Strike Sixteen: Ukraine Is Burning Down Wildberries' Logistics Empire, and Russia Answered Kyiv with Iskanders

Overnight into August 5, one of Wildberries' largest logistics hubs in Russia, a 194,500-square-meter distribution center in Aleksin, Tula region, went up in flames after a Ukrainian long-range drone strike. NASA FIRMS satellite fire data confirmed the scale within hours; sources on the ground expected the building to burn down completely. The same night, Russia put 24 ballistic missiles into the Kyiv region and none of them were intercepted. These two facts are the same story.

Tula: the sixteenth facility

The Aleksin hub wasn't a random warehouse. Opened in 2022, it was the distribution backbone for central Russia, feeding Tula, Kaluga, Oryol, Bryansk, Kursk, Lipetsk, and Ryazan. Tula's governor confirmed the fire, attributing it to "the fall of a UAV." No casualties were reported; the facility had been evacuated in advance, which tells you Wildberries itself now expects to be hit.

That makes Aleksin at least the 16th Wildberries logistics facility targeted. Per Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, Ukrainian drones struck 15 logistics facilities in roughly three weeks, with 13 destroyed by fire. The night before Tula, drones hit Wildberries warehouses in the Tver region, the St. Petersburg region, and the Novoselki industrial zone near Moscow, the Moscow-area strike killed five and injured at least ten. In the same window, drones reached the Syzran oil refinery in Samara region, a plant that processes 8.5 million tons of crude a year, over 3% of Russia's entire refining capacity.

The bill

Wildberries is not a boutique target. It's Russia's dominant e-commerce platform, functionally the Amazon of the Russian consumer economy, and its fulfillment network was built on exactly the kind of massive, concentrated, flammable hubs that long-range drones love.

Reported damage estimates now circulating put direct company losses around 100 billion rubles (~$1.2B), with worst-case scenarios near 200 billion (~$2.5B), and as much as 1.3 trillion rubles (~$16B) needed to stabilize and rebuild the logistics network as a whole. Treat the top-end figure with OSINT discipline: it's an estimate of total network reconstruction, not verified booked losses. But even the conservative floor represents one of the most expensive corporate casualties of the war, inflicted not on a refinery or an airbase, but on the everyday consumer economy the Kremlin has worked hardest to insulate from the war.

Ukraine's stated rationale: these facilities move goods that serve military supply. Wildberries calls the strikes "acts of terrorism." Both talking points are doing work, the honest read is that Kyiv has decided Russia's rear-area logistics, civilian-coded or not, are fair game, in exact mirror of what Russia has done to Ukrainian warehouses, postal hubs, and ports since 2022.

Russia's answer: the night Kyiv's interceptors ran dry

Photo: Russian MOD (mil.ru) via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

The response was not subtle. Overnight into August 5, Russia launched 24 ballistic missiles, Iskander-Ms among them, plus 4 hypersonic missiles and 115 Shahed-type drones at Kyiv and the surrounding region. We posted launch footage on the channel showing simultaneous Iskander-M firings from ground systems inside Russia, those were the birds used against Kyiv that night.

The number that matters: zero ballistic missiles intercepted. At least 15 killed (some counts reaching 17), dozens wounded, a 20-story residential building burning in Obolonskyi, and, notably, warehouses across four districts, including a Nova Poshta postal hub and a food distribution warehouse. Days earlier, a smaller wave (one Iskander-M, 136 drones) killed civilians in Mykolaiv and Sumy, including two children.

Shahed-136 / Geran-2 technical drawing. Image: US Defense Intelligence Agency · Public domain

Zelensky's own framing explains the intercept math: the shortage of interceptors "only encourages Russia to launch such attacks." Patriot stocks, not Patriot performance, are the constraint, and Moscow demonstrably knows the window is open.

What this actually is: the logistics war

Strip the rhetoric and August 4–5 shows a war that has converged on a single doctrine from both directions. Ukraine is systematically deleting Russia's e-commerce and fuel logistics with cheap deep-strike drones; Russia is answering by emptying ballistic magazines into Kyiv's logistics and residential districts while Ukrainian interceptor stocks run thin. Wildberries hubs and Nova Poshta depots are the same target class on opposite sides of the border.

What to watch: whether Wildberries starts dispersing its fulfillment network, smaller, redundant nodes; expensive, slow, and a permanent tax on Russian consumer logistics. Whether Brovdi's Unmanned Systems Forces keep the three-week tempo. And whether Western interceptor resupply closes Kyiv's ballistic gap before Russia's next massed launch. September's Moscow–Pyongyang missile talks, covered in our companion piece on the DPRK missile unit in Voronezh, hang over that last question directly: more KN-23s in Voronezh means more nights where zero intercepts is the headline.

Follow the daily feed on Telegram (t.me/TheLeaflet), launch footage and strike aftermath from both sides of this story are on the channel now. The deeper files live here in the The Daily Sitrep.

Sources

United24 Media · RFE/RL · The Moscow Times · Euronews · Kyiv Post · Kyiv Independent. Cost figures are reported estimates circulating as of Aug 5, 2026; treat as indicative, not audited.