On the night of 17-18 July 2026, Ukrainian long-range drones struck the Wildberries fulfilment centre in Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast (365,000 square meters, roughly 55 kilometers east of central Moscow), destroying the facility and starting a fire whose smoke reached Moscow city limits by Saturday morning. The same overnight operation hit a second Wildberries facility in Kotovsk, Tambov Oblast, and a Nafto-Service oil depot in nearby Noginsk. Zelenskyy confirmed the strikes in a Telegram post: the targeted facilities "were used by the aggressor to supply sanctioned components for the production of drones and navigation equipment," positioning them as military-logistics targets rather than civilian retail.
Wildberries is Russia's dominant e-commerce platform by order volume - often described as Russia's Amazon - with an estimated 90 million registered users. The dual-use claim is reinforced by what the platform was openly selling at the time: body armour, tactical vests, and military load-bearing equipment, items that fall under Russia's active wartime procurement. A search for "бронежилет" (bulletproof vest) on Wildberries returned hundreds of listings marked "tomorrow" delivery to Moscow addresses.
The Elektrostal smoke column drifted 50 kilometers west toward Moscow: the wind field explains why
The fire at Elektrostal generated a smoke plume visible from Moscow city limits by early Saturday morning. Elektrostal lies approximately 55 kilometers east of central Moscow; for smoke to reach the city's eastern edge, it must travel westward across that full distance. Satellite coverage confirmed the plume spread across roughly 2,000 square miles over the Moscow Oblast basin before dispersing.
A smoke column displaced 50 kilometers in a consistent direction is a direct tracer of the low-level wind field: it moves where the wind pushes it. Westward displacement from Elektrostal toward Moscow is consistent with wind blowing west to west-southwest over the basin on the night of 17 to 18 July. This is not an unusual pattern for the Moscow region in mid-July, when high-pressure ridges over western Russia can push wind westward.
AirVeto's wind map covers the Moscow Oblast wind field for the overnight window of 17 to 18 July 2026. The surface and 1,000 m wind layers for this period and location are available on the live map. Wind reconstruction methodology is described in the methodology.
The strike-by-strike record
Ukraine kept hitting Wildberries logistics sites through the rest of July and into August, expanding well beyond the Moscow-Tambov corridor of the first wave. The largest single-night raid, on 20 July, paired 400 UAVs against Moscow Oblast with strikes on three separate fuel and logistics sites near Podolsk. The 22 July wave was the first outside the Moscow-Tambov corridor and the deadliest: Wildberries founder Tatyana Kim confirmed 15 employees injured across Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk, one fatally.
| Date | Facility | Size | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 Jul | Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast | 365,000 m² | Largest fulfilment centre |
| 18 Jul | Kotovsk, Tambov Oblast | - | 1.4M items/day processed |
| 20 Jul | Koledino/Podolsk, Moscow Oblast | 225,000 m² | Largest sorting facility; 400-drone raid |
| 22 Jul | Krasnodar | 150,000 m² | 4th-largest hub; 1 death, 10 injured |
| 22 Jul | Nevinnomyssk, Stavropol Krai | 120,000 m² | 6th-largest hub; 5 injured |
| 23 Jul | Voronezh (Nechayevka) | - | Roof damage, no fire |
| 23-24 Jul | St Petersburg, Novosaratovka, Tver, Simferopol | - | 4 sites in one night; ~50 Pulkovo flights delayed; 3 injured |
| late Jul | Yekaterinburg | - | |
| 29 Jul | Ryazan | - | Hit alongside a Rosneft refinery |
| 30 Jul | Penza | 90,000 m² | 200+ evacuated, 1 injured; 14th facility per United24 Media |
| 30 Jul | Sarapul, Udmurtia | 50,000 m² | 15th facility; no casualties |
| 31 Jul | Volgograd | - | Hit alongside a Lukoil refinery |
| 1-2 Aug | Novosemeykino, Samara | 178,600 m² | "Logistics bridge" to Siberia; no casualties |
| 11 Aug | Novaya Usman, Voronezh Oblast | - | Series of explosions; confirmed by Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert Brovdi |
| 15-16 Aug | Koledino, Moscow Oblast | 250,000 m² | Largest facility in the network; hit again in a 600-drone overnight raid on the wider oblast |
Wildberries changed its contract terms before the strikes began - leaving sellers uninsured
A detail that emerged in reporting after the first strikes: in early July 2026, weeks before the Elektrostal attack, Wildberries updated the terms of its standard offer agreement to release the company from liability for goods destroyed or damaged as a result of military actions, drone attacks, shelling, or explosions. The clause was not widely noticed at the time.
Once the fires started, the clause's practical effect became clear: sellers whose inventory was destroyed in Elektrostal, Kotovsk, Podolsk, Krasnodar, and Nevinnomyssk had no contractual claim for compensation. Meduza's reporting, drawing on Russian business sources, estimated the total value of sellers' uncompensated losses at 150 billion rubles; other estimates in Russian media cited figures up to 235 billion rubles. Wildberries offered sellers subsidised loans, delivery deferrals, and logistics discounts - but no direct compensation for destroyed stock. The contract clause had transferred the financial risk of exactly this scenario from the company to its marketplace sellers before the first drone had been launched.
At least 18 strikes, a fifth of the network: what the escalation adds up to
The campaign has not stopped: the Novosemeykino hub, hit 1-2 August, is what Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi called the company's main logistics bridge between European Russia and Siberia. That strike is a useful scale check on the whole campaign. Wildberries operates roughly 200 logistics facilities nationwide, totalling 5.2 million square meters and handling an estimated 45% of Russia's e-commerce market. Ukrainian forces have now struck it at least 18 times in two weeks, disabling more than 1 million square meters - over a fifth of its total floor space, and, per Kyiv Post, ten of its 26 largest distribution centres, several destroyed outright.
The economic damage estimates grew alongside the target list: initial Russian media figures after the Elektrostal fire put losses at 50 billion rubles; the most recent Ukrainian media tallies put direct facility damage at $770 million to $1.2 billion. Sellers' goods losses are counted separately, at 150-235 billion rubles ($1.7-2.7 billion), a cost that lands on marketplace sellers rather than Wildberries itself, per the contract clause above.
Zelenskyy's rationale - that the facilities "supply sanctioned components for the production of drones and navigation equipment" - has remained the public justification throughout. It also fits a wider timeline: on 25 June, Zelenskyy ordered Ukraine's Security Service to run a 40-day "influence operation" against Russia, aimed at "compelling it to end the war" through strikes on oil refineries, military logistics, and the shadow fleet. By 5 July, Ukraine's General Staff was claiming 42.74% of Russian oil refining capacity disabled. The Wildberries strikes, beginning 18 July, fall inside that same window and use the same justification against a target class the original campaign hadn't named. The 40 days run out on 4 August 2026.
Update, 17 August 2026: the campaign outlasted the 40-day window and hit Wildberries' largest facility twice
The 4 August deadline came and went with no pause. Ukrainian forces struck a Wildberries logistics hub in Novaya Usman, Voronezh Oblast, on 11 August, and returned to Koledino, Moscow Oblast, on the night of 15-16 August in one of the largest single overnight drone operations of the campaign against the wider oblast. Ukraine's Defense Ministry described Koledino as Wildberries' largest facility, at 250,000 square meters, and said the strike brought the total to seven of the company's ten largest logistics centres taken out of operation. Moscow Oblast Governor Andrey Vorobyov said Russian air defences intercepted 187 drones over the region that night; Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin put the total headed toward Moscow Oblast at roughly 600.
By 5 August, independent Russian outlet Vyorstka estimated 14 warehouses covering more than 1.5 million square meters, about 27% of Wildberries' total warehouse space, were out of operation, The Moscow Times reported. Forbes Russia, cited in the same report, put the rebuilding cost at roughly 70,000 rubles per square meter, which applied to that 1.5 million square meters works out to about 105 billion rubles ($1.29 billion) - a cost The Moscow Times described as significant but likely manageable against RWB's (the merged Wildberries-Russ group's) reported 175 billion ruble ($2.15 billion) net profit in 2025. Separately, Forbes Russia put sellers' potential losses at 214.9-279.6 billion rubles ($2.64-3.44 billion), a range close to Meduza's earlier 150-235 billion figure and based on the precedent of a 2024 fire at Wildberries' St. Petersburg warehouse, where sellers received almost 35 billion rubles in compensation.
A market source told independent outlet The Bell, in reporting relayed by Meduza on 6 August, that Wildberries' own direct losses could exceed 100 billion rubles, and in a worst-case scenario reach 200 billion rubles - a scale amplified by the fact that up to 10% of goods listed on the platform were owned by Wildberries itself, not third-party sellers. The Bell's sources said the company would remain unprofitable for years and need to "reinvent itself from scratch," compounding more than 1.3 trillion rubles in debt it had already accumulated by the end of 2025. A drop in turnover of at least a quarter threatens the marketplace's core cash-flow model, in which Wildberries collects buyer payment immediately but pays sellers later, using the interim float as working capital; once turnover falls, that model runs in reverse and losses compound.
Both of The Bell's sources, per Meduza, said Russian authorities will not let Wildberries collapse or go bankrupt, though the shape of any rescue remains undecided. Reuters has reported government discussions of preferential loans for the company, potentially through state bank VTB; Bloomberg has reported a parallel support package for sellers under discussion, including credit or tax holidays. Any state rescue competes for room in an already strained budget: Russia's deficit for the first half of 2026 reached 5.7 trillion rubles, 1.5 times the full-year plan. Moscow-based economist Dmitry Nekrasov told the Zhivoy Gvozd YouTube channel that even a worst-case 200 billion ruble loss total would equal "slightly less than 0.1% of Russia's GDP," and that unlike a refinery strike, the damage to Wildberries is unlikely to cascade into the wider economy given a competitive online-retail market that includes rival platform Ozon, forecast at 32% market share in 2026 against Wildberries' 45%.
The Elektrostal and Kotovsk strikes are among the longest-range large-scale drone operations Ukraine has mounted against Russian logistics. Elektrostal is approximately 500 kilometers from the nearest point on the Ukrainian border; Kotovsk in Tambov Oblast is roughly 700 kilometers from the front lines. Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk extend the geographic spread further south. For other documented Ukrainian deep-strike operations covered on AirVeto, see the Omsk refinery strike brief and Ukraine's long-range drone campaign, July 2026.