Ukrainian drones struck Wildberries logistics hubs at Elektrostal in Moscow Oblast and Kotovsk in Tambov Oblast overnight on 17 and 18 July1. Wildberries is Russia's largest e-commerce company, and the Elektrostal warehouse alone covers more than 360,000 square metres. Authorities in the two oblasts reported 8 dead and more than 50 injured, relayed by Ukrainska Pravda without a named agency attached to the count2.
The damage figure now circulating does not come from the company. The Russian investigative outlet Vazhnye Istorii put it at roughly 100bn roubles (about $1.3bn) by comparing the sites with the 2024 Shushary warehouse fire, an estimate by analogy rather than an audited loss. Wildberries itself had issued no assessment as of 18 July, though it classed its warehouse losses as force majeure, which pushes the cost of destroyed stock onto the thousands of small vendors who own the goods rather than onto the platform holding them3.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy justified the strikes on the grounds that the hubs move sanctioned drone and navigation components. Set against that, a retail distribution centre runs on shift workers and third-party inventory, and the proportionality case for hitting one rests on evidence of a military supply chain passing through it that Kyiv has not published. The category matters more than the two addresses. Ukraine's deep-strike campaign spent the past fortnight working shadow-fleet tankers in the Azov and the Black Sea, targets whose sanctions-evading function is documented in shipping data anyone can check. Warehouse floors holding consumer stock offer no equivalent public paper trail, and the claim has to be taken on assertion.
