In a significant escalation of Ukraine’s long-range aerial offensive against targets inside Russian territory, seven people were killed and 51 more injured in a wave of overnight drone attacks, Russian regional and federal officials confirmed Saturday. The strikes mark a continued push by Kyiv to bring the costs of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now in its third year, home to Russian civilians and disrupt Moscow’s military supply chains.
Multiple sites across central and western Russia were targeted, including two large storage warehouses operated by Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce retailer. One warehouse was located in Kotovsk, a town in the Tambov region roughly 360 kilometers (220 miles) north of the Ukraine-Russia border, while the second sat in Elektrostal, an industrial city just 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of the Russian capital.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the strikes in a social media post on Telegram Saturday, noting the two targeted logistics hubs were being used by Russian forces to source sanctioned electronic components for Russian drone manufacturing and navigation systems. He added that an oil processing and storage facility was also hit in the coordinated attacks, alongside additional strikes against Russian military targets in the Sea of Azov and Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.
Casualty reports released by regional officials confirm all seven fatalities were night shift workers at the Kotovsk Wildberries facility, where 25 additional people were wounded. In Elektrostal, 24 people were injured in the strike on the second warehouse, according to Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov. A separate drone attack on an oil depot in Noginsk, a city north of Elektrostal, sparked a large fire that forced precautionary evacuations of a nearby maternity hospital and one adjacent residential building, with two additional people wounded in that incident.
Further east in Vladimir, a city 180 kilometers (110 miles) east of Moscow, a drone struck a residential apartment building causing a small fire, with no reported casualties, regional governor Alexander Avdeyev confirmed.
The Russian Ministry of Defense reported in a statement Saturday that its air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 379 Ukrainian drones overnight across 19 Russian regions, as well as over the illegally annexed Crimean Peninsula, the Sea of Azov, and the Black Sea. Kyiv’s ongoing aerial campaign targets both energy infrastructure and military-linked logistics assets across Russia, part of a strategy to erode Moscow’s ability to sustain its full-scale invasion by forcing Russian society to confront the ongoing conflict directly.