 billion roubles, about $2.2 billion, in destroyed merchandise alone.

CBC reports nine people killed and 80 wounded across the string of attacks; the Guardian's count also puts the death toll at nine. St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov confirmed a strike on "civilian infrastructure facilities" in the city, and Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko said three people were injured in the Novosaratovka attack, according to the Kyiv Independent. Around 50 flights were delayed at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Airport as a result.

St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin's hometown, sits roughly 684 miles from the Ukrainian border and has historically been shielded by concentrated air defenses. The Kyiv Independent notes that Ukrainian drone technology has increasingly been able to penetrate that shield in recent months, reaching both Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Who actually pays for this

The financial damage isn't landing on Wildberries' balance sheet so much as on the small vendors who stored inventory in its warehouses, according to the Guardian. Tatyana Mikhailova, a Russian entrepreneur, lost 4,000 fur coats bought ahead of the winter season. "It's not just a warehouse that's burning," she said in a video posted to Instagram. "It's the time you've invested, the immense stress you've endured, your money, and your last bit of hope."

A vendor identified only as Maria, who handmakes postcards, told the Guardian she lost about $8,000 in goods when drones hit a warehouse in Elektrostal, then lost the rest of her stock days later when a second warehouse in Krasnodar was struck. "How am I supposed to stay calm?" she said. "Yesterday you had a peaceful, normal life... Today I have nothing."

This represents a deliberate shift by Kyiv from hitting oil refineries and fuel depots to hitting the infrastructure of ordinary Russian commercial life, according to the Guardian's framing. The goal is to erode the sense of normalcy that has let many urban Russians go about daily life largely untouched by the war for over four years.

The other side of the ledger

Russia is pointing to a different attack to make its own case that Ukraine targets civilians. Regional officials in the partly Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia region say a Ukrainian drone strike hit a "holiday camp" on Saturday, July 25, killing 12 people, including four children, and wounding 19, according to Russian state media outlet RT and reporting picked up by ABC News. Kremlin-installed regional head Yevgeny Balitsky called it "a blatant crime" and accused Ukraine of deliberately targeting civilians. Ukraine has not issued a public statement acknowledging or addressing the strike, according to ZeroHedge's reporting via Sputnik.

Zaporizhzhia has been under Russian administrative control since a 2022 referendum that the United States and most Western governments do not recognize as legitimate. No independent, non-Russian verification of the holiday camp death toll has been reported in these sources. Russia's own defense ministry claimed, separately, that it struck a Ukrainian "storage and launch site" for drones in the Sumy region that same night, where Ukrainian officials said three civilian postal workers for Nova Poshta were killed.

Both governments accuse the other of striking civilians. Both are also, provably, striking infrastructure that keeps ordinary people fed, employed, and supplied. Ukraine's Wildberries campaign is a calculated economic-pressure strategy aimed at a legal, Western-style logistics giant; Russia's strikes on Ukrainian courier and postal infrastructure serve a similar purpose in reverse.

What remains unresolved is scale and intent verification on both sides. Wildberries' own press service has confirmed at least seven warehouse strikes and called two St. Petersburg facilities "temporarily suspended," a fact that undermines any claim this is a minor irritant to Russian commerce. Whether Ukraine's long-range strike campaign expands further into Russian consumer and financial infrastructure, and whether Moscow's Zaporizhzhia casualty numbers hold up to outside scrutiny, remain open questions.