Ukraine strikes Russian retailer Wildberries sites; five killed near Moscow

Ukraine's campaign against Russia's largest online retailer has entered a new phase of intensity. Over the course of a single night into Monday, Ukrainian forces struck at least three facilities operated by Wildberries—the e-commerce giant sometimes called the Russian Amazon—across multiple regions of western Russia. Two warehouses were confirmed hit in St Petersburg and Tver. A third strike, on an industrial site in Chekhov about 43 miles south of Moscow, killed at least five people and wounded ten more, though local officials stopped short of publicly naming the facility as Wildberries property. The company itself remained silent, though Ukrainian media outlets and Russia's own Yandex search engine linked the Chekhov site to the retailer.

The strategic logic behind the campaign is straightforward from Kyiv's perspective: Wildberries warehouses, Ukrainian officials argue, function as supply depots for the Russian military. Moscow flatly denies this claim. What is certain is that the strikes have become routine enough that they now form part of the nightly rhythm of the war. Video footage verified by Reuters showed one warehouse engulfed in flames, a column of dark smoke rising into the sky. In the Samara region, a Wildberries facility hit on Sunday was reported completely destroyed, along with everything stored inside.

The Russian response to the overnight barrage was swift. The defense ministry announced it had intercepted and destroyed 320 drones. Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov reported that beyond the warehouse fire in Chekhov, an electrical substation and an administration building sustained damage. Of the ten injured at the industrial site, seven were in moderate condition and one was serious. The warehouse itself had caught fire.

But the strikes on Russian territory were only half the story. As Ukrainian forces pressed their campaign against Wildberries, Russian aircraft and missiles were conducting their own strikes across Ukrainian cities. An 89-year-old woman was killed in Mykolaiv, a southern port city, along with two girls aged two and twelve among seven injured. In Sumy, a woman and two girls—aged five and ten—were killed in a residential strike that wounded four others. Russian strikes also injured two people in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and set a food warehouse ablaze in Dnipro. The toll accumulated quietly, as it has for months.

The escalation comes a day after a beach in Russia's Krasnodar region was struck by a drone, killing seven people and injuring 58. Video verified by the BBC captured the moment of impact—a drone crashing and exploding as tourists watched from the shore and the water. The cause remains contested. Some Ukrainian channels claimed electronic warfare had jammed the drone's signal, forcing it down. Eyewitnesses quoted by Russian media suggested gunfire had preceded the explosion, implying Russian air defenses may have brought it down themselves. The regional governor blamed Ukraine for what he called a deliberate strike on civilians. Ukraine offered no comment.

Neither side acknowledges targeting civilians deliberately. Both maintain they strike only military or military-adjacent targets. Yet the pattern is unmistakable: warehouses that may or may not supply armies burn; beaches fill with the wounded; apartment buildings collapse; the definitions of legitimate targets grow ever more elastic. The question of whether Wildberries truly functions as a military supply chain—the core justification for Ukraine's campaign—remains unresolved and perhaps unresolvable. What is clear is that the strikes continue, the casualties mount on both sides, and the war finds new ways each day to blur the line between military necessity and civilian harm.