A new wave of tit-for-tat drone assaults between Russia and Ukraine has left multiple civilians dead on both sides, with Kyiv extending its aerial campaign targeting Russian commercial and industrial infrastructure deep inside Russian territory, local officials confirmed over the weekend.
At the center of Kyiv’s latest strikes is Russia’s largest e-commerce platform Wildberries, often dubbed the domestic equivalent of Amazon. This attack marks at least the latest hit to the retailer’s facilities in less than two weeks, part of a coordinated Ukrainian strategy to disrupt Moscow’s war economy and bring the costs of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine home to the Russian public. Since the first strikes against Wildberries depots in Elektrostal (east of Moscow) and the Tambov region on July 18, Ukraine has targeted more than a dozen of the company’s warehouses across western, southern Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea, leaving at least nine people dead and dozens injured to date.
The most recent Wildberries strike hit a depot in Russia’s Samara region, located roughly 500 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border. Samara Governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev reported that the strike sparked a large fire but resulted in no casualties.
Across other regions of Russia, the overnight drone attacks left a devastating civilian toll. In the Saratov region, east of Samara, two civilians were killed when a drone hit a residential building in Engels, Governor Roman Busargin announced. The strike also damaged civilian infrastructure in both Engels and the regional capital Saratov—two locations that have emerged as frequent Ukrainian strike targets in recent years, due to their hosting of a key military airbase (in Engels) and a large-scale oil refinery (in Saratov).
Further north in Russia’s Bashkortostan republic, air defense systems repelled a mass drone attack on industrial facilities in the city of Ufa, Governor Radiy Khabirov stated. While Khabirov did not disclose details on the specific facilities targeted, he confirmed that emergency crews were working to extinguish a post-strike fire.
In the Udmurt Republic, located northwest of Bashkortostan, three additional civilians were killed and two more wounded in a drone strike, according to acting regional head Olga Abramova. Abramova added that Russian air defenses downed two of the attacking drones and foiled another attempted incursion, noting that a civilian car was damaged in the attack, though she did not specify if the damage came from downed drone debris.
Overall, local Russian officials confirmed that the latest round of Ukrainian drone strikes across multiple Russian regions left at least five civilians dead.
In response to the Ukrainian attacks, Moscow claimed its air defense systems shot down 635 Ukrainian drones overnight across occupied Crimea, the Black Sea and the Azov Sea. The Russian Defense Ministry did not provide details on how many drones Ukraine launched total, or how many successfully reached their intended targets.
Russia launched its own large-scale drone assault on Ukraine the same night, according to Ukraine’s Air Force. Ukrainian officials reported that Russia launched 133 drones, 24 of which evaded air defenses to strike targets across the country.
Separate Russian strikes on Ukrainian territory on Sunday left two more civilians dead. In the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, one civilian was killed when a Russian guided bomb hit a residential building, local administration head Ivan Fedorov confirmed. In northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, a second civilian died in a strike that ignited a fire at a postal terminal on the city’s outskirts, regional governor Oleh Syniehubov reported.